FSX
Today while testing some newer video cards on old systems with Win7, James dug out an old ATI Radeon Sapphire HD4870 we gave up on because we never could get the detail clarity, AA, Anisotropic, to work right on it. I have no idea why he neglected to send it back because we gave a really nasty report on this stinker to the mfg. I dug out a piece of software I stumbled on some months back and darn if it didn't make this HD4870 come to life and gave great frame rates and terrific quality. It is actually meant to be used to force Crossfire to work with older drivers that did not work well with Crossfire. It actually forces the 8x/16x to work so you can use your Catalyst to fine tune FSX.
http://epichardware.com/index.php?topic=12.0
I set up my ATI Catalyst 6.9 to the normal settings for FSX and the video card quality, AA and Anisotropic was still jaggy and in general lousy. I started up ATI Xtension next and setup 8x and 16x on a profile inside of extension and saved it. I set it up to launch FSX while both the Xtension and Catalyst were working in the background and whaddya know...WOW! My frame rates stayed at 35 on very high settings. I honestly never saw it drop and flew this lovely old port for almost an hour-I wasn't supposed to play that long, but I was having fun and totally amazed. It even made the cockpit look good in FSX. Oh yes and it also does great on multiple monitors for ATI cards that had trouble doing that because of poor early drivers. OK back to work...
Ted
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