for those of us who, like me, inherited the steadfast fs9 rule, "max out the card, don't filter in the sim..."it seems to be the exact opposite in fsxthis will be, of course, highly dependent on your hardware and game settings, but on my nvidia card turning aa and af off on the card and setting aa and af in fsx produces noticeably superior results, in terms of both performance and visual qualitytry it. these ms guys did their homework :-)

Absolutely!AA , af, and screen quality to the max-textures to the max and screen res to the max without autogen gives superior results...the autogen can still look very nice at low altitude-but users really should try out the above settings and see what they are missing.http://mywebpages.comcast.net/geofa/pages/rxp-pilot.jpg

It's still just the same as with FS9 for me, so no, that is not universal advice you're giving there :)It might be that nVidia cards work that way but my ATi sure doesn't.

Well I can say that after I read your post Vilk I decided to check it out. But alas, I can say that I definitely get superior results letting my ATI drivers handle the AA and AF jobs.I have Trilinear selected in the sim too which I think adds to my driver's filtering. I remember turning it off once in FS9 and the texture rendering quality went down, even though my driver was set to control AF. I think I'll try putting it on None in the FSX to see what happens.But anyway, setting my ATI video card driver to control these functions works best on my system. Thanks for trying though. :) Perhaps setting them in the sim and setting 'Let the Application decide'(ATI's wording) will work better from some other people.Jim

Trilinear doesn't add anything to anisotropic, it's the other way around. Anisotropic is basically angle correction added on top of normal trilinear. I have by far the best results in FSX by leaving AA unchecked in the sim, setting the filtering to trilinear, and then setting 4X AA, transparency AA, and 16X anisotropic in the Nvidia driver. (I use a program called nHancer to create profiles for games)

ryan, you beat me to it :-)my results looked kinda fishy to me, too. then i realized that nvidia drivers list way too few combinations of filters. a quick google and nhancer it is. with the crippled driver options, the contest was rigged in favour of ms; with nhancer, setting filters on the card wins hands downsorry for the confusion. hope this thread helps someone