[PA_Willy]

A couple of notes that might be helpful.
When this thread made me realize that the visual effects of all those settings that we have in conf.ini only appear when running Perfect mode, I set everything to zero (as suggested) running Excellent mode, I did get a nice increase in frame rate and I basically at no cost in terms of image quality, as I couldn't run Perfect mode anyway.
Continuing on the line of thought "let's see how much I can lower my settings before it starts looking ugly" I started lowering my screen resolution trying to find the best compromise between FPS and nice graphics.

My findings so far are that assuming that the highest resolution is the best is at least as wrong as runing Excellent mode with high settings. It seems that the pixel reseolution of the screen doesn't affect the image quality in excellent mode on a regular 19'' LCD, monitor.
The only difference I could notice was that running at 800x600 ( x3 monitors) is that some ground objects are slightly less detailed when you're looking at them from a static plane on the runway.

NO difference at all once in flight, and the cool thing is that at 800x600 the text of icons, messages etc is switched to a thinner font in order to keep it from appearing to big on screen. the result is that at 800x600 the graphics look pretty much the same as they look at 1280x960, and the text messages appearing on screen look _better_.
I haven't tried to run at 640x480. I I think that a that point it woult start looking ugly but I havent actually tried that yet.

You do what you want, but I'm running 800x600 from now on.
(BTW thx again this thread, it got me on the right way to improve my FPS)

Probably you have got a CRT screen. With a TFT screen, whatever resolution lower than the native one, results in a ugly and horrible image.

Regards.