Pleae ,please.. one more COF question Do the top end

[Guest Wizard]

users suffer this same problem? I changed my ' video card drivers' and noticed right away..better performace such as more fluid.BANG I got it..but after an hour of flying..things changed..smoothness was gone and the slide show continued. Sh....t! I thought I had it beat.I could at least cross coutry fly into small areas,,but no..the system slowed?What is it CPU? I was sure the drivers helped at first. WOW I loved this sim..but no way stutter city.Do high end users notice this situation after 1/2 hr to 1 hr of flyuing.When I shut dow FS4..it is a long shut down..the processor works..what gives??MS may have not thought about us small end system users???

[John_Cillis 2,406]

You don't mention your system specs...Slowdowns like what you describe happened to me prior to upgrading my RAM. Basically, the sim was using virtual memory (a.k.a. HD access) and that made performance poor over time. With Win 98 as my O/S, I've been able to slide by with 384 megs of RAM.I'm certainly on the small end as far as systems go.... I have a few quibbles with panel performance and performance around airports, but the flying in general seems fine. On the FS2004 side, if your system is fairly slow, turn off the autogen if you're flying around the cities (it works fine for me when I do Bush flights). Kill the AI if your flying is mostly cross country. Kill the shadows & water reflections. Kill the AA if you're res. is anything over 1024x768...These are very generic and generai suggestions. Maybe if you post some more specs, people will be able to help you in other ways...

[Guest JonP01]

I have observed the behaviour, but only in some circumstances. If I fire up the sim and then regularly go swapping aircraft or selecting different airports, saved flights or do a lot of slewing, then I definitely notice a dramatic decrease in performance after anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour. It can also happen more quickly even if, for example, I toggle between the sim and MS Notepad where I might be doing something like editing a simple 6k cfg file. However, when this occurs, my swapfile is still untounched and I have plenty of spare memory left. But the only fix is the do a warm re-boot and then the sim is perfectly fine again.At first I thought this was going to be an FS9 show stopper. But I found that I cannot get the sim to drop in peformance at all if all I do is fly one aircraft in a session and don't excessively go swapping from airport to airport. In my case, once I finish discovering the innards of the sim and have it tweaked, that will usually be the way I will use it. It is only at the moment that I do a lot of plane swapping, airport jumping and slewing. But I'm still not sure what happens if I just use one aircraft but load up a whole lot of different flights.Over the last week, I've set up quite a few flights in the Trimotor and Piper Cub, where I have left the aircraft flying for hours - even repeatedly refueling them in the middle of a flight. Not once, even in 12 hour flights, have I seen any performance drop whatsoever in these flights. Even 2 hour flights where I nurse the aircraft the whole way, the performance seems to be just as good at the end as at the begining. I also tried flights starting at dawn and ending during the day and flights starting during the day and ending at night. No performance drops there either.So I'm not sure what is going on - how I can make it perform badly after 15 minutes but then have very long flights with zero problems. I would have attributed the problems to memory leaks, but as I say, Sysmon always tells me my swapfile usage has been zero the whole time, and that I still have a spare couple of hundred megs main memory unused. But a re-boot solves the problem every single time, though it is not a satisfactory work-around.So what I'd like to know is what does a warm re-boot do that those memory flushing programs can't do? Is it something to do with the memory onboard the graphics card?