Hi, after a few years flying FSX and much of the last year using tileproxy and photoscenery, I thought I had a pretty good basic understanding of the various factors that affect performance and what yiou see in the sim. I have not had Tileproxy installed for about 4 months now and after a recent pc upgrade, ( see sig for specs) decided to re install. This went very smoothly and I was pretty soon enjoying the delights of tileproxy again. I should add that using my normal photoscenery, I had FSX running very well, I had tried using bojote's .cfg file utility and was using the .cfg file it generated with good results for my photoscenery. However, I noticed that in tileproxy, I was not getting the performance I had experienced previously. By way of a brief intro for anyoner unfamilar with how it works, it has a little DOS window that shows 10 scenery rings, depending on which settings you choose , ranging from LOD 8 upwards. The rate at which these rings fill and or remain filled, theoretically depicts wether you have all the tiles of each resolution loaded around you. There is also a little counter at the top that shows tile accesses per second, and this is usually indicative of the power of your machine - the higher the number you can achieve, the better. My old machine, used to manage up about 3500 - 4000 under max load, the new machine up to 5000. In tile proxy, if you are flying along and all the ovals are filled then you theoretically be seeing perfect scenery all around you. My problem is, that I am not. Even though all my ovals are filled and the max access I am showing are approx 250 per second, indicating not much load. So , I wiped my .cfg file ( after backing it up of course), in case any of the entries that bojotes tool had added were screwing things up. I started again with a fresh .cfg file. Exactly the same result, which got me thinking, what do these values do? There are various values I know that will control texture and scenery tile loading efficiency: TBM_Multiplier, texture max load, LOD radius, Fibre frame time fraction being the main ones. As the .cfg file was a fresh one, the only one of these present was TBM_Multiplier, which was set at its standard number of 40. I changed it to 400, the value that tileproxy changes it to when you install it. This made no difference at all. Which was strange, as before, I have had excellent results in ensuring quick, blur free tile loading, by changing this value from 40 to 300 or 400, when using photoscenery ( which is all I use I add) So, something is throttling back the performance of FSX, but I cant think what or why. Why is my new uber computer not being able to perform as well as my old one, despite being 25% faster and me using all the same values in my tileproxy .ini file and in my FSX config file as before? And why are changes that used to have big effects having no effect now? The other wierd thing is that I can pause the sim and wait and wait for the scenery to catch up and snap into focus, and sometimes, it never does, yet if I press the "reload scenery" button, it will reload very quickly and everything will be crisp and clear and in focus. Something is stopping FSX loading the tiles, but I cant think what setting or lack of it it may be.... Any input to help my musings would be appreciated. Cheers, Mark

I have had excellent results in ensuring quick, blur free tile loading, by changing this value from 40 to 300 or 400, when using photoscenery ( which is all I use I add) So, something is throttling back the performance of FSX, but I cant think what or why. Why is my new uber computer not being able to perform as well as my old one, despite being 25% faster

Hi Mark,am I right in assuming that in the past you used to fly with your frames 'locked' and now you fly with your frames set to UNLIMITED? Every single point you describe seems to indicate you ARE flying with frames set to UNLIMITED, which among other things ignore TBM and FFTF.Can you do a simple test? can you LOCK your frames internally and set FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION to 0.75? do you notice any diff?

Hi *******, thanks for taking an interest. figuring these things out is another of my pleasures in flying FSX! I am using the new frame rate limiter you linked to recently, with frames set at 0 within FSX and 30 in the limiter. Does this still mean that the two values you described will not be effective? I do not have the FFTF variable in my cfg file, just TBM Multiplier, as the file I am using is a virgin one generated fresh, as a test, to see what difference in performance I got from using the heavily modified one generated by your tool and the basic one as generated by FSX if you delete your config file. ( My reasoning there was that if the entries in my tile proxy .ini file were the same then the only other thing to have changed and therefore be affecting performance would be the modified .cfg file, so which variable? Too many , I know, I will wipe them all and see what happens..) On my machine, right now, the difference is negligible, which really puzzles me, as previously changing those values had very noticeable effects.For your test, shall i remove the external limiter?cheers, Mark

For your test, shall i remove the external limiter?cheers, Mark

Yes, remove the 'external' limiter, so that you limit your frames internally in FSX to 30. Under this scenario you'll see how TBM and FFTF have a dramatic impact in texture loading, particularly, the FFTF value. They 'key' thing here to remember is how FSX behaves under those two scenarios (LIMITED vs UNLIMITED) then you'll have to make a choice on which way you want to go. (each has its pro and cons)

Mark"I am using the new frame rate limiter you linked to recently, with frames set at 0 within FSX and 30 in the limiter"One small point shouldn't the frames in FSX set to UNLIMITED? The frame limiter only attempts to control the wide range of frames per second as we fly in more complex and less complex scenarios, it can't really do that if you have set a limit of 0fps in FSX :( .That may have been part of your problem? :( RegardsPeterH

Mark"I am using the new frame rate limiter you linked to recently, with frames set at 0 within FSX and 30 in the limiter"One small point shouldn't the frames in FSX set to UNLIMITED? The frame limiter only attempts to control the wide range of frames per second as we fly in more complex and less complex scenarios, it can't really do that if you have set a limit of 0fps in FSX :( .That may have been part of your problem? :( RegardsPeterH

The setting UPPER_FRAMERATE_LIMIT=0 is the same as the use of UNLIMITED in the FSX GUI

Wooooahh !!! That did it *******!!! I removed the limiter tool .dll, and set as you said and now my tile proxy is awesomely fast, tile accesses at 4000 max and no blurