Wow! Graphics!

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Member for

18 years 2 months

Posts: 7

Hello.

How do i get the sort of great graphics i see on screenshots on this forum, and in PC Pilot mag?

I have FS 9 and add-ons, but my aircraft textures still look 2D, and ground textures are still quite basic. I dont get tyres marks on runways etc.

I have a GeoForce FX 5200 128MB graphics card and a 2.60 Ghz Pentium 4.
Are there better cards, or changes to my system i can make to achieve similar visuals?
Those that post great screenshots, please share your system and configs.

Thanks,

Franc'.

Original post

Member for

24 years 2 months

Posts: 6,503

My graphics card is identical to yours and processor speed is 3.06GHZ. :)

Member for

18 years 2 months

Posts: 7

Thanks fo rthe reply.

Will an upgrade in processor improve my graphics?

I have seen your screenshots, and your enviroment is much better than mine. I have traffic 2005, FS Global, Road and Rivers and Flight enviroment.

Where do you get the impressive 3D aircraft models from with reflections etc?

Thanks again.

Franc'

Member for

19 years 1 month

Posts: 232

Upgrading your graphics card will have no notceable effect on what you see, but it may make what you see move more fluidly.

The key to changing the graphics in FS is the display settings. Take some time to to experiment with changing one at a time. The higher the settings are, the more workload is put on your system so although you might see improvements such as denser tree/building population (the autogen setting for example) the 'performance' of your sim will suffer. As you increase the complexity of the graphics you may notice your sim slow down and 'stutter'. The key is to make a compromise between having the settings as high as you like and getting a fluid performance from you sim. It's a matter of personal preference at the end of the day.

Of course if you find the perforance is not acceptable you can upgrade. In your original post you don't specify how much RAM your system has (which in FS is equally important as processor speed and graphics card) upgrading RAM is often far cheaper than replacing a graphics card or processor, I would reccomend at least 1Gb (1024Mb) in total to get the most out of FS9

I hope this helps.

Bruce

Edit : It's just occured to me if there is anything in partcular you want to improve why not post an example screenshot ?

Member for

18 years 3 months

Posts: 32

franczola,

Load up your FS and go into the 'display' settings.

Then go to the hardware page, and increase the 'Global Max Texture' (or something like that) slider at the bottom to full. That will amost indefinately make your aircraft look 100% quality.

For scenery, it's recommended you get addon ground textures (if flying in the UK use Just Flight's VFR Scenery) and then in the 'Display - scenery' settings page on FS, turn off autogen. This will allow faster loading of surrounding scenery areas and allow them to produce higher quality results.

Finally, set 'Terrain Texture Size' to high (scenery settings), flitering to tri-linear (hardware settings), and MIP-Mapping to 6 or higher (hardware settings).

Your graphics card should be able to cope with them and produce frames of around 15-30 depending on various things.

Also if using 3D clouds, turn them to 50% - there isn't too much difference between 100% density and 50% density, but the latter will result in better frames. Or you can turn them off...

Hope that helps, let me know the results and I may be able to offer further advice.

Martyn (seasoned FS settings messer-arounder :D )

Member for

18 years 2 months

Posts: 7

Thanks guys for taking the time to help me out.

I will play around with my settings over the weekend, and let you know how i get on.

How do I take and post screenshots on the site? Maybe I will do this so you can see my present state of graphics.

Ta,

Franc'

Member for

24 years 2 months

Posts: 6,503

Followed your F-keys along (F1, F2, F3 etc..) and the key to the right of F12 is Print Screen (or Prt Scrn). That will copy whatever is on screen to the clipboard. Paste (Ctrl + V) at any time into something like Photoshop, or, if you don't have that, Paint will do the job. :)

Member for

18 years 2 months

Posts: 7

Sorry.

A Clipboard? Where do I find that?

Member for

20 years 8 months

Posts: 1,381

its easier to download the minute freeware program called FSScreen, from somewhere like avsim (you'll have to sign up to the free accounts to download). simply save the file into a folder like My Pictures, and run the program when you're flying on FS.

when you want to take a picture, simply press 'print screen' on your keyboard. the program saves the image into the folder.

to post an image on the forum, first, convert the image from bitmap (FSScreen saves the image in bmp format - i think the bmp files are too large to upload onto the forum) into JPEG - use MS Paint, or better still something like Photoshop - MS Paint produces low quality images.

then, click on 'manage attachments' button and search for the image and click upload.

hope that helps

Member for

18 years 10 months

Posts: 221

I used to run Fs9 on a 128MB GeForce FX5200, and I found it reasonably acceptable. :)
It would give frame rates of around the 15-20 fps, as stated, with the details set to medium(ish).

I should say your card is perfectly capable of running Fs9 at an adequate quality and speed.

But I "Splashed-Out" and brought a 256MB GeForce 6800GS Ultra PCI-e.

Man she really flies now, and looks stunning.
The display settings are set as high as they can go, and I get frame rates around the 30fps mark now.

3 Ghz Processor.
1 GB Ram.
256Mb GeForce 6800 GS Ultra.

Member for

18 years 1 month

Posts: 17

Hello. I am very new to this flight sim stuff & microsoft (as I'm an Apple man) but I bought a Geeforce FX5500 for around £45 for the pc I have, for FS2002 I bought for Xmas. This pc is just used for this by the way. Playing with the settings helped & experimenting really helped to make things fly. This pc is about 2MGhz, XP & 756 (?) of RAM. Most settings are quite high & I do get smoke & tyre marks from landing the Tornado without due care.

The thing I found really helpful was to turn the realism settings to detect structural stress & damage. That really made me put kid gloves on. Now my Tornado just floats down. After all, it's expensive & costly to repair!! I can now land Spitfires at 80 mph with just a whisper from the tyres. :-) Settings. It's all in the settings.