Changing the MIP mapping quality and Hardware-rendered lights. they are stock 4 and 6 on my machine, i cranked them to 8. What does it do, am i being an &@($* Alan

Well, this is a question I´ve allways wanted to ask but forgot to do. I´ve also cranked them up to 8 and don´t have any ideay what they´re doing.It´s shame, using FS9 for such long time now and not knowing what a single setting is doing.

Setting mip mapping to anything higher than 4 can cause distant shimmering if you don't combine it with high AA. Anything lower than 4 will cause the scene to become blurry. 5 is a reasonable setting if combined with a high AF and AA setting in your video card control panel. You will most likely have to disallow any sort of clamping (where applicable) in your video card control panel, or this setting may have no effect above 4. Google "mipmap bias" for more information.

Setting mip mapping to anything higher than 4 can cause distant shimmering if you don't combine it with high AA. Anything lower than 4 will cause the scene to become blurry. 5 is a reasonable setting if combined with a high AF and AA setting in your video card control panel. You will most likely have to disallow any sort of clamping (where applicable) in your video card control panel, or this setting may have no effect above 4. Google "mipmap bias" for more information.

Vod are you saying that for setting Mip Map 5 and above you should NOT clamp in the control panel? The reason I ask is if I set mine to anything other than 4 I get terrible shimmers. But I have it clamped in the control panel..

Vod are you saying that for setting Mip Map 5 and above you should NOT clamp in the control panel? The reason I ask is if I set mine to anything other than 4 I get terrible shimmers. But I have it clamped in the control panel..

The way it works in FS is the MIP quality value is inverted mip bias with 4 being the base. A value of 4 in flight simulator is really 0 mip bias. A value of 5 is -1, and a value of 3 is 1. Negative LOD clamping prevents the mip bias from going below 0 (or higher than 4 in flight simulator), which fixes the shimmers associated with a negative LOD bias. So in order to get the quality improvement, you would set it to a higher value (such as 5) and counter-act the shimmering with AA. (such as SS+MS).

Clear as mud, clearer explanation required for us "idiots" !!!

With nvidia card I used to set it to 8 which was the best. Now, I have ati and I found that anything over 4 causes shimmers.

Clear as mud, clearer explanation required for us "idiots" !!!

Setting the mip quality to anything above 4 requires SS AA (IE: 8xS), otherwise shimmers is the result. If you set your nVidia driver to clamp negative LOD bias, then setting mip quality to anything above 4 will have no affect, as it will be "clamped" to 4 (which is actually 0). So yes, you will see no shimmers, just like you see no shimmers setting it to 4. Based on my experience, 5 is the highest value for mip quality without shimmers, if used with SS AA.

So this setting should be all right: mip quality set ot 5 + negative bias + 8xSQ AA + 2xSGSS

As far as hardware rendered lights are concerned: I didn't have a clue either (and still don't really). However a recent experience made it clear that too low settings can get you into trouble. I lost the logolights on planes, sometimes completely, sometimes on one side of the tail. Apparently at one time I had put the setting at 2. Changing it to 6 solved the problem. So some lights are clearly influenced by this slider, but which (apart from the logolights) and to what extent still remains rather mysterious for me. Regards,Rene Edtit: After a Google search I found this thread from 2003: http://forum.avsim.net/topic/29071-hardware-rendered-lights-slider/