New to FS2002

[Guest]

Hi everyone, and a Merry Christmas.I have been lurking around here unregistered for about a year now without owning FS2002. I am a student pilot trying to get my PPL, My girlfriend (Soon to be wife) bought me FS2002 and a CH Yoke USB and Pedals for Christmas.My Specs are:Intel PIII 866Mhz256MB-SDRAMAOpen Nvidia Geforce 2 MX 400 64MB20GB HD17" Samsung MonitorWindows 98SEDirectX 8.1For some reason my game is very choppy even on minimal display settings, I checked to see all my drivers are up-to-date.FSAA is off, in the settings menu the Anti-Aliasing is off, and I am runing at 16-Bit Colour depth. I am running about 5-8 FPS. When I start up FS2002 I have 92% of System Recources free.Just though some of you guru's out there would care to help me.shrvmshrvm@thevortex.com

[Guest Josve]

Give your PC some more Ram.....Buy a new CPU......and get a new videocard :) Nice suggestions eh?If you're not a PC tweaker,you'd better be changing some of your hardwareto get most out of the sim.First I would do was to get some more Ram.At least 512MB.Than I would change the videocard to a GF3 TI500 (those are cheap theese days)Johnny"I'LL BE BACK"[div align=center]http://www.avsim.com/hangar/fly/josve/zone.jpg ][/div

[Guest]

Hi JohnnyDue to bills, taxes, food, flying, I have no money.

[Guest DSandberg]

Something seems wrong here. I have a wimpy little P3-450 with 256MB RAM and a Matrox G400 MAX videocard, running the oft-maligned Windows ME no less, and I get framerates in the low teens with most FS2K2 settings in the middle range (except for max visibility, which I keep turned down to the still quite reasonably high minimum value). It only drops down to 9-10 fps when I'm around unusually dense areas (i.e., downtown New York).I'd check to see how many other programs you have running ... maybe something in your system tray is a memory or CPU hog? I don't know what else to tell you offhand, but keep looking for a solution ... you shouldn't have that much trouble getting better performance than you currently are, and without buying new hardware IMO.- David Sandberg (Fly II beta team member, and creator of InfoMETAR)

[Guest]

Hi DavidWhat are you colour settings and anti-aliasing?That is more than I ever see!

[Guest]

Turn all your sliders down, ATC/AI off and if you can, overclock your CPU using SoftFSB. FS2002 is a CPU hog! To run over 20 FPS with all sliders maxed requires a 2 GHZ CPU. If you use addon scenery, ATC and realistic planes as I do, you need close to 3 GHZ, a very fast HD, 512 of RAM and a good video card. The more realism you want the more power you need. All my PC upgrades are dictated by FS, my obsession. My last upgrade cost a hair over $300 for new MB/CPU. Good luck, frame rate is life.FL_FlyerMSI 645 Max-U (SIS 645DX chipset) latest drivers and BIOSIntel P4 2.53/533 OCD to 2.77/583 with Intel retail cooler @ 34c under load350 watt PS 512 MB DDR 2400 Abit Siluro GF4 Ti 4400 275/550 OCD to 300/600 nvidia 41.09 Drivers(1280x960x32@85hz, Quincunx AA, 16 tap AF)Maxtor 30GB HD ATA 133 NTFS w/ seperate partition for FS2002SB Live X-GamerWindows XP Home tweaked to min. services and fixed 1 GB swapFS2002 with all sliders maxed all boxes checked, real world weather and AI.DreamFleet 737-400 is only aircraft flown.Simflyers scenery for all airports flown.Radar Contact 3.0 for ATC.Lago FSAssist for pushback.FPS locked at 30, 14 on ground in traffic w/ AI, moving gates/vehicles etc. 22-30 airborn depending on clouds and weather. Smooth, realistic and full of eye candy.

[Guest DSandberg]

Color setting is 32 bit (which the Matrox does just as quickly as 16 bit). No anti-aliasing (it's way too slow on the Matrox). I run at 1024x768 resolution (which you didn't ask about ... but if you're attempting to run at very high res, I suppose that could have a performance penalty as well).The big CPU hog that I turn down is the max visibility (as I said above). Additionally, I keep both AI traffic and the AutoGen terrain no higher than 50%, as they can both gulp down a lot of CPU cycles as well.http://www.usinternet.com/users/mystic/infomsig.gif

[Guest PhilipManwaring]

#1 - It sounds like you've chosen your wife well!#2 - Make sure reflections, water effects, detail textures are all off. These have a large impact on frame rates. Also, turn auto-gen down to the middle setting or lower. For the purpose of these tweaks and tests, use only the default Cesna 172. You may need to play with it all to get it right, but it should run OK on the machine you have. Good luck,Philip.

[Guest]

Hey there PhilipYep, she sure is good in more ways than one ;-)I managed to squeeze out 15fps a few minutes ago.I reinstalled FS2002, turned colour to 32Bit, Turned Anti-Aliasing on 2X, Anisotropic Filtering to 2X, Performance- Agressive, I am running the 41.09's on the Nvidia site, But just then the computer mysteriously rebooted!!

[Guest sunstriker]

HiWelcome to fs2!I would say reduce AI to 50% this is by far the biggest resource hogReboot is most likely to be driver issue (or ram)I would swap 4109 for 3042 driver and see what happens, also if your running agpX4 try X2good luckSun

[Guest]

Perhaps you could lead me to these 30.42's?

[Guest]

Here you have a lot of drivers.http://www.guru3d.com/files/Regards.

[Guest crashing_pilot]

my system spec's:p3 500 256mb ram 20gb hdd geforce2 mx/mx400 64 mb i get 20 fps,with reflections turned on,mipmapping on,water reflections on,and weathermaker running.i have set all my sliders low,with the exception of scenery textures(in order to have taxiway lines...:-) )andyes,i don't so much care about the scenery,i want the flight to be smooth....you have to compromise with a rig that has been 200 years with noah in the ark :-)see ya

[Guest PhilipManwaring]

Reboots can have a lot to do with aggressive BIOS settings and some video card / motherboard combinations. Try dialing back the BIOS performance settings (turn off AGP fast-writes, try just 2x instead of 4x AGP, etc.). Also, go to the web site for your motherboard if you know it and see if they have any BIOS updates. It sounds like you're getting close. This really is a fun hobby - I hope you get your performance issues sorted out and can begin to enjoy it. Welcome to the club!Philip.

[Guest]

Philip-I just set the performance back to balanced and it stopped the reboots. But now am back to 10 fps.