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sorry Max, but i disagree about the Mem. Bus. don't know where you got ur info. about me being told about this before and spreading mis-leading info. if anything i was told by NickN that the Mem. Bus did play a big role. i Do Not try to mis-lead anyone. and that's not to say i'm never wrong either. far from it.it's been My experience with FS over the years that from a Graphics Card standpoint FS craves 2 things...Fill Rate, Mem. Bandwith and, if you throw in a PMDG A/C or the like, more Mem. can help too. again, i find it hard to believe that the Mem. Bus does not play a big role. to me that's kinda like saying that the ole FSB speed didn't play a big role on older AMD and Intel systems.i would like to also point out that i was Wrong about ATI's crappy AA method comment. i was a little frustrated when i typed up that post and had forgotten about FS's old, archaic, outdated rendering engine. you were indeed correct in pointing that out.happy flyin, fm
Here's the thing about the memory bus: on its own, it means nothing. The end goal of pairing a certain bus width with any particular memory technology is to achieve a certain bandwidth. Bandwidth is the metric. How much data can be transferred per second. Case-in-point: if memory bus width meant anything on its own, why then is Nvidia moving to a 384-bit bus with their upcoming GT300-based parts? Answer: you have to account for the speed of the RAM. Since NV is finally going to adopt GDDR5, they don't have to use such a massive interface to achieve the bandwidth they desire with their upcoming products.

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Guest djt01
Hi, Clean install, alwaysYes, the NVIDIA (any driver version, now 195.81 beta) , with PMDG MD-11 can fly smooth and fps at LAX for example in 2D mode with 50-60 fps (VC at 30-40) . The same situation with ATI, stuttering and 30-35 fps (CAt 9.11 , 9.12 and last hotfix pack).In the air,more 60-120 fps with NVIDIA, more or less (a bit less) the same with ATI. Sorry I am not a fan from NVIDIA or ATI. I choose what I think it

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I still love XP. In fact, works like a dream and FS9 runs rock solid without any problem.Some issues with FS9 and Ultimate 64 bits...Miquel.

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I still love XP. In fact, works like a dream and FS9 runs rock solid without any problem.Some issues with FS9 and Ultimate 64 bits...Miquel.
The only "issues" I've ever encoutered with FS and Windows NT 6.x (Vista and 7) x64 relate to the Aero interface, and the need to increase the "userva" value (aka 3GB switch).

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I still love XP. In fact, works like a dream and FS9 runs rock solid without any problem.Some issues with FS9 and Ultimate 64 bits...Miquel.
I

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A question of taste.Miquel.
Sorry Miquel but hardware support as far as drivers are concerned is no question of taste, it

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Before everyone with a gtx 285 or other perfecly fine card runs to the store and gets the 5870 just because people report about FPS increases, I would like to express my huge disappointment using this card in FSX. While the card is really awesome [in modern games], I just can't stand it in FSX. I haven't exactly spent months tweaking this card so take this as my personal opinion based on my particular systems. If the card works for you, that's great.Basically, just comparing FPS will not give the whole picture. For example with the default ultralight flight I will get up to 250 FPS using my old gtx 260, while with the 5870 I peak at over 400. This is a nice number for us tweak geeks but it says absolutely nothing about the actual performance that matters of course. Actually it turned out to be quite the opposite.The biggest issue here is that to get the same picture quality as the nvidia cards and to get rid of as much shimmering as possible, you have to change the card's settings (the very few that are available) to pretty much the highest levels and it will really bring the card to its knees, losing all the performance gain you previously had.For example there is currenly no way (that I know of, or that anyone else knows about, it seems) to control the negative lod bias with the 5870. The ATI Tray Tools can do this with older ATI cards but it hasn't been updated for ages and it does not work with 5870. This makes it impossible to specify a sane mipbias value in the FSX config. This makes FSX fast but ugly. I also sometimes get some ugly horizontal tearing even though vsync is set to forced. The tearing is not quite as bad as all the horrible FSX/5870 videos you see on youtube, but it's still not acceptable. The graphics is also not "smooth". I'm not talking about stuttering because of too low or too high FPS or bad texture loading or anything like that. I haven't really looked into this so I can't tell why, but when locked at 40 FPS for example and flying at exactly a constant 40 FPS, the graphics really doesn't move very smoothly. I've never experienced this behaviour with any other card in FSX.So basically, with the 5870 I currently get impressing FPS numbers but an image quality that is less than impressing.This is a shame because the card has some other features that are really FSX friendly. For example the eyefinity feature actually works very well and you only get a slight FPS decrease compared to a single screen even in high resolution. It's nice to finally have a decent multi monitor hires scenery display in FSX, unlike the previous crude hacks like triplehead2go or wideview. Using multiple monitors as a regular extended desktop for displaying panels also shows no FPS decrease whatsoever. With all other cards I've tried, I immediately get a ~5 FPS decrease as soon as I drag anything at all to a secondary screen, let it be fullscreen or undocked windows.I've given this card a chance on two different machines with identical results. It's simply not for me.

