Hi folks,I have added an EVGA GTX580 to my system, the rest of it is as follows:i7-2600K 5GHz4GB Corsair DDR3 1600MHzASUS Sabertooth P67 B3 motherboardCrucial C300 SSD for FS2 x 300GB WD Velociraptors in RAID0 for WindowsEnermax 1kW PSU2 x HannsG 1920x1200 28" screensSoftware wise I am using Windows XP x64 and FS2004 with many many add-ons (REX, GEPro, ASA, FSGlobal2010, custom AI traffic with 1880 flightplans etc etc). I have the latest XPx64 graphics driver (270.61) and have used Nvidia Inspector to set up the AA profine as shown here: http://www.simforums.com/forums/nhancer-settings-for-new-drivers-updated-v1932_topic36586.htmlI have also overclocked the GTX580 to 900MHz and it is stable there - all the issues I describe occur with the stock clocks also!To get the fullscreen view over my two monitors, I use nView to set a span mode of 3840x1200 and I set the same in the sim. This worked very well on my previous PC setup and older GTX285 card...I see two problems with the current setup:1) Performance seems to be a lot lower than I would expect. I could only get 15-20 FPS in busy airports with heavy cloud cover (aircraft independent). I can improve that by a few FPS by removing the AI, but it seems like a small change. The 'killers' seem to be complex buildings and 3D clouds!2) I have really bad shimmering on any detailed textures, trees, AI planes, fences etc that are more than a few virtual metres from the viewpoint. I can reduce these somewhat by setting AA to 32xS but then I don't get the FPS to make it useful... and even then they are still present!The issue I have is that it seems to be worse than with my GTX285 on the same system!!! I certainly don't remember this level of shimmering and I got nearly the same framerates but for slightly higher AA settings. I tested just about everything I could think of including:- Reseat the GFX card- Reinstall drivers (and sweep out old ones in between)- Update DirectX 9.0c with 2010 redistributeable package- Switch to a single monitor view - some FPS improvement but nothing much- Remove overclocks (CPU and card) - of course it /lowered/ the FPS- Turn off hyperthreading and move FS9 to different cores (no change)- Change power leads from PSU- Re-set monitor cableing- Change Nvidia Inspector settings (*)- Removing all AA settings - still LOW FPS!Now, on the Nvidia Inspector settings I saw a couple of oddities: I got much worse FPS when I had the Texture Filtering - Negative LOD Bias set to 'Clamp' so I turned that off. Also, the AA seems to actually be better in 8xS mode than in 8xSQ, which I find odd... I wonder if these point to some issue I don't know about? Finally, and not FS related, my DX9 benchmark gives this new setup an awful score for CPU usage - far lower than it should be. I wonder if the DX9 performance is broken somewhere, but dxdiag reports nothing bad...Note: During FS9 running, I looked at the processor usage and the GPU core usage. CPU core with FS9 gets close to 100% but never gets there. GPU core goes up to 65% at most.The image quality, in the areas that are not boiling with shimmer, is actually very nice, but I still think something must be wrong, but I'm out of ideas as to what it is... For equivalent settings, I seem now to have less IQ overall compared to my GTX285 and I have not been able, as I had hoped, to crank up the AA settings more with the new card! I thought that finally I had a rig that would run FS9 at smooth 30 FPS on full settings...!? Any ideas would be appreciated - am I doing something way wrong?Geoff

Yes, something is definitely very wrong to see that kind of perf on a 5 GHz CPU with a clocked 580. With FS9 running in 8xS plus 2X SGSS Transparency AA, I rarely see any excursions below 30 fps where I have the internal frame rate limiter set.My significant NVI settings for FS9 are:Antialiasing behavior flags: None (0x00000000)Antialiasing Mode: Override Any Application Setting (0x00000001)Antialiasing Setting: 8xS (Combined 1x2SS + 4xMS 0x00000018)Antialiasing - Transparency Supersampling: 2x Sparse Grid Supersampling (x00000018)Texture Filtering - Negative LOD Bias: Clamp (0x00000001)Texture Filtering: High Quality (0xFFFFFFF6)The 2x SGSS transparency AA kills shimmer dead. In FS9, you should have plenty of overhead on a 900MHz 580 to do 8xS and 2x SGSS without sinking frames.Are you running a graphics DLL that hooks into DX9 like an external frame rate limiter or ENBseries?

Thanks very much for the help. I tried the settings you gave but these do give me pretty awful performance! I think there must be an issue with supersampling in nView span mode?Anyway, after a bit of playing about with the settings I have settled on the following (other settings same as yours / Nick N's guide)16xQ [16x CSAA (8 color + 8 cv samples)]2x Sparse Grid SupersamplingThis so far seems to give me a good level of performance and the shimmering is much reduced. I see reduction in FPS to the mid 20's only when in the presence of lots of AI at an airport terminal with a skyful of REX's finest... Now I'll have to test it properly at the weekend and see how it is actually flying!With regards to the question about external DX9 hooks, yes I have the ENBseries v0.075 but it makes no difference to FPS if I remove it or not!Cheers!GeoffPS. Just for fun I did try setting the AA to AA_MODE_METHOD_SUPERVCAA_64X_4v12. The image quality was stunning and no shimmering whatsoever... unfortunately I was only getting 8-15 FPS /without/ AI so I don't think I'll be using that mode... not yet anyway!

XP does not have the ability of W7 for that chip. Different memory management for the SB that XP is not compatable with. I would buy W7-64 in a heart beat.

XP does not have the ability of W7 for that chip. Different memory management for the SB that XP is not compatable with. I would buy W7-64 in a heart beat.

Yeah - I can see that there would be plenty of advantages. The problem is that when I last looked into it (about a year ago) there were several issues with Windows7 incompatability with software that I need for my work... This PC is not just for flying FS all the time! Perhaps it is time to investigate it again - I would also need a DualHead2Go because, of course, dual monitor span is not supported via nView in W7. Oh well, it will be at least next month before I can afford to even consider it! As for FS related software, I think out of my many add-ons only the only totally incompatible one would be FSHotSFX.Geoff