No, meant it in the way of it should be listed as you did.And if you are running stock AI as compared to add-ons like UT or TX as many of us run makes it that much more important to list.

Eh, sorry, I don't understand what you mean about the screenshots... (English is not my native language, sorry!) I thought you were asking for screenshots but you meant to say you liked that I added those screenies of my settings? (Bummer, I just made and uploaded 7 screenshots to show you how everything looks over here... :( )Afaik I listed everything I use: I do not use AI addons (which seems logical since I don't care about AI! :( ) If I come across something I missed, I will add it to the post (if that's still possible).EDIT:Here are the screenshots anyway (otherwise it would be a waste of time :( ). The little pics lead to the jpg's of the original bmp's (tried to upload those, but Tinypic converted them, so I uploaded jpg's instead).Mind you, (I don't want to lie about it), fps (and pictures) don't say much: fps might still seem okay on average in the three pics above Portland, but it sure wasn't a smooth ride there! It was worse than above Seatlle, really. But that's something I don't care about because I fly above the bush most of the time. If you like fast planes and cities and large airfields and AI... then you probably need other settings. B) But even then BP=0 coud/should do wonders.

After reluctantly moving up (?) to FSX I bought a new computer. i7960 @ 3.2GHz. 6GB 1600 ram. GTX 260 W7 64 and was very disappointed with the perfomance I was getting, so was following this thread with interest. I was using the drivers that came with the rig, 191. something or other. Installed 185.50 which had worked flawlessly on my previous rig. No improvement. just installed the 197.13 quite a marked improvement. I was happy with that. locked at 30, dancing between 27-30, but nice and smooth. So decided to try the Bufferpools 0. Frames never budged off 30. Took of and started a climbing 180 to the left. Half way round the turn FSX froze for about twenty seconds, then black screen for about 15 seconds, then came back on and unfroze. The whole screen was covered in tiny dancing lights, so I shut FSX down and checked the card temp. 47c. I then opened the FSX cfg to change the BufferPool back to 5000000 and that too was covered in tiny coloured marks and some of the entries were distorted. After making the change, I fired FSX up. It was a mass of tiny flashing lights, so I shut it down again. I fired up again after five minutes, and all was back to normal. I guess the moral of this is that, while tweaking is OK for the many, for the few (like me) it's a nightmare, because it NEVER EVER works as advertised, and finishes up scaring the bejesus out of me. I want to overclock this thing, and yes, I know it's easy, everybody and his mother tells me so. But dare I have a go ? What ? I'd rather face a charging bull, because I know that no matter how carefully I follow the instructions, one of the steps will come up with something totally unexpected, and I'd probably finish up blowing the thing sky high. I could fly your plane, but never employ me as a mechanic.Russell

Eh, sorry, I don't understand what you mean about the screenshots... (English is not my native language, sorry!) I thought you were asking for screenshots but you meant to say you liked that I added those screenies of my settings? (Bummer, I just made and uploaded 7 screenshots to show you how everything looks over here... :( )Afaik I listed everything I use: I do not use AI addons (which seems logical since I don't care about AI! :( ) If I come across something I missed, I will add it to the post (if that's still possible).

Your English is as good as mine and I'm English!Yeah, you did a great job posting all your settings and info, might be able to find something you missed but overall like JohnC said this helps prevent wasted time, tail-chasing.So keep up the good work!

After reluctantly moving up (?) to FSX I bought a new computer. i7960 @ 3.2GHz. 6GB 1600 ram. GTX 260 W7 64 and was very disappointed with the perfomance I was getting, so was following this thread with interest. I was using the drivers that came with the rig, 191. something or other. Installed 185.50 which had worked flawlessly on my previous rig. No improvement. just installed the 197.13 quite a marked improvement. I was happy with that. locked at 30, dancing between 27-30, but nice and smooth. So decided to try the Bufferpools 0. Frames never budged off 30. Took of and started a climbing 180 to the left. Half way round the turn FSX froze for about twenty seconds, then black screen for about 15 seconds, then came back on and unfroze. The whole screen was covered in tiny dancing lights, so I shut FSX down and checked the card temp. 47c. I then opened the FSX cfg to change the BufferPool back to 5000000 and that too was covered in tiny coloured marks and some of the entries were distorted. After making the change, I fired FSX up. It was a mass of tiny flashing lights, so I shut it down again. I fired up again after five minutes, and all was back to normal. I guess the moral of this is that, while tweaking is OK for the many, for the few (like me) it's a nightmare, because it NEVER EVER works as advertised, and finishes up scaring the bejesus out of me. I want to overclock this thing, and yes, I know it's easy, everybody and his mother tells me so. But dare I have a go ? What ? I'd rather face a charging bull, because I know that no matter how carefully I follow the instructions, one of the steps will come up with something totally unexpected, and I'd probably finish up blowing the thing sky high. I could fly your plane, but never employ me as a mechanic.Russell

Russell,Thanks for sharing your findings. Strange that, the distortion and all! This does make me want to try 197.13 though... :( Stephen

Your English is as good as mine and I'm English!Yeah, you did a great job posting all your settings and info, might be able to find something you missed but overall like JohnC said this helps prevent wasted time, tail-chasing.So keep up the good work!

