Im on P3d now

[gray eagle]

I finally got my dedicated HD plugged in and P3D (Academic) is installed and wow, pretty nice!!!

I am attaching a pic of one settings page and maybe some old P3d timer (User) can explain what some of the stuff I circled is all about.

The image and texture quality setting I am not sure if they are correct. What is Hardware tesselation?

Any info is appreciated.

BTW: I still have FSX/A installed (on another drive) for old time sakes.

[AussieMan]

These are my settings. The top one is your screen resolution. Usually the biggest number is your res.

[Daube]

For information, the hardware tessellation is a process that uses the power of the graphic card to build the terrain complex shapes.
It takes some work out of the CPU, more or less.

Concerning the other options, be careful what you switch on or off, as some of them can have quite an impact on the FPS
If you've got some shiny metallic painted planes in your hangar, you might want to push that reflections slider to the right. The more or the right, the more kinds of elements are reflected on the aircraft

You might also want to play around with all the checkboxes "send" and "receive" for the shadows.
"Send" means this kind of object is allowed to cast some shadows.
"Receive" means this kind of object is allowed to be shadowed by the objects that are casting shadows.
I would recommend you to activate them all, excepted:
- the send for the autogen trees
- the send and receive for the transparent objects

The autogen trees "cast" is expensive of the FPS, but it produces a beautiful effect in dense forests on hills and mountains. You might want to try to activate it just to test.
The "receive" option will allow them to be shadowed when they are on the shadow-side of a mountain.
Just don't push the shadow distance slider too far.

Thanks to these options, your plane will no longer be illuminated by the sun when it's standing under a hangar, as you can see for example in my screenshot below: the aircraft fuselage if shadowed by the hangar, but the nose is illuminated by the sun because the aircraft was rolling out

[Montie]

Hardware Tessellation is a method of putting height information into the triangles that make up the polygon, also known as displacement mapping. The height information can be changed dynamically on the fly based on different variables. Hardware Tessellation also helps smoothing out the surface as it transforms between heigh and low. In P3D it's noticeable when looking at the ocean and wave animations. The height of the waves changes as the injected weather, static or dynamic, making it more lifelike. On modern graphics cards this feature make little to no impact on performance.

In the old FS9 days I used to edit displacement map into screenshots to make them look more realistic. Hardware Tessellation is much better at it though.