FS2004 autogen/framerate problem WORKAROUND!!!!

[JimmiG 244]

"I did not get poor Anisotropic Filtering you are talking, I use 4x or 8x anosotropy with the drivers display with Gforce4 cards 128mb almost same performance, no 3rd party tweaker here running on background.""Ps: Never use the MIP-Map slider to 6, frame rate drop for nothings and building and trees shimmering, by default use 4. "Yes, I discovered that after a few days of trying to figure out why the framerate was so terrible and the trees were shimmering like christmas trees :-lolThe Radeon requires some more tweaking to get the anisotropic to look and perform well, but if you do it right, it looks awesome."never get those terrible frame rate drop you are talking"Are you certain you don't experience the frame rate drop? So far, everything seems to point at this being an issue that affects all systems. It depends on how you fly. The fastest way to induce the stutters is to simply start in a city like Portland Or, San Diego, or another major city with Autogen at Extremely Dense, then Slew back and fourth over the city a few times and panning the view around. Try this and get back to me.Anyone else with Geforce cards who doesn't get the stutters? I've seen mostly reports from users of Radeon cards, maybe because they are more common these days, or maybe because they experience a much greater framee rate drop...."If all user buy it one month later from the initial release, more the tips will be laters and slower, users will not able to find any tweak and tips in this forum. Frustration will appears one month laters"There will always be enough people who are too impatient to wait. I'll just let them go through all the headaches and then install FS when everything is resolved :)

[Guest 747drvr]

Hey, chris, I think my bottleneck may be my video card(I overclocked it a little no stutters). I pulled it out today and said it was a " vision tek" geforce ti 4200 4x agp. I contacted vision tek and they said they don't support nvidia products any more. So I went looking for a new one and found an asylum fx5600 256mb 8x agp for 223.00us is this a good card or deal?

[John_Cillis 2,406]

I believe Chris's card is a 4200 as well. I have a 4200 4x 128 Meg card.Be careful when choosing h/w to get around bottlenecks. Sometimes I've seen people with 3 GHZ system and the finest cards posting with fps in the low teens, and it has more to do with their sim settings than any bottleneck on their systems.I can fly with moderate autogen, moderate weather, and still eke out 20 fps away from the cities. Why? Because I fly at 800x600x32 instead of the higher res's many simmers fly at. If I up my res to 1280x1024x32, fps falls to 15 or lower. On a P3/800. mind you, and a 4200 TI. But if I add AI to the mix, fps tanks. Too many polys to draw given my ancient cpu.IOTW, there's a million and one things you can juggle before having to resort to more Hardware. I'd also argue the 5600 isn't going to increase your performance that much. I should also note I haven't seen any stutters as I rarely fly with Autogen...only over wide open spaces in my Microlight. I call it "situational flying"--I model the flight after my system's limitations. That means no flights into or out of detailed airports for me. -John

[Chris Willis 8]

