ziffel

This is true, especially when using any 3rd party add-ons to FSX, like GEX, REX, FTX, etc. The aforementioned Nick N guide is the quintessential FSX tuning/setup guide, just plan to set aside a day (week?) to get it done. Considering it takes powerhouse systems to make FSX run smooth & pretty, what the hell were people doing in 2006? It must have looked like arse.

You'd want your motherboard to have at least one x16 slot, for maximum bandwidth. I'm pretty sure those x38 boards do have that.As for comparing cards, you might try this tool:http://emsai.net/reviews/gpu/Example, i put a 9800GTX in the top slot, and a GTX 260 in the bottom. It shows a difference of around +27% in favor of the 260. I've found this chart to be generally in the ball park on getting an idea of the differences in video card power.

I have a Gigabyte motherboard, and Afterburner works fine for me.

The reason NickN wants you to use Trilinear, is not because it's better, but because he wants you to have Anisotropic 16x set up in nhancer. Same with Anti-Aliasing. Nhancer, when properly set up, overrides the in-game settings for filtering and anti-aliasing. In order to make the override work, some applications need to have filtering and AA set to something specific. So, if you were to set FSX' in-game settings to Anisotropic, and have Anti-Aliasing checked, those settings would overrule nhancer, and you'd lose nhancer's far superior settings. So Nick has us set filtering to Trilinear, and AA to OFF, so that nhancer can have control of those settings.

Anisotropic is the best filtering available. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisotropic_filteringCheck out the picture in the top right to see a comparison against trilinear.

Thanks. As it turned out, the error I was getting from RivaTuner was about it not being able to load an unsigned driver in Win7-64. It asked if I wanted to turn off driver signing, reboot, then enable it. I did, and of course it didn't work. Just kept saying the same thing over in a loop. After googling around, I found that RivaTuner appears to be, for the most part, a dead project and the dev is now producing updated RivaTuner re-packs in the form of MSI Afterburner, and EVGA Precision Tools, that I know of. I got Afterburner, and it worked great. I set it up to do a dynamic fan control based on GPU temp, and it's working.

Dolph, how did you get Rivatuner working? When I tried it, it said "no supported driver" or some such.

With 197.13, I installed the Nvidia "Performance Tools", which add the OC'ing and fan controls - and profiles - pages to Nvidia Control Panel.I can't get these things to work for love nor money. I can manually change the clocks and fan speed, but the "Save to Profile" button never lights up, it's always ghosted out and unusable. Every time it asks if I want it to load when Windows loads, I say yes, but it never does. Anyway, my texture flashing came back again, despite high fan speeds and reasonable GPU temps. It's something in the cfg file. When it was all working perfectly a few days ago, I backed up that fsx.cfg file. I guess I made some changes, or something changed, I don't know, today they were happening bad. It's where a geometric shape, usually water, will flash to plain white for a split second and then back again. It never happens in the sky or clouds, and rarely on land. I restored that known good CFG from a few days ago, and presto, it went away again. Some clues. It does not happen in windowed mode. It does not happen in any other 3D game/application. It does not happen in DX10 Preview mode. There are just sooooo many variables. drivers, heat, 3rd party textures, dx9 vs dx10, 1000 different cfg settings, nhancer and it's many settings. and so on.

I actually just came here to post about this exact topic.I have a GTX285, and also the 197.xx drivers. I've been having texture flashing problems. They'd seem to go from occasional, to horrible. I'd tried everything I could think of over the last 3 days, but nothing gave me relief. I'd have moments of 30 minutes where I thought i'd at least minimized the problem to where the sim was playable, but then it'd come back with a vengeance. Last night, I tried going to older drivers, it didn't help. In reverting back to 197, I also grabbed ntune and thought I'd try underclocking my card (it came factory oc'ed to 666/1512). That didn't help either. But then I noticed the fan speed was on 14% (!). I moved it up to 45%, and haven't had a *single* texture flash since (90 mins of flying, incl PNW and non-PNW areas). Now I don't know if it was from reinstalling the drivers, or from the fan bump, but my money's on the fan. I just hope it sticks. Every time I think I have this thing beat, it seems to come back and bite me in the arse.

Ok, in retrospect, the above videos were pretty bad :) Well, the L39 vid is ok, if a bit mechanical.I've been getting pointers from Jigsaw, and he's helped me a lot. Here is my latest:Heart in San Francisco (2:53)For some reason, this one only upped to 480p, so it'd probably look better in the default youtube window size.I think you'll notice a slight improvement over the Mt St Helen's video :(

When you go to Customize, in Settings, what is your filtering set at?

Thanks. I did leave HighMemFix=1 in there.

I tried everything he said, including disabling nhancer and giving FSX control of AA/AF, turned of vsync, etc. For me, this was a bust ... I lost 5 fps, and it looks much worse, due to FSX's poor AA/AF, and no vsync for me is just not doable. I get bad screen tearing and I just can't handle it. I went back to my nhancer setup, 8xS AA, 16x AF, vsync on, and reset all that stuff I added back to the way it was, and I'm back to getting 20fps sustained over a very dense downtown San Fran, and 30fps (using FPSlimiter) over non-city areas, and it looks stunning. I think I'll just leave well enough alone.

Ulfb,Did you leave TML at 1024? That's the one setting I don't understand about *******' settings ... he says make it "30" whereas the default is 3. I show default of 1024, and up to 4096, as you mentioned.

I do, and thanks! No wonder i couldn't find them.