What kind of PC?

[andarlite]

Hi Joe

Ken is right, you should be having no problems running FSX on your new system. Also take a look at this link for getting your system tune properly for FSX:

http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?...0281&mode=full

Regards,
Henry

[Georg Schneider]

Hi Henry hi Joe !

I made my tests in FSX withe Forceware 174.74 whql running 1280x1024 settings AA2x.
And thats true i can run FSX with mor then 20fps but with some hours tweaking.And without tweaking i got 15-20 and sometimes dropdowns
to 5-10!

And for me i do not like tweaking FSX or FS2004 ! because it should run
good without tweaking !You pay a lot of money for the software or?

When you buy a new car it should run like the specs without tweaking underneath it
Just my 2cents.

With system tweaking its another thing. I know the avsim link and the tips are good but not all is true and you can do horrible mistakes!
This tip from the avsim post is totaly wrong and costs system perfomance!"The page file ALWAYS goes on the boot drive with WindowsXP. Never move it"

The best perfomance gain is to have a extra partition with 3500-4000MB
and place the pagefile.sys there!
I gain about 2-7fps from that!

And this is for Joe

When you have problems loading scenery and in this case stutters
look in my prev. post.
I advice everybody when the old HD is out of order sometime
to get :

1x 36GB 3,5" WD Raptor ADFD SATA 10000rpm 16MB for system
1x 160GB 3,5" WD Raptor ADFD SATA 10000rpm 16MB for FS

With these ultrafast HD`s and pagefile.sys on extra
partition(4GB partition on the 40GBHD) you have almost no stutters anymore! These HD`s have everage access time from 4,6m/sec !
and 16mb cache.

I do only have a very little stutter on 100%ai traffic at a very big airport.
But never flying on 100%ai! Thats useless!

Greetings Georg

[andarlite]

With system tweaking its another thing. I know the avsim link and the tips are good but not all is true and you can do horrible mistakes!
This tip from the avsim post is totaly wrong and costs system perfomance!"The page file ALWAYS goes on the boot drive with WindowsXP. Never move it"

Hi Georg
Other people have also mentioned that. Here's Nick's response:


Bottom line, What use is it to put the page on another drive?

On a network server whereby the page will most likely be used it is important to TUNE and position it for best results

If you do as I specified above the page will ALWAYS end up at the END of the data on the platter. Since the user makes sure their PM is in line with their use, the ONLY thing the page is used for is for program allocation. In example.. some programs such as Adobe Acrobat Professional, when booted, look for an allocated and specified space on the page file. It only makes sure that space is available. If its not there because the user specified a "constant" page size that is too small, or, the system is not set up to use "SYSTEM MANAGED, which increases and decreases the file as needed, you can get an OOM error with that program at boot and it will exit.

So the two major things that file is there for on a properly defined and built system that is not a network server, or other of that nature, is for crashes and a log file write, and, to ensure programs have the space they may wish to have allocated for its use. Otherwise the file is not used unless you run out of PM

Now, if you are telling me you are running FSX on a system with 1GB of memory, then it is possible optimizing the file and its location MAY help but I would never fly or use a system that required the page file in ANY operation. I would increase PM before I would bother moving the page around.

Moving it therefore becomes an operation that nets you absolutely nothing, other than to believe the internet story about moving it will make your system run better, which is TRUE if -and only if- certain network or lack of memory criteria are met... If it won't, why do it.

And for me i do not like tweaking FSX or FS2004 ! because it should run
good without tweaking !You pay a lot of money for the software or?

When you buy a new car it should run like the specs without tweaking underneath it
Just my 2cents.

When it comes to tweaks for FS, everybody has an opinion about what works or doesn't. NickN has been around for many years helping thousands of flight simmers get the best out of their system. I have a lot of respect for Nick and I would rather listen and apply his advice than anyone else on the internet. And do you really believe that any computer you buy is going to come completely optimize for whatever your needs could be? The way I see it there are 2 things you can do here: 1) Tweak your computer to get the best performance for your application and needs or 2) Spend money to buy a faster computer.

Me, I rather save money and tweak my lowly dual core e6700 with only a Nvidea 7900GS video card (following Nick's advice) and I am now enjoying flying FSX.

Regards,
Henry

[BHawthorne]

Just to throw my 2 cents into the mix...

If your machine is dedicated to a simpit or even a simulator app without a simpit Vista has it's downsides. All those new extras within Vista are totally worthless to the function of the flight simulator itself. You don't need the Aero theme, the sidebar or other new Vista only things. Those only become impediments to the smooth processor and memory prioritization for the sim.

Another big issue that downright kills all interest in Vista for me is that horizontal span modes are permanently removed from Vista. That option only exists in XP and older OS.

For me, I pretty much require my OS to be stripped bare, have graphic span modes and be used specifically for the simpit. The removal of critical features and the addition of useless features make Vista a "no go" for me with a simpit. However, if the machine is not dedicated to the simpit, that's another matter altogether.

[Joe60]

Hi Guys,

Firstly I must sincerely apologise to Benno from Holand for stealing his thread but I must strike while there are good people willing to help

Yes I agree with you Ken and Henry that it should be better but its not.
Let me just put my case and hopefully we can solve the problem once and for a all as I see many posts around the sim forums relating to the absolute rotten performance in FSX.

First a little about myself, I was in the engineering side of the broadcasting world for over 30 years, hence I understand what Ken is talking about regarding FPS although with interlacing its actually double, so 25 FPS is actually seen as 50 FPS by the naked eye.
Also scanning a digital LCD monitor's pixels is a far cry from the movie machines but we can talk all day on that subject alone, so back to FSX
About 3 months ago I was approached by a company thats involved in flight/vehicle motion simulators and was given all the flight simulators plus a pile of other stuff and told to learn them inside out.
The flight section of this package consists of MSFS 98, MSFS 2000, MSFS 2002, MSFS 2004 and MSFX + Accelerator pack, also the whole of the Janes (non public version) aircraft design package.
Not to mention all the books, maps and drawings which will take me years to get through.

So back to this topic:
This is where I have to agree with Georg, and we must also take into account FSX is not a modern 2008 game designed for today's hi-end PC's such as I now have, but FSX was released way back in 2006 when a Celeron 2.8 or a Prescott 2.4 and a nVidia 6600GTS256 was the order of the day, also no gaming company in their right mind will release a sofware package if you can only play or use in X years time.
Now can you emagine if I had to spend my time running around to heaven knows how many clients all around the country tweaking and adjusting their PC'S and operating systems just so the things can work properly as you must remember most people that work with this stuff have never even heard of Microsoft or even the internet.
No, this should be all plug and play like FS2004 and previous versions are.
My wife's PC has a 2.4 gig Celeron with a FX2590 card and I installed FS2004 on her machine just to test and it works great with no 'tweaking' required, and boy oh boy is that PC full of junk (nuff said).
On the side I have always, and still am an Unreal Tournament fan, and this latest UT3 which I couldn't play on my older machine, now rocks big time on my new machine with everything set to max and that is a 2008 game designed especially for a 2008 hi-end machine.
I dont normally play much as I'm coding and testing stuff most the time but my partner was complaining bitterly about the lack of FPS on his FSX machine he bought in October last year which is similar to my new PC but has a 2.33 gig CPU and a 8600GTS256 card.
I watched him play a while ago to see what he's complaining about and sure enough as soon as he goes in low (approx 1500 feet) over any well populated area everything shudders and shakes so bad it becomes unplayable.
Except for a maybe bit of extra detail, FSX is no greater than FS2004 regarding terrain, and the aircraft detail (in my book) has actually gone backwards.
I realise these forums have very experience and very dedicated people on them and I have to be very carefull what I say as not to offend anyone but I'm just being practical from both a private and business point of view.
The biggest problem we're facing is FS2004 is no longer available, accept the odd copy at the odd online shop here and there, so a need to switch to FSX is very necessary but looks like I have a nightmare of a job ahead and maybe should just stick to broadcasting
Yesterday I bought a copy of Windows Vista Business and am going to soon install that on a new hard drive with only FSX, which will simulate a typical clients machine, and see if that improves anything.
It's also said the next version of MSFS is only due mid 2011, and we cannot sit around that long waiting for something that may not even improve anything.

Thanks so much for listening as I'm in a real dilemma here.
Joe

[SSO]

Hi Joe,

Gotten any further over the past month?

[Joe60]

Hi SSO,

In a way yes.
I re-formated and re-installed form scratch following all NickN's advice together with installing nHancer etc and stuck with Xp SP3 as Vista I did not like, maybe because I dont know it well enough.
Although FSX is pretty much working well now as I managed to get my FPS right up to average around 35+ with everything set on High as can be seen in the pic of Seatle, but its still not nowhere good enough for my requirements.
[media]http://www.proasm.com/images/pics/seatfsx.jpg[/media]
Basically I like to fly at low altitudes, under bridges, in canyons etc and for that you need a good FPS.
FS2004 most certainly does that for me as my LCD can only handle 75 so its basically 75 wherever I go with everything on Ultra High++ except the odd really high density stuff where it may drop somewhat.
A similar pic for Seatle in FS2004
[media]http://www.proasm.com/images/pics/seatfs9.jpg[/media]
Sooo... I have basically shelved FSX for a while longer and switched back to FS2004 where everything just plain rocks
Regarding the business side of things we have decided to go with X-Plane.


Joe.

[SSO]

Thanks for the update. Too bad, as there seems to be alot of nice visual improvements in FSX.

Interesting comment on the Aircraft modelling being degraded in FSX by the way. Any details on this?

Im still with FS2004 XP Pro SP2, and quite happy with this.
Is it worth installing SP3?

[Paul G]

While I would generally agree that users of software shouldn't need to have to tweak it to get it to work right, there is no way that producers such as Microsoft can know how well or badly their software is going to run on your system. And unless you have someone to regularly check and optimize your system, you're left to do it yourself.

The way I look at it is that to run FSX on today's computers, you're effectively driving a sports car where you expect at least 95% optimal performance out of it. Optimizing it and then doing nothing will see a degradation of performance over time, even if you don't do anything else on the computer other than run a flight simulator.

I would like to subscribe to the notion that you should never change a working system. That's fine if you are using 20% of your system's potential, using Internet Explorer and Outlook. But when you are running FSX you're red lining all the time. To keep it running you need to optimize and regularly fine tune it.

I don't understand people who build computers just to improve their 3D benchmark, which I consider to be a fanatical obsession. But tweaking my system and occasionally getting a 10% increase in FPS is reward in itself for me.

[fweinrebe]

This has been a fun thread to read so I thought I can just as well participate.

I was wondering what sort of antivirus program you guys are running on these PC's? I read this very interesting Blog entry about the fact that nothing cripples your PC's performance quite like anti-virus software. If using a antivirus program on your FS PC, I think this is sometimes overlooked as a reason for better/worst performance.

The url is: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000803.html.

There are also some XP vs Vista links.