Fly! II and ATI 9700

[Guest]

Hi,I would like to know if anybody here runs Fly! II with ATI 9700/PRO videocard using antialiasing and anisotropic filters turned on, and how about the final performance (specially when fly!ing through the clouds)? I'm thinking to change my Gforce4 Ti4600 for anything faster and read that ATI's card has amazing speed with those options enabled.Thank you,Keyton Cabral

[Guest Max Cowgill]

While I don't have a 9700 Pro, and therefore can't give you a firsthand account of its performance in Fly! II, I can, however, tell you that what you've heard about the 9700 Pro is absolutely true. If you want to see it at work in a flight sim, head on over to the MSFS forum and search for "9700" or some such. The R3xx-based video cards (Radeon 9500, 9600, 9700, and 9800) absolutely shine when you enable both FSAA and AF. If you want to see some performance comparisons of the R3xx core vs. other comparable GPUs (GF4, GFFX) using FSAA & AF, checkout www.hardocp.com & www.anandtech.com, they not only have their own well-done reviews of said video cards, but have links to other sites which have reviews of their own.hope this helps,Max Cowgill

[Guest]

Sorry for my belated reply.I have FLY2! and an ATI 9700 All-In-Wonder (and had the plain 9700 untill just a few weeks ago, when it died). They both use the same chipset. Running in a Pentium 4 (478 pin) 2.4Gig, ASUS P4T533-C mobo. 512 Rambus PC-800 (can't afford the 1066 yet!)...I have had problems with "flashing" of the background scenery during day-time flight. Night time is OK. I'm using the DirectX 9 and the latest drivers available. When in FLY2! I have to choose DirectX7 mode, otherwise the flashing becomes unbearable. DX7 cuts it down some.While this video card (AGP) is very fast, I'm sorry that I no longer have my old Nvidia 4600Ti, which exhibited none of these problems in FLY2! ( FS2002 is no problem at all. All runs a little bit faster than with the Nvidia, but it's not a big difference, though.) And ATI doesn't seem to have got to FLY2! to fix this problem yet!If anyone has a solution for this matter, please let me know.Still, I DO enjoy a lot an add-on plane: the SOCATA TBM700 for FLY2!, which is almost like a Pilatus PC-12, but a bit more high performance. Very nicely done by a French chap who flies one regularly. I definitely recomend this download available from AVSIM.com. It's free! (and I would have paid money for it!)Best to all,Alex

[Guest]

Thank you for the replies.Maybe is better to wait a little bit more until new drivers fixes this flashing problem. My ONLY objective to change my videocard is better performance with Fly! II and if there is some visual bugs with ATI's Radeon card, better forget for while.PS: Alex, did you try to enable vertexIndexFormat=1 in the RENDER.INI file? I read before that if your card is not Nvidia based chipset, you can fix lots of visual problems changing this value.Cheers,Keyton Cabral

[Guest]

Keyton,I'm using the Radeon 9700 Pro with Fly II and the results are excellent. I'm running a Dell Pentium 4, 2.8 Ghz, with 512 RAM. I'm also using a FPD which has to be set at 1280 x 1024 resolution for it to shine. I've experienced no flashing at either day or night. The only problem I've experienced, and it's really not a problem, is that the change to the higher resolution causes the cockpit displays to change somewhat from the norm. Not really a problem, they just look a little different when you change views than they do with lower resolutions.Hope this helps.Jim

[Guest Hagar]

Jim,Are you telling us that Fly II looks fine in 1280x1024? Right now I have a 1024x768 Flat Panel, but I need a bigger one for 3D desingn work and other stuff, but I was afraid to buy a new 17" or 19" because of their native, higher resoulutions. And I know if I use a resolution other than the native on a PFD, things can get unsharp...

[Guest]

Andrew,I'm using a Dell UltraSharp 18.1" FPD, and, after changing the resolution settings in the Fly.ini as follows everything looks great except as noted re: the cockpit views.gamePIXX=1280gamePXXY=1024Jim

[Guest Hagar]

Thanks for the info, Jim :)