If you have an ATI card, you might have the catalyst control center. I am pretty sure you can cripple or make great gains not only with in game sliders, but these sliders as well. My question for you is.....Geometry Istancing?? There is a tick box for that in the catalyst contol center, is it good to tick or leave off for FSX? I have not tried with it off, and am not home at the moment. I do not really know what the heck it does....so Im not sure. Also if you could let me know your individual slider settings, that would be great, and MUCH appreciated. Just as a comparison. I will post mine when I get home.Danon - - ATI X800XL 256megger. Running 6.10 cats. thanks!!

Hey there. Geometry instancing in basic is a method of telling a rendering engine how to replicate a certain object over and over again, altering its position and rotation only, but no other data. Say you have a house, with a certain number of vertices, faces, and textures. Once the first house is rendered, a rendering engine that is capable of geometry instancing will be able to replicate that house very quickly by telling the hardware to do the same thing over again, just put it in a new position that you state. That way the engine doesn't need to state over and over again all that vertex and colour data. It's a way to save rendering time in a scene with many copies of the same object, by making the assumption that all copies of the object are identical.The terms "instance" and "copy" in the 3d rendering world differ only in their dependence on the original object. If you make a change to the original object, the "instanced" versions will also reflect that change like a mirror. "Copies" may be identical, but are independent of each other, with their own full dataset. Hope that explanation makes sense hehe.Some videocards can perform this function in hardware, but unfortunately FSX does not support this, as stated in one of the developer blogs. Many older videocards can't do it. Probably would have been very useful for autogen, but FS9 didn't support it either.

DARN!Does that just ring alarm bells for autogen, or what?I can't believe there is no support for it, isnt it a newer feature, at least a feature that has sprung up on cards made in the past year and a half?? I know my old nvidia didn't have it....well, I guess I will just turn it off. Another member suggested using ati tray tools, so I will give that a go when I get home. Thanks for your input and your time, it makes perfect sense and you explained it well. Just a shame something like that is not supported, just because the same building/house/tree is layed out thousands of time with autogen on, seems that may have been able to decrease the system load at least slightly. Guess we will never know..d - -

In the developer blog, I don't remember which one, he stated that they knew their decision not to take advantage of geometry instancing would hurt them, as all modern cards are capable of it. Basically their choice to allow the game to run on old 32mb fixed pipeline cards is really holding back everyone's performance. Which of course begs the question, just why would anyone with a 32mb card even consider purchasing FSX? If it's marginal performance wise on even powerful systems, it'd be hopeless on that. I can't see their logic myself.I wish they had made the two versions different in functionality rather than content. Call them FSXlite, and FSXhardcore or something. Make a version that only works on hardware produced in the last year or so, dual core, sli, 256mb cards and up, and let at least *some* people have decent performance.

I have tray tools on now, but could use some guidance as it is quite different from what I am used to. There are alot of options, could you perhaps let me know the basic things you have selected, I have 4x AA on, high quality AF, with 4x Anisotropic Filtering, texture preference high quality, mipmap high quality, on the additional tab I have support DXT and Bump mapping, temporal AA disabled, catalyst A.I. low (i heard running hight actualy drops frames down) LOD adjustment is on 0, file queue size undefined, smart shader no effect. Thats all I have for now, and have not messed with any of the tweak settings...Man i have to relearn a whole new app... fun stuff.. :)danon - -

Tray tools adds a lot of options that you can mess with, but for the most part you'll find no gains to be had by doing so, and I'd recommend avoiding any of the advanced registry based tweaks as they can have some unintended albiet possibly humourous consequences in your games.Do turn off catalyst AI for now, as it isn't tuned for FSX just yet. Catalyst AI provides some small fixes for known issues in certain games, but I don't think they've had time to optimize for FSX. Leave DXT and Bump on, you need those for FSX. Smart shaders are a toy, mostly useless.About the only things I'd recommend playing with are your antialiasing and anisotropic filtering settings, although the same functionality is provided in the catalyst control centre. Ati Tray tools is really just a much lighter and more functional version of that. I recommend you uninstall the catalyst centre if you're going to use tray tools.One thing you might want to play with is the flip queue size. What this does is specify the maximum number of frames that can be rendered in ahead of time in DX9 games. If you leave it at unspecified, it uses the default value which is 3. One thing to check though is that vsync is on. I'm not entirely sure that flip queue size works when vsync is off.Try settings between 0 and 3 and see what you like best. With a low number, or 0, you may lose a touch of straight line flight FPS, but you may also have fewer stutters, especially during turns. A higher number may increase your overall framerate slightly, but you may also encounter control lag, as it may take upwards of 1/4 of a second for control inputs to show a reaction on the screen. I leave mine at 0 as I get stutters with any other setting, and prefer to fly helos, where I enjoy instant control responses.As for antialiasing, I believe you said you had an X850, which I also used to have. I don't recommend using any antialiasing if you can avoid it. I found it generally slowed my performance, and I run at 1600x1200, high enough res that the jaggies are rather insignificant. If you do use AA, don't bother with the temporal stuff, and use no more than 4x. Anything more than that is pretty much overkill. Also be aware AA consumes a fair bit of vram.Best of luck.

