Hi,well, I finally got around to upgrade my computer. I'm running an Athlon 3500+, nForce4, ASUS A8N5X, Radeon Sapphire X850XT PE, 1gb Corsair RAM, ThermalTake water cooling, etc... temps go to 35 deg C at most when running at full load and 8% overclocked (the AI NOS thingy in BIOS)The sim runs great, but stutters a lot. On ATC contact, every time a piece of scenery or AI AC load and so on. I tried all sorts of things, read through this forum, but nothing seems to help. What I did so far:- tweaked fsconfig file a lot: Terrain section, bandwidth_mult, etc...- tried different video drivers from 5.10 backwards, including Omegas. I thoroughly cleaned drivers remnants before installing new ones.- reduced sound quality- disabled the onboard sound completely- played with AA, AF, Vsync.- FPS set to unlimited, then limited in snyc with screen refresh rate with Vsync On, then Off, then App preference.- I use Ken's FSAutostart- I spent hours disabling unneeded services, went through the tweak posts on this forum to set things right on the system. And yes, it runs great, it's blindingly fast. My FS installation is new with few add-ons so far. I tried to disable different sceneries as well, but to no avail.Any thoughts, guys? What am I missing here? Thanks!Regards,Jure

hi well id first go and upgrade my motherboard drivers and bios drivers,try that.

Just a thought here, On my machine, I get the exact opposite of whats supposed to happen when using FS Autostart, I used to use it with fs.2k2 and worked wonderfully, load times were a lot faster, but for some reason when i use it with fs.9, I end up with longer loading time and some bad stutters, even when selecting aircraft window, the plane stutters, really funny... It's a really good program, just don't know what happened, all my configuration was same as fs2k2? try running without program and see if theres a diffrence.. cheers, HAKU

Clayton, Haku,thanks for your replies! I have the chipset drivers and bios up to date. That was one of the first things I did and it slipped my memory as it seems. I tried running FS without FSAutostart as well, but the stutters are exactly the same. Which is interesting, in fact. There is no change no matter what I do. Also, there is no difference if I run FS in Full Screen mode or Windowed. Jure

Lock your FPS at 20. See if that helps reduce the load...-Paul

If yours is a VIA Chipset, you should upgrade your VIA drivers, i had the same problem and upgrading the VIA drivers did the trick.Id look at the asus website for these new drivers or do a search for VIA.

What sound card are you using? If internal, have you tried an external card? I've noticed the sound can make adifference on some machines. It's almost like the sound fights the video for supremacy in some cases...:/ I was gonna mention a clean sim, but you say yours is pretty fresh. I recently pulled my hair out for about a month trying todecide why my sim had "changed". It dropped a few FPS overnight,after having to load it to a different partition. I've tried a new vid card, a new MB, a new sound card, etc,trying to find out what was slowing it down. The reason I changedthe sound card was a sporadic buzzzing fit it would have everyonce in a while. But....Turned out to be the sound driver, not the card. The new card did it too, if I ran the WDM driver set.It's ok with the standard PCI drivers. Anyway, I putzed aroundfor a good while, and with the new vid card, it was pretty decent, but I still knew something was not quite right. Well...It wasn't.!!! Problem was fixed finally about 2 days ago..!!!!The problem? I had to reload a new sim, complete with a newpatch install. What seemed to have happened was the sim lostthe benefits of the patch, and the supposed memory leak with the autogen scenery. I was using a patched sim, and all files wereintact, but for some reason the patch wasn't working right anymore.When I compared a fresh install with the old install, I could seea large difference. 10-15 fps in some areas... So I think I'm prettymuch back to normal. The sim is finally running right, and the 9800is doing what it should be. I now average in the 20's to 70'srange as far as fps. Average in the 30-40-50's range at low alt cruise with full scenery and clouds. But....I noticed last nightafter a long flight still the symptoms of a memory leak. Not near as bad as pre-patch, but I don't think they totally fixed it.I still show symptoms of a slight leak after running long flights.Usually shows up at a large airport, after a long flight. The fps willbog down to lower than normal. But...If I reset the autogen sceneryin the menu, the fps pops back up to normal. So there still seems to be a leak to me...Anyone else notice this much? I know I'm not the only one to suspect it still leaks memory a bit... As an example, this AM I landed at KHOU after a long flight, and was in a learjet.I had been doing 30-40 fps average until landing, and then aftertaxing around for a while, I noticed it dropped to about 10 fps by the time I got parked. :(Not good, and not normal for my machine. When I reset the autogenscenery by turning it off, and then back on, it jumped back up to about 20 fps with the same exact settings, sitting in the same place.Anyway, hope you find the problem... Can increase hair loss after a while, when things don't pan out to normal.. :/ MK

Paul: I did lock my FPS to 20. No difference at all, stutters as before.Clayton:I am not on Via chipset. I had it once but dropped it for nForce and never looked back. :) MK: I run an internal sound card, yes. I DID disabled it in bios and saw no difference. When I updated the chipset driver, the sound drivers were replaced as well. Could it be that they still interfere even if the sound itself is disabled (AC97)? BTW, after I updated the chipset drivers, I reinstalled directX and then the video drivers.My default.xml is disabled, so there should be no leak because of autogen. In fact, I have a simple batch file to switch it on and off. Yes, I have played with that as well. :) But I will check the installation of FS anyway. An interesting observation for sure! I have, as I said, a new FS installation, with add-ons slowly being installed one after another. I am quite sure that no single add-on has produced these stutters. They are present from the beginning. I have two(!) old installations on the old disk in the new machine and stuttering is present in those as well. One is my previous FS install, the other being a Golden Wings installation.I *think* that I haven't installed the WDM drivers but I will check, just to be sure. Are there any other tweaks for a PCI-E card? PCI latency tool and AGP aperture are no more and I am not aware of any other tool to do... hm, whatever. Anyway, I do appreciate the feedback; thanks a lot! :) I'll report if I find something and dig in the forums some more. Jure

I was getting very similar problems and in addition blurry textures after I upgraded. I then remembered that I had my XP tweaked before and I had not done any of them since I upgraded/reformated. Here are the tweaks that I used. http://home.wanadoo.nl/mike.dolle/indexuk.htm They took care of the blurries and seamed to smooth and speed up my system. It sounds like you know what you are doing so you will probably do like I did and pick and choose which ones you want to apply, but there is a lot of good info on that site. Hope it helps.

Jeremy, thanks for the link, I wasn't aware of that site. I'll take a closer look.I discovered something, though. Apparently, I was wrong and haven't tried to run the FS2004 installation yet. Well, it runs OK, without stuttering! There are tons of add-ons, tweaks and backup folders containing textures and whatnot, but there it is - it runs smoothly! With all the trash that accumulated over these few years it is all but perfectly smooth!The only difference I discovered was that the old FS2004, remaining from my old computer resides on an older disk with FAT filesystem and the new, properly installed FS2004 sits on a brand new SATA NTFS disk!!How can this be??? I went through both FS installations, comparing files and I can't find anything that wouldn't also be in the old FS installation which runs great. FS "system" files are identical. I also compressed the new FS disk to no avail. Totally stumped here.... should I attempt a reinstall? Say no, please! :DJure

Steve Lacey has a recent post on stutters:http://www.steve-lacey.com/Thursday, November 17, 2005The Stuttersby Steve @ 12:32 PM in FlightSimPermalink | Comments (14) | TrackBack (0) Just thought I'd tell you..-Dasher7

