NZFF

Hey guys, just upgraded to a new rig and completed a fresh install of FS9 followed by all of my addon bells and whistles. After a few days tweaking around with various settings to get the FS9 .cfg and the Nvidia control panel settings matched, the results with the new system are close, but not as sharp as my old system. Main problem im getting is "jaggies", especially on the aircraft models and upright poles in the addon scenery. Doesnt seem to matter what level of Antialiasing im running, the results are almost identical.
Computer specs are : OLD

Intel P4 3.0GHz
1.5Gb RAM
160 & 320GB HDD's
Nvidia 7600GT 256Mb PCI-E

NEW

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz
2.0Gb RAM
500 & 750Gb HDD's
Nvidia 8400OEM 256Mb PCI-E

Now the question is, although the 8400 is a newer card, could the 7600GT have superior performance and would it be worth my while to swap them over? Warranty is not an issue on these machines.

The newer 800 series has a newer nivdia control panel ,,it has settings that affect it the way you explain ,,there is a newer control panel called Nhancer ,you have to delete the default fs9 control panel propertys and redo them with out the super Antialiasing etc ...

have a look at this topic http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=38921

Short answer:

The 8400GS sucks... ditch it.

Long answer:

There is an interesting chart here which groups cards into tiers in terms of similar performance... you'll notice the 8400GS is down with the Geforce 4 Ti4600/Ti4800 and several tiers below the 6600GT!!!

and in pretty much every benchmark I checked on the VGA charts at tomshardware.com... the 7600GT outperforms the 8400GS...

which is not really suprising given that the 7600GT has a wider memory bus (128-bit vs. 64bit) and consequently the memory bandwidth and fill rates are better... the only advantage of the 8400GS that I can see is that it supports DX10 and shader model 4.0

Code: Select all

      GeForce 8400 GS
Core Clock (MHz)     450
Shader Clock (MHz)     900
Memory Clock (MHz)     400
Memory Amount     256MB
Memory Interface     64-bit
Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec)     6.4
Texture Fill Rate (billion/sec)     3.6

Code: Select all

    GeForce 7600 GT
Graphics Bus Technology     PCI Express®
Memory     256MB
Memory Interface     128-bit
Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec)     22.4
Fill Rate (Billion pixels/sec)     6.7
Vertices/Second (Millions)     700
Pixels per clock (peak)     12
RAMDACs (MHz)     400

Ooops, misread the Q.
Definately take the 7600GT.

Sweet! Cheers for your advice guys swapped cards around between the two units and the results were much better (still not quite as good as the XP install though). Should tide me over until sometime after Warbirds over Wanaka when i get some cashflow happening again.