In light of some the excellent suggestions made here in this forum I would like to add a couple bits of information regarding tweaking.

As has already been pointed out FSAA (also called AA) or full screen anti-aliasing is better done through programs outside of the sim itself.

What has not been covered is the fact that each set of Nvidia Drivers responds totally differently to the application of anti-aliasing as does each video card.

Nvidia has struggled with this issue since the beginning. To make a faster driver which can handle difficult AA issues in a variety of games knowing that AA causes frame rate drops.

So for instance the 29.42 drivers are recognized as amongst the fastest but their AA is very weak(which makes them fast) so simply applying anti-aliasing of say 2x or even 4x will not have the same effect as say on the 40.xx series drivers which have  more well developed anti-aliasing programming built in but may not be as fast.

So in short each set of drivers has to be considered seperately and there is no universal answer to this issue. Plus screen refresh rate plays a role in the appearance of edges and that has to be dealt with also.

Vertical sync (the relationship between your monitor  and your game) and prerender are other factors which govern how your screen redraws itself and they do have to be set although they are pretty universal for Fs2k2.

Anisotropy which is a major part of how ground textures appear is a whole nother can of worms.

While recently Nvidia has started to give support to anisotropic settings it really is a false front. No nvidia driver can be set through NVIEW on your desktop for anisotropic settings. It's there but it does not function. Only RIVA tuner at the present time supports patches which will correct this fault in Nvidia drivers and they must be applied for them to work.

This is also true of refresh rates and digital vibrance. Although lately Nvidia has made some breakthroughs in digital vibrance.

This is also true of mipmap LOD bias which is another way of increasing clarity detail. It must be patched to work correctly and only RIVA tuner can do this at the present time.

The 41.09 drivers were the closest that Nvidia ever came to matching the power of the RIVA and other tweak utilities but they had other problems and can be unstable.

So to cut to the chase each set of drivers as I said before and each machine has to be treated seperately to truly achieve maximum results.

For those of you eager to learn more about basic tweaking ,patching, and refresh rates there is a guide available for download at AVSIM called bgttv1.zip which is an excellent starting point.

It deals with the 29.42 drivers as an example but the same general ideas can be applied to all Nvidia drivers as long as a patch exists but I caution you to disregard his other settings since he doesn't pay enough attention to AA.

There are also specialized settings that need to be applied to the Fs2002.cfg file to deal with terrain issues but that's another story.

I hope all this will be a help to you so that you can have a much more responsive and beautiful looking sim.

Excellent subject matter Ramsa... ...!
...Made a good read, (I've saved the text).... ....!

Cheers mate... ...!
Paul.
(England).

(Ge-Force 4 Ti 4200).
Current Drivers: 4.13.01  4072

Quote:


Hi Ric, Ramsa.... ...!
My card and drivers work fine on programs such as Quake, Unreal, etc.....fantastic effects.... ...!
...when moving left-right-up-and down...
...It's just the peculiarity of flight sims which force the screen to re-calculate X-Y-Z co-ordinates when banked over at an angle.... ...!
(The same problem was apparent in the Sinclair Spectrum computer and caused serious screen shuffling problems).... ...LOL...!
Straight and level flight is fine, (X-Z, Y-Z), and frame rates dropping to 8 FPS when banked over, (X-Y-Z), are acceptable for a short time..
...no problem... ...smooth is fine... ...!
LOL...!

Cheers all... ...!
Paul.
(England).

Quote:


Hi Ric... ...!

It's the problem that all computers have in displaying information on the screen.
If you are stationary all the computer has to do is to refresh the horizontal and vertical scan quickly.
If you move to the left the pixels all have to be shuffled to the right, a simple, quick, machine code calculation.
The same applies if you move to the right, or up or down. It's a simple machine code "rotate" instruction.
Now...
As soon as you move to the left AND down, (as in banking), the instruction has to be calculated TWICE, once for left and once for down, alternately.
This DOUBLES the time it takes for each pixel movement, and therefore the screen refresh takes twice as long... ...!
It was particularly noticeable in the Spectrum as the colour screen was made up of 8X8 pixel squares and without some very clever coding these 8X8 squares shuffling sideways AND down, produced some alarming effects... ...!
LOL...!
...and all of this is just to display the outside scenery...
..thats without all the rotating hands on all the gauges...
...phew... ...
LOL...!
The modern processors and graphics cards do a particularly fine job of all these complicated calculations.. ....
(I still love my trusty old Spectrum and it's machine code tho')..... ... ... ..!

Cheers all...
Paul.
(England).

P.S.  With a screen resolution of 1024 X 768, (multiply those two numbers together, (my little calculator exploded trying to display it), that's the number of pixels on the screen. Now imagine having to shuffle EACH one, starting from the top left of the screen to the bottom right of the screen, and that's just ONE screen refresh...
...it's mind boggling.... ...!
LOL..LOL..LOL..!

Yep, sounds about right to me mate!

Ahhh, the days of the Spectrum huh? I had a 16k, a 48k and 2 128k's. I remember tyring to program that thing in Basic back then, I wrote a program to teach myself times table.

My calculator says that for each 1280x1024x32 RGBA frame, the data output is 41943040 bytes, or 419.4MB per frame, and that's just raw image data. At 25fps, that's over 10Gig's a second........no wonder they have mega bandwidth RAM on these modern cards. 

I wonder how long it would take a Spectrum to render that? 

Ric B