Brian--what kind of monitor are you using?  I'm wondering if you're using a TV or monitor that internally upsamples a 720p input to 1080i/1080p.  Even my 9-year old Samsung HDTV does that, and reasonably well.  A straight computer monitor probably doesn't do that, so the picture would look awful.  But a TV that has dedicated hardware to do that upsampling might explain what you're seeing.

 

Which begs an interesting question...what about feeding that 720p output (or even a 1920x1080 output) to a newer 4K TV?  I have two identical 55" Samsung 8500 series TVs here (found them on sale last year)--one is my entertainment TV in the living room and one is the primary monitor on my sim rig.  The cable box on my living room TV outputs 720p signals on a number of channels and 1080p on some of the others, and the internal upsampling for both to 4K in the TV is very good, at least at TV viewing distances.  I'll have to experiment with it tomorrow to see how that works on the sim...my guess is that there could be lag issues associated with the upsampling latency, and possibly the IQ I observe on the TV looks as good as it does because I am seated out further away from the screen where I can't see the finer detail flaws that might be apparent when seated 3 ft in front of the sim display.

 

Things that make you go "hmmmm"

 

Regards

I have 3 24" ASUS monitors in Expanded mode (5760 x 1080 resolution).   I run my sim on the middle window (1920 x 1080) and leave the left and right monitors for all my other add-on interfaces.   I don't know what switch P3D to 1280 x 720 did but the FPS counter in the corner of that screen shot doesn't lie.   I am able to get 60 FPS in the VC at certain airports, not all of them mind you.  Some are still pretty brutal and knock me back down to about 35 FPS but that is better than the 25 fps or worse, 18, I was getting at certain places.      Like Drew's KLGA in New York use to always be 15 FPS, even with my medium settings I have set but now with this one little Resolution change I am sitting right at 28-30 which is a feat on my PC in New York area.    I've been flying like this new for a couple days and have done 5 flights and all have been amazingly smooth with higher FPS than I've seen ever on my rig.    I don't know what's going on but I'm not jacking with it anymore.  XD    

The only problem I have which was expected is my ground textures are not 100% sharp, they are 1 level away from full sharpness but that's to be expected with unlimited everything and an FFFT factor of .10 in my CFG file.