Frame Rates Question

[shivers9 1,174]

First of all....I love this product. I do seem to take a big hit in the frame rates area which is something I don't normally see with the Carenado products. I was wondering if someone with similar computers (See below) could give me an idea of their performance. I have seen no complaints from others so I am thinking I may need to try a reload. I do have a smooth flight without jerks even in some bad wx. I was just surprised at the 18-21 FPS.

[Guest Fastball]

Shivers9I agree with you. Granted I have tweaked my system a great deal so I can maintain around 28 to 30 fps with the caravan but this model in general is a little heavy on the frame rates compared to past Carenado offerings. I for one would like to see a non HD set for those of us that prefer smoothness over exact rivet count on the exterior. I find that if I have the Carenado caravan set as my default aircraft then FSX is extremly slow to load both at initial startup and when loading a flight. I now load the default cessna and than change to the Carenado caravan once the flight is loaded. For me the sound is the first this to start hiccuping followed by frame rates. Other than that I really like this aircraft, once things get patched up a bit and it matures it will be one of my favorites.FastballMy systemIntel 3.4 Duo core4 gig ramSoundblaster xtreme gamer audio cardGTX280 1 gig graphics cardWindows 7

[Simba 34]

I too feel that this very heavy on framerates.

[spotlope 0]

Curiously, I'm not having any frame rate problems with the Caravan compared to my other Carenado planes. My system isn't super beefy, but my video card is pretty good - a GeForce 285 GTX w/1GB RAM. The biggest factor I can think of that would reduce frame rates in this bird is the high-res 2048 textures. Perhaps some video cards just can't cope with the massive amount of texture info flowing through the pipe. Apparently on my rig, the CPU is more of a bottleneck than the video, and it doesn't care much about how big the textures are. A good test would be to convert a whole set of Caravan textures to 1024 and see if it makes a big difference. I'd be willing to bet it would.

[Guest 413X3]

It's the high res textures. A video card with 1gb of memory is enough to load them fine.

[RudiJG1 172]

Curiously, I'm not having any frame rate problems with the Caravan compared to my other Carenado planes. My system isn't super beefy, but my video card is pretty good - a GeForce 285 GTX w/1GB RAM. The biggest factor I can think of that would reduce frame rates in this bird is the high-res 2048 textures. Perhaps some video cards just can't cope with the massive amount of texture info flowing through the pipe. Apparently on my rig, the CPU is more of a bottleneck than the video, and it doesn't care much about how big the textures are. A good test would be to convert a whole set of Caravan textures to 1024 and see if it makes a big difference. I'd be willing to bet it would.

I have the same processor as Bill over-clocked to 3.8 MHz; it's paired with a 275GTX video card with 896 MB video ram. I don't have significant FPS problems either and suspect that that's due to both the amount of video ram and the memory bus width (448 bit) on the card. And I'm sure the CPU overclock helps too.

[shivers9 1,174]

Thanks for the replys. I thought the HD was probably the problem. Guess it is time to pull the trigger on a 460. My hat is off to Carenado for bringing this wonderful aircraft to us. All the pergormance tweeks here have made it truly a thing of beauty for us low and slow guys.pergormance is southern speak for performance...LOL :(

[Simba 34]

"A good test would be to convert a whole set of Caravan textures to 1024 and see if it makes a big difference. I'd be willing to bet it would"Sorry for being so naive, but how do you do that. I would be willing to try.

[Ozark_Dogfighter 0]

While it's true that there is a bit of a difference in FPS for me, too, the RealAir Duke hits my system harder than any Carenado product.Won't give up the Duke though, just sayin' :)Someone needs to paint the RealAir Duke to a western theme, a tribute to John Wayne (THE Duke), with maybe custom saddle leather and denim interior and pic of Wayne on the tail. Anyone?

