um, scuse me please, do you see 'birds in the rigging'?

[She-Wolf]

Hello people. I feel a grockle coming in here with my query, but as the Ubi forum for this game seems not to be accepting logins, I thought I would look elsewhere and found YOU - so here I am.

I have owned SH3 for some time, and never 'got round' to playing it, being a slow but dogged 'X-Universe' player as well ( a space-sim genre, bit like a modern Elite), and there only being so many hours in the day ( well, night actually) to indulge myself. However, a few weeks back I started in on it and instantly got hooked simply because of the realism of how the ships roll and the waves break - all that sort of stuff. Because it seems such a well-made game ( or sim if you prefer), I wanted to do it properly, so enrolled in the Naval Academy and ( slowly) worked my way through the different training scenarios.
At present I am on Torpedoes, and have actually 'killed' the required amount of ships ( through luck more than skill I think), but my results were 'unsatisfactory' presumably because I did not take the sub far enough 'back to base' before coming out of that training session, so I have to do it all again. Well that is fine, thing is, while I was actually in SH3, few days back, something nasty happened to one of my SLI graphics cards and I had to replace it. Because we could not find another Geforce 6800 to pair up with the good one, we bought two Geforce 7600's, which are technically superior, being a later model, so I expected to have improved graphics experience. Well... in X3 everything seems to be fine and I have no grumbles, but in SH3 I have seen something which I do not remember was there before - so that is why I am here.

When you first surface, in the torpedo training exercise, you see two ships dead ahead - the big cargo vessel and a stationary small merchant closest. I thought that with my old graphics, when I looked through the scope at this vessel, I could see its rigging as a continued line, no breaks, just as you would in real life. However, now when I look through the scope, unless a ship is really quite close, the rigging appears to be broken up into little black squares - looks just like a load of birds perching on an invisible wire. I can live with this but it does spoil the realism a bit, and if there is a graphics tweak I should be tweaking ( I am a bit dim on all the technicalities there), then I would like to know - but mostly my question is, what do YOU see?

My machine is quite powerful (P4 3.4 GB processor), and the graphics cards, as I said, are two PCIe Geforce 7600 GT's with SLI enabled.

There are other things I would like to ask you too - but not here and not now. However, if there is a sticky on AOB, understanding headings, maps and other arcane skills ( I would look but have to go downstairs to prepare hubs lunch like five minutes ago) I may find insight there and not have to be an irritating novice in the main forum.

For now, If you can advise me on the 'birds in the rigging appearance' according to what others expect to see, it would be greatly appreciated