Hey guys,
Thanks much.
I have to tell you though, I found out why it was running poorly and why it was suddenly running good.
I booted up FSX again a moment ago and found the frame rates being back to 7 FPS. I couldnt believe it. I rebooted. Same.. Bummed me out, and I dared not tell you guys of the horrible news after such good news.
It then occurred to me that the issue that was blocking it must be present at that moment.. I looked at the screen and noticed Gmax was idle in the background, running.. I booted up FSX, same.... I shut it down, saved my build in Gmax, exited, rebooted FSX, and bang, 30 FPS with AA ticked on!
It was Gmax this entire time. Evidently its just enough to throw resources over the edge and cut performance in FSX when AA is online. Perhaps the edge of performance for the ATI card? Dont know.....
I have Gmax running idle ALOT... Part of the biz. I had rarely ever run FSX without Gmax running in the background, lol.. (my fun flying is in FS9).
A note for developers on the Gmax issue. I have resolutions in FSX set at 1024 and 512 (max settings) and I use 2048 size master PSD files for mappings in Gmax, which is a hurrendous, astronomical taxxing of memory resources when having perhaps 20 materials in a project.
So.... That is a clue on performance for devs... If you want good frame rates in FSX and you have Gmax running, aint going to happen... Shut down Gmax or Max for better performance if you seem to be having issues with frame rates in FSX.
Bill
EDIT: The reason I found this odd, having FSX and Gmax running at once, including Photoshop, is that in the past 2 years, it never seemed to effect frame rates before, as though the program running was the one that had master control of the memory, but not this time.