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Guest badkharma

Major FSX performance issues - i7 build. Confused!

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Guest badkharma

Before I get started, here are my system specs:Coolermaster Cosmos 1000 caseCoolermaster 850w PSUAsus P6T6 revolution moboIntel Core i7 920 CPU w/ Zalman 9700 heatsink4 gb kingston ddr3 1333150 gb 10k WD raptor hdd500 gb seagate hddBFG Tech GTX 280 GPUVista home premium 64 bitI can play any game I have at max settings with excellent results....except FSX. Get this - with FSX I get an fps of EIGHT (that's 8) with settings at the LOWEST. If I move everything to the max, fps drops by 1 to 7. I mean, an FPS of 8?? I got better than that on my old Dell XPS Gen III that barely ran it.What's the problem here? I have all the latest updates (SP2) & drivers. I've tried adjusting all the settings dozens of times and I cannot get above 8 fps.

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Before I get started, here are my system specs:Coolermaster Cosmos 1000 caseCoolermaster 850w PSUAsus P6T6 revolution moboIntel Core i7 920 CPU w/ Zalman 9700 heatsink4 gb kingston ddr3 1333150 gb 10k WD raptor hdd500 gb seagate hddBFG Tech GTX 280 GPUVista home premium 64 bitI can play any game I have at max settings with excellent results....except FSX. Get this - with FSX I get an fps of EIGHT (that's 8) with settings at the LOWEST. If I move everything to the max, fps drops by 1 to 7. I mean, an FPS of 8?? I got better than that on my old Dell XPS Gen III that barely ran it.What's the problem here? I have all the latest updates (SP2) & drivers. I've tried adjusting all the settings dozens of times and I cannot get above 8 fps.
I can only offer you have a problem of some type probably related to your gpu. I'm getting 25-30 fps with most of my settings on high. I'd go to the hardware forum to seek advice--probably someone there can sort it out. Have you tried deleting your fs-x.cfg and letting the sim build a new one? Regards,John

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Guest badkharma
I can only offer you have a problem of some type probably related to your gpu. I'm getting 25-30 fps with most of my settings on high. I'd go to the hardware forum to seek advice--probably someone there can sort it out. Have you tried deleting your fs-x.cfg and letting the sim build a new one? Regards,John
No, I haven't, but that's a good idea - because I did swap out GPU's AFTER my install of FSX. I upgraded from a PNY 9800 GT to the BFG 280 GTX. My knowledge of the inner workings of FSX is limited, but perhaps the cfg file is running off of the PNY specs and causing issues. I'll try this fix and see what happens. Thanks John!

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Guest Alphahawk3
Before I get started, here are my system specs:Coolermaster Cosmos 1000 caseCoolermaster 850w PSUAsus P6T6 revolution moboIntel Core i7 920 CPU w/ Zalman 9700 heatsink4 gb kingston ddr3 1333150 gb 10k WD raptor hdd500 gb seagate hddBFG Tech GTX 280 GPUVista home premium 64 bitI can play any game I have at max settings with excellent results....except FSX. Get this - with FSX I get an fps of EIGHT (that's 8) with settings at the LOWEST. If I move everything to the max, fps drops by 1 to 7. I mean, an FPS of 8?? I got better than that on my old Dell XPS Gen III that barely ran it.What's the problem here? I have all the latest updates (SP2) & drivers. I've tried adjusting all the settings dozens of times and I cannot get above 8 fps.
I can tell you it is not your hardware...unless it is something with your memory setup. I have a similar system to yours but yours is much better with a better GPU and the Raptor HDD should scream, but I would have expected to see you with 3gig or 6gig of ram...to use the tripple channel......and not 4. I have the P6T Deluxe M/B and I don't know how it works with 4 slots populated...which is what you have to have instead of 3 slots or 6 slots. I am asuming you have 1gig sticks in 4 slots. That may not be it but try posting in the M/B hardware section and maybe someone can sort it out....but your hardware should run FSX fine. Regards

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Assuming the forums let you read this reply (How many "Server too busy" messages can one get in the space of 5 minutes anyway? :( ), these are my thoughts:4Gb is an odd amount of RAM for an i7 system, as has already been mentioned. You'd normally buy a triple-channel kit, comprising 3Gb or 6gb. Depends on motherboard though I guess.As for lighting a fire under the performance of FSX on your system, try Nick's tuning guide here:http://www.simviation.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/Ya...?num=1208959973It's a lot of work and steps to go through, but trust me, it's worth it to get your system at a base tuned level to build on. Nick is usually around the forums to offer help and guidance too.Edit: I just looked at the motherboard on the ASUS site - it is triple channel. Maybe you purchased the wrong memory kit for it, assuming your original system specs doesn't have a mistake in it.

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Guest ryebred

I have the same exact machine as you except I have 6 GB of OCZ triple channel DDR3 RAM. Video card, cpu and mobo are all the same as yours. I too had very low FPS on my first attempt. I did two things and the problem was resolved. First I turned off directX10 preview. That sent my FPS from 8 to around 12. Then I went from windowed mode to full screen and my FPS went up to my locked amount of 30 and it never strays from there. I never had a problem with windowed mode on my lesser computer but once I upgraded a week ago to what you had, I lose a ton of FPS in windowed mode.

