Good Day, Could use a little help from the video card experts out there…… Currently running an ATI 4870 512MB video card with my Intel Core 3 Duo E8500 CPU which I have overclocked to 3.8GHz….. In FSX I get acceptable FPS with scenery settings at max with only water set in the mid range….. With LOD radius set at 6.5 and several fsx.cfg tweaks I have gotten the “Blurries” to a minimum, but still have a few close in textures pop into the clear a little late on occasion……My question is would replacing my 3 year old ATI 4870 512MB card with a newer ATI 6950 HD 2GB card help to totally cure my issues with the “Blurries”……. Got a very good price on the ATI 6950 about $85.00 less than a GeForce GXT 570 1280MB and $200.00 less than the 580 1536MB. I have always been an ATI guy, my last four cards have all been ATI and they have all been great… Any help or suggestions would be appreciated as have the new card still sealed in the box on my desk….. If I am not convinced that I will see a large improvement in performance and visuals I will probably return it for refund unopened…… I only care about FSX as the older card performs perfectly in all other applications……. I have a dual monitor setup….Again, any help or suggestions appreciated,JayDub

Good Day, My question is would replacing my 3 year old ATI 4870 512MB card with a newer ATI 6950 HD 2GB card help to totally cure my issues with the “Blurries”……. JayDub

Very likely: Not.Close-in blurries are more likely caused by the CPU/bus/memory subsystem not keeping up.What could help is lowering your LOD radius to 5.5 (or 4.5) and limiting your framerates at 30 within FSX.

Again, any help or suggestions appreciated,JayDub

That sounds like a configuration issue to me. For ATI, I like Bojote's Shader Mod which is in the file library here. Also, try increasing your FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION setting. That made a difference on mine. I'm running a 1G 4870 HD.

Thanks Guys, Since my original post I installed the XFX Radeon 6950 HD 2GB card…… I saw absolutely no improvement in either performance or visuals in FSX…… Returned to my older 4870 512MB card and will be happy with that for now……. Going to LOD 6.5 and locking FPS rate to 30 in FSX was the single most help in improving the visuals for me and minimizing the “Blurries”…….. I the blurrie textures issue is really only minor for me now but was trying to eliminate them all together……. Will play around a little more with the cfg file but believe I have about maxed out the tweaks…… Will learn to live with the limitations of my CPU until the next computer build and will probably go with an nVidea card next time….. My last three cards have all been ATI but it looks like it is time to move on……..JayDub

Will learn to live with the limitations of my CPU until the next computer build and will probably go with an nVidea card next time….. My last three cards have all been ATI but it looks like it is time to move on……..JayDub

You said it right, it's the CPU which is the bottleneck... it is far from able to push your GPU to it's limits!Now about your last sentence I can only tell you that, from what I have been able to test myself with my GTX570 and HD6970, when hitting higher CPU clocks (4.4+) it seems that the HD6970 was able to 'swallow' more data sent by the CPU than my GTX570 did. I am suspecting that the much higher texture fillrate of the 6970 is one of the reasons for this... I did a couple of extensive tests which ALL gave me better results when using the 6970. In addition I think that ATI's driver setup is so much more simple (image quality is exactly the same as Nvidia's through Inspector's 8S profile!). And I can confirm you that the HD6970 definitely DOES supersample REX HD clouds @ 4096pixels just as good as the GTX570 does!I saw on numerous forums that the HD 6950 can quite easily be flashed to a 6970 rom in order to unlock the number of available shaders (this should give an interesting boost in performance).All I can say is that there are some key cfg tweaks (amongst others ofcourse) you have to do like removing the usepools lines (if any present) and setting the reject treshold value as low as possible (mine is @ 64k with the 6970 and had to be set @ 128k with the GTX570)