Okay, thanks. BTW I was confusing your post with NOK's post when I mentioned the screenshots. (This topic can get quite confusing... :( )

J van E:Thanks for the screenshots, and they look great!It's not the inquisition here, I'm just very interested in how your set-up works, and if I can maybe learn something from it...But the watersettings baffles me a bit.Quote"Mind you, (I don't want to lie about it), fps (and pictures) don't say much: fps might still seem okay on average in the three pics above Portland, but it sure wasn't a smooth ride there! It was worse than above Seatlle, really. But that's something I don't care about because I fly above the bush most of the time. If you like fast planes and cities and large airfields and AI... then you probably need other settings. But even then BP=0 coud/should do wonders."UnquoteIf you fly the bush most of the time, why then have this extremely high watersetting?Lowx2 looks absolutely OK IMO, and you save CPU resources. :(

We have the same card, can you please confirm the BP setting? It looks like you have too many 0's.

1/2 gig.jja

Hey All First off Let me make this very clear i take no responsibility for the follwing tweak/setting and peoples usage of it,i decided to take the risk in using it on my system and just wanted to pass along my finding if it toasts your system dont blame me!Ive been following this thread with some interest over the past few weeks and i thought id add a little of my own findings Just like pretty much everyone else id been having hit & miss attemps at getting my system 100% stable while using BP=0,some flights would flicker out,and snow within a few mins (forcing me at shutdown completely to get the PC back into a usable state)other times i could go for longer but it would always sneak in within 30mins or soSo while you guys reseached to try and trackdown the tigger/cause i took another approach that being,how could i stop the reaction of the system to the trigger....whatever that trigger was/isAfter monitoring/loging my 260GTX's activity in FSX with BP 0 inplace i found that my GPU was Clock Throttling to 400mhz core clock, 800mhz shader, 300mhz memory once FSX has flickered/snowed/crashedoutnow it Turns out that this is a feature of NV hardware,when the GPU isnt getting a high % usage in full3d &/OR is running at low FPS for and extended time the controller decides it will save you power and drop the GPU/shader core/memory clocksChecking the wider (gaming) web i found that this problem isnt just effecting FSX with BP=0 inplace but also WOW,Crysis and many other games that either run at low GPU usage or Low FSP for and extened time,this feature was disabled in the 170.xx series due to bugs but was reimplemented in the 180.4x drivers & onward,NV later added a switch to there Control pannel (Power management mode) allowing you to switch between adaptive or performance modes to stop the Clock Throttling,the only problem is that with BP=0 inplace this setting is getting ignored and the controller is still resetting the GPU clocks,im gussing that bp=0 is causing FSX to act outside of the profile that NV have setup for it within there drivers Doing some more digging on how to stop it from happening i came across a guide that shows how to force full 3D clocks all the while using rivatuner,so stopping the controller from resetting the GPU clock,heres a link to the guidehttp://www.overclock.net/nvidia/423880-how...wnclocking.htmlIve been testing this for a week now and ive found that with BP=0 and the Rivatuner force inplace FSX will not snow/flash or spike,I set up a cfg/flight that was causing flashing/Clock Throttling and ran it a number of time with the force on/off everytime without forced 3d clocks it bugged out within 30 secs,everytime with the force 3d clocks inplace i flew for over an hour before shutting FSX down & the only side effect i saw was a slight hitch where it seems that the clock was trying to get downclocked but was being reset by rivatuner more reseach turns up the fact that some OEM's decide to remove this Clock Throttling feature from there range of cards,which helps explain why some people have reported total succes with BP=0 where others even with the same series of cards have reported flashing/snow.......Let me just say again i take no responsibility for what the above tweak does to anyone's system if they decide to us it,using it will set your GPU to run at 3DClock setting at all times if you dont understand what that is doing or dont have anyway to monitor or adjust your GPU's fan/clock/temp leave this tweak well alone....as i said it works for me and im willing to take the risk in using iti'll contiune to keep it inplace and report back after more testing or if i find any problemsGreat thread btw many thx to all who have contributed worth while posts within it :)CheersGizmo

If you fly the bush most of the time, why then have this extremely high watersetting?Lowx2 looks absolutely OK IMO, and you save CPU resources. :(