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Thanks for the review. I am looking for a replacement for my 8800gts. On this card when I have a complex 3d vc and virtually any ground scenery or clouds, the graphics goes to heck. I am more interested in getting rock solid AA/AF, no shimmering, slow texture loading etc than a few frames here or there. I'm only running at 1200x1000 res too.scott s..

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Reformatting is the only way to go if your switching from Nvidia to ATI or vis-versa.
Disagree - run all the uninstallers available in Add/Remove Programs, then run Guru-3D Driver Sweeper in safe mode. Then remove the card from Device Manager just before shutting down to put the new one in. This fully uninstalls any trace of the old card and it's drivers from the system. I've done it multiple times and it works.
I bought the 5850 card. It is a bit if a disappointment. It's no faster than the 275GTX that it replaced.
If you're looking for framerate increases in FSX, swapping between high-end video cards is not going to do it because of how CPU limited FSX is. Test a GPU-driven game and you'll see a big difference between those two cards.

Ryan Maziarz
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For fastest support, please submit a ticket at http://support.precisionmanuals.com

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Guest djt01
Disagree - run all the uninstallers available in Add/Remove Programs, then run Guru-3D Driver Sweeper in safe mode. Then remove the card from Device Manager just before shutting down to put the new one in. This fully uninstalls any trace of the old card and it's drivers from the system. I've done it multiple times and it works.
You can disagree all you want, the only sure way of getting rid of all traces of the previous install is with a reformat. I build and upgrade gaming systems as a side business I would never upgrade any customers machine (or my own) with a new video card without a reformat, that

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Before everyone with a gtx 285 or other perfecly fine card runs to the store and gets the 5870 just because people report about FPS increases, I would like to express my huge disappointment using this card in FSX. While the card is really awesome [in modern games], I just can't stand it in FSX. I haven't exactly spent months tweaking this card so take this as my personal opinion based on my particular systems. If the card works for you, that's great.Basically, just comparing FPS will not give the whole picture. For example with the default ultralight flight I will get up to 250 FPS using my old gtx 260, while with the 5870 I peak at over 400. This is a nice number for us tweak geeks but it says absolutely nothing about the actual performance that matters of course. Actually it turned out to be quite the opposite.The biggest issue here is that to get the same picture quality as the nvidia cards and to get rid of as much shimmering as possible, you have to change the card's settings (the very few that are available) to pretty much the highest levels and it will really bring the card to its knees, losing all the performance gain you previously had.For example there is currenly no way (that I know of, or that anyone else knows about, it seems) to control the negative lod bias with the 5870. The ATI Tray Tools can do this with older ATI cards but it hasn't been updated for ages and it does not work with 5870. This makes it impossible to specify a sane mipbias value in the FSX config. This makes FSX fast but ugly. I also sometimes get some ugly horizontal tearing even though vsync is set to forced. The tearing is not quite as bad as all the horrible FSX/5870 videos you see on youtube, but it's still not acceptable. The graphics is also not "smooth". I'm not talking about stuttering because of too low or too high FPS or bad texture loading or anything like that. I haven't really looked into this so I can't tell why, but when locked at 40 FPS for example and flying at exactly a constant 40 FPS, the graphics really doesn't move very smoothly. I've never experienced this behaviour with any other card in FSX.So basically, with the 5870 I currently get impressing FPS numbers but an image quality that is less than impressing.This is a shame because the card has some other features that are really FSX friendly. For example the eyefinity feature actually works very well and you only get a slight FPS decrease compared to a single screen even in high resolution. It's nice to finally have a decent multi monitor hires scenery display in FSX, unlike the previous crude hacks like triplehead2go or wideview. Using multiple monitors as a regular extended desktop for displaying panels also shows no FPS decrease whatsoever. With all other cards I've tried, I immediately get a ~5 FPS decrease as soon as I drag anything at all to a secondary screen, let it be fullscreen or undocked windows.I've given this card a chance on two different machines with identical results. It's simply not for me.
You could have saved yourself some key strokes, by looking at the comments from users a few pages back. You did forget to mention that the 5870

