Hi,I've set up FSX/Acceleration with FSGenesis meshs, MyTraffic, ASX and Level-D 767 on a rather good equipped rig (see below). Basically I'm fairly satisfied with the overal performance. I have locked my frame rate at 18 fps with scenery sliders at about 2/3 and 40% of AI traffic. Everything looks good and runs smooth until I approach a busy and detailed airport (i. e. KLAX). During approach FPS fall to 9-11. At the same time I see a overall CPU load of 35-40% and if I go into the task manager I see that only one core is really used while the other three are near idle. Playing with the sliders shows that the fps depend directly on the scenery densitiy (clouds and AI traffic has no real influence). I've read several sources that Accelleration supports multi core cpu's. Have I made something wrong? Is there a special tweak to dedicate more cores to scenery rendering?Thanks.

It might be the jetways.http://forums.simflight.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=66295This helped my frames at KPHL a whole lot.

so is there a way to stop them from moving and be able to set the scenery density to very dense still?

SP1 induces multi-core use, and is a necessary req. for Acceleration. There might be a tweak on Phil Taylor's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/ptaylor

>so is there a way to stop them from moving and be able to set>the scenery density to very dense still?Yes. You can remove the section of the aircraft.cfg file for all of your AI aircraft. That will stop the jetways from animating to them, and hence no slowdown.But that's kind of a no-good solution...if ya ask me...To me, the best option is just hit the pause key ('P') for about a minute or two, and let the jetways do their thing. The jetways will continue to animate and move while you're paused. Once this 1-2 mins passes, the initial "jetway slowdown" period is over and fps should return to a more normal level.I'm hoping the animations are moved off to another core for FS11.RhettAMD 3700+ (@2585 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2gb Corsair XMS 3-3-3-8 (1T), WD 150 gig 10000rpm Raptor, WD 250gig 7200rpm SATA2, Seagate 120gb 5400 rpm external HD, CoolerMaster Praetorian

The best setting for a Quad I've found is{JOBSCHEDULER} ....(square brackets)AffinityMask=14in FSX.cfg That frees up Core 0 for WinXP stuff, has Core 1 running at 100% for FSX, and uses Cores 2 and 3 for texture loading when required.Even with this, FSX is still CPU bound and will slow down if you give it enough to do, like highly detailed airports with lots of traffic. On my system, AI airplanes are the worst for slowing things down.

Hi Bert,thanks for the hint, I will give it a try. The thing I still can't understand is even with scenery complexity set to dense (meaning no jetways) I will get only 10 fps on the hardware listed when looking towards (simple) airport buildings. If I stay at the same place but look into a different direction where no airport buildings are visible fps jump to 20+ Also autogen scenery does not seem to have much of an impact nor have a resonable AI setting. Do I really have to live with 10 fps at airports even on the most powerful hardware currently available? From my experience you need 18 fps to have a smooth sim, especially during the approach and landing phase.

When on the runway, or taxiing at KSEA at Scenery=extremely dense and Autogen=normal, I get a solid 25 fps, except for when parked AI aircraft are present in the view..Does your cockpit slow things down? What if you switch to 2d cockpit and remove the panel with the W key? I find the Maule VC cockpit to impact framerates a bit, compared to the C172 or the RealAir cockpits.Q6600 @ 3.0, 8600GTS 256 M, 2 GB PC800 RAM, Windows Pro.

>I will get only 10 fps on the hardware>listed when looking towards (simple) airport buildings. If I>stay at the same place but look into a different direction>where no airport buildings are visible fps jump to 20+ Also>autogen scenery does not seem to have much of an impact nor>have a resonable AI setting. >That should not be. I don't notice that kind of hit with my hardware. Similar to what Bert said, AI aircraft are the biggest fps robber for my system by far.>Do I really have to live with 10 fps at airports even on the>most powerful hardware currently available? From my experience>you need 18 fps to have a smooth sim, especially during the>approach and landing phase.You should be getting more than 10 with your hardware, unless you're running 150-200+ AI aircraft. I can even do that with pretty good settings on my rig.First thing I would do is uninstall and clean my video driver with a cleaner such as the one from Guru of 3D. (guru3D.com) or the more commonly known DriverCleaner software.RhettAMD 3700+ (@2585 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2gb Corsair XMS 3-3-3-8 (1T), WD 150 gig 10000rpm Raptor, WD 250gig 7200rpm SATA2, Seagate 120gb 5400 rpm external HD, CoolerMaster Praetorian

