For once I have to agree completely with Jwenting. (never thought I would see myself type that....) :-)Many people complain that this sim can't run good on their system.Well Let's see.This Sim was released in July 2003. I bought a new system 2 weeks after release, so it is safe to say my system is a system that was available at time of release.I also purchased the LEAST expensive system I could find. $498.I also purchased the LEAST expensive current video Card I could find. $80.I also purchased 512MB of memory... Another $80.So it is pretty fair to say, that regardless of what the box says, my system an Athlon 2400XP with 640MB and an Nvidia FX5200 is considered a "BUDGET" machine at time of release.Yet my budget system, can run the system at "default" graphics settings and average above 24FPS. I like to fly with extremely dense AG and Scenery complexity. My clouds are at 100% with 50mile draw distance and Medium Density. I am using Nvidia's QC AA with 8X AF and Trilinear Filtering. I have Ultimate Traffic at 100% and FSGenesis 38m mesh and Landclass installed.Using all this, I still get 10 to 15FPS during Side view climbing out of SEATAC most of the time. Now, I could pull back the horns a bit. But instead, I CHOOSE to use the Cloud Fix and the Replacement Autogen Textures so that I can get 15 to 18 on climbout.What's the point of this?The point is, I am running my system pretty high. I am satisfied with 15 to 24 FPS in most situation as the sim is smooth at this level.I am really sorry you are finding such problems, but to blame Microsoft is pretty ridiculous. I am running the system on what is considered a bargain basement computer with a bargain basement card without Over Clocking. Would I get "better performance" out of FS2002? Probably. But the use of multiple runways, realistic cloud and sky environment and better AI traffic alone, prevents me from goig back.The FACT is judging by MY machine, Microsoft made a simulator that is ENTIRELY appropriate for the machines available today. If your expectations are THAT out of whack, then it is YOU who needs the patch....Not the game.

I do agree with this fact...I own a PC solely for flightsimming. Pentium4 - 2.4 Ghz , 512 MB ram with SCSI hardrives in striped RAID configuration, Radeon 9700 Pro, and Win XP pro. Flown msFS since version 4 but haven't owned FS 2002 because I have been an avid Falcon simmer during the last years, and still am! The graphics code in this sim is quite old so it performs like hell on my current system (framerate around 100). Because of all eyecandy en Lago's Falcon package I decided to give FS2004 a try again... After 4 weeks I give up and go back to Falcon. Mind you, my system has no problem with rendering all the eyecandy... It never drops below 20 frames but it is not smooth... Flying fast yets means flying sharp, high G turns in which the landscape is stuttering by while my framecounter shows 35 fps??? Flightsimming is more than eyecandy. It's about immersion and that's exactly why the stuttering is killing!I also tried every tweak, FS is installed on its own partiton, fresly formatted and defragged. I tried all drivers including Omega drivers. Win XP is completely clean (no extra background services) with swapfile on it's own dedicated drive, but the stuttering remains, even with every thinkable combination of settings, even with most sliders to the left??? I even tried installing FS 9 on a newly bought IDE Seagate Barracuda drive because the last bottleneck I could think of could be the non standard SCSI RAID configuration. Guess what? Stuttering!So I don't know what you guy's think is normal. Maybe my expectations are to high because i,am used to Falcon with it's smoothness while the sim has over a hundred AI planes in the sky, dogfighting each other and communicating all together over the radio, at the same time driving your avionics system including all weapon and radar display's in a highres cockpit. Ah well, it doesn't have 3D clouds, maybe that's why it's so smooth ;-)

> It was either a CPU upgrade; or>>transponder/altitude encoder, prop governor & vacuum pump>>system for the "biggie" airplane. And the airplane won out..>>:)>>So how long before your ready to take the maiden flight?Suppose to be going to the hangar next month. But just figure early "spring" of next year.L.Adamson

Hi all.Simply stated, MS made a sim that will reach it's full capacity in 2005, when we are able to have Radeon 11500Pro's, 5.2ghz CPUs, 2 megs of PC8000 memory, WindowsXYZ....For now, turn off ground and aircraft shadows, turn off "Render to Texture", and turn down the autogen slider to "Normal" ( and perhaps some other sliders ), and try to enjoy the sim.There is no bug. This is how the scenery is designed. We'll have the same problems with FS2006, as it's highest settings will be aimed at an even higher performance computer.I don't blame anyone for sticking to FS2002, and it's better framerates... but those framerates are a result of the sim being targeted to your current hardware ( which in 2001, was state of the art PLUS ).A year from now, and with newer hardware, most of these issues with performance will be resolved.Dick

Dear Jim,Please consider that in order to do beta testing you do not have to have access to the source code. It is nice to be in touch with the developers so that you can, report your findings, let them change the source, then test again to see the difference from the changes, and then report back again. But I don't feel it is a neccesity and I don't think the Beta testers of FS2004 had the source code. I used to work at a company called iBeta doing beta testing, and I paticipated in JimmG's test. And I had noticed the behavior he had been describing all along ever since I installed FS2004, and it was an incorrect behavior new to FS2004. And the cure he came up with seems to work very well, for me and a lot of others that reported back. Personally, I am now using a file made by David Bailey named 'fs9xml.zip' available in the avsim library. Anyone think the Autogen engine isn't broken? How about missing/messy looking bridges, anyone? Let alone the xml autogen. I don't expect FS2004 to be absolutley perfect, but I do think it would be a very nice if MS were to patch this part of FS2004. Just my opinion.Jim

>yea, im not gonna get involved with this thread except to>make this point..we shouldn't have to rename delete whatever>for the autogen problem. this should have worked from the>begining.It does work, and works just fine.You will just have to BUY the fix.P5 4.2 GIGGFX 7200 512mb 16AGPLOLIt works as advertised, we wanted, no we demanded scenery...Microsoft told us it would cause FPS to drop, we demanded scenery Microsoft said FPS would suffer, we DEMANDED SCENERY, microsoft delivered!!!!!!!!!!!FPS have suffered.Endith the lesson!.Dont rename the default.xml file, dont change your config, dont change or upgrade one darn thing, oh and one more thing.DONT COMPLAIN ABOUT POOR FRAME RATES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.Sorry 747drv but i dont think Microsoft is in the business of building games to match YOUR performance expectations.But rather building games that U can MAKE match your expectations.One thing nobody has mentioned, is the ability to tweak just about every single aspect of this sim, whereas before you got what u got!Endith Lesson 2.Cheers747dvr happy stuttering!

Macman, It is very possible that you are experiencing stuttering due to your RAID 0 configuration. RAID 0 will give you increased performance when dealing with extremely large files (such as multi-gig video files), but you will experience a performance DECREASE when dealing with loading files along the lines of what you load in FS.JimP.S. After more carefully reading your post, I see that you already thought of that and still have the problem. :)Was it here that I read somewhere that stuttering can be caused by the AGP aperature size in the BIOS? I can't remember.

I can't say one way or the other because I haven't experienced this problem. However, even when you are beta testing, you don't ever decide whether or not something is a bug. That's left up to the developers. Beta testers enter MANY bugs that are determined to be by-design. The only ones who can conclusively say that something is a bug are the developers of the software. Even things that looks very much like bugs may not be.The reason I bring this up is not just a matter of semantics. It's because if this is NOT a bug in FS, one cannot look for Microsoft for a solution. The flickering issue is a prime example, although not comparing apples to apples. When it first occurred, people complained about it being a bug in FS and demanded that MS fix it. We now know that this is actually a driver issue that the hardware vendors must address.It's worth repeating. Things that look 100% like a bug are very often determined to be caused by something else entirely. I see it every single day. Still, the work of people in this forum who have identifed a workaround of renaming the XML file is a great thing for people experiencing this issue.Jim

double bump.nearing 70hrs without the first problem, glitch, etcperfect performance on a wide range of systems from p4 1.5 to pr 3.06, various video cards, etcsorry for your problem, i know its real or you wouldnt post it but many of us have been getting near perfection from this simdon

"I haven't experienced this problem."If you follow the steps to reproduce the error, you WILL experience this problem. It depends on HOW and WHERE you fly, but it's fairly easy to reproduce if you know what to look for."It's because if this is NOT a bug in FS, one cannot look for Microsoft for a solution. The flickering issue is a prime example, although not comparing apples to apples."I don't know exactly what's causing the flickering but I'm fairly sure it's a bug in ATI's drivers, and that's what people have been saying since FS was released, I believe. I'd like to confirm it first.I have however confirmed that the unreadable text in checklists, learning center etc. are caused by a bug in ATI's driver. It seems to be triggered whenever 2D windows are put on top of a DirectX app running fullscreen. Turning down Hardware Acceleration one notch to disable hardware acceleration of bitmaps will prevent these display errors, but you will get a flickering mouse cursor and a few other issues. You can't blame MS for this one. They simply programmed according to DirectX specifications, but ATI failed to implement some functions and calls correctly in the drivers.I have attached an image of an experiment in a DirectX 2d accelerated title that shows the same thing when moving a standard window on top of a directx screen.http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/36834.jpg"Beta testers enter MANY bugs that are determined to be by-design"This is not the case with the autogen issue, however. There are several reasons for this but I'll mention a few reasons why I don't think it's likely:1. MS has provided sliders to adjust virtually any aspect of the visuals, in order to get more performance at the cost of image quality. If they anticipated that the new autogen defined in the xml fil was to cause such a huge performance hit, they would have provided a slider for "Additional Autogen density" or something.When the autogen bug kicks in, I get the same framerate with EVERYTHING at LOW except autogen, as I get with everything at HIGH (Including autogen), but after deleting the xml file.2. The behaviour is not normal. It's obvious that no-longer visible Autogen objects are taking up resources because they are not being released properly. Old Autogen (the one not defined in the xml or the vector objects defined in the cfg file) does NOT behave this way and FS2002 never did this.3. The autogen slowdown bug has been reported by people running Intel and AMD, Nvidia and ATI, XP/2k and 9x. It's not hardware or software dependant."Still, the work of people in this forum who have identifed a workaround of renaming the XML file is a great thing for people experiencing this issue."Yes, but it's only a workaround. It's not an acceptable long-term solution to this problem. First, you have to remove scenery features. Sure, not a big deal to most, but the rural autogen objects DO add quite a bit to the scenery especially for bush-flyers or those who like to fly low and slow (Low and slow is the whole point of the vintage planes MS prodivded for "A Century of Flight", after all). Also, people who don't frequent the message board (that would be the majority of those who bought FS) will never find out about this workaround, while most of them would find out if MS released a patch.FS2002 didn't absolutely NEED a patch. It was a very polished product that felt "finished". Sure, it had a few issues here and there, but nothing that stopped people from enjoying the sim. FS2004 on the other hand, just like FS2000, feels more like a beta version in retail packaging and it NEEDS a patch.The bottom line is that if MS release a patch for this (and fix some other nagging issues while they're at it), there would be a lot less whining and many more happy simmer on this message board.