With 'bush' I mean rural area's, forests, mountains and... lakes and rivers! (Sorry if I misused the word!) In short: nature. The difference between flying over a lake with Lowx2 or my settings is mindblowing and that high setting makes it utterly realistic! If I could I'd set it at the highest option (so also all autogen etc. is reflected) but that's too much (well, until the next holy grail is revealed! :( ). But really, seeing the clouds and the mountains reflected in the water makes me feel I am REALLY there! Without those reflections it just doesn't look right imho. I know it's heavy on the resources, but so is Extremely dense autogen... But since I can have both on and still enjoy smooth flights... I see no reason to lower the setting. :( I will make a screenshot that compares the two settings...EDIT:Now you tell me: where would you rather fly? B) (You can see the difference already on these little thumbnails, but to get a good look, click on them for the big picture.)Random simple lake:Random (less simple) river:As you can see on the last two shots, it doesn't only influence how things look up close but also how things look in the distance: you see lots of different colors etc. This makes rivers in small valleys look totally different than rivers in the wide open. Without the reflections the water seems something seperate... and the land seems to float in the air somehow. But with the reflection everyting is 'ONE'.The screenshots with reflections look almost real to me, the other two don't. But of course that's my opinion! (Almost makes me wonder if FSX is a flight sim to me or a landscape sim... B) )

I would like to throw in something for you guys to try using the BP=0 tweek. With adding this to the mix and I have only done a very short flight with this but and this is a BIG but.... I got no artifacting adding this......Set your pre-render to 1 (3 is the default). I have not tested a value of 2 yet but the setting of 1 worked real nice with the BP=0 applied. You can see my sig for my system specs. I set mac scenery complexity and very dense autogen. My test flight was from 4S2 Hood River Oregon.Try it out and see how it helps with the artifacting. I had my FPS locked at 30 if that matters.Jim

Set your pre-render to 1 (3 is the default). I have not tested a value of 2 yet but the setting of 1 worked real nice with the BP=0 applied. You can see my sig

Jim, et all:BP=0 is IN FACT (and please, DO test yourself using your OWN methods) a 'Static' Memory pool. Even if you set it to 1, 5, 10 or 500 million, what you are doing is creating a 'memory pool' (a pool buffer) to be used by FSX, this buffer is NOT (and I repeat) NOT created using Video Ram!!! it uses SYSTEM RAM, and ALSO uses CPU, think of this pool as a 'cache' were calls are made, and no.. I'm not 'assuming' I've been commited to this for the past three weeks, and in time I'll prepare a formal guide/document.When you set BP to 0 the CPU is free to do more work and you DO get more performance out of FSX, however it STALLS the GPU because of the HUGE ammount of Draw calls and rendering to be done which now go DIRECTLY to the GPU and do not go thorugh any pool. WHen you use high aniso, AA or ANY setting that puts a load into the VIDEO CARD (GPU) BP=0 becomes suceptible to corruption, artifacts... the WAY you counter this, is trying to 'balance' how the CPU and GPU interact making the CPU do more mork.. for example, using BP=0 and the MAX Water setting will give you an idea of what I'm saying.. it will make the artificats completely go away, as long as the GPU is able to handle the calls.The reason that having a high BP value (or ANY value above 0) makes artifacts go away is the HUGE AMMOUNT of CPU that is required to read/write from this pool. FSX was NOT designed to be used with BP=0, what we are doing is throwing the scheduler completely off balance and sending so many calls to the GPU that the command buffer is being filled and flushed by the driver. I'm confident BP=0 is no mistery any more, I just need to document everything I've done including the specific test scenarios.The is also the issue of TDR (the timeout detection and recovery mechanism build into the WDDM) this is the reason why so many people experience black screens and/or artifacts 'snow' when using BP=0 the driver 'dies' and Win7/Vista resets it. This doesn't happen in XP because it used the XPDM instead.The good news is that, with time and having everthing documented everyone will be able to benefit from the performance gains of BP=0 just be patient.

Jim, et all:BP=0 is IN FACT (and please, DO test yourself using your OWN methods) a 'Static' Memory pool. Even if you set it to 1, 5, 10 or 500 million, what you are doing is creating a 'memory pool' (a pool buffer) to be used by FSX, this buffer is NOT (and I repeat) NOT created using Video Ram!!! it uses SYSTEM RAM, and ALSO uses CPU, think of this pool as a 'cache' were calls are made, and no.. I'm not 'assuming' I've been commited to this for the past three weeks, and in time I'll prepare a formal guide/document.When you set BP to 0 the CPU is free to do more work and you DO get more performance out of FSX, however it STALLS the GPU because of the HUGE ammount of Draw calls and rendering to be done which now go DIRECTLY to the GPU and do not go thorugh any pool. WHen you use high aniso, AA or ANY setting that puts a load into the VIDEO CARD (GPU) BP=0 becomes suceptible to corruption, artifacts... the WAY you counter this, is trying to 'balance' how the CPU and GPU interact making the CPU do more mork.. for example, using BP=0 and the MAX Water setting will give you an idea of what I'm saying.. it will make the artificats completely go away, as long as the GPU is able to handle the calls.The reason that having a high BP value (or ANY value above 0) makes artifacts go away is the HUGE AMMOUNT of CPU that is required to read/write from this pool. FSX was NOT designed to be used with BP=0, what we are doing is throwing the scheduler completely off balance and sending so many calls to the GPU that the command buffer is being filled and flushed by the driver. I'm confident BP=0 is no mistery any more, I just need to document everything I've done including the specific test scenarios.The is also the issue of TDR (the timeout detection and recovery mechanism build into the WDDM) this is the reason why so many people experience black screens and/or artifacts 'snow' when using BP=0 the driver 'dies' and Win7/Vista resets it. This doesn't happen in XP because it used the XPDM instead.The good news is that, with time and having everthing documented everyone will be able to benefit from the performance gains of BP=0 just be patient.