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Guest adam_uk_wmids

I'm running a similar set up to you, with a P6t Delux motherboard, 6MB ram (but only 4 recognised due to using XP Pro 32 bit edition) and same make/model of graphics card.I have had an issue which was related to my sound card and have now sorted that out. However, it works fine now. I agree with the reply froim filotUK - Nick's guide is REALLY good and you don't have to be a PC whiz to follow it either. Alphahawk is probably onto the best solution though - i7's work on triple channel memory. You can buy RAM kits of 6GB which have been paired so that they work properly together - I'd recommend these.I've also read that greater than 3GB of RAM is desirable for 64bit OSs with FSX - so I would recommend 6 rather than 3GB.As for the 280GTX - mine is the 1GB version of this, I don't know what yours is, but I can assure you, it works fine. I can get 20 fps average with sliders set higher than those recommended for high end systems in Nick's guide whilst flying over KLAX on 100% AI traffic (With JustFlight's TrafficX installed) in pouring rain and heavy cloud.So, Whilst I haven't added much to a solution, I would hope that I have confirmed that your components are fine for the job (with the exception of the RAM!).

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Guest badkharma

Thanks guys - the RAM would play a minimal role in this case. The mobo allows dual channel RAM (although obviously triple channel is preferred) and it is installed per the mobo user guide (2 x 2gb). Every other app / game I have absolutely flies with no issues.That said, I swapped out GPU's after installing FSX...and so I tried uninstalling and then reinstalling FSX - which I did today. That brought everything together much better.I can run most settings on high, sans autogen, and get 30-35 fps consistently now. That said, if I enable autogen, even on sparse, fps is cut in half. I do plan on getting the 6 gb triple channel.I haven't yet done the tweaking, but I'm going to go through that now to get everything set. I do need to re-DL SP2 as well.

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Guest ryebred
That said, I swapped out GPU's after installing FSX...and so I tried uninstalling and then reinstalling FSX - which I did today. That brought everything together much better.
Swapping out GPU's can cause multiple display entries in your fsx.cfg file. I once did two swaps back and forth as I was testing my old NVidia card and comparing it to my friends ATI card before installing my new Nvidia card. Performance was down and I came across a tip in one of the FSX tweaking guides that said to delete multiple display entries in your FSX.cfg files. Or, better yet, if you make a bunch of changes to your setup then you can delete the file entirely and a new one will be regenerated without the duplicate entries

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Guest Alphahawk3
Thanks guys - the RAM would play a minimal role in this case. The mobo allows dual channel RAM (although obviously triple channel is preferred) and it is installed per the mobo user guide (2 x 2gb). Every other app / game I have absolutely flies with no issues.That said, I swapped out GPU's after installing FSX...and so I tried uninstalling and then reinstalling FSX - which I did today. That brought everything together much better.I can run most settings on high, sans autogen, and get 30-35 fps consistently now. That said, if I enable autogen, even on sparse, fps is cut in half. I do plan on getting the 6 gb triple channel.I haven't yet done the tweaking, but I'm going to go through that now to get everything set. I do need to re-DL SP2 as well.
Something is just not right with the setup. I can run autogen at normal in almost all places I fly and even dense in some areas with all my settings maxed out...traffic at 54%...weather at max...and I can get away with that on the 920 before I clock it. At Seattle with autogen set to normal I can get high 20's locked at 30. You have a far better video card than mine...although FSX is CPU bound.....and the Raptor you have is much faster than my Seagate. I can tell you that if the memory is not tuned correctly for the system it will slow down performance. I learnd that the hard way and reading a lot of Nicks writings. The whole system has to be tuned together for FSX to give you the max from the hardware you have...example...I was clocked at 3.2GHz with XMP settings with my memory running at DDR3 1600 timing at 8-8-8-24-2T. I wanted my memory to run at it's max....but that was not the best way for me. I turned off XMP and did a manual clock at 3.5Ghz and let the M/B set up my memory auto and it is now at DDR3 1360 with timings of 8-9-9-24-1T....and I am running cooler and FSX is running better. Now I am still trying to gather all about this I can but this setting has given me a really good increase over trying to use XMP settting of the memory. I can't really get my memory to run at it's max due to my cooling limitaions. To get the memory to run at 1600 correctly and in tune with everything else I would have to get very close to the 4GHz mark and I just can't do it. It gets too hot. Now someone may come on here and give me another idea about clocking and I will read and listen but I think my performance for this rig is doing quite well and I am baffled at what is going on with your setup. If you read some of Nick's writings he even discuuses where your system may run better with autogen set a notch higher in some cases....and as someone said it might not hurt to delete your fsx.cfg file and let it rebuild itself. That fixed a problem for me that occured whenh I bought the Bush Hawk XP plane. Stutters all the time with that plane...jumping from 7 to 50 and all over the place. Deleled my fsx.cfg file and let it re-build and all has been well since. Hope you get it going. Regards

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I'm no computer guru, but I agree with ryebred on full screen mode. Going from windowed to full screen mode tripled my fps! I would suggest doing this one tip before anything else.Curt

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I'm no computer guru, but I agree with ryebred on full screen mode. Going from windowed to full screen mode tripled my fps! I would suggest doing this one tip before anything else.Curt
Just out of curiosity, is windowed the default setting? I have a setup even a step up from the orginal poster's powerful computer, and have always been a bit disappointed by my FPS even with Nick's tweaks.

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Guest badkharma
Just out of curiosity, is windowed the default setting? I have a setup even a step up from the orginal poster's powerful computer, and have always been a bit disappointed by my FPS even with Nick's tweaks.
How do you switch to full screen mode?As a note to the above discussion, I have 6 gb tri-channel ddr3 1333 arriving today....so the system will be much better tuned.After some playing around, I am actually able to run with normal autogen settings and max almost everything else (except traffic) out and get a decent fps around 30-40. With the RAM hopefully this will increase and if I need to switch to full screen mode. Like Nick's article (I believe it was his) the performance is actually better (to a point) with the autogen sliders near the max.

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How do you switch to full screen mode?
Hold ALT and press ENTER. Use this key combination to switch between full screen and windowed mode.

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