One more thing. As an ATI user I recommend you take some time to read through this guide. It's pretty concise and can answer any question you might have in far more detail and accuracy than I could. I switched to an Nvidia 512mb card recently, so my memory of "tray tools land" is slowly fading, haha.http://www.tweakguides.com/ATICAT_1.html

Just about fed up with this!I went back to the 6.10's thinking that was the stuttering problem, even had tray tools, but still stutters. Of course all of this before reading your post.I am currently at 6.10's with CCC, which I want to get rid of now that you have given me tips for tray tools. Should I go with the latest ATI drivers (6.11's)Also, the guide you pointed me to says to disable all .NET stuff, as it is needed for CCC, doesnt FSX install .Net and need it in order to run? Just wondering, they said it was just alot of bulk associated with the CCC install, before trying to follow their advice I would like to know if it will effect FSX.I guess I will go home and do a wiped install of FSX, my drivers, and tray tools, follow your tips.I have a feeling I have not gotten rid of the pre-existing drivers properly and its causing me problems. Man, when I get it good again, im not going to touch anything....darn tweaks....cant resist trying them, then when you do you cant get it back to where it was.... :(thanks for your help, any response to this post would be very helpful!danon - -

Stutters!I know its a driver issue because I did not have them 2 days ago, and I have changed NOTHING in my config. #### drivers....I am running a Fiber Frame of .20 and texture bandwidth of 300 with FPS locked at 25. was running like butter, now I am getting constant stutters or what some call "microstutters" especially DURING TURNS OR BANKS!! #### that sucks....ok, well if anyone has any other ideas let me know, if not then I am going to the 6.10's with tray tools, I had 6.10's with CCC and NO STUTTERS, but I just had to "tweak"If that works then I will try the 6.11's just to be current, if I get stutters then I know why...None of this works...then im going to school to get my pilots license then I wont have to worry about stutters!!! hahaha. I have trackir 4 pro coming in, I have to get this working before then..thanks Danon - -

Don't expect the track-ir to be exactly "nice" out of the box, the current driver for FSX is totally hooped, and they're being painfully slow at getting it fixed. They decided to try and improve on what was already perfect and that was a mistake on their part. The naturalpoint forum is almost angrier than the avsim forum at the momment, and that's saying a lot. ;)Still, once the driver issues are sorted, it is awesome to use.#1 cause of stutters on that card you have will probably be caused by using 1 or 2 meter textures. Use 5 meter and see how it goes. My X850 couldn't handle anything finer than that, which is why I went to an Nvidia 512mb. Super smooth.You don't need to uninstall any .NET stuff. Tray tools shouldn't cause any stutters at all. As far as driver revision goes, the last one I used was 6.9, so can't really say. Best of luck!

my ati x800xl 265m. should be able to handle the 2 meter textures fine, I had it like that with a previous install and no stutters at all. It was something I messed with that made it go all crazy.I am now running tray tools, with the 6.10's and have found that those "tweaks" such as fiber frame (at which any setting produces the same result) and texture bandwidth are the culprits. Its like playing darts, you dont know which way to go, and it could be single digit increments, who knows. I have tried all the popular settings, but right now im at fiber frame of .70, and texture bandwidth of 300, if I go to 400 it gets stuttery. Ill see how it goes, but I do like tray tools over CCC, im just setting it up like I had CCC but without the bulk..very nice.Curious, what are your Fiber Frame, and bandwidth settings at in your config..??thanksdanon -