Hi 747drvr, I have the same card like you except it is an Asus gforce4 Ti 4200 8X 128 MB and I got the ASUS p4p800 8X combo with internal sound card, not frame rate drop when pressing Q or not QI run fs2004 at:1024x768 32 bits 2x antialasing at max or disabled, Windows XP PRO.-Disable all shadows-Clouds; use Ms settting clouds draw to 40 or lower, clouds percentage to 100%-Mesh to 85% MAX-All others fs2k4 slider to right-Never use the Antialasing in fs2004 disable it, only from external-Do not touch the MIP MAP slider,leaved to 4, higher will cause frame drop and autogen shrimmers.-Be sure your AGP FAST WRITE is enabled in the BIOSI use PAI traffic, there is differnece from 100 to 50 FPS on some detailed airports scenery, with default almost non in my case. I leaved to 100% all the time.-Increasing these resolution and antialasing will cause frame lost with a gforce4 Ti 4200 8X 128 MB and not acceptable to me, Until I bought higher video card to handle higher resolution and handle better Antialasing with higher frame rate, which I saw from others user 3d card type and similar then my P4 2.53 GHZ 512 of ram, but have better 3d card.I have seen some user changing their card from Gforce4 Ti 4200 to others 3d card, have reduced their stutters and able to use higher resolution. From what`s I have seen changing the 3d video card, will only let you to use high resolution and handle beter the antialasing. And it will supports directX9 which Gforce4 Ti 4200 do not supports.The resolution and the Antialasing is a factor on FPS performance, Running fs2004 with 4x antialasing you will see noticable frame drop when there is clouds in the sky, with 2x antialasing almost none. Running fs2004 with higher resolution than 1024x768 32bits, your FPS will drop-My Registry is clean, not uselees entry in the registry, there is some free cleaner registy availableBefore you buy anything set like mine;I run fs2004 at:Windows XP PRO-1024x768 32 bits, latest Nvidia Official Driver 45.23-2x antialasing at max or disabled, -Disable all shadows-Clouds; use Ms settting clouds draw to 40 or lower, clouds percentage to 100%-Mesh to 85% MAX-All others fs2k4 slider to right-Do not touch the MIP MAP slider,leaved to 4, higher will cause frame drop and autogen shrimmers.-No background program running, anti virus, firewall etc.More I have seen post one by one More I saw expectation are too much high concercing higher resolution and Antialasing on mid system and some high end want the FULL resolution possible which cause all the frustration here.-On lower than 1.5 ghz, I have noticed some want run these to full which is not possible at all, + higher resolution + Antialasing-Others freez, pause, crash caused by external 3rd party, driver or sound cards or misc issue.-Issue is replicable on all System is the 2xx Antialasing will cause black screen with most of driver-Issue is replicable on some type of card and driver with the black panel-Autogen when they render/appears on some type of area on lower system 1.5 ghz, will be more noticable then higher system, Like the clouds fix I have released, there is some that`s will notice the change and others not, will cause trouble on fps.-2d Panel cause frame rate hit when enabled on some type of system with default aircraft, but less noticable on others.ThanksChris Willis[link:fsw.simflight.com/FSWMenuFsSim.html]Clouds And Addons For MsFs

[Guest freequest]

Well I must say it works for me now i have autogen at max AI at max and i dont drop below 15fps and my vid cards still the old Gf2 mx-400.Also have clouds at 100% great.

[Guest 747drvr]

I'll try it late tom got to fly out tonight.But short hop so hopefully be back tommorow and try it out.

[Guest ScottPilot]

Great find!It is working for me. I don't get a noticable increase in fPS so to speak, but the slight pausing that I was getting is gone.Also, when taking off or landing, the sim is now much smoother.The only negative thing that I did notice is that the textures seem to be a bit more "blury" at times since I disbled the XML file and I get a few more jaggie edges to the mountains.Before disabling this file, I didn't have any problems with the old blurries that were in FS2002.I wonder if there is some texture information in this file that is now omitted.Other than that, this has really helped the sim.Scott :-)

[Chris Willis 8]

Hi Jimmi, I have tested on dense area near detailed airports a low level only and yes this help me, I have set TERRAIN_USE_VECTOR_OBJECTS to 0 and renamed the xml file. I have gain near 5 fps, but those gain do not appears anywhere, I thing only on dense area near detailed airports.If I only put TERRAIN_USE_VECTOR_OBJECTS to 0; I have gain near 2 fps, and renamed the xml file another 2 or 3 fps.But I never got 10 fps drop or 15 fps drop before that`s near detailed airports.I use anasotropy 4x, no fps hit at all.ThanksChris Willis[link:fsw.simflight.com/FSWMenuFsSim.html]Clouds And Addons For MsFs

[rockhopper 0]

Thanks for the tweak! =)

[Guest JonP01]

