I'll throw my latest in here too, *******:CCC:- AA - 8x; AF - 16X; Cat A.I. Advanced; MipMap - Quality; Vert Refr. - Always on; AA Mode Adv. Multi_S.TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=60UPPER_FRAMERATE_LIMIT=0WideViewAspect=TrueFIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION=0.125CLOUD_DRAW_DISTANCE=3DETAILED_CLOUDS=1CLOUD_COVERAGE_DENSITY=8AirlineDensity=25GADensity=25FreewayDensity=25LOD_RADIUS=4.500000MESH_COMPLEXITY=60MESH_RESOLUTION=22TEXTURE_RESOLUTION=28AUTOGEN_DENSITY=2DETAIL_TEXTURE=1WATER_EFFECTS=4TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_TREES_PER_CELL=800TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_BUILDINGS_PER_CELL=700[DISPLAY.Device.ASUS EAH5870 Series.0]Mode=3840x1024x16Anisotropic=1ATITools abandoned. With these (CCC) settings, the A2A Spit @300+at zero ft - ~48fps.at 3000 ft - ~60fpsTaken between FTX PNW Arlington and KPAE, MS Fair Weather, REX clouds 1024.Pretty huge difference from having to lock the 9800GTX at 22 and still have the minor stutters, limited water, weather and traffic. I haven't locked this down to, say, 30 and ramped up the detail yet. Prior to the rebuild BP would not work as it does now - even with the 8900 it was very much smoother, but not much in the way of frames. Also the vSync "effect" is not so noticeable. I'd be interested to know if anyone else is trying the BP mod while using the ATI card. I think this find is incredible.

Unless you really want road traffic, try turning it off. I find ground traffic is the biggest cause of stutters. Also with your system you should be able to bump up your TBM to about 80. That smoothed things out for me. Look at Nick_N's post earlier in this thread. As for the BP=0 mod, that didn't work out good for me. I get bests results with no BP setting, and using the fame limiter utility. My system is an E6850 3.0Ghz (Not O/C'd - Dell XPS720) 4gb with a 9800GTX card.

Sure...

ProcSpeed=8635

Did you edit that value? can you delete it and have FSX calculate it again?

I find ground traffic is the biggest cause of stutters. Also with your system you should be able to bump up your TBM to about 80.

totally agree with you... Paul, he's right... road traffic induces terrible stutters! (and its 100% CPU dependant) also TBM of 80-100 work great on most system.

Shockwave, found this in terrain.dll:[TERRAIN]MIN_DETAIL_TEXTURE_LEVELMAX_DETAIL_TEXTURE_LEVELI don't know what they do, or if they are even useful.. but, since you have a good 'eye' to the blurries, maybe you can see if they make a difference? (regardless of BP value) and Paul, I don't see any 'tearing' with vsync off, at least, I don't see any difference... vsync is 'slightly' smoother, but you REALLY have to be paying attention to notice. vsync off will not make the sim smoother, it will simply take off some load from the video card.

Thanks *******,Yes, unfortunately I know may way around the GPU settings all too well, angle depenadant aniso (as in bad=4X serries ATI) and non-angle dependant aniso(Best=Nvidia 8x & GF200 and Now ATI 5X), vsync etc and thats my main problem, too familiar with the traits and anything less than steller bothers the eye and the good part of my brain.Vsync=off bothers me very much, same as Tri vs Full aniso, low AA etcThanks for sharring the Terrain settings, Keep up the fine work!

Did you edit that value? can you delete it and have FSX calculate it again?

No reason to, FSX only uses that value at initial setup, for the first time just to setup FSX settings according to your system as to what "it" thinks will work, never reads it again after that.I never install while O/C, probably was based on 2.66 default speed of the I7-920

I get bests results with no BP setting, and using the fame limiter utility. My system is an E6850 3.0Ghz (Not O/C'd - Dell XPS720) 4gb with a 9800GTX card.

