In my constant struggle to get FSX working well, I had always messed with the scenery and weather tabs to try and increase performance without sacrificing too much quality. As I have had little luck with that, I decided today to try the general graphics settings. I set up the CS 757-200 with a detailed McPhat livery at Newark Liberty International Airport (NEWR) and set weather to "Gray and Rainy". I tried lowering resolution, but that gave me little to no FPS increase and a major quality hit (though lower resolution coupled with DX10 worked reasonably well). While no filtering gives a performance boost, everything looks grainy, and I don't see much of a difference between the different filtering methods, so I just left it at bilinear. Then I decided to try something I hadn't before: turn off anti-aliasing. You can see my results at the bottom.
With AA turned off, my frame rates improved a good amount, going from 12-16 to 20+ (I have my frame limit set to 20, so I don't know how much of an increase there would actually be, but probably 2 or 3 FPS more). But, as you can see from the picture, edges are a bit jagged (obviously, as that's what AA corrects). Now, I don't think that they're too jagged, and it's certainly preferable to poor FPS, but I did find a way to get rid of at least some of the jaggedness. Go into your video card settings and find the Anti-Aliasing settings (for me, it's under Gaming>3D Application Settings) and set AA to a lower setting (I have mine at 2x). Now your video card is controlling the anti-aliasing and not FSX. I hope it works!
Now, maybe a bunch of other people have noticed this and I'm just making a fool of myself posting this, but it works well, so I thought I'd post it here just to be safe.


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