new system , last time for FSX

Dear Simmers out there I want you to know that I have been around doing this simming thing back in the flight 98 days, and a little earlier.

To be honest all versions of the Microsoft flight Sims have been great to work with, that is until FSX.

Since FSX came my enjoyable flying days came to a end, since FSX nothing but tweaking , more tweaking , upgrades that did little for the software but waste your money.

And here is the clicker of it all, just to get a few more frame rate just to play the game.
Never dealt with that with any other software and I mean none.

So what do I go out and get, another upgrade hoping that the new faster chips, 5 or 6 years later will no dought:?: do the trick.

I have been running a e8500 chip, from some advice given to me, it kept upped as long as I left my sliders in the center, and it allowed for more head room for all my add ons.

So im thinking of upgrading to one of the super chips, the 980 extreme, or the 2600k.

Pay a thousand or three hundred, on chips that were very fast.

This is my system. W7 and Vista 64 bit
I7 2600k cooled by corsair H-60
Gigabyte UD3
PNY 285 GTX 1024 vid
Patriot 16 gig 1600 mem.
1 terra HD
1 320 HD
1200 antec PW
1 LG blue –ray player
1 hita, DVD –rw
I did all the up dates, did all the ram test and CPU test.

System runs good temps are great 29c 59c max

In my humble opinion that should run FSX just fine.
I went out and got the gold addition of FSX.

Loaded it the way the Nikki tweaks showed you even did.

Trust me I have done all the tweaks.

So with that said I loaded it and guest what, absolutely terrible for the money that I spent on this set up.
Frame rate is terrible, I get lock ups, frame rate is the same as it was with my other build.

Am I fed up with this software you bet I am, from where im sitting this system will not run FSX any better than my last system.

So I dumped it and just looked at my computer wanting to throw it at Microsoft, wondering what in the world made them make such a bad piece of software.

There is no one to date that can tell me what gives with this software.

So right now im looking at a clean fully ready to load computer, built for FSX.


So folks out here that will be honest with me and tell me where im going wrong here.

You see what I have, so you folks out here tell me what to do to get full sliders to the right and enough head room to add all of my hundreds of dollars worth of software.

I did with fs9 and somewhat better results with FSX early on (if I kept my sliders at half)

I love and hate FSX, because it is a great sim from the looks, but under the hood the writers did a bad job.

So with a healthy system with nothing on the hard drive except the operating system.

You good folks tell me what to, take what I have and tell me what to do.

I know there are some claims of full slyders and everything nice with a system with less.

i just want some trust worthy facts and not from folks making great claims with no facts to back it up.

I have a fast system , tell me why it wont blow FSX away, after five years on the market.


Thank you ………………………………….Robert

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Mr. Midnight

Dear Simmers out there I want you to know that I have been around doing this simming thing back in the flight 98 days, and a little earlier.

To be honest all versions of the Microsoft flight Sims have been great to work with, that is until FSX.

Since FSX came my enjoyable flying days came to a end, since FSX nothing but tweaking , more tweaking , upgrades that did little for the software but waste your money.

And here is the clicker of it all, just to get a few more frame rate just to play the game.
Never dealt with that with any other software and I mean none.

So what do I go out and get, another upgrade hoping that the new faster chips, 5 or 6 years later will no dought:?: do the trick.

I have been running a e8500 chip, from some advice given to me, it kept upped as long as I left my sliders in the center, and it allowed for more head room for all my add ons.

So im thinking of upgrading to one of the super chips, the 980 extreme, or the 2600k.

Pay a thousand or three hundred, on chips that were very fast.

This is my system. W7 and Vista 64 bit
I7 2600k cooled by corsair H-60
Gigabyte UD3
PNY 285 GTX 1024 vid
Patriot 16 gig 1600 mem.
1 terra HD
1 320 HD
1200 antec PW
1 LG blue –ray player
1 hita, DVD –rw
I did all the up dates, did all the ram test and CPU test.

