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Just wondering.....I'm a dope when it comes to this stuff but what resolution is best for fsx? I tried 1680x1050x32 and 1680x1050x16, is there any noticeable difference? They both look the same to me.

It will depend on your system and how much processing power you have, Chuck. The higher resolution you run, the harder you are pushing the system and the more you will see impacts to frame rates and blurred scenery textures. And FSX can be a very demanding application.

Because of that, it will sometimes look sharper overall at a lower res if the CPU can keep up with updating the scenery textures.

I was running FSX at 1280x1024 to 1024x800 on my previous system, on the hotrod system I now run at 1600x1200. But then again I also run in Windowed mode a lot of the time (ALT-ENTER to switch) which reduces FSX to the desktop resolution, which I have set at 1280x1024.

Best thing is to experiment and see which you like best on your system. The cool thing is, you can save the settings with a unique name and call them up in mid-flight as the situation demands..... one for desktop flying, one for full-screen, one for cloudy flying (which has greater demands and so maybe you want to reduce some other features to keep frame rates up), etc....

Hey Chuck, just thought I'd mention some more on settings and also tweaks.....just in case you're trying to squeeze as muchout of FSX as possible.

I read the rest of the ORBX FTX user manual last night and I have to say there's some REALLY good advice in there regarding slider settings in the sim....particularly the AI traffic stuff (some of that can really kill your performance).

In addition to that EXCELLENT starting point, there's a lot of info flaoting around about FSX tweaks and I've been tweaking FSX myself ever since it came out and learned a lot...the good tweaks that still work effectively with FSX SP2 are these:

(by the way if you haven't found it, your fsx.cfg (config file) to enter these is usually found by going to "My Computer" -> "Documents and Settings" -> (your user name) -> Application Data (might have to tell WIndows to let you see or access that folder) -> "Microsoft" -> "FSX" folder...or in other words, something like:

C:\Documents and Settings\Stoopy\Application Data\Microsoft\FS9


Anyway here's the good tweaks these days:

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(as Fled has suggested this a couple of times before)...

under the:
[Main] section in the fsx.CFG add this little line

DisablePreload=1

This keeps FSX from (as far as I understand it) pre-loading a bunch of textures at the default flight location, just in case you intend to fly somewhere else other than the location shown in the "Free Flight" menu when FSX loads. And so reducing that pre-load on your graphics card is supopsed to help performance and such in the place where you DO go fly. Seems to reduce the time to load FSX up anyways.

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[SCENERY]
SmallPartRejectRadius=2

What this does is control at what point very small objects will or will nto be rendered. THe example from Microsoft is air conditioner units on top of building roofs...if that kind of detail isn't important to you at altitude when they are only 1, 2 or 4 pixels big, then tell FSX not to try to render them by entering that value here. Default value is 1, 2 is a compromise to gain some performance performance, and the next largest setting is 4 which is what I personally use and am happy with.

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[TERRAIN]
TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_TREES_PER_CELL=2500
TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_BUILDINGS_PER_CELL=2500

Norm is 3000 trees or buildings per "cell" or block of terrain within FSX. Some folks take this down to very small numbers (zero is supposed to be very bad but 1 works)...your trees or buildings wil be very sparse as a result. This works in conjunction with your autgen terrain setting, which is a multipler of the numebr here. The point is, FSX allows for a TON more of trees or buildings per "cell" than FS9 does, and as such carries a performance penalty for rendering which you cn adjust here.

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In [DISPLAY] section,
TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=30

Normally this is set to 40, but actually smaller numbers give better performance, unlike FS9, where you see people using values of 400 or 800 or higher - those higher numbers are not good for FSX. I run at 30 or so but may try 20 or 10 since that's what I had with my ATI1650 card.

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In [GRAPHICS] section,
TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD=1024

Max size of textures to load to the vid card, it's supposed to match your vid card memeory from what I understandm, and the norm is 512. That being said, upping this number decreased the instances of "blurries" (smeared or blurry textures) with my ATI 1650 and has no ills effects with my ATI3870 either. I do realize this number "shouldn't work" since it's bigger than my vid memory, yet it does show a benefit regardless.

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in [TERRAIN] section,
LOD_RADIUS=4.500000

This is about the the biggest you can go without FSX resetting it smaller...you can set it to 6.5, and it'll stick, until you change any option in the menus at which poitn FSX sanity-checks this and sets it back to 4.5. When it's at 6.5, ground scenery can look clearer farther in the distance than it normally does.

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Microsoft recommends adding this toward the end of the FSX.CFG file IF it isn't already there:

[BUFFERPOOLS]
Poolsize=5000000

Description from ops.precisionmanuals.c..._FPS_Guide :

"This is a sort of scenery cache that will help eliminate a lot of the stuttering you see when panning the view around the cockpit or outside the plane. It does increase video memory usage though, so this probably won’t be effective on a video card with less than 256MB of memory.

[BUFFERPOOLS] Poolsize=n

Where n is the amount of bytes we will allocate for one pool of vertex and index buffers to store geometry.

Again from Raf: “In RTM, the default setting was 1MB (1000000). The lower this number, the more pools the allocator will have to rummage through to find space for buffers and the more stutters you may have. In Sp1, we raised the default to 4MB (4000000) and optimized the underlying algorithm for finding free buffers“

Long story short - check first to see if this is in your FSX.CFG file, if it isn't, you can try adding it with the value of 5000000 (5 million) and see if it helps smooth the sim out in any way. Do this as a seperate step without making any other tweaks so you know for sure what the results are of this change only (same advice can apply to all the other tweaks if you want to go step-by-step).