NZFF

I've been not too happy with my FS9 performance lately.. It's just my computer seemed to be struggling to load up sharp textures on the ground around me, in particular in the distance, but even close by me. I'm happily running quite high FPS (locked at 30 fps which I achieve nearly steadily), but, the textures have been struggling.
So, I decided to try something. I've gone from 4x AA and 8x Anisotropic filtering to only 4x AS filtering with 4x AA. In terms of quality of textures, I can't tell the difference from altitude. 4x looks just as good as 8x, but the blurries have nearly all vanished! In particular the distance views have improved. Not FSX quality distance, but good for FS9 distance..
Looking into the distance at low level there is a slight drop in quality, but certainly nothing I can't live with!
So bigger might not be better. If you have this problem, it might be worth a try and I encourage you to try turning them back a notch if you are running high AS filtering, and see if it improves for you.
I run a 7950GT 512mb Gforce gfx card, Core 2 Duo chip, 4gb (lol more like 3.2gb) of DDR ram, Win XP.. etc etc

Thanks for posting your tips Alister
For those with Nvidia cards, this link may also help improve graphics performance for ya.

Scenery Medium low
Traffic Medium low
for an 8800 card, I'm picking these are for FSX?

Yea thats what it said in the link

Yer I think they are for FSX.
Seems a little bit conservative in places but conservative should give you great performance.
Definitely don't follow those to the letter especially if your system is high specced, but they are a good guideline I think.

Those settings are probably suggested for pre SP1 FSX