System runs good temps are great 29c 59c max

In my humble opinion that should run FSX just fine.
I went out and got the gold addition of FSX.

Loaded it the way the Nikki tweaks showed you even did.

Trust me I have done all the tweaks.

So with that said I loaded it and guest what, absolutely terrible for the money that I spent on this set up.
Frame rate is terrible, I get lock ups, frame rate is the same as it was with my other build.

Am I fed up with this software you bet I am, from where im sitting this system will not run FSX any better than my last system.

So I dumped it and just looked at my computer wanting to throw it at Microsoft, wondering what in the world made them make such a bad piece of software.

There is no one to date that can tell me what gives with this software.

So right now im looking at a clean fully ready to load computer, built for FSX.


So folks out here that will be honest with me and tell me where im going wrong here.

You see what I have, so you folks out here tell me what to do to get full sliders to the right and enough head room to add all of my hundreds of dollars worth of software.

I did with fs9 and somewhat better results with FSX early on (if I kept my sliders at half)

I love and hate FSX, because it is a great sim from the looks, but under the hood the writers did a bad job.

So with a healthy system with nothing on the hard drive except the operating system.

You good folks tell me what to, take what I have and tell me what to do.

I know there are some claims of full slyders and everything nice with a system with less.

i just want some trust worthy facts and not from folks making great claims with no facts to back it up.

I have a fast system , tell me why it wont blow FSX away, after five years on the market.


Thank you ………………………………….Robert

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First.. SSD hard drives are then way to go... and I have 2 x 128GB SSD drives read and write 285mb/s by OCZ. Yes you can purchase a 256mb drive as the loading is the same as having 2 drives. Plus buying 2 x 128gb was cheaper than buying 1 256gb drive.

next.. how fast is your mem...

not sure what speed that 2600k is running at but if your system is running at 4.0ghz or more the performance is way better than a system running under 4.0ghz.

Also what monitor(s) and resolutions are you using ..

heré's my setup and of course I have done quiet a bit tweaking to have it running smooth..
I7 920 overclocked to 4.0 using corsair h50 cooler.
ASUS P6T motherboard
2 x 128gb ssd drives OCZ 285mb/s
G-Skill 1600mhz CL6 3 x 2gb ram
BFG 480 video card
TH2GO with 3 monitors for outside view only.
FSX deluxe with add-ons.

Of course in the fsx setting menu all the sliders are not set to max cause i;m using custom settings and have done tweaking.

FSX looks great and runs very smooth on my system but i'm working on it to get it much more better.. I do get micro stutters onces in a while as I can live with that and i'm sure once I upgrade my processor it will improve more. Even the outside view while flying, so can see good textures and all..

My biggest improvement I saw was when I purchased the ssd drives and the CL6 1600mhz ram.

Hi Robert.

The specs for your machine are much better than mine and I get reasonable frame rates. The biggest and best tweak that I did was to set the frame rate slider to unlimited. It improved no end. Apparently if you set it to a designated position, it will struggle as it always tries to meet those demands.
You have probably done this already but it is worth a mention.

Gary

Optimising FSX seems to be much more of an art than a science. Some people with incredibly meaty machines report poor performance, others with mid-range hardware swear that it's silky smooth for them.

FSX eats CPU, first and foremost. The more cycles you can give it in a given second, the better it will generally run. There are plenty of other factors that affect it (RAM speed, as mentioned above, disk speed etc) but CPU is the big one. Given it the fastest, most overclocked processor you can find. Single-threaded performance is the key, too; it's no good having an 8-core monster running at a relatively low clock speed like many mobile chips. The Intel Sandy Bridge chips appear to be the best ever in terms of single-thread performance, if set up and turbo'd correctly.

To the OP - you can spend a lifetime doing tweaks and hacks and playing with sliders. One of the problems with FSX is that it's 5+ years old, and wasn't designed for the multi-core world, or the newer DirectX versions, or a host of other little tweaks that you'd do to a modern game to max the performance. The older it gets, the worse it gets. At least some of the potential performance of your rig is being lost because of that. I see people who swear blind that putting a modern video card in an FSX box slows it down, and that it reaches its sweet spot with graphics cards from about 2-3 years ago (Radeon 4860 was one I kept seeing mentioned as perfect for FSX).

