BaseLining

Forget about getting FSX to run and look sweet and try BaseLining. The primary lesson will be to learn how each and every tweak you are interested in, including graphics / nhancer settings, affects FSX. And you will gain a new respect for your computer and FSX and find out what your planes are doing. In the programming biz we call this kind of thing a sanity check.First - strip every setting down to 0. All of your display settings pages will be zeroed out. Turn down realism settings if you want. Zero out the GPU driver also. No AA or Ansio. What you do after that is up to you - like wether you are OC'ld or tweaks in place. You can still test them. But keep the same config (BaseLine) for all of your tests. Don't forget to set weather to clear skys.You can also use a specific BaseLine to test a specific setting like KSFO and air traffic with UT II.Next - choose your metric. I will use the FSX average frame counter. FRAPS, load time ect..Have fun - Load FSX and set up a flight where you are flying out over the ocean at FL10 in the default Mooney (no GPS). Load the flight and go to outside view looking up under the belly of the Mooney. You should try to acheive the highest Avg FPS by figuring out what to turn off to get the highest Avg FPS. I got mine to 800 FPS after I averaged the value over a few seconds. You will use this same exact flight for every test.You would think that testing would take a long time - because you have to make a change to your fsx.cfg or whatever and reload FSX each time - but that is not an issue as it loads on my machine in exactly 1 second because LOD is 1.5. Cool!Next - choose your favorite tweak that you want to know about I chose AFFINITYMASK trying 12, 14, and 15. At 14 my Avg FPS shot up to 1200. Hmm, I think that I'll use that one. Revert AFFINITYMASK back and do the math, get the percent change for each test you make and keep all the changes in an Excel SS.Of course when you are configured correctly all settings will affect each other but no matter because we are BaseLining.Finally, when you are done testing and reconfigure FSX you will know EXACTLY what you are doing and may keep some of those settings a bit lower because you get used to the high performance from your BaseLine.Cookie: Try top-down view zoomed out to view the entire earth (where they just spilled a bunch of oil.)BTW, the reason that I'm doing this is because I got frustated with FSX even after Bojote's settings. :( Cheersjja