More Mem or Bigger CPU?

[veldthui 0]

I love to run FSX at full everything and am getting between 15FPS to 50FPS nearly all the time. However when watching the FPS counter I see it drop to 4-6 for about 1-3 seconds quite often. I currently have 2GB DDR2 ram and a E6700 C2D CPU. I am thinking of adding another 2GB ram (yes I know the 32bit version cant use it all) because I have looked at the CPU usage and it seems to be only about 20-30% usage on each core most of the time indicating that it had plenty left there (works it butt off on the initial load). Memory usage however is alway about 98% and I am wondering if these drops are swap file related and would be fixed by extra memory.John Veldthuishttp://www.virtualpilots.org/signatures/vpa475.png

[Chaos81 110]

What video card do you have?

[veldthui 0]

NVidia 8800GTX 768MB DDR3 jobby.John Veldthuishttp://www.virtualpilots.org/signatures/vpa475.png

[tunnelcat 1]

John,Adding more RAM will not get you any boost unless you have the 64bit version of Vista.Here are some tweaks from the February 2008 PC GAMER that might help.Turn off Desktop Search by right clicking on your hard drive in Windows Explorer and UNCHECK "Index this drive for faster searching". This one could be causing the occasional FPS drop. Turn off the Sidebar by right clicking on the tray icon before you launch FSX.Here's a really weird one they recommended. You can use a USB storage device with ReadyBoost in Windows Vista. They say to plug in your flash drive, right click on the device in Windows Explorer, select Properties, click on the ReadyBoost tab, select Use This Device and then select the amount of space you would like the OS to use.I have no idea if this one even works. I haven't tried it out yet.Kim

[mburkhard 23]

>Here's a really weird one they recommended. You can use a USB>storage device with ReadyBoost in Windows Vista. They say to>plug in your flash drive, right click on the device in Windows>Explorer, select Properties, click on the ReadyBoost tab,>select Use This Device and then select the amount of space you>would like the OS to use.Kim,as far as I understand that feature, it's really just to increase your memory with kind of a faster thing than the harddrive's page file but slower than RAM. So if FSX doesn't use the page file at all this will not do anything. However if memory usage is more than 2GB in John's case this would indeed help.Regards,Markus

[veldthui 0]

I have done all the tweaks. Indexing was the first service I turned off on my machine when I got it. I even tried stopping many services but it did not get that much improvement.My frame rate is 30-70 while in the air but it is just taxiing and taking off/landing that these small stutters appear. I have whacked down the trees/cell to 800 which made a big help. Might turn down autogen buildings per cell and see what that does. It is down from the default already but I may take it further.John Veldthuishttp://www.virtualpilots.org/signatures/vpa475.png

[Guest Foizman]

that sounds strange: 20-30% CPU-load and frames go down to 4-6?maybe a driver problem?regards,Volker

[veldthui 0]

>that sounds strange: 20-30% CPU-load and frames go down to>4-6?>>maybe a driver problem?I dont watch the CPU all the time just enough to get an idea of what is getting the most hammering. The low FPS spikes are very short but noticeable and to me look like something going on like loading stuff into mem from the drive (which makes me think swap file).I have a seperate partition for the swap file close to the front of the drive so it does not get fragmented (fixed size and quite big) also I have defragged my FSX drive and it looks really clean. It is a RAID0 on SATAII so disk access is quite fast with big buffers on the drive.I have decided to go with an extra 2GB of ram to start with. I know Vista 32bit will only see another 1GB but at present it is running 98-100 usage (even with heaps turned off in the system). Also I still have to find out if my MB can take a Quad. The next revision of me board does but it does not mention it for mine (Gigabyte GA-965P-DS4 Rev1). Waiting back for an answer from Gigabyte on that one.John Veldthuishttp://www.virtualpilots.org/signatures/vpa475.png

[Dougal 165]

I went from 2 to 4gb of RAM, but by far the greatest boost in performance i got was to overclock the system - Board, CPU & RAM.

[veldthui 0]

>I went from 2 to 4gb of RAM, but by far the greatest boost in>performance i got was to overclock the system - Board, CPU &>RAM.I tried overclocking mine with just the basics for a start and found it crashed as Vista tried to load 100% of the time. Everything is supposed to be able to be overclocked but I have yet to find a setting that will work. Cant even get a 5% increase which this MB is suppose to handle automatically and my other one did.John Veldthuishttp://www.virtualpilots.org/signatures/vpa475.png

[Guest fyrestrtr]

How fast is your disk? If your system is thrashing; then it could be a delay in your disk read.Most systems skimp on disk RPM. A great bump when going from 5400 to 7200. A bigger bump if you have a hybrid disk (or onboard high speed cache). A giant difference if you have a SSD :D

[MELKOR 5]

The best way to figure out what is going on is FS is:1) Start FS2) Start "perfmon"3) Go to "Counter Logs" under "Performance Logs and Alerts"4) Create a new log, and configure the log to collect stats on the FS process (and other things like swap file, CPU, etc) and log to a file.5) Start the log6) Perform a flight7) Stop the log8) Open the log file in perfmon, under "System Monitor", and analyze.The trick is, of course, you will need to learn how to use perfmon properly (there is online help available from perfmon). :)- Bill

[veldthui 0]

Well I nearly did the more memory but last second decision to go from the E6700 C2 Duo to a Q6700 C2 Quad.All I can say is WOW. Made a huge difference. Load time is much faster even with my LOD set to 7.5, Getting 16 FPS on the ground consistantly and stays at 25-26 FPS (locked at 26 at present) in the air. No more short pauses and scenery is really smooth and all nicely done now.More mem next when the visa recovers.John Veldthuishttp://www.virtualpilots.org/signatures/vpa475.png