FS9- New clouds and weather worth the frame hits? (Long...

[Guest brad_s]

Hi All, Don't want to start a flame war here, and I'm not trolling, but..... I received FS9 the day it was officially released. Installed the sim and had to get immediate help from here in the forum, due to not being able to boot from CD #4. I was pointed to the CD crack on another website, got the sim running and was merrily taking my first few flights here in the Pacific Northwest. The weather here has been pretty good and I was pleased with the overall performance, even though I was testing the capabilities of my computer, after a recent nearly full rebuild, including MB, CPU, memory, drives, vid card, etal. I thought I would check for some more severe weather, found some and d-l'd it, took a flight and was immediately shocked at the frame rate hits my computer is taking. Went from 30 ish to anywhere from 8-20, depending on the usual things like scenery, etc. So I am back to the searching mode to tweak this sim and getting it to work to my satisfaction, preferably back into the mid twenties.The thought occurred to me that I have never before seen such a drastic difference in frame rates due to addition to some clouds and more severe weather. Before you smack me too hard, I have been an avid flight simmer since the mid 70's, and have purchased most of the "new kids on the block". I have updated many different computers to keep up with the advancing demands of flight sims. I lived through the patching and repatching process of TRI's flight sim, (bless them for working so hard). Speaking of TRI and Rich (God bless his soul), I thought that the volumetric clouds in Fly! were just as nice as those in FS9, and I got better frame rates, too!! I hope that Microsoft and the hardware manufacturers can work together to help solve these issues. If I remember correctly though, MS didn't issue any patches for MSFS2K2, so I don't hold much hope from them. So now that I'm finished ranting, I'm again asking for help from you people that know so much more of the inner workings of the sim than I do. I'm not going to give up and I'm not going to return the sim, so don't start that war. I just needed to get this off my chest in this discussion forum. This is the important stuff:Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro MBAMD XP 2500+ Barton CPU2, 512 MB PC3200 Corsair memory chips, configured in dual channel DDR ATI Radeon 9200 Video card w/128 MB's of DDRWindows XP Home Edition OSAll the newest updates and drivers for everythingThanks for reading this, and as always, the help I receive from everyone!!Brad StreeterKKLS

[Guest jase439]

For starters: turn of full screen anti-aliasing in the driver. I can almost guarantee you that your performance bottleneck is there.That said, I agree with your assessment on the clouds to a point. Without question, the new clouds are a vast improvement, but I don't know that they are leaps and bounds above what FS2002 had with FS Sky World - at least not enough to justify the steep performance cost. Fly! had beautiful clouds - no where near the variety though that you find in FS2K4 and they were not dynamic. Still, Fly! captured that 'wispy cumulus' effect very very well and they were inexpensive computationally. FS2K4 clouds capture this effect to a fair extent - but I am still partial to Fly!'s implementation.While it's unfortunate, that I have to turn FSAA off with the new Microsoft clouds, I still think it represents a technological leap forward. They need to revisit cloud performance. I'm sure atmospheric wizards like Chris Willis will likely conjure up a solution to this problem too though :) If you recall, out of the box, FS2002's clouds were also somewhat 'performance laden'.Thanks for the 'non-flaming' post :).J

[Guest brad_s]

Hi J,Thanks for the reply. I have the direct 3D default settings set on the hardware as application preference and have unchecked anistropic filtering in FS9. That has improved my frame rates to where I'm not seeing such a huge drop in FPS.Any other suggestions?Thanks,Brad