Classic British Flight Sim

Inspired by Katy Pluta's testing of settings for FSX, I applied some of her findings to FS9...The main thing I wished to try was to set the screen resolution high enough to nullify the need for Anti-Aliasing and Anistropic Filtering...The idea being to relieve the computer of these onerous tasks and therefore to get acceptable frame rates in high intensity scenery.

I am very pleased with the results and have decided to operate in this mode from now on, until I see a good reason for change...I have set my monitor for 100htz refresh and I've set the resolution in FS9 and FSX to the maximum for my monitor (2048x1536x32). In the Forceware I have set AA and AF to OFF and "Application Controlled" and in FS itself I have unchecked the Antialiasing box.

Here are three shots I took yesterday at McLeland Field on a Thursday (all 36 F-16s present plus all the other usual Traffic).







Remember there is NO antialiasing being used in the above shots. I have made them larger than normal to enable the frame rate to be read and the detail seen.


Thanks for looking :dance:

Hi Peter

That's incredibly sharp

I must have a play arround with mine and see it I can get it clearer.

Thanks for the info

Garry

I use 8xAA and 16xAF but only at 1280*1024.
Id never be able to run those settings at 2048x1536 though!

100hz at 2048x1536? You must have a VERY good monitor!

They look very sharp indeed.
At that resolution I would still have at least 8AF enabled, just to reduce the texture bluring in the distance.

Peter,

Don't think I would get anywhere near that setting for my monitor!!

Only a bog standard 17" flat screeny thingymajig!!

The graphics card will still be working hard to produce the image at that res.

How does your frame rate compare to what you had it set at before?

According to my quick n dirty calculation, there are 2.4 times as many pixels at that resolution than at 1280x1024 which is the native resolution of my (and possibly most people's) TFT. Peter does have a point though about eliminating the need for AA (and thus improving FPS), vs. CB's comment of more pixels to draw (and therefore lower FPS), so it will be interesting to see further tests to reveal which works better. I'm not sure what algorithms are involved to anti alias each frame, but I suspect that dependent on exactly what is being shown (and how much contrasts there is in it), the processor time required probably varies quite a bit, so it may not be very 'black and white', pardon the pun

Well I'm still juggling and have come up with a slightly better half and half solution...I'm now back to 1600x1200x32 but with no Forceware use and with the AA box ticked in FS9 (this is a mild AA of about 2x). I'm now able to lock at 25 FPS and get it for most of the time. The image looks just about as good and I've taken a series of shots with my AI Traffic Trident 3...I'm off to bed now and I'll put them up tomorrow

I think its better to use the manufacturer's AA setting in the display properties rather than the one in FS as the former (hopefully) is doing it in hardware, whereas I believe the latter does it in software... or so a little birdie told me :think: