Totally compressing FS2004 works wonders and much smoother.

[Guest danowat]

The article is question states that todays modern CPU's have more power therefore more spare cycles in which to compress/decompress data on the fly, OK, run FS2004 whats your CPU utilizetion?, 100% I bet, so where are the extra cycles gonna come from?.LOLDan.

[Guest akirabbq]

hyper threading

[Guest danowat]

Ahhhh, yes they could, but did they state that you need hyper threading in this "article" to use this "tweak", err...no.Dan.

[Guest Ken_Salter]

Nope.http://saltydogfly2.avsim.net/images/avsim_sig.jpg"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams."

[Cruachan 705]

"Yet we are the movers and shakers of the world for ever, it seems"Mike

[Guest Enzoblue]

Found out why this works. It's actually only good for the image files, it's like turning a bitmap into a jpeg, makes them load faster because they're smaller.

[Guest]

Yours is going to be jerky until you get rid of the geforce2. You could have a 10ghz cpu and it would still be jerky. Tim

[Bray 1]

yeh I think you are right. I am looking into a 4600ti or something like that. Not sure what brand to get yet.Also considering an ATI but again still waiting for all the driver issues to get resolved plus I hear the cards are quite large, so I have to check on space.Bill

[Guest]

If it runs smoother and I get no chugging along at 8-9 fps in thick clouds and now get 17-18 in same situation, do you really think I CARE why it works. It just does and that's good enough for me. I mean, what's it hurting?Tim

[Guest]

What I have found is that after compressing the whole FS9 folder, any file or folder you now put in the main fs9 folder is automatically compressed by windows, cool. Remember you can always uncompress the FS9 folder if you want or any file in the fs9 folder by removing it from the folder and placing it somewhere else and then uncompress.Tim

[Erv Moore 21]

Thank you very much for this tip. Seems to work as you said on my system, P4 3.0. Thanks again, love the smooth action and seems the color and clarity has improved.Erv KSDF

[JimmiG 244]

Whenever the speed of the harddrive is the bottleneck, this tweak will help. When the bottleneck is other components (CPU usually), this tweak will only slow things down.It doesn't quite make sense that this would help in FS2004, though. I have found that disk reading is not the biggest problem to FS2004 loading times. The computer usually spends most of the time at 100% CPU utilization with no reading from the disk. I guess it decodes the landclass data, aligns autogen objects etc.But, if it works, then it works. When loading sceneries with many .bmp files which typically have a very good compression ratio, you might still notice an improvement. Reading 100 .bmp file at 1 MB each will be slower than reading them compressed at 300KB each even if the CPU usage is higher.On my system, I noticed no increase in performance and the loading time was about the same. On the other hand, I did gain over 1 GB of disk space so I'll leave it compressed for that reason.

[Guest JeanLuc_]

Hi Dan,in fact you are not totaly right in my opinion. Why is FS running better with compressed files is because while it loads a file, the hard drive / ATA / PCI / DMA (whatever is used to transfer the bits from the disk to ram) is "blocking" FS to run less longer (since there are less bits to read). You can easily spot this on lower end systems, even with ATA133 drives: anytime there is a huge load of files from the hard drive by FS, the FPS drops. As soon as the disk activity settles back to nothing, FPS raises again. I suspect that any file access either stall the CPU (requires the CPU) or maybe "locks" the PCI/AGP bus to some extent.I've discovered that any file intensive gauge (a gauge which reads and writes to the hard drive files, like a database), has an impact on performances as soon as it access files. The only way to reduce this was to put the disk access code in a thread, and lower the thread priority 1 notch (in the code).In that, decompressing a file in memory takes really little CPU useage, and if the FPS hit is due to a locked bus (PCI/AGP) during disk access, it would then mean that while the CPU is decompressing, the video card can still render / fetch textures on the AGP bus, etc...Just my opinion.

[JimmiG 244]

While we're on this topic: Make sure DMA transfers are enabled for your harddrive. Some CD-Writers can not be used with DMA mode, check the documentation. You should still however enable DMA mode on the harddrive.In XP/2k: Right-click My Computer, choose Properties, Hardware, Device Manager. Expand IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, double-click both the primary and secondary channels, and check that DMA is enabled for all channels that you have something connected to.In 9x: Right-click my computer, Properties, Device manager, Harddrive (or something similar), and check for all devices that the DMA Checkbox is checked.

[Guest ScottPilot]

OK, thanks for the tip!I compressed the FS9 folder and my scenery mesh folders (Realscene, Alaska Scenery, ect...) and the sim is running even smoother!I didn't get a big boost in FPS (+2 to 3) or anything, but the sim is definately smoother than before.I have to say that I am starting to LOVE FS2004!It is running as well as FS2002 ever did and even though I still have FS2002 installed on my system, I havn't flown FS2002 for almost 3 weeks now.FS2004 is now my full-time sim of choice!Happy Simmming!Scott :-)ATP/CFII - KCOS, in the real aviation world.PIII 1Ghz with 512MBSDRAM and the Geforce 4 MX440 card running dual 17" Monitors on Windows XP Pro