Should you not be using the extreme res texture resolution setting? I use ZL18 photoscenery with W2XPlane and find it makes a substantial difference on my 770 with no fps impact.

Thanks!  Looks like your GPU load % is consistent with my numbers here (with a 970) if I haven't max'd out my VRAM.  And you clearly have headroom in the amount of VRAM.  So I don't personally see an issue.  

 

Actually I think you're right on the texture compression thing.  That's probably fine.  But I wonder if you can run a test with that checked...(more for me than you).  I'm curious if you can see a difference in quality and/or performance even though you have plenty of VRAM.  I tried once to not use that option and my performance came to a crawl.  I'm just wondering if you can be pushing 100 FPS with that turned on...well probably not with 8x AA but still.    And that would also confirm the question as to whether you really are CPU bound or not.  Also that Anisotropic is pretty low demand, you can probably dial that up to 16 and not see any change in performance.  I'd love to try that card in my rig but I'm trying really hard to wait for the next gen.

 

OK I can play some more,

 

To be honest with you I have tried the Anisotropic filtering on 16X but saw no difference whatsoever

Should you not be using the extreme res texture resolution setting? I use ZL18 photoscenery with W2XPlane and find it makes a substantial difference on my 770 with no fps impact.

 

I tried the extreme texture setting and if I leave everything else as is I end up with a slideshow so I dialed that one back

Found this blog entry but it's really old and not sure it's applicable any longer.  But the test outlined might prove something (or not).

 

http://xplanescenery.blogspot.com/2007/08/texture-compression-is-your-friend.html

 

And recent general explanations:

 

http://www.x-plane.com/?article=setting-the-rendering-options-for-best-performance