Which, just incase your not aware if you dont have the setting in the cfg and if you are using RTM will default to a value of BP=1000000 or if SP1/2 it will be BP=4000000

No reason to, FSX only uses that value at initial setup, for the first time just to setup FSX settings according to your system as to what "it" thinks will work, never reads it again after that.I never install while O/C, probably was based on 2.66 default speed of the I7-920

Correct, if you delete it, FSX will calculate that number again... I'm considering buying 2000 Mhz CAS7 just want to know how procspeed calculation is affected by using faster memory

Which, just incase your not aware if you dont have the setting in the cfg and if you are using RTM will default to a value of BP=1000000 or if SP1/2 it will be BP=4000000

Yeah I know, the funny thing is when I set BP to 4000000 I have problems. In fact any BP setting causes problems with perf and/or graphic corruption. This occurs when you fly over the same area multiple times. Try this test, keep flying around the island of Manhattan. With a BP setting of 1m and 4m On my system I can fly around it about 3 times, before my frames drop and/or I start seeing texture tearing. Without this setting I can fly around indefinitely with no negative effects. (I haven't tried it with BP=0 though yet) I can recreate this condition at will. That was with FSX SP1 though. I just recently upgraded to SP2 after Fly Tampa KBOS was released. (I have compatibility issues with SP2 and my chosen video capture program GAMECAM which I use due to performance, but there are just too many good quality addons out or coming out that are only SP2 compatible, so I bit the bullet and upgraded) So I think I'll try that test again to see if anything has changed. I'll report back.

Correct, if you delete it, FSX will calculate that number again... I'm considering buying 2000 Mhz CAS7 just want to know how procspeed calculation is affected by using faster memory

Ah, ok, well I dont think it is easy as just letting FSX rebuild for that, pretty sure it will come out exactly the same, I do beleive it gets written once somewhere else and I cant remember where as it was one of those give it no mind kind of things and I would have to do an un&re-install to really reset that figure, but Ill give it a wirl.

And why do we have to have Water on High? It eats my FPS away... for no better visual appearance.

No better visual appearance...? Let me repost my pictures I posted last weekend... :( (Click on them for the big picture.)Random simple lake:Random (less simple) river:I refuse to fly with water at anything lower than High x2. :( It IS indeed heavy on the fps...!

... just a point of interest that might be of value... my FSX sits on an 80gig SATA drive, "Stuff" goes on a 230 gig IDE, and the OS sits on a 200 gig SATA drive. In moving from Win7-32 to Win7-64, I didn't reinstall FSX, but fixed the (new) registry pointer. The performance was much, better than the earlier OS, but BP at 0 did nothing, and both TMB and BP of any size didn't do a whole lot, other than reduce or increase artifacts. Aniso pulled frames down and caused micro-stutters, as would larger amounts of traffic, especially when combined with clouds and a larger LOD. Most noticeable for smoothness was reducing FFTF to below the 0.22 that others' have quoted. In uninstalling and then fully removing the FSX directory, all it's components and doing a registry clean - it allowed for a very fresh installation: this was last Sunday, and at this time I was running the GTX9800, and I got a moderate performance increase at 4 gig - better but still limited; it tolerated moderate cloud settings, 3.5 LOD, 40/20/12 traffic, High 1/ Low 2.x water, 4X aa, 8x aniso - not bad, but still not fast and free-flowing everywhere: not much headroom. The Maddog at SEA still caused stuttering, and that meant pulling back traffic or clouds or AG, and still locked at 22 or 23. Full storms over SEA caused the same. On Monday evening I installed the 5870 - and immediately there was a noticeable improvement in the "look" of the environment, but I didn't have much time for setup. I moved the lock to 27, clouds up, water up and traffic up a bit, but the Maddog still caused some hesitations - then on Tuesday (last night) evening I played some more, with not too much gain - more concerned with the vSync issue - and not really aware that greater performance was just around the corner. ..... and then I thought I'd try the "BP=0" again, and also set the frames to unlimited: well - this was like stamping on the throttle in a Corvette! The machine just took off - getting anywhere 68 - 80 frames at 3000'. I did a 300kt run down Highway 5 from Arlington to a couple of miles from Seattle itself, with frames sitting between 48 and 58. Absolutely perfectly silk-smooth. This is the spot. I think ******* is correct with the assumption that BP 0 unloads the proc and places that load on the gpu, and that one thing, combined with changing from a lowly GTX9800 to the DDR5 ATI5870 has altered FSX's personality entirely. For me there have been at least five/six areas of FSX setup that have had to be corrected, in order to get that performance.

