I don't mean to change the thread but, have you looked on the box for FSX on the requirements? a GTX280 wasn't even out when it was released lol, or the i7.
This doesn't have much to do with the video card, but rather with the cpu, because it's a function of how much cpu *time* is dedicated to the process of creating terrain textures and sending them to the card (FS uses synthetic textures generated on the fly since FS2002), vs doing other tasks.
In FS9 this ratio is fixed and, even if it was possible to tweak it like in FSX, the more time one would dedicate to the texture construction process, the less time the sim would have to do other things, the fiber time fraction parameter (which is not tweakable) is kept purposely low in FS9, in order not to impact fps, because everything runs on a single core there.
Instead, since FSX CAN use multiple cores for this process, it can dedicate more time to it without stopping the sim, so textures can be sharper.
