Well anyway, arguing over FPS in FSX is a circular debate: bottom line is FSX as a platform is broken. And that's all FSX is; a platform for add-ons.

I always laugh when I see "Freedom of Speech" brought up on a privately owned forum. lolAnybody who understands the law, knows that "Freedom of Speech" does not apply to privately owned mediums like a computer forum. This is not the free speech area at UC Berzerkeley. :(

Yeah, freedom of speech applies to the public square, not private clubs, which, essentially, this is. And I don't think the American constitutional writ runs worldwide anyway. Actually, as long as you keep a civil tongue in your head you won't get into trouble here.And I've been to Israel. I've even been banned from Israel, but that's another story. Haifa's not a bad port town (I don't think there is such a thing, har, mateys) although I don't recommend tooling around Nablus in a rental :( What's not to dig about chicks carrying assault rifles on busses? Israel's cool with me. Now. (Right, Israel?)

Well anyway, arguing over FPS in FSX is a circular debate: bottom line is FSX as a platform is broken. And that's all FSX is; a platform for add-ons.

So just for the fun of it , and to keep the circle going, what does "broken platform" mean. I've heard this often. I'm guessing that it means that FSX is so bad that it can only be made bearable by the use of addons. And then, some of these addons may not work right either. Hmmm.I mostly fly in and out of my own airporrts, so traffic addons don't help me much. My FSX, for whatever reason works great.I don't mind people saying whatever they want. But they have to be able to take the lumps they get for saying foolish things.Bob

The thing that continually amazes me about these kind of threads is the, "It doesn't work, so it sucks. But I found a way to make it work!"And then the "fix" or "tweak" is something that does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in reality.Case in point...the Affinity Mask Tweak of 15 for an i7.The last 4 cores of an i7 are VIRTUAL cores. FSX can't use an Affinity Mask for them. Setting the Affinity Mask to 15 for FSX will do NOTHING in increasing the performance in FSX.Placebo effect.RickEDIT: Oh heck, while I'm at it.....If your main arguement against purchasing a possibly "buggy" addon is it might "hose" your FSX installation and you'd have to re-install FSX...That dog don't hunt anymore either. Hasn't for over 3 years now. If you can afford an i7, you darn well should have an external hard drive and a Disk Imaging program to back up your darn computer. There is NO reason anybody should have to worry about re-installing FSX nowadays...or any other program on your computer...or your ENTIRE computer. Before you spend one more dime on an FSX addon:1. Buy an external hard drive.2. Buy a Disk Imaging program.3. Disk Image your entire computer to the external hard drive. If ANYTHING goes wrong with your computer, including losing one of your hard drives, you can put a new hard drive in and restore EVERYTHING in one step. Not just FSX (and all it's addons and associated settings, saved flights, etc)...but EVERYTHING. For starters, just think how much time you would spend after re-installing your OS just doing all the Windows Updates for the OS.Rant over.

Agreed Falcon. A thermaltake blacx esata dock and casper imaging software has saved my life many times. One set of backups for home in case something fails while I'm there and one set at work in case of total home disaster. No way I'm losing data or getting a hosed system due to a bad program or driver that I can't recover from within minutes by swapping out a drive.

Case in point...the Affinity Mask Tweak of 15 for an i7.The last 4 cores of an i7 are VIRTUAL cores. FSX can't use an Affinity Mask for them. Setting the Affinity Mask to 15 for FSX will do NOTHING in increasing the performance in FSX.

This statement implies that setting affinity mask to 15 addresses an I7's virtual cores. I disagree. According to Nick needham and IIRC Phil Taylor, the RMB pertains to Core 1. So an affinity mask of 15 (binary 1110) sets FSX to use cores 2,3,4 and not to use core 1. Whether or not this has any effect is a separate question. To address any of the virtual cores an affinity mask would have to be greater than 16 ie Binary 1111.

John,No, that's exactly OPPOSITE of what I was saying. Setting an Affinity Mask of 15 for an i7 for FSX is useless. FSX doesn't use the 4 Virtual Cores. No Affinity Mask setting for them will do anything for FSX. But, if a person had no Affinity Mask set previously, a setting of 15 would affect the use of the 4 "hard" cores, but not any virtual cores. That may lead them to think any improvement in FSX is because ALL 8 cores are masked for FSX, but that is false. Any setting above 4 cores is useless for FSX. They would see the same "improvement" using a 4 core only setting.But some i7's won't see any improvement at all concerning FSX, even with a 4 core affinity mask setting.It's not a "silver bullet" tweak for i7's and FSX. And it shouldn't be passed along as anything like "a fix for the UT2 problem on your i7". As Nick stated, setting an Affinity Mask for FSX should be the LAST thing anybody does to their computer to get FSX "running better". If you already have an i7, and FSX is NOT running OK on it WITHOUT the Affinity Mask setting, you probably have something ELSE wrong with your setup. And THAT should be found first and fixed before messing with any Affinity Mask settings.Rick

I'm gonna put in my backup hard drive today and uninstall ut2 and reinstall trafficx and compare the two. I only got to use trafficx for a week or two before ut2 came out and I switched over so I never really got to put trafficx through its paces. I do seem to recall that there wasn't any flickering of the plane textures or any weirdness in plane behavior in the brief time I used it. I also like the fact that I could control the number of AI through fsx's traffic sliders instead of having to leave the program and reset the AI values through a separate interface like with ut2 which is a pita when going from airports like seattle to LAX where one setting at seattle is perfect but at LAX would overwhelm my system.

John,No, that's exactly OPPOSITE of what I was saying. Setting an Affinity Mask of 15 for an i7 for FSX is useless. FSX doesn't use the 4 Virtual Cores. No Affinity Mask setting for them will do anything for FSX. But, if a person had no Affinity Mask set previously, a setting of 15 would affect the use of the 4 "hard" cores, but not any virtual cores. That may lead them to think any improvement in FSX is because ALL 8 cores are masked for FSX, but that is false. Any setting above 4 cores is useless for FSX. They would see the same "improvement" using a 4 core only setting.But some i7's won't see any improvement at all concerning FSX, even with a 4 core affinity mask setting.It's not a "silver bullet" tweak for i7's and FSX. And it shouldn't be passed along as anything like "a fix for the UT2 problem on your i7". As Nick stated, setting an Affinity Mask for FSX should be the LAST thing anybody does to their computer to get FSX "running better". If you already have an i7, and FSX is NOT running OK on it WITHOUT the Affinity Mask setting, you probably have something ELSE wrong with your setup. And THAT should be found first and fixed before messing with any Affinity Mask settings.Rick

The poster that mentioned the Affinity Mask tweek of 15 never said it would fix the problem but gave the suggestion for them to try. He also never said it was a tweek for the 4 VIRTUAL CORES and that it was to control the 4 actual cores.