How to examine display resolution (continued)

We've discussed on the previous page how difficult it is to see the polygons that make up the terrain displayed in Flight Simulator, and the reasons for that difficulty.

So how to we get to actually see what's happening with the terrain display resolution? Simple - we just turn off the display features which are obscuring the polygons. To view the raw terrain polygons in Flight Simulator we simply change the filter setting from Bi-linear or Tri-linear to None, turn off Detailed terrain textures and set all land and water effects and detail to their minimum settings.

Obviously it also helps if the polygons aren't covered by autogen or 3D object scenery, so we set autogen and scenery complexity to minimum and if necessary, disable any add-on scenery areas via Scenery Library.

Important

As well as removing the masking effect of the detail terrain textures and filtering, it is important that the resolution that the terrain textures and terrain mesh are displayed at are not degraded by other settings, so make sure terrain complexity and terrain texture size remain on maximum.

Graphics card filtering and effects such as anti-aliasing should also be turned off for this exercise. 

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