Simviation Forums

I've heard that changing your 3D card settings will make FS look a lot better than changing the game's settings. I got my "new" rig today (with a Nvidia GeForce FX 5200, running DX9 and with the latest drivers) and decided to try it.

I put AA and AF to 8x (the highest it would go) and loaded up FS. What I got was the most atrocious-looking graphics I've ever seen, and with an FPS that'd make slideshows look speedy. I then set the AA/AF to "Application-controlled" and modified the settings in-game. This gave me slightly better graphics (yet still not very pretty), with a somewhat less lousy FPS. I'm not exactly a computer expert, so I'm not sure what I did wrong.

Am I being an idiot and forgetting a step, or am I just gonna have to get used to crappy graphics?

EDIT: never mind, I'll get used to the graphics.

The graphics driver set 16bit colour or less when it installed, or doesn't have the correct driver installed.

The banding is because the colour pallette isn't large enough for the "infinite" smooth blending of one shade into the next.

Right click desktop, go to properties/settings and set the screen resolution you desire and 32 bit colour pallette, then click advanced, go to the monitor tab and set 85hz refresh rate if you have a CRT monitor that supports it, goto the GF6600 device tab for your advanced driver settings and remove application control and set anti-aliasing to manual - 2Qx and anisotropic filtering to 4x or 8x (I use 4x).

Set the graphics quality to very high and turn off the vertical sync. Nothing else need be touched and this will apply the settigs globally for all apps and displays.

If you don't find the above options it's because the driver is not correctly installed.

Within windows services you'll find the nVidia display driver service which can be disabled and in your system startup, any nvidia applications can be disabled, the driver settings you set using the method described above will work fine without the background apps running. It's ridiculous that driver install programs must always seem to install applications and run them as default in the background when they are not at all required or desirable. Again, this will only be required after the correct driver installation and after every subsequent driver installation. (Because nVidia just keeps installing all this crap with every driver release).

Cheers.