I was recently experimenting with Anisotropic filtering settings, and noticed that when I switch the in-game setting to "none", I get a shimmering mess, despite setting it to 16x in Inspector. With AF set to "anisotropic" in-game, there is absolutely no difference in visual quality between AF set to "off" in Inspector , and AF set to 16x in Inspector. I know that inspector works, since I use it to control the anti-aliasing, so does anyone have any idea what's going on here?

I was using the new 301 drivers, so I uninstalled them, did a driver sweep and then did a clean install of the 275.33 drivers, but to no avail. I also deleted my FSX Inspector profile and created a new one, but that didn't help either.

My graphics card is an Nvidia 450gts.

Gtox

One thing that I found was that the "Global Settings" in NVI were changing on each reboot and in some cases were overriding the FSX profile settings. After some experimenting I found that if I set the fps limiter in global to 29, and then set the FSX profile setting to 35 then in FSX the 29 setting was used. Being paranoid I now have my global settings the same as FSX and check them before each restart. In another sim if I set "show physX indicator" in global but not in the game profile - on my screen I see the physX - cpu being displayed (this does not happen in FSX).

Regards

pH

What's happening there is FSX is disabling mipmaps entirely when filtering is set to Off. This means that, no matter what AF is forced to with Nvidia Inspector, you'll get a shimmer mess.

 

You'll notice that if you set it to Bilinear (the next higher setting from Off for filtering) it'll look like normal 16x AF again.

It seems that while the inspector settings make no difference to the visual quality, it does hammer my FPS when changing the water from 1x to 2x, so I've kept Inspector on Application controlled. There is no loss of visual quality (why, I have no idea - maybe I need new glasses), but I have better looking water. So, problem solved, in a funny sort of way.