Hey,That brings me to a question that might have been brought up before in this thread, but perhaps not conclusively answered. Let me phrase it this way:If bufferzones=0 offloads from the CPU to the GPU, and if such downloading improves performance at the expense of an overloading of the GPU, at least in Nvidia based equipment, does a switch to an advanced ATI based video card negate the negative side effects? Short questions version: Would the most recent and best ATI card bring the best of both worlds? Are bufferzones=0 texture corruption issues primarily a Nvdia based problem?Stephen

Yeah I know, the funny thing is when I set BP to 4000000 I have problems. In fact any BP setting causes problems with perf and/or graphic corruption. This occurs when you fly over the same area multiple times. Try this test, keep flying around the island of Manhattan. With a BP setting of 1m and 4m On my system I can fly around it about 3 times, before my frames drop and/or I start seeing texture tearing. Without this setting I can fly around indefinitely with no negative effects. (I haven't tried it with BP=0 though yet) I can recreate this condition at will. That was with FSX SP1 though. I just recently upgraded to SP2 after Fly Tampa KBOS was released. (I have compatibility issues with SP2 and my chosen video capture program GAMECAM which I use due to performance, but there are just too many good quality addons out or coming out that are only SP2 compatible, so I bit the bullet and upgraded) So I think I'll try that test again to see if anything has changed. I'll report back.

Well here's the results of my 3 tests with FSX SP2. Each test was 6 laps around Manhattan Island, preceded by a fresh reboot, also Prerender was set to 1 and traffic turned off. There were no graphic corruption in any of the tests which is the good news as opposed to my SP1 results.No BP setting (My Current config) - Frame rates consistently between 28-45 (Depending on location on the Island) and little to no stuttering. BP=4M - Frame rates consistently between 28-45 (Depending on location on the Island) and 2 5 second pauses and 1 10 second pause in addition to micro stutters. (I ran this test twice)BP=0 - Frame rate drop to a range of 20-35, but like my first test little to no stuttering. For now I think I'll stick with my current config, (atleast til I get a ATI 5870! :( )

First let me say thanks for all the good information in this thread. I just got a new system and FSX is running like a dream. I fly with autogen maxed (mostly) and with BF=0, autogen tweak, fiberframe=0.10, texture bandwith=130. I had a lot of trouble getting my 5870 to work with vsync and Win 7 x64 but finally I got it fixed with Ati tray tools. At first framerate was horrible and stuttering with vsync forced. The things that fixed it was: - force vista vsync override on- no triple buffer- flip queue size=0 <- i think this is important, it's frame to render ahead- catalyst ai offI'm using 1920x1200 with 4xbox AA / 16 AF (i might up the AA if there's power enough in the 5870, haven't tested) If you have a 5870 try this. It should give you perfect vsync with Win 7 like with Nvidia. My system:i7 930 @ 4.258706GB @ 1600mhz2 x C300 SSD's

I will: thanks, Zorg: the vSync was my only concern now. I'm will going to move the TBM up to, perhaps your 130; I didn't know about the flip queue size, as I've been an nVidia a really excited user for a long time. Regarding your "if there's power enough in the 5870," - I'm running 3840 x 1024: you have enough power.... :(

I will: thanks, Zorg: the vSync was my only concern now. I'm will going to move the TBM up to, perhaps your 130; I didn't know about the flip queue size, as I've been an nVidia a really excited user for a long time. Regarding your "if there's power enough in the 5870," - I'm running 3840 x 1024: you have enough power.... :(

i'll try higher AA. thought i read ATI being bad with AA and FSX that's why i had it down. but i guess you're right the 5870 is powerful enough - i think i read on the box that it renders over 2 terraflops pr. sec! not sure what that means excactly but it sounds like a lot :) :( :(