So to summarize, some people reckon they can run FSX in clouds pretty well with HD 5870 cards, using the shader mod. But the nVidia crowd think their GTX480 cards perform better, although most reviews highlight issues with power consumption, heat and noise.What is missing from this dialogue is actual data on differences in frame rate between the two cards. We need someone who actually has both cards to do some tests and report the difference in frame rate, if any. Otherwise all we have is a bunch of useless anecdotes based on subjective evaluation.Cheers,Noel.

So to summarize, some people reckon they can run FSX in clouds pretty well with HD 5870 cards, using the shader mod. But the nVidia crowd think their GTX480 cards perform better, although most reviews highlight issues with power consumption, heat and noise.What is missing from this dialogue is actual data on differences in frame rate between the two cards. We need someone who actually has both cards to do some tests and report the difference in frame rate, if any. Otherwise all we have is a bunch of useless anecdotes based on subjective evaluation.Cheers,Noel.

I just came here to post my results!As I stated previously, I had an ATI Radeon 5850. I just installed a GTX 470. Both cards are roughly equivalent in terms of power and most game benchmarks, so this should be an excellent comparison.Results? Huge improvement in frames when flying in heavy weather! Taking off from my favorite airport (La Cross Mun.) under heavy overcast was previously (with the 5850) giving me about 18-20fps. With this card it has no problem chugging along at my 30fps cap. So there can be NO confusion, the Nvidia cards are much better at handling cloud rendering than Radeons. I never tried the Shader 3.0 mod but at least for anyone like me who doesn't want to tweak into oblivion to get good frames out of FSX, ATI/AMD is the way to go IMO.

I just came here to post my results!As I stated previously, I had an ATI Radeon 5850. I just installed a GTX 470. Both cards are roughly equivalent in terms of power and most game benchmarks, so this should be an excellent comparison.Results? Huge improvement in frames when flying in heavy weather! Taking off from my favorite airport (La Cross Mun.) under heavy overcast was previously (with the 5850) giving me about 18-20fps. With this card it has no problem chugging along at my 30fps cap. So there can be NO confusion, the Nvidia cards are much better at handling cloud rendering than Radeons. I never tried the Shader 3.0 mod but at least for anyone like me who doesn't want to tweak into oblivion to get good frames out of FSX, ATI/AMD is the way to go IMO.

Happy that your happy! The 470 has some great capability and muscle.It is like Sydwyn said though about how useful the Bejote Shader fix is for ATI cards and as I was trying to point out there is a slight difference in the AF filter that some prefer in the Radeon cards. Beyond that it is just a shame that AMD/Radeon wont support the game as well as the folks on Green team and so just with FSX in mind the Radeons are harder to recommend.

I just came here to post my results!As I stated previously, I had an ATI Radeon 5850. I just installed a GTX 470. Both cards are roughly equivalent in terms of power and most game benchmarks, so this should be an excellent comparison.Results? Huge improvement in frames when flying in heavy weather! Taking off from my favorite airport (La Cross Mun.) under heavy overcast was previously (with the 5850) giving me about 18-20fps. With this card it has no problem chugging along at my 30fps cap. So there can be NO confusion, the Nvidia cards are much better at handling cloud rendering than Radeons. I never tried the Shader 3.0 mod but at least for anyone like me who doesn't want to tweak into oblivion to get good frames out of FSX, ATI/AMD is the way to go IMO.

Hey, that's more like it! Some real numbers!Cheers,Noel.

"I don't care to fix known issues, therefore card A is better than card B" is a strange conclusion.Discussing which card is the best is fine and all and this will continue forever, but the cloud issue is no longer an issue so using that as an argument is just silly.Simply spend the 40 seconds it takes to install the shader mod and move along...

"I don't care to fix known issues, therefore card A is better than card B" is a strange conclusion.Discussing which card is the best is fine and all and this will continue forever, but the cloud issue is no longer an issue so using that as an argument is just silly.Simply spend the 40 seconds it takes to install the shader mod and move along...

True but then there is Vsync and alpha AA issues to deal with and fix were you can and then simple shader performance in FSX vs the different way it was implimented by NV that FSX seems to favor and then back to driver support etc..I'm sorry but do we really need to go on?

True but then there is Vsync and alpha AA issues to deal with and fix were you can and then simple shader performance in FSX vs the different way it was implimented by NV that FSX seems to favor and then back to driver support etc..I'm sorry but do we really need to go on?

Again, if you don't care to apply known fixes to known issues, that's fine. Each card has each own pros and cons.This thread however was about "Do current ATI graphics cards have problems with clouds in FSX?"The answer is simple - No, they don't.

Again, if you don't care to apply known fixes to known issues, that's fine. Each card has each own pros and cons.This thread however was about "Do current ATI graphics cards have problems with clouds in FSX?"The answer is simple - No, they don't.

Well, what about the many, many posts I've seen where people had various issues with the shader mod? Stuff like payware aircraft having missing or corrupted textures, blurry or excessively shimmering water, etc etc. I'm sure others have had it work without problems, but still many others haven't. Many of us, me included, do NOT like messing around with tweaks and fixes and just want to get up in the air and FLY. The simple answer is not that ATI don't have problems, they DO - it is possible to fix it for some people, but they do, out of the box, handle them poorly compared to Nvidia.

Can NV users please get off their soap box now These ATI vs. NV threads are bloody annoying! They're as annoying as the FS9 vs. FSX flame wars! *Dismount soap box*

Can NV users please get off their soap box now These ATI vs. NV threads are bloody annoying! They're as annoying as the FS9 vs. FSX flame wars! *Dismount soap box*

I agree, at least I attempted to break up the pointless flames with some actual solid data.

You all do realize what a raster operator and that AMDs only have 32 and the Nvidia cards have 48? Kind of like the difference between 6 cylinders and 8. But then again raw physics has nothing to do with it.

Well, I upgraded from a Radeon 4850 512MB to a GTX460 1GB last summer. The Nvidia card is about 30% faster in FSX (12 vs 9 FPS in my stress test scenario). Never had problems with clouds, maybe because I use sensible settings.The biggest difference is that the Nvidia drivers give you the option to clamp negative LOD bias and enable super sampling, which together help eliminate issues like flickering autogen trees. This is more by chance than anything else. Those are features that are barely used for other games, especially clamping negative LOD bias. They're needed because the FSX graphics engine is flawed and outdated.In general, ATI Cataylist drivers are fine, but when it comes to flight sims, it seems Nvidia spends more time optimizing and fixing their drivers. The Radeon card also had issues with memory leaks, display corruption and crashes when running X-Plane 9. All other games I played on it worked perfectly.