I have made several cross country flights in big jets and have yet to see a problem with decreased framerates. There are several things to consider here before you nail down the problem.First, Win98me was well known for "memory leaks" that failed to release unused memory back to the OS for other uses. That may be a problem in and of itself.Second, only 512 megs of system RAM can cause problems if your scenery demands are set too high. When you fly at altitude, there is essentially no autogen scenery visible, just, sometimes, 3D clouds if you have them set on. As you descend, the settings for your distance viewing will determine how much forward terrain the computer must fetch and display in front of you. The lower you descend, the more scenery that must be displayed. When you approach the LOC and GS, the computer is working like crazy trying to maintain framerates and begin to display autogen buildings, etc. Then you flip to a side view, when your RAM is loaded with terrain textures and autogen scenery, and you ask it to display a bunch of wing bitmaps and a whole new direction of scenery that the computer hasn't been working on. With 512 megs of RAM, you run out. So the computer begins cutting fps back trying to display just rudimentary scenery and that big fancy bitmap of the co-pilot that you just asked for.Remember, on take off, your computer has had time during setup and taxi to fill in all that local autogen stuff while your aircraft was moving slowly toward the runway. As you apply power, you don't usually pan around to the sides and load those co-pilot bitmaps, just straight ahead, pull the gear, up with the flaps, only sky in the window and you leave the framerate killers behind, back on the throttles, course adjustment, find and lock on the VOR and settle down. THEN you look around at the airport behind you that's already been loaded and slips away in the distance.I have always seen lower framerates on approach to a large airport than on departure.It is also instructive to note your system's performance. Open the Task Manager window (Ctrl-Alt-Del) and click on the performance tab to get a current reading of your CPU load, RAM usage, etc. The CPU will probably be at 100%, but watch RAM demands. They will be essentially the same at the start of a session as they are at the end. Your trick of shutting autogen off and back on again simply clears the RAM of all autogen objects, gives the CPU time to regain it's framerates and then begin reloading autogen that is needed. If you look at the number and size of objects in the autogen .bgl files, you'll find there aren't that many for a given geographical area. The same bitmaps are reused over and over, not loaded up one on top of another.MDavis

yep, happy stuttering straight to the trash can!!!!!!!!!!!!Poor quality bring products down. I didnt know a coment about a game can illicet personal attacks. listen here in the united states there is something called free speech or did your 6th grade class did not get to that chapter yet.You dont even know what kind of system I have or what kind of experience I have in computers nor flight sim. You are either still in middle school or work for ms to take it so personaly. And no your employer microsoft is not in the business to make anything to MY expectations. But they ARE in the business to make code to THE CUSTOMERS expectations. If people get a shotty product they will stop buying plain and simple. I hope however that doesnt happen I like it. Theres just two problems that need to be fixed TWO not ten twenty or whatever. And all it takes is for you egg heads there at ms to change the release time to a minute or less for autogen and have the program clear old data not compile it more and more.thats all.word of advice -- stop the personal attacks or be talking to the mods in the future.:-outta

ok

I will certainly agree that if you are seeing a problem on all hardware and it's easily reproducable, it's almost certainly a bug. Once I get my new system and install FS2004 on it, I'll get some perfmon logs and see if I can get more info just out of curiosity. I've seen some folks mentioning using task manager to get stats on this issue. Task manager is not a good tool to get granular information on memory usage.Boy, that's the first time I've seen that anolomy with the ATI card in a screenshot. Pretty nasty. Jim

Bottom line here, FS9 was released with such obviously bugs it is embarrassing.All one has to do is click on the ATL menu then pick a different list and see the original list not go away. This is an embarrassing UI bug that should have been fixed in ALPHA testing, forget about making it to release.The aircraft models have obviously been tossed in the trash, as cleary evidenced by completely different handling in FS8 vs FS9 due to a rush job to get it into store for the fall shopping rush.None of these are even talking about user performace problems which rate from poor to criminal in nature. (product failing with 25% of all standard video cards on the market, rush hack job to push to the next directx version, etc).Lets face it, Microsoft was more interested in getting new folks in with the flashy COF then moving the product ahead as the next FS.And as always don't expect a patch, because Microsoft is far too busy fixing critical security holes in their operating systems to bother with this market apart from their biyearly donation.Looking at the tin container:2000/XP - 128 MB ram, 98/ME - 64 MB ram450 MHz processor and a 8 MB/3D video(one might note that anyone with less then 20/20 eyesight probably could not read the font size anyways)Had they simply stated something reasonable, a lot of folks would probably be a lot less ticked off.