I was tinkering with MSFS today and turned off filtering inside the sim to see if it would make a visual difference well what do you know...Not only did visuals appear more crisp, but I gained a boat load of frame rates even at crowded airports. For instance, at KDEN (3d party scenery not default) with every United gate loaded with non AI-only aircraft (lots o polygons and textures), I gained 8 fps to a steady 18fps! This is at dusk, with scattered clouds and about 3 cloud layers. No stutters and textures loaded VERY quickly.Departing KDEN was a "WOW effect" because the smoothness of climbing into the clouds was palpable and gave a very realistic impression. Once I got away from the airport and continued my climb through the clouds I saw frames between 25 to 50 fps. All this with the IFDG airbus and PSS A320 panel.Now, with that said, I have a pretty over clocked system, Omega Drivers et al and it is always performing at the bleeding edge. But it is an easy thing to try. My assumption that, like Anti-Aliasing in MSFS, filtering can be switched off in the sim and handled by the video card? Any thoughts here?I'd like to hear if other simmers have tried this and gained equally impressive performance gains. Its not the "Holy Grail" but every little FPS counts! :-)Take care,Mike T.

You do realize what filtering does right? Basically you're telling your video card not to smooth the transitions between mipmap levels - this is why you're seeing an FPS increase - your card is doing much less work, however you should be seeing a very noticable dividing line between texture detail levels into the distance.You have a 9800, so I assume you're running AA and AF through the Radeon control panel. I'm not really sure what disabling filtering in the game will do when you have AF being forced on in the control panel. AF is the next step up from trilinear for smoothing mipmap transitions by the way...

Interesting. We have a very similar system, spec wise and if I turn off T & L My 30 - 50 FPS drops down to steady 18-20. So not a good tweak for me.Austin

Ignore my post I turned off T & L which wasn't what you were talking about. Not sure what I was thinking there.

Not at all. I just completed the flight, dusk>night and arrived at KLGA. No problems with textures rendered in the distance, and like I said, there seems to be an increase in the display quality, ergo, very crisp textures, but no flickers or stutters.I am running AA and AF through the Omega control panel. I didn't know that AF was the next step up from Trilinear.None-the-less, I'm pleased with the results. Best,Mike T.

And it certainly doesn't work for Nvidia cards - urrgh! it looks horrible!Allcott

>And it certainly doesn't work for Nvidia cards - urrgh! it>looks horrible!>>AllcottSince i have a Ati i will give it a try. Hopefully it is the solution for my low fps in FS9cheersMartin

I still dont really understand how all this filtering business works and have been reluctant to fiddle with it (FS2004 rookie here) but I can see now it wont cause anything to flip out! Im going to try turning mine off as well!:)

Okay I tried turning mine off from inside fs9. Now I didn't notice any performance increase as I wasn't really paying attention to that, plus I didn't have anything to compare it with. One thing I did notice however was that I couldn't see the difference from when it was on and off...so if someone could post a picture off what exactly it does that would be good.

I've tried it as well, and I can also say that everything seems to run smoother but not at cost of visual appearance. I do not know for sure wheter the FPS increased, but I'm fairly sure that they have, gotta test some more after work :)

Visualy speaking, setting your filtering in the ATI control panel or in the FS9 option dialog should lead to the same.However, using the FS9 option dialog to setup your filtering may in addition tell the FS9 program to allocate ressources differently than when set to off, hence, probably, a difference in FPS / stutter / ressources etc...We are yet to know which way is better though, as we don't know what extra stuff the FS9 code is doing when filtering in its option dialog is set to anything other than OFF...Hope this helps!

Tried turning off filtering in FS9 a while back. Horrible texture shimmering (especially runway textures and other high-res textures) and a slight performance decrease. Apparently if you set filtering to None in FS9 it will still interpolate the textures but it doesn't mipmap them. This may be different for different videocards though. FS9 filtering is confusing because many textures themselves are mipmapped for performance reasons, in addition the the normal mipmapping done by the videocard.

I tried your tip. Turned filltering off.I did see a 1 frame increase and didn't notice any change in visuals.Don't know if that's enough to leave it there but I'll see what it looks like for the next day or two.-Terry

GUYS THE MAN IS ON TO SOMETHING WITH ATI 9800 CARDS!!! :-ukliamI've got huge improvements on my system. I decided not to use those extra autogen objects even after the 9.1 patch. So my 'default.xml' file is disabled and this may help.I tested this out at airports like Simflyers KORD and KDFW and doing what was suggested here has given me a 10-15 framerate boost from what I had before!!!I can now fly in and out of Simflyer's scenery with more reasonable framerates. I'm still testing this though but I think we have a winner with this suggestion.I'm sure glade I got a ATI 9800 video card.... I guess you don't need this setting turned on in FS if your card already has the feature active, awesome....I was going to take a screenshot but realized my framerat was showing 6.7 at Simflyers KLAX. Problem is I everything was smooth as silk, as if I was at 15-20 frames. The only lingering problem is texture loading with Simflyers, other than that it's an amazing improvement... :-eek

Now that is a funny one. Despite all I have heard about this I turned it off following your suggestion. I hav only positive results so far. A plus in fps, better, faster texture loading. I have forced 8xAF in the ATI control panel. Shimmering stays the same as before with my ATI 9800XT (I never had this in FS2K2).AlexP.S.: Having finished a flight I correct myself. I do not have positive results, I have fantastic results.Alex