>IOTW, there's a million and one things you can juggle before>having to resort to more Hardware. I'd also argue the 5600>isn't going to increase your performance that much. I should>also note I haven't seen any stutters as I rarely fly with>Autogen...only over wide open spaces in my Microlight.I prefer to fly without autogen as well, as the performance hit isn't worth the visuals. The problem is, I've discovered a scenery rendering bug in FS2004. If you use third party sceneries with more than a handful of objects within a small area of where you start the flight, FS9 will simply cull a certain number of those objects and never display them - ever - unless you continually keep hitting a key allocated to "Refresh Scenery". I'm no more inclined to keep hand-cranking the sim like this than I am driving a car that needs to re-started every 30 seconds. The only other way around the problem is to turn autogen on, whether you like it or not. And even if you do turn the autogen on, the 3rd party scenery visual ranges don't work properly. When you approach an object, it will become visible at the correct distance, but then it won't disappear from the scene when you are way past it. It just seems to stick in memory forever, just like what people are theorising about with the autogen itself. The thing is, autogen is autogen and normal 3rd party bgl scenery is normal 3rd party bgl scenery. They are different things and this should be fixed by MS. Still, it wouldn't surprise me if the scenery problem I have reported to MS and this autogen "hogging" business are somehow related, even though they shouldn't be.

[Guest Fishu]

I didn't see big of a difference, but then again I only tried it with FPS eating PMDG 737, since thats the only plane where I would have the need for the extra juice.With the default planes, the FPS is good as it is, but with this FPS hogger I didn't see more than a minor improvement.Perhaps I've already tweaked too much of the juice out of FS :>

[Guest JeanLuc_]

Hi,thank you for the tip! works like a charm on my lower end test systems (P4 1.3) and less noticeable but still an improvement on higher end CPUs. Consistent with the Reality XP tweak guide here at the avsim library and the point that autogen takes CPU ressources too, more than video card / GPU ressources!The best and simplest tweak for lower end systems and more than acceptable in my opinion to loose a couple variety in the autogen, to gain in "more stabilized" FPS over the duration of a flight, and little if none FPS drop when approaching complex airports / cities.Great!Also, some report the point about the performances and AA or AF (Full scene Anti Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering): NVIDIA cards can't sustain the same speed with these enabled as the RADEON do. With AA 4x, and AF 8x, there is little difference on the Radeon 9600 PRO for example as compared to without AA & AF (in 1024x768 only. Above, it starts to decrease but not as much as with a NVIDIA). And in 1024x768, AA 4x makes a real difference, especially the thing I like the most is the "smooth" blending and display of the runway edges to the scenery texture it is drawn upon (no jaggies here means a better visual reference of the centerline displacement and relative position of the aircraft to the runway).

[Geofa 108]

That makes sense as I didn't see much of a difference on my machine at all-athlon 2.1.I have also found autogen takes the biggest hit on performance-so it only makes sense limiting the amount drawn would help. However, looking at the list of objects in the.cfg file-I can live without fast food restaurants but a lot of the others are pretty important for where I live. I guess, luckily or perhaps unluckily, since I didn't see much of a change I'll stay with the default.http://mywebpages.comcast.net/geofa/pages/Geofdog2.jpg

[JimmiG 244]

JonP01 - so there's a problem with normal objects too, like I feared? Looks like it's back to the drawing board for the programmers at MS :-lol

[JSACKS 0]

I don't get this whacking great fps drop either. I've done a lot of practice flying around KLAX and LA basin in the default Cessna and found no accumulated loss of fps or whatever. I have not tried the fix yet although it sounds remarkable.I use a DELL P4, 2.53Ghz, 1024 RDRAM, Ti-4600 with nVidia 45.23 drivers. DISPLAY settings set on average to 2/3 or 3/4 right, nothing at max, no FSAA, 1600x1200x32, windows mode. I don't get stutters in generla although frames fall noticeably lower in dense areas/airports with heavy cumulus on approach, but still fairly fluid and smooth.I think the biggest hit to frames over cities and around dense airports is the AI slider. Mine is at 50% and fps are kept at a decent level (range is 14 to 21 at KLAX and KSEA for e.g.), but if I move it to 80% or 100%, fps fall by around 35-40%. JS