We all know that using high AA to get rid of shimmers at our Payware Airports is a must, until you start flying in the clouds and get 10 FPS!Can we add something to our CFG or do something to tell the GPU not too AA clouds and just AA Autogen/Trees/ Poles etc?

It really depends on what type and quantity of AA that you use!Your first sentance is rather a blanket statement.Its always a compromise.......

Edited February 2, 201214 yr by GHarrall

The issue on the cloud's AA is inherent to the FSX system and way of rendering clouds. I wonder what the Flight beta folks say about that one if one allows them to speak. In FSX, any way of transparency AA receives a huge load due to the way FSX generates and draws clouds and, as far as I can tell, there's no way to tell the driver to just AA the trees and instruments for example.Maybe some next gen GPUs allow a better approach on that old FSX engine. Currently, even the GTX580 struggles with nice AA, plenty of autogen and clouds. Ask the folks with the latest AMD cards. They run some more raw power there, but I doubt that they get through cloudy skies without an impact.As Glenn says, the trade-off is to choose the 'right' AA setting.

Edited February 2, 201214 yr by CoolP

If using ATI/AMD cards, then there's Bojote's Shader 3 mod.Cheers,- jahman.

We all know that using high AA to get rid of shimmers at our Payware Airports is a must, until you start flying in the clouds and get 10 FPS!Can we add something to our CFG or do something to tell the GPU not too AA clouds and just AA Autogen/Trees/ Poles etc?

Unfortunately, this is a shortfall of the FSX engine. You are going to need to get a GTX580 or wait for the GTX680. I am confident that with PCI gen3 + IB @ 5GHZ, this will totally eliminate almost all of the FSX shortfalls within the code. Hardware has sped up considerably since I started simming. I started with a [email protected]. I am now with a SB @ 4.8GHZ.Bascially what I am attempting to say is that it will be highly beneficial to wait for the Kepler GPU's from Nvidia. This will likely resolve your issues.

Avoid high multisampling/super sampling methods.

I use the SMAA injector instead of my ATI CCC anti-aliasing, and I turn AA off in FSX. This seems to give me a very nice sharp image with no impact on performance:http://tombstone-aoc.net/forums/index.php?topic=262.0However, note that you can't use the external frame rate limiter with it.More information:http://mrhaandi.blogspot.com/p/injectsmaa.htmlGive it a go!No guarantees, butI like what I see.

Give it a go!

thanks for the tipjust done a quick flight from IOM over the irish sea (using OpenClouds) looks good to me alsobob

This seems promising, I will have to test this myself as well.

I d/l it but how do you open it? It does not show as a zip or rar file? Also, why can you not use an external limiter?

I d/l it but how do you open it? It does not show as a zip or rar file? Also, why can you not use an external limiter?

It is a zip file...a .7 file, you have to use a extraction like 'BitZipper'. one of the files you copy to your fsx root is a d3d9.dll file which I gather is a similar file to the one you use for the ext limiter.

What did Bojote with shader3 mod to get better performance in clouds with ATI cards? Isn't it also possible to do this for Nvidia?I think the only way is to change something in SwarmCloud.fx.I really like SGSSAA because it helps a lot against shimmering textures on airports, but it's a killer in heavy clouds.

Edited February 4, 201214 yr by Capt Lalle

What did Bojote with shader3 mod to get better performance in clouds with ATI cards?

He replace Shader Model 2 with Shader Model 3.

Isn't it also possible to do this for Nvidia?

Yes, but it doesn't yield the benefits it does for ATI/AMD cards because nVidia cards don't have the cloud perfromance problem to begin with.Cheers,- jahman.

You can use the nVidia Inspector external frame rate limiter, but not the one that uses d3d9.dll as this is now used by SMAA injector. If you use ENB Series, you can load up SMAA injector as a proxy dll.So in other words, you can have:ENB+LimiterorENB+SMAAbut you can't have SMAA+Limiter.Irritating thing on my system is that the nVidia Inspector frame rate limiter doesn't work properly, causes huge stuttering. In DX10 it works great though, but that doesn't help much, so I'm stuck with the external limiter and no SMAA.

This seems promising, I will have to test this myself as well.

Tried it, but disabled it. It turns out I get better results with the same performance using regular 4xS AA with 2X supersampling. Anything higher on AA kills performance for me in clouds (down to 15fps), but even 4xS as better performance and quality than SMAA. This is with an Nvidia card (560Ti). I verified that it worked because I saw difference when switching it on and off by pressing the pause key.