>Totally stumped here.... should I attempt a reinstall? Say no, please!Dunno. I think that would probably do the trick. This is quite like the problem I've had recently. And...I also had recently made a diskchange, and *copied* my FS over to a newer drive. But both drivesare fat 32. Shouldn't have been any problem. But...For some reasonit got messed up, and lost the patch changes, or something along those lines. I did some tests lately. I have lots of room, so I have about 4 or 5 sims installed at once right now for test purposes.Remember how I discovered the patch loss, and got the 2nd new installworking ok, except still traces of a mem leak? Well, I decided to install a fresh version to test unpatched. The frame rate of the unpatched version was about the same as my *problem* sim. Hummm...:/I also noticed quite a mem leak, and once even saw it run down to nearlyzero ram, and then stable out. Not too good. Then I tried a freshpatch of that install. Frame rates instantly jumped up a good bit.*Everywhere*. Even at first startup. The effects of the mem leak weremuch reduced, and it never runs down to nearly zero mem, but....I stillsee obvious signs of a mem leak. And this is a fresh install, freshpatch, and *no* extra installed scenery. Even in the patched state, I see a degradation of performance after a while. This degradationcan be returned to normal by resetting the autogen scenery. After doing that, the frame rate will jump back to normal. The differencebetween the "gagging" sim, and the flushed sim can be anywhere from 5-15 fps depending on area, scenery, etc. So...I'm fairly convincedeven the fresh patched sim is not memory leak free, and I'm fairly convinced the problem is with the pesky autogen scenery as beforethe patch. In effect, they bandaided the problem, but did not totallyfix it. Hopefully, the next version will clean this up..I know what some will ask...Any extra scenery, landclass, etc..??Nope...Totally stock sim, with *no* addons. So...I came to the conclusion my problem had nothing to do with the small amount of add ons I do run. "mainly for my local airportterminals, etc...Anyway, you probably don't wanna hear this, but yea, I would trya reinstall. Thats what it took to fix me up.. Or as good as I can get anyway...Mine flies great everywhere, but when I get to a largeairport, it begins to bog down. In some cases, pretty bad. IE: 10 fps,etc..Reset the autogen, will jump to nearly 20 fps...:/ So...It's *NOT* a problem with my hardware keeping up! My system can handleanything I see, until it gets bogged down by the leak, or whateverit is...Reset, and it's back to normal. It's funny, with my old fx-5200 card, I didn't really notice too much of this. Yes, I would notice slight slowdowns after running a while, and changing scenerya bunch of times, etc, but not too major. But now, with the 9800pro, it seems to stick out more. I'm guessing cuz my "max" rate is much higher now, and slowdowns are sticking out more now. I've tried a few sets of drivers. And yes, I agree with one post I saw. The selection of drivers for the 9800 is kinda bleak... :/But, right now I'm using an older omega set, which seems fairly good. Like I say, when I'm not bogged down with the "leak", this thing is screaming. I did notice that setting the max rate down toa lower setting like 30-40 works better than just letting it run free. Seems to help a little, but I still see the effects of the leak once I get to a big airport. With the older slower 5200, I didn't have too many noticable problems at big airports. Orthat I noticed anyway...Kinda weird..Anyway, if you have one set running good, I'd be blaming the installof the bad one..Some problem has surfaced in that copy it seems. I don't know why having it on a new SATA drive would effect, but then again, I don't know why the copy I did, goofed things up either.But it did. Some way... :/ Yes, I could turn off the autogen, and be domne with the problem, but I've got kinda spoiled on looking at it...Turn if off, and I don't like the lack of buildings, etc in the cities.. So I still run it. All the way up too, I might add. Like I say, my machine can handle all the scenery full blast, *until* I get that goofy leak problem. And if I watch my mem usage, it is slowly increasing the whole time this happens. When I "flush"the autogen, I note that the mem is released back. Then is starts over again, slowly building up until it starts slowing down again.Flushing once, won't fix it. It builds up, and slows down again, asyou fly. Only turning off the autogen seems like a sure fix. Kindof a bummer... Oh well...This novel should give you something to ponder.. :/MK

MK,thanks for the "novel", it sure was an interesting read! :)I've done some experimenting these days but so far without any appreciable difference in the stuttering department. I fully activated and cleaned all three installations, so I can compare performance directly. Well, I guess I will make another clean installation and see where that leads. Thanks for your thoughts, MK! :)Jure

Well, I guess I will make another clean installation and see where that leads.BTW...Might wanna also try a new startup, etc, just to make sure the sim reads the vid card right, etc. May not make any difference once running, but say if you change cards, I don't think it deletes the old card, etcin the fs9.cfg. I *think* it just adds the newer one fartherdown the page. So...Myself, I made sure the old cfg file wasnot the problem by letting the sim start totally fresh with new cfg, and start files. To do this, you need to renamethe old fs9.cfg , so it will force a new one. I was just thinking, it's a slim chance you may be double dipping on the video cfgs or sumtin...That could cause a stutter I bet, as the sim will be all confused trying to deal with one card, but using the video cfg of an old one..This is assuming maybeyou have a new card, etc. One thing about mine, I may have the mem leak quirk, but I have very little stuttering, and normallymy frame rate is pretty high. I may see some slight stutterson "new" scenery loads as I fly, but I consider that fairly normal. Nothing is going to be absolutely perfect... :/But overall, I don't stutter much at all. Even the small stuttersI see are very fast, and often only noticable if looking out the side. My machine is not that fast really, compared to some. It's only a P4 2.4 prescott clocked at 3 gigs. It's ok, but not a superbox by any means these days. I tried slightly o/cing the 9800, but frankly, the results didn't seem to be worth it much.So I let it stay stock speed for now. The increase was quite small.Where as the old 5200 I always o/ced... It needed all the help it could get...Actually..The 5200 is not a bad card really. It getsslagged as about the bottom of the pile, but for the price, it's not too bad. The only time it really gagged was in dense clouds.It handled dense autogen scenery quite well. They go for 30-40bucks these days... It's a usable card for a cheap box. Flyableanyway..MK