Thank you ******* for this explanation. I have just taken another long test flight and indeed the artifact problem is back but significantly less than when on my earlier Q9550 specifications. I am looking forward to benefiting from your research. When you want to test anything just give the instructions and I will be glad to do so. Good work.Stephen

Jim, et all:BP=0 is IN FACT (and please, DO test yourself using your OWN methods) a 'Static' Memory pool. Even if you set it to 1, 5, 10 or 500 million, what you are doing is creating a 'memory pool' (a pool buffer) to be used by FSX, this buffer is NOT (and I repeat) NOT created using Video Ram!!! it uses SYSTEM RAM, and ALSO uses CPU, think of this pool as a 'cache' were calls are made, and no.. I'm not 'assuming' I've been commited to this for the past three weeks, and in time I'll prepare a formal guide/document.When you set BP to 0 the CPU is free to do more work and you DO get more performance out of FSX, however it STALLS the GPU because of the HUGE ammount of Draw calls and rendering to be done which now go DIRECTLY to the GPU and do not go thorugh any pool. WHen you use high aniso, AA or ANY setting that puts a load into the VIDEO CARD (GPU) BP=0 becomes suceptible to corruption, artifacts... the WAY you counter this, is trying to 'balance' how the CPU and GPU interact making the CPU do more mork.. for example, using BP=0 and the MAX Water setting will give you an idea of what I'm saying.. it will make the artificats completely go away, as long as the GPU is able to handle the calls.The reason that having a high BP value (or ANY value above 0) makes artifacts go away is the HUGE AMMOUNT of CPU that is required to read/write from this pool. FSX was NOT designed to be used with BP=0, what we are doing is throwing the scheduler completely off balance and sending so many calls to the GPU that the command buffer is being filled and flushed by the driver. I'm confident BP=0 is no mistery any more, I just need to document everything I've done including the specific test scenarios.The is also the issue of TDR (the timeout detection and recovery mechanism build into the WDDM) this is the reason why so many people experience black screens and/or artifacts 'snow' when using BP=0 the driver 'dies' and Win7/Vista resets it. This doesn't happen in XP because it used the XPDM instead.The good news is that, with time and having everthing documented everyone will be able to benefit from the performance gains of BP=0 just be patient.

Thats why I feel the Pre-render of 1 helps to even all that out and still allow a BP=0. At a pre-render of 1 the CPU is kept busy sending the data to the GPU. At a value of 3 it wont send it to the GPU till it has rendered 3 frames ahead but at 1 it is more of a constant flow. Im not a CPU/GPU guru by any means but it really makes a difference on my system. I have tried setting the prerender back to 3 and I quickly start to get Autogen spikes and flashes, ect. Also another thing I noticed with the prerender at 1 is that the surges one gets with a i7 running unlimited is GREATLY reduced but I feel I get a better flight locked at 30 still.

I just got BP=0 running beautifully on another machine, the core 2 duo in my specs below, I took it back to WinXP64 which flushed almost all of the artifacts, also using a 22" monitor seems to help but right now the thing is running as well as my core I7 on a 1gb card no less.A weird things tho' when I had a second monitor hooked up to the video card I was getting very average framerates like 20 in the default flight, I took of that second monitor and voila'back up to 60 with breakouts to 100.There is one scenario that give me spikes and flashes thats flying over a rainforest like a take off from SBCC, then the spikes come back but not as bad as on my core I7. Which makes me wonder if I should increase my system ram on the i7.

Edit to my last post..... Im going back to what I was using before all this. I do feel the tweek has some benefit but after doing a few short flights with it and playing around with other settings then going back to what I was using before I just dont see any thing which warrants me to use it right now. I do look forward to all your findings as this goes on and on and on......... I really was done tweeking untill this darn thread, will we ever stop driving ourselves nuts? Now if you will excuse me, I am going back to flying again.