Simviation Forums

I'm not technically minded when it comes to these things, can you help please?

For starters do not turn on the anti aliasing in the game instead turn it on in your video card driver leave the game setting at application controlled.
The fx5200 is a older card I use to use it and it was not bad. I hane now gone to a NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GS with 512 k ram  8-)

I think he means turn it off in the game, and turn it on in the nVIDIA Control Panel.

If you don't have the nVIDIA Control Panel, then go to www.nvidia.com and download the latest drivers.  This should give you the control panel...

Excellent, thanks for your help.

Yea but you should really get a new graphics card. The FX5200 is quite old now and won't be able to run FSX acceptably... at least not with any improvement over FS2004. The FX5200 doesn't even let you turn on shader model 2.0 (if you do turn it on by changing the display.cfg file, then the game will run at like 1 or 2 fps at minimum settings) meaning there won't be any lighting effects or reflections and the water will have no effects at all even if you turn the settings all the way up.
I seriously advise you to buy a new graphics card. Depending on how much you can spend, I would go for an 8600GT for a low/medium settings ($150-$250 I think), an 8800GTS (300-450 depending on whether you get the 320mb or the 640mb version) for high settings (you can probably max with the 640mb version) or an 8800GTX or Ultra for all maxed.
You can also choose ATI but only for the low/medium range cards. The HD2600 is quite good (just about the same as the 8600GT). Now don't go for the high end HD2900XT because that card draws too much power from the PSU and can't even rival with the 8800GTS.