Is there a way to do it? Because I noticed that without AA and AF, in lots of clouds, my FPS stay around 30, locked at 35. And when I push AA and AF to max I get like 10 FPS. With the scenery and everything else it's another story. And what's the best, there's no visual difference on the clouds when AA'ed and AF'ed.I wouldn't think that this is possible, but hey, if someone knows the way, please share! :)Thanks!

I don't think the Radeon cards anti-alias clouds - clouds are alpha-blend textures (semi-transparent) and the tech the Radeons use for AA is unable to cope with alpha textures of any kind...

well, if that's the case, why is it that when I turn off AA and AF, my FPS goes up? my only explanation is that AA or AF does render the clouds in that case.

I would really love to know if that's possible too. "Jaggies" in clouds I can live with. :-) If that is possible, then AA can be turned way up giving a much better quality to the scenery and airplanes while keeping FPS up because the clouds aren't included.Ok.....time to wake up I guess.

:-lolTrue, that would be awesome what you say. My scenery looks awesome when I push 6x AA and 16AF at Quality setting, without much FPS lost...

No the Radeons don

Does the Geforce really AA clouds in all modes though? The card features several modes of AA:Multisampling (same as Radeon but worse quality so I don't see how this one would AA the clouds), Supersampling+Multisampling (this wouold AA the clouds) and I think also pure Supersampling (same as Radeon 8500 and earlier, as well as Geforce2)

ATI doesn't alais clouds by choice. It's not built into the drivers. I use Chris' clouds. Then I change em' to DXT3. They still look the same, but don't consume anywhere near the ram. Thus, smooth flying even in the clouds. I run 4xAA & 16xAF (Performance). If you're running quality AF with your ingame mipmap slider on 4, you're probably wasting resources. I can't tell the difference between 16xPerformance and 16xQuality so long as I stay with a higher resolution. Currently using 1400x1050x32 res.

Chris offers a package that includes both 32 bit and DXT3 textures. The file's name is HiFPSv2, and is available here: http://fsw.simflight.com/FSWMenu2004.htmlCheers,Greg

Well, I've speculated on this before. I only have an ATI9000 and I don't do antialiasing, but I think it's the same problem: Without clouds, it really doesn't matter much how much scenery is displayed, or which resolution I use, I get fairly constant fps. I think the reason for this is that there actually is enough processing power available to render all the 3d-objects, even at high resolutions. So the main problem with frame rate drops, I believe, is memory bandwidth: once there is a considerable amount of different textures on the screen, the texture pipeline seems to get all clogged up. While the processing power is really there, the graphics card can't move all the data (texture, resolution, alpha information, ...) between the graphics chip and memory quickly enough. What helps for me is to lower the resolution. While I don't have a considerable fps change without clouds, when there actually are many clouds I get a considerable improvement in fps when lowering the resolution - that's because bandwidth is freed up. I guess it's the same with higher end cards and AA: everything runs fine until a certain point, at which the amount of data throughput necessary is higher than the bandwidth available. A reason for this are the clouds, with their bandwidth consuming alpha channels. You could try and lower the resolution and see if it helps. Maybe this is all nonsence that I'm talking here ... but to me it's the best explanation.-Daniel