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There's really just two reasons the 285 looks better:1. ATI doesn't have hybrid combined AA modes - what the 8XS AA mode actually is is a 4X multisample AA pass (which is what normal AA is) and a 2X supersample AA pass being applied at the same time. Supersampling is able to smooth transparency textures, which are what the trees, power pylons and other autogen objects that shimmer in the distance are. Multisampling only gets the edges of actual polygon geometry whereas supersampling is a "full scene" process. This is why it's so much harder on the video card - the card is literally creating multiple higher resolution versions of the whole screen internally and using those to create the SSAA. The combined mode lessens the performance drop by using both types.2. ATI's drivers don't have a negative LOD clamp. Games engines will sometimes attempt to negatively "bias" the filtering of mipmaps in an effort to sharpen the image. This works when the scene is stationary, but when you're using high levels of AF on the card and the scene is moving, it'll cause the shimmering in the actual textures themselves. The clamp setting overrides what the game engine is trying to do and it makes textures shimmer much less.If ATI added these features to their driver, the 5870 would look indistinguishable from while performing better than the 285.
I posted a utility long long ago that is like the nHancer for Nvidia. It has prerender (called Flip Queue on ATi cards), LOD clamp, etc, basically all the stuff nHancer has. It is widely unknown though because it is an enthusiast program, and unless your unsatisfied with ATi's drivers then you have to search extensively for a program like this.http://forums1.avsim.net/index.php?showtopic=251945&hl=BTW, to all people that say ATis image quality is worse. That is the most BS I've heard in years. ATi's quality has always been better than nVidia and will always be till this day. nVidia has made a significant improvement with their anisotropic and anti-aliasing and super-sampling quality recently though (since the 8 series) so now it is very hard to tell the difference in image quality between ati and nvidia, but in some games ati is slighty better and in some games nvidia is slightly better. This is because of games being sponsored by ATi and Nvidia, so when you select 8xAA in one game, it might be a combo of two things, but on the other brand 8xAA, making things hard to compare. The problem here seems to be lack of knowledge. Everyone has tried one manufacturer, or has not searched for extra programs or researched settings when they switch brands, so false things start to spread around like this. I've had both nVidia and ATi, and I can tell you I was very satisfied with my nVidia card, BUT, the image quality then was still worse, even with nHancer at the highest settings (but these were old gen cards). ATis image quality is higher with the highest setting vs Nvidia with the highest setting. That is what image quality is anyway, you test quality with the highest setting... not the lowest.The ATi card can perform 8XAA (multisampling) (even my card can do it) combined with anti-aliasing filters (highest is edge-detect filter) which gives you an over all theoretical sample of 24xAA. You can also combine that with what is called Adaptive AA for transparent textures (Supersampling) on ATi cards. Supersampling is a very expensive process although and if not used properly reduces texture qualit because of the algorithms it uses. People do not know how to use the card properly therefore they turn on adaptive AA and AA and expect it to look equal to nVidia. Thats not the way it works 8xMSAA + Edge Detect =24x giving the best results. With the latest cards if I remember correctly the latest gen cards (4 series, and 5 series) have 16xMSAA, and the highest samples you can get on CCC (Catalyst Control Center) or 32xAA (although its not entirely MSAA, unless with crossfire)http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/dirt-2...ark,2508-2.htmlhttp://www.tomshardware.com/forum/254368-33-struggle-crysisPlease Read This, very good article!!:http://alienbabeltech.com/main/?p=12648&page=2Same Article Showing Supersampling being used properly the best it can be used on each card:http://alienbabeltech.com/main/?p=12648&page=6
Patroit ATi 5000 Series Image Quality Analysisby BFG10K on Nov.01, 2009, under Articles, TechnologyATi’s Super-SamplingSuper-sampling returns with the 5xxx series, and the method ATi has chosen is actually closest to 3dfx’s approach than others’. Both vendors render the same scene multiple times with a slight offset and combine the samples together. The main difference is that 3dfx shifts the position of the geometry, while ATi shifts the position of each sample. Like 3dfx, ATi has a 4x rotated grid and an 8x sparse grid, but 8x was only available on the unreleased Voodoo 5 6000.The advantage of this method is that rotated and sparse girds are easily viable, and provide superior anti-aliasing to ordered grids with equal sample counts, especially at (near) vertical and (near) horizontal edges. The disadvantage of this method is that the LOD isn’t automatically improved and has to be controlled properly, otherwise scene blurring may occur.I’d recommend a LOD bias of -0.5 for each AA level (so -0.5 for 2xSS, -1.0 for 4xSS, and -1.5 for 8xSS). You may subjectively prefer a sharper image and use smaller values, but don’t go overboard. There’s more to image quality than just sharpness, and an excessively low LOD bias will introduce additional texture aliasing which defeats the purpose of super-sampling in the first place. You can control the LOD bias with a tool such as ATi Tray Tools if you can get it to work with your 5xxx. I couldn’t at the time of this writing, but there was a new version released just as I was ready to publish the article.
He didn't even use Ati Tray tools so he was most likely not able to use an LOD Bias, and he still got significantly better image quality (IQ), and take note this was on a 5770.http://www.rage3d.com/Board/showthread.php?t=33952981

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You could have saved yourself some key strokes, by looking at the comments from users a few pages back. You did forget to mention that the 5870's image quality with FSX isn't any worse than Nvidia's without the use of nHancer. By the way an "auto" LOD bias feature was implemented back with the Catalyst 9.11's.
I'm sorry you had to waste your time reading my opinion then. I don't want auto. Auto doesn't work well for me in this case. I've used so many versions of the drivers/CCC and tried as many versions of the nhancer-style addons for ATI that I could find but so far none of them has given me the results I want. If this is because of my own incompetence, so be it. Still have a few things on my list to try though so I've not given up. I got perfect results in other games with the 5870 in no time at all so I know very well what this card can do.

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