[Jigsaw 8]

Here are some frame rate tests that I did sitting in the virtual cockpit on runway 7 of Chilliwack (CYCW) in the Pacific Northwest Scenery. The framerate was limited to 30 with the FPS Limiter tool. 1920x1200 in windowed mode, 4x Anti Aliasing, Very Dense autogen, no performance tweaks whatosever:PMDG J-41: 22Captainsim C-130: 24Captainsim 727: 25Real Air Duke: 25A2A B-17: 28Carenado Grand Caravan: 28A2A Cub: 30Lotussim Albatros: 30As you can see it's not that bad and a normal result for the high quality aircraft segment.

[Gabe_62 1]

Those FPS comparisons are all well and good... but the beauty of Carenado has always been its very friendly performance - on a par with default aircraft.Personally, I feel that many people will be disappointed with the FPS performance... and not surprisingly. Yes it's a nice looking aircraft, but to me it looks like Carenado are becoming 'another typical developer'. Looks nice and all that, but runs like scmuck.As for converting to 1024 MB textures: it is very laborious but here goes:1. All textures need converting to normal bitmaps using something like: dxtbmp.exe. Google it.2. Once you have 'standard' bitmaps' that yo can view normally in say Compupic or any photoshop-type app, you can then resize them. Keep the quality and ratio identical.3. Convert back to original format.4. Replace old textures.Backup first of course.I think the bitmaps present are 24bit DXT 5, may be wrong. So, retain this format if you can. You may only be able to convert them to 32 bit initially, depending on the software you use, and may therefore end up with textures that around 1.3 MB. But that's still a huge saving on memory requirement..There may well be a quicker and better way... maybe some kind of batch processing. I don't know of one... but if anyone does, feel free to share !

[Jigsaw 8]

Yes it's a nice looking aircraft, but to me it looks like Carenado are becoming 'another typical developer'. Looks nice and all that, but runs like scmuck.

That's because they progressively increase the graphical fidelity of their aircraft in conjunctiion with the increased hardware that is available now. FSX is four years old, which is an eternity in PC gaming, and you can't expect them to stay with the visual standards from 2006 just because your PC can't handle the increased details. ;)So, if becoming "another typical developer" means that the keep improving on their modelling and texturing, then I'm definitely for it.

[Tierborn 188]

 

"..........Yes it's a nice looking aircraft, but to me it looks like Carenado are becoming 'another typical developer'. Looks nice and all that, but runs like scmuck........"

it runs fine on my system ..

[Gabe_62 1]

That's because they progressively increase the graphical fidelity of their aircraft in conjunctiion with the increased hardware that is available now. FSX is four years old, which is an eternity in PC gaming, and you can't expect them to stay with the visual standards from 2006 just because your PC can't handle the increased details. ;)So, if becoming "another typical developer" means that the keep improving on their modelling and texturing, then I'm definitely for it.

Well witohut getitng into a flame war - and I won't even read any more replies to this thread, I am quite justified in stating that Carenado have not become a "run of the mill" developer.Pushing the limits of FSX, stuff the performance, let's get it looking as good as possible. If you need to upgrade to an i7 920 with 16 GB of RAM and a GTX 480 card... tough !!!Yeah well, Carenado are no more the "FPS-friendly" developer. They now also, need to compete with the big boys, as their performance matches theirs.As such I will buy no more Carenado planes, expecting them to be FPS-friendly. They are now low down in the "performance charts", along with non-optimised PMDG, Level D, Captain Sim (especially), Eaglesoft and the Fligtht1 Mustang. All of these produce around 10-15% the performance of the default G1000 Mooney.Yes, that's "fine"... yes, they look great... but you need to be aware of ithe fact tha you pay for it in framerates !

[Jigsaw 8]

If you need to upgrade to an i7 920 with 16 GB of RAM and a GTX 480 card... tough !!!

My system is an AMD Phenom II 940 @ 3,3GHz, 4GB RAM and an Ati 4870. All these components are far from being the best setup for FSX, but I'm still getting around 28 fps with Very Dense autogen, 1920x1200 resolution, 4x Anti Aliasing and being close to a town in the orbx PNW scenery and without any tweaks whatsoever. I think that's perfectly fine performance for the provided detail.Oh yeah, I forgot that your are in footstomping/pouting mode now and that you won't read this reply, but maybe others are interested in the fact that you are blowing things completely out of proportion. ;)