FSX & Shimmering

[kiwimail 1]

Is there a way to lessen the effect. I know there's an option within FS9 so is there one within FSX hidden somewhere?

[Reset XPDR 1,271]

Have you tried turning on in-game anti-aliasing and ansiotropic filtering - first tab on the display options - yet?Gary

[Cruachan 705]

Hi,What GPU are you using?I would suggest you take some time to carefully go through Koroush Ghazi's excellent guides:For ATI: http://www.tweakguides.com/ATICAT_1.htmlFor NVIDIA: http://www.tweakguides.com/NVFORCE_1.htmlOnce you have optimized the basic driver settings you can then transfer your attention to FSX.The advice usually given for FSX is to select 'Application Controlled' at driver level (using the graphic card's driver control panel) and switch on Anti-Aliasing (AA) and Anisotropic filtering (AF) in the sim.Now, this may work well with Nvidia based cards but, from my experience with ATI Radeons, this advice is not at all appropriate.Currently I am using a (PCI-E)Sapphire ATI Radeon X1950 Pro 512MB (prior to that an X800 XL) with the Catalyst 7.1 WHQL drivers along with Ray Adams' excellent ATI Tray Tools (v. 1.2.6.964). I don't use the Catalyst Control Panel.I have configured the ATI drivers via ATI Tray Tools to implement AA 6X and AF 16X and these, along with the selection of Trilinear filtering in FSX, produce a very nice sharp image in the sim. If I leave these settings as 'Application Controlled' at driver level and switch on AA and AF in FSX, the anti-aliasing works, but the ground textures are only sharp in the immediate vicinity of the a/c. Further afield they appear blurred and without detail.The other important setting is the MipMap Detail level. I choose the 'High Quality' setting in ATI Tray Tools and this eliminates 99.5% of any shimmering, so much so that most of the time it is not noticeable. In FS9 I believe this setting equated to a MIP mapping quality value in sim of '4'. Refer to the appropriate Koroush Ghazi guide (links above) for more detailed guidance on this one. In general the Mipmap LOD Bias slider (if your control panel has one) should be set to the left of 0 for best results.Mike

[frankla 44]

reduce your MIP.

[McCrash 3]

Try not using anisotropic filtering.

[kiwimail 1]

Thanks for all the suggestions. I'm using the 8800 GTX. FSX runs fine with SP1 with the odd stutters and of course blurries but nothing show stopping, just that now I'm noticing the shimmering a lot more. Will try some of the options presented here and see if it helps.

[kiwimail 1]

...Sorry forgot to add that I'm also using Vista. Could this have an effect?

[Guest TomOOO]

All the replies are correct - I will try to elaborate...Shimmer is over-sharpening of the picture It is caused by MIPS to highIt is reduced by lowering the MIPS value in FSIt is also reduced by increasing the AF value.Set MIPS to about 2 (picture will look blurred and horrible)increase the AF for your graphics card to a valuethat does not reduce the fps for flying you do. Ie : AFmakes the graphics card work harder, if you make it work toomuch it effects the fps. Now you have an ideal AF, now increase MIPS until you justget shimmer - now reduce MIPS by one step. This is the bestview you can get with your system.

[jackcnd 0]

We really need a sticky for FSX 8800 setup...Here's how I ended with a great image:1) Add mipbias=6 in fsx.cfg2) Use nHancer to delete the existing FSX and FS9 presets and create a new one:AA Supersampling 8xSGamma CorrectionAniso: 16xTexture Filtering: High QualityNegative LOD Bias: CLAMP3) In FSX set the Level of Detail radius to large.Turn AA off. Filtering to Trilinear or Ansi, Frame rate 25.That works great for me with most settings up high, its night and day compared to default settings.