Whats up and coming in video cards??

[HeavyMetal]

Whats coming in the near future??  Is it worth buying the 9800pro or should one wait.  I dont wanna spend the big bucks only to find out I should have waited 2 or 3 months and now my 9800 is "old news'  It cost 450 here and we all know the price will drop as soon as something better comes along.

Speedbird_1961

[Dan]

As far as I know the only big improvement is gonna be PCX.
Dan

[Gixer]

Er..... The 9800pro is old hat already!!

The new gen cards are

Nvidia FX6000 range, i.e.

[Iroquois]

Another thing worth mentioning is that the X800 and Geforce 6800 are virtually the same in preformance except for one thing. The 6800 has something called Shader Model 3.0. The X800 only uses SM2.0 which all 9000 series Radeons and all FX series Geforces use. SM3.0 is supposed to make games look more realistic by redering lighting and shadding more realistically. What does this mean for FS? Well nothing because it doesn't support it. However all newer games such as Far Cry, Doom 3, and Half Life 2 use this model. The Geforce 6600 will also have SM3.0 support. The new Geforces are something too look at because FS2006 is probably not too far off and it probably will support it along with 64bit CPU support. Of course we will have Geforce 7s and Radeon 11000s by then. God knows what features they'll have.

[HeavyMetal]

[quote]

One thing though, if your holding 50fps with all things maxxed why do you require a new g/card?

[JBaymore]

[quote]

Im very happy with the FPS I currently have, however, in looking at some screenies here at SimV I see that there are some very high quality shots ie: no jaggies, very crisp, clear shots, some even looking very realalistic.

[Gixer]

Ah thats why you holding such a high FPS.

Ok well your card is capable of Anti-Alias I think, my old GF4 ti4600 was anyhow.

Now you can make yours look pretty to, though it may become unflyable, but just to get an idea of how FS can look.

Go to your graphics settings through the control panel/settings.  choose settings then click the advanced button.  Click the tab at the top which should say Ti4200.  Go to the Performance and Quality bit and set Anti-Alias to 4x.  Set Anistropic Filter to 8x.  Set Image settings to 'Quality'  Set the res in the game to the highest your monitor can do, prob 1280x1024 but goto 1600x1200 if possible.

Ok start your FS up.  Max everything in display settings but leave mip-map quality at 5 and do not tick the anti-alias box on the hardware tab in the game.  Ok create a flight.  Once started take a look, should now look very pretty, if your at a busy airport expect to see your at about 5.  U cant fly like this but u can get an idea of what the game can look like.  Now go get yourself a 6800U as this card can hold about 20fps in this situation with the amount of 3d clouds turned down to 60% and AI reduced to 75% also the IQ is much better so you will have a crisper image still  ;D

Of course now you will have to go turn off AA and AF in your control settings so its back to how it was.

[HeavyMetal]

Well, I think I buillt a pretty good little toy here.  Its used mosttly for gaming  and the reason I chose the Abit NF7-S board after extensive research, was because every review I read gave it top marks in the speed dept, and its an overclockers dream.   Its a darn good board, and I can afford to lose a few FPS to bring up the image quality.

I see a lot of people here with better specs, but they dont seem to get the FPS that I get.  I attrivute that to the Abit board, since my video card is only middle of the road and my Ram is only the standard 512mg.

[Gixer]

Yeah i think that mobo is alright, my suggestions were alterations in your graphic settings nothing to do with the mobo.

I just run a little test on my rig here.  I turned off AA and AF and flew into KSEA with all sliders maxxed and res at 1280x1024 (The max res your TFT should do)

I held 26FPS all the way in, unless I looked away from the airport then it shot up to 60ish.  So what is very strange is how my new g/card works as upping the res to 1600x1200 and putting on 4xAA and 16xAF only loose me a few FPS (Goes down to 20).

My install of this game is only a week old, though I do have a lot of addons installed and I dont use progs like enditall etc, in fact I had MSN and IE pages open so dunno how much this would have effected the FPS.