FS9 test flight to investigate performance problems

[JimmiG 244]

"Yeah, slewing around back and forth is the same as simply flying"Yes, it's the same. I've experienced it while flying. Several times. It's very annoying when you're on base getting 30 FPS and as you turn final it drops to 10 because all those invisible autogen objects have to be calculated."That aside, you say you have everything maxed but among your exceptions to that you dont mention weather unless I may have missed something, I hope you are testing with perfectly clear skies."Weather doesn't have a very big performance hit on my system. I have tested with thunderstorms and with clear skies."If you can find any program anywhere that does as much rendering of so many objects, terrain, weather, other aircraft and all the while calculating flight parameters all on our puny little desktops...:-roll"It does render many objects, but the polycount is hardly higher than in a modern 3D shooter. The buildings are simple boxes and the trees are just ahlpa-textures. The polycount of games like Unreal2 or Morrowind are at least as high as FS2004, plus they do a lot of shader-based effects. The rendering is pretty simplistic overall with no real high-end 3D features being used. Apart from the refletive water, the sim mostly uses the DX7 feature set. No dynamic shadows, per-pixel reflection effects or similar.As for the flight parameters, the look-up table based flight models don't require that much CPU power compared to the AI in action games. The slowdowns have nothing to do with AI, weather or flight dynamics. FS2002 worked fine, but there's something fundamentally wrong with regards to how FS2004 handles autogen data. I think we can all agree on that. That's all. The Autogen is the ONLY problem here. If it weren't for the extreme slowdowns from using Autogen, I would not complain about performance.The truth is that sloppy coding of a sim like FS2004 would not be tolerated outside of the Flightsim community. Imagine if Unreal2 slowed down to a crawl after killing 10 enemies because the data was not being released properly. The gamers would just buy another action game instead, because there are so many to choose from. Because of the limited choice of civilian flightsim we just have to use whatever is available.See CFS3 for a perfect example of what happens when the same 3d engine used in FS is used for a game that people outside of this community would buy.

[Guest PaulL01]

>"Yeah, slewing around back and forth is the same as simply>flying">>Yes, it's the same. I've experienced it while flying. Several>times. OK, I don

[JimmiG 244]

"OK, I don

[JimmiG 244]

I will reinstall FS2004 and try this tomorrow :)

[ulisses 1]

great Kurt,I didn't know about these settings.Ulisses

[Guest OneTinSoldier]

PaulL01,"When you take all that FS2004 does into account, the sim DOES run at a decent framerate. The problems appear only when the FPS tanks with no explanation, and this problem is entirely new to FS2004. This is what I mean with sloppy coding. If it were not for this problem, I would have been happy with the performance of FS2004."I don't think I could agree more. Actually, I love this new version of the sim over FS2002. But, the issue of the the FPS going in the tank for no apparent good reason, which is indeed entirely new to FS2004, is a pretty dismaying. I have seen numerous posts about people having the FPS crap out on approach and final. Which is just when you don't need it happening. I was just reading in another thread today where some guy expplains about how he has darn good FPS, but it sometimes goes down to 10 on approach and final. This problem and the missing bridge debacle, in my mind, points to a bug in the Autogen code beyond the shadow of a doubt. Now, if they would just patch it to gives us Autogen the way it was envisioned to work(!), this would be the greatest release of MSFS ever. Otherwise, to me, that crown sticks with FS2002. I'm not trying to say I'm gonna drop FS2004 and go back to FS2002(just speaking my mind is all), but I can see why JimmiG and some others on here have wanted to stick with FS2002.Regards,Jim

[Guest Roderick]

I ran into some problems trying to duplicate your test. Under settings: FSAA/AF: off I assume AA is anti aliasing and should be unchecked but what is AF? Under hardware tab I have Target framerate: Unlimited, Render to texture: Checked, Transform and lighting: Checked, Anti aliasing Not checked, Filtering: bilinear, Mipmap quality:6, Hardware rendered lights * Global max texture size: massiveWhat about the scenery tab? I maxed all sliders and checked all boxes. Where do I disable AI traffic?You say "from the welcome screen". What welcome screen? If I check "Select a Flight, my first option is "Along the Rockies in the Caravan. Manually I selected "Other" and my default flight which is KSAN in the 172 at RWY 34 ready for TO. Took off, turned heading 360, AP on and Ctrl S to slew Keypad has no effect with NUM lock on or off. FPS 46-47 over city. Would to duplicate your test EXACTLY if you'll walk me thru it. Graphics :Radeon 9800 Pro Windows HP Home SP2, P4 3.0gig, 1.024 gig DDR SDRAM.Pleaase note I have SoCal Mega Scenery loaded which may give different results. I could use SeaTac if you think it would be better.

[JimmiG 244]

You need to install the attached flight to the proper folder to be able to select it.AF, or Anisotropic Filtering, is toggled through the display settings in Windows, NOT inside FS2004.To get to the display settings dialog, right click the desktop, choose properties, click the settings tab, then the Advanced button, select the Direct3D tab and you can choose AF settings. For normal use, with a Radeon 9800, I recommend you select AF to 16X Performance or 8X Quality, but for the sake of comparing results, turn it off (Application) for now. AF makes textures sharper at the cost of some performance.If there is no Direct3D tab, you may need to download the ATI Control Panel from www.ati.com.

[Guest Roderick]

Where is the attachment?I found the Direct 3D panel. Do I just uncheck AA and AF boxes? Thanks for all the help. I presume the flight attachment that I haven't found has its own scenery and my MegaScenery is not a factor?