The INCREDIBLE 120.00 expierment!

[737NUT]

A little history,
For the past several months, i have been flying FSX on my laptop hooked to a 20" CRT. It was getting a respectable 20FPS with most sliders at low to med and autogen off.

Well last night my HDD took a crap and left me w/o a computer. I had some spare desktop parts and a 120.00 of hidden sim money.

Went to FRY's electronics here in Indy and bought these,

ECS mobo, 69.99 on sale for 29.90!
Corsair Mem, 2G DDR2 667 79.90 on sale for 39.95
CPU fan and heatsink for 24.99
A cheap case w/ps for 24.99

I had these parts laying around that i got from 'bad' pc's.

Pentium4 3.2G processor
ATI 1950XT Crossfire PCI-e
80G Sata hdd
450W PS (i'm using this for the card only!)
KB and Mouse

Assembled it all and installed winxp home SP2. Updated all drivers

Clean install of FSX, ALL sliders maxed except autogen (normal) and light bloom off!!!
Max FPS set to 31

Cessna 172 at KMQJ daytime in fair weather.

11-13fps straight, 6-9fps turning

Installed FSX SP-1 same flight,

24-28fps straight, 17-19fps turning

Installed FSX Acceleration w/SP-2

pegged at 31 straight, 25-28fps turning.

This is on cheap PC that hasn't been optimized yet. I'm stoked!!!! I have NEVER seen my flightsims look so real and crisp in the graphics and also be silky smooth flying.

I took the F-18 over the rockies at 550kts at 16,000 ft. Gorgeous!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

24-26fps at low altitude and fast flying.

I thought you all would like the FPS comparison between all the updates.

Nice job Microsoft!!

[Tomlin]

This is very interesting, and Im glad you shared it. You would be flamed so bad over at Avsim for sharing this that you would have no hair left on your butt. Seriously.

MS has made some crazy mistakes in FSX, but I dont see how people get such horrible results. I really think that performance is not only subjective, but also that some people that know so much about computers, really think they know more than they do (whatever that has to do with FS, who knows...) but any how-

My PC is old now, an AMD 2800XP with 1 Gig of old RAM and a 256 Geforce 7600GT, and while I dont get stellar performance, it's not that bad. In all honesty, I cant fly an airliner in a heavy populated airport (and I know, that's what a large majority of simmers do) and yes, there's very little headroom for LVL D and PMDG aircraft for FSX ATM, but still, you and I both prove that you CAN run FSX satisfactorily as long as you dont push the system too hard.

MS should have spent more time optimizing, but they didnt, and so now we hope and wait to see what they do with FS11. I think it will be another FS2000 to FS2002, and we will all be BLOWN AWAY by what comes with FS11. Nothing ground breaking, but slight improvement of what is in the package now but with greatly enhanced performance, along with much better hardware for the task by then. We have a little less than 2 years to see!

Fingers crossed....

PS- BTW, this system runs my FS9 pretty good- no the best, but good!

[Bob Reed]

I have to agree with both of you. I ran Beta1, not too bad on my 3800+, 2gigs of ram Raid twin 160s(220gigs) and at the time 6800GS SLI (6800 x2) video cards. Beta2 came out and would not even run. From 2 on I was unable to run FSX. Final came out still would not run on my machine completly unstable. First srevice pack came out and poof.... Runs now and although like you, nothing steller it is flyable with out going stupid on the sliders. Well at this point I have not tried the add on and looks like more improvements so it should run even better, not to mention I have upgraded my video card. So I think it may actually be usable now.. More to come on this......

[David Rogers]

To illustrate the contrasts; I bought a Core 2 Due E6600 2.4Ghz very shortly after they came out and was initially getting worse performance running FSX from it, than from running FSX on my 3 year old Dell P4 2.4Ghz (single core).

After FSX SP1 the frames went up by over 50% but unfortunately the sim (on my system) developed an awful stutter whenever I turned. The stutter cannot be directly translated into FPS performance as, during the stutter, my FPS would display at least 19 FPS ..... the nasty half second stutters were simply not reflected in the FPS monitor display. I spent a week trying to configure my set-up to address this problem. I changed from ATI to Nvidia (and back again), both high end cards (one a 8800 GTS 640Mb), I made a dozen or so tweaks to .cfg files and nothing addressed the stutters.

I eventually unistalled FSX and reverted to FS9 where I enjoy smooth fluid performance that never drops below my capped 35 FPS.

I am not one of those people that slags off FSX simply because it wouldn't work for me - I really want to make the move because in a home cockpit setting, the scenery / exterior displat is everything! It's all FS does in my Project Magenta set-up! .... so I want the vastly improved scenery that FSX offers but I cannot live with really nasty stutters in the turns.

It's worth saying that all of the above experiences were not in a Cockpit setting - they were before my cockpit days, and were experienced when using FSX on a single PC system, using virtual cockpits and 2D panels.

So the time is now right to try FSX again, in my cockpit setting, with FSC only having to worry about the scenery!

I already have FSUIPC4 for FSX so all I need to upgrade to use my Project Magenta set-up with FSX, is the specific FSX version of WideFS..... very tempted to try this out once I have the bones of my cockpit completed!

[James Twomey]

Hi Guys,

If I might jump in here as well. I also installed FSX Acceleration, and saw a jump in the flight performance that was very shocking. I, running FSX with Mega scenery as well and there is/hasn’t been any frame stutters during landing, taxi or turning in my 737.

I'm running FSX acceleration of course, PM MCP, CP Flight MCP and EFIS, VOX ATC and Go-flight Throttles (Till I build my new throttles) Radios, buttons and switches. So needles to say I'm pleased with the results of the latest from MS.

737 Nut, I must say that you really got your monies worth on that build. It makes me re-think some of the old pc's sitting on my bench......

[737NUT]

Building computers is like building race cars, it's all about the combination. Just because someone spends mega bucks on his project doesn't mean they will get the fastest performance. I see it all the time. I would probably call BS myself if i didn't see these results with my own eyes. I think allot of people miss the details of what all is going on on their PC which could hurt performance. I just proved that a medium system for todays standard on a clean and NOT cluttered system can perform perfectly fine.
Next i'm going to apply the cfg tweaks, overclock the PC and see if i can squeeze a few more FPS out of her.

Now i'm off to re-load FS9 since i miss my PMDG 737. I can't wait for NGX from PMDG!!!

[Tomlin]

I cannot wait to use FSX, or FS11. It's going to be an incredible experience for the outside view, as mentioned by David R., et al. I love the way it looks now, and with products like FEX and Terrain EX, it's only going to be much better, not to mention that the default Learjet looks like it was made by Eagle Soft, or another 3rd party company. It flies just as well too with some slight mods Ive done to the FDE.

Now, I just have to allow the wallet, hardware, and 3rd party airports catch up!