Do a bit of research - there's so much advice out there. Admittedly some of it is contradictory. But don't give up yet. While I maintain that it isn't possible to absolutely max FSX out (especially with add-on scenery etc) on any system, it's certainly possible to get decent performance in most situations.

NH

Hey Robert my name is Terry. I saw this post from you a few weeks ago when I was doing my research on whether or not I wanted to upgrade my computer to the new I7 2600k cpu in hopes of running FSX better. After about 3 weeks of going back and forth on whether or not to do the upgrade I finally decided to take the plunge and upgrade my FSX system.

My setup is very similar to what you have. It is:
I7 2600k cpu
Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3 LGA 1155 Z68 ATX Intel Motherboard
2 - EVGA GTX 260 video cards
1 - matrix triple head 2 to go digital
16 gigs Corsiar Memory
500gig - Standard Western Digital Hard Drive
3 Standard Case Fans doing the cooling but I am vigorously looking into other cooling options

With this setup I have 3 projectors running off the Matrox Triple head 2go on port 1 video card number 1. I have 1 monitor for captain instruments running off of port 2 on video card number 1. I have 2 more monitors for MFD and copilot instruments running off of port 1 and 2 on video card number 2 for a total of 6 different displays.

My previous system was configured in this same manner and it was a i7 920 with 6 gigs of memory and the same GTX 260 video cards.

The best I ever got out of thay system from a FPS perspective was 12 - 15 FPS when flying at 30000ft with no other traffic or major clouds. On the ground at airports trying to taxi with traffic was a slide show.... 5 - 10FPS.
I did my upgrade and was all excited about running FSX smoothly. I started up FSX and patiently waited for everything to load. Finally got everything running and hit ctrl-z guess what.... 7 - 12FPS!!!!!

I was just like you ready to call it quits. I got the same performance results with my new upgraded system that I got with my old system! Complete frustration on my part now... so I started thinking there is just no way I should be getting the same performance numbers on a proven much better sytem. I started doing more resarch and found the information on Nicco Kaans LevelD 767 site dealing with Nvidia Inspector and video card settings.

I went into my nvidia settings and matched it to what Nicco had and I did the same with my FSX settings matching Nicco's. I make the changes then go into FSX and run it with no expectations for improvement. I start a flight hit CTRL - Z and guess what: 30 - 50 PS sitting on the ground at the airport with traffic. Talk about a kid in the candy store and christmas morning all rolled into one and you would be talking about me. I could not believe what I was seeing and swore something was right. So I closed my eyes and started my push back just waiting for the slide show to kick in! Guess What... FPS stayed between 30 - 50 FPS and was a smooth as silk while taxing to the runway. I was so excited I didn't even wait for clearance I took off and got up into the sky at 30000ft. Guess What FPS is now between 40 - 60FPS!

For me it seems that my Video Card Settings and FSX Display settings were all completely wrong and causing me all the heart ache!!!!! Thank you Nico for sharing your settings.

So I hope you haven't given up on FSX yet. All the stories about folks getting seriously high frame rates is true and I am one of them now. Check and Double check your video card settings and FSX settings and hopefully you unleash the potential in your system.

I have been down the pull your hair out path with FSX.

I found X-Plane.

I would heartily recommend picking up a copy of X-Plane 10 when it is released this Christmas to see if that suits you better than FSX does. I feel x-plane is FSX looks at FS9 performance (oversimplification and depends on what scenery you have, but XP10 is getting a lot more 3rd party support than previous versions and the future looks bright).

Only thing is you'll have to adjust to the differences and learn the x-plane way of doing things. Persevere and you may find a gem, but be aware that the sims are very different. Some of FSX's strengths are X-planes weaknesses and vice-versa.

The biggest suggestion is dump Vista 64 and go with W7 64!