Hi Rhett,thanks for your response. I played a bit with the sliders and managed to get a minimum of 15 fps even at KLAX. As I tried a lot I can't tell what was it that has increased the FPS. I'm using MyTraffic and have the AI sliders at about 25%. I can't tell exactly how many, but at KLAX there is a large number of AI aircraft. It seems that I need to start some systematic tests. But before this I need to know what all these sliders really mean and what kind of impact will the movement of them generate.

The automobile traffic slider can also hurt frame rate, particularly at KLAX where you were testing things. I run 20% car traffic normally, and in my "big city" config I only run 10%. It still has a reasonable amount of the animated car traffic for my tastes.Any busy airport in a big city is a good place to test framerate and settings in FSX. You're doing a good job by testing at KLAX. My FSX torture test site is at Heathrow EGLL.Do you know that you can save configurations in FSX? It's pretty useful feature to have a config for normal flying, and a config for big cities/complex airports.With those cfgs and my older system I can generally maintain an absolute minimum of 15 fps even at Heathrow with 120 AI.RhettAMD 3700+ (@2585 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2gb Corsair XMS 3-3-3-8 (1T), WD 150 gig 10000rpm Raptor, WD 250gig 7200rpm SATA2, Seagate 120gb 5400 rpm external HD, CoolerMaster Praetorian

Well, to put things in sad perspective using a QX9650 running at 4.12 GHz on an 8800Ultra on SP1 (DX9), Vista 64: 7 to 12 FPS at 50% AI using MyTraffic X, PMDG 747X VC, Ultimate Terrain X, at KSFO looking directly at the terminal. The terminal is fully populated with A/C.If I look away from the AI aircraft, +10 FPS.Some tests:- turn off water 2.x and use 1.x: +1 FPS- turn off VC - no impact (on the PMDG 744X).- turning autogen to dense (from extremely dense): + 0.5 FPS- turning light bloom off - no impact- removing all AI airplanes from the scene - + 15FPS- reduce clouds to 60nm - no impact- reduce boats / leisure crafts to 10% from 20% - +1 FPS- turning aircraft self-shadow off - + 1 fpsAI is a total killer of frame rates at busy airports on the ground, especially near water (like San Francisco). I'm ok with 10 FPS for the eye candy and "immersion factor".My t/o run is at about 15 FPS to 20FPS, climbing to 30 or so in the air.I need to get FSX Acceleration to see what DX10 will do to me.Zip

I think you are right considering AI as the fps killer no 1. In my statements above where I mentioned that AI has not that much of an impact but the terminal buildings I was a bit short minded and forgot that these buildings have "hidden" most of the AI aircraft.Other thing, if I take a look at the task manager I see only one of four cores really used. I read a bit about multicore support (but probably not the whole story) and it seems to me that only texture handling is moved to an additional core if ACES speak of multicore support. Would A/I and weather not be ideal candidates for parallel tasking and so for moving to additional cores? Even the flight logic meaning flight physics and all the gauge computing stuff could be split across multiple cores from a logical point of view.Can anybody tell what is really possible in FSX or is having more than two cores only wasting money?

> Would A/I and weather not be>ideal candidates for parallel tasking and so for moving to>additional cores? Even the flight logic meaning flight physics>and all the gauge computing stuff could be split across>multiple cores from a logical point of view.>Yes absolutely. And that's one of the things I am sure they are looking to do with FS11.>Can anybody tell what is really possible in FSX or is having>more than two cores only wasting money?I don't think having more than 2 cores is wasting money.The reason being, as we move forward, more and more apps will move to multiple cores, i.e. the more cores, the better.If I were buying today, I would probably buy a quad. The only time I would buy a dual would be if I planned to upgrade again in a year, and even then I would have 2nd thoughts about it.RhettAMD 3700+ (@2585 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2gb Corsair XMS 3-3-3-8 (1T), WD 150 gig 10000rpm Raptor, WD 250gig 7200rpm SATA2, Seagate 120gb 5400 rpm external HD, CoolerMaster Praetorian