Pushing the old dinosaur...

[dolph98 24]

After trying the tweaks (all the tweaks) I still have scenery segments popping in late, and scenery in the distance decides when it wants to pop into place. It's not like the scenery is loaded up front and stays there, it keeps adding as I go. Some squares pop in and then pop back out.Worst of all, I still have huge hesitations, not small stutters as the overall framerate stays locked at 20.8 (locked at 21). No, it's a pause - sometimes 2-3 seconds long!Also around my aircraft, below it, is very crisp but it has a line say a mile ahead that is not crisp at all. This line moves with my aircraft (outside view above and behind the plane). Nothing I have done gets rid of this line of demarcation, if you will. I have to say that the overall quality of the scenery is more realistic but the hesitations and blurries and popping just suck and take much of the enjoyment out of it. It isn't available system RAM or video RAM that is causing my problem. I ran MemStatus 2.5 from Kevin Reems and it shows max used RAM during a flight was 654MB (I have 1GB installed) and the video memory maxed at 107MB (of 256MB). I watched the hard disk light when the stutters occur and it does not flash during that time.I have concluded that it is the video card. I dropped to 800x600 and the thing still paused with the same slider settings. The GF6600 has 8 pipelines. I want a 6800 with 12 pipelines but cannot afford it right now.So I minimized the pauses by dropping my bandwidth in the following ways:1. Lowering the colors depth from 32 bit to 16 bit. Can't really notice the difference neways.2. Enabling vertical sync in the nVidia control panel (that alone gained me 2-3 fps, especially when looking to the side)3. Dropping the autogen density to very dense (1 notch)4. Turning off ground shadows (aircraft shadows left on)5. Mip quality to 76. HW rendered lights to 7The only pauses are when switching views.I think this thing can get me through the holidays like this. Onward and forward. To infinity and beyond...dolph

[old_doggie 0]

Dolph, Your system, at least your CPU is twice what I got so I would expect that FS should run smooth with min scenery woes. Could be a combo of things or a config setting or two.Question(s)Do yo use on board sound?Have you updated your chipset drivers?Was this problem(s) always the case or has it just started?My system.P4 1.6Ati Radeon 9200Se 128mb512Mb memcreative live2 maxtor drives 10G each hhmm maybe 20g each..lol i forgot..Slight stutter on short final (200 ft or less),Douglas

[DaryllB25840 1]

Dolf,Have you tweaked FS9's cfg? I'm using a program called "CFG FS9 Configurator" which allows easy access into FS9's cfg because it puts a shortcut icon on the desktop. The new settings are always retained in the cfg.If you do, I think that's where you should start your tweaking. There are current threads about using TextureMaxLoad = 10, locking FPS, Texture_Bandwidth_Multi, Terrain_Default_Radius, Terrain_Extended_Radius etc.Daryll

[Paul J 349]

To get rid of blurries:5. Mip quality to 7 -> change this to 4 or 56. HW rendered lights to 7 -> try 6, but 7 s/b ok.pj

[Guest Phantoms]

To get rid of the stutters, try the PCI Lattency Tool and set you video card to 32-64.

[Guest martin842]

> To get rid of the stutters, try the PCI Lattency Tool and set you video card to 32-64I agree. I have a low-end system, and the PCI latency tweak made the biggest difference to my stutters.Do a search for "pci latency" in the Avsim forums, and you will find a lengthy thread on the subject, which includes links/advice etc.Martin

[dolph98 24]

Thanks guys. I have all those tweaks in. The latency did nothing for me. I still have it at 64 but the thing that did the trick for me was reducing color depth.The ground textures are much better with the sliders maxed. I cant really tell the difference between 32 and 16. Dolph

[DaryllB25840 1]

What's your AGP aperture size in the BIOS ? Mine was 128 but I increased it to 256. I happy with the way my FS9 is performing and the way the textures load. There is different advice on this subject but what I've read was written back when most people had 512 MBs of RAM. Now most of us have a Gig.Daryll

[dolph98 24]

I set it at 256MB. Didn't make much difference on my system.I don't know for sure but I suspect that my video card is not that great. Perhaps that is the first investment I will make then I will get a SATA drive. dolph

[altstiff 71]

The 4600 series NVidia cards and above (nost people have them now), setting your depth to 32 bits over 16 bits is actually BETTER for frame rates.

[dolph98 24]

Of course, I shopped and checked before I bought this card. It seemed to be a big bang for the buck over my old ATI. Well, I didn't have much time to check it out because I was a full time student and didn't even get back into simming until Aug. of this year when I graduated. Now I have time to nitpick and complain. 8^)I will experiment more the next two weeks as I have vacation until 1/2/07. I will put my color depth back to 32bit with no other changes and report the results here.I think there is many combinations of settings that got me to where I am now, which one was the magic key I just don't know anymore. My res is at 1280x960 which matches my desktop, and I am getting around 20fps normally which slows a little to 16 or so around crowded airports, mostly because of the traffic I have added. Every system is different of course, and there must be a certain combination that works for any system I would think. That's the tweaks referred to above and everywhere else. I have done all these and none were the magic key on my system. I tried one at a time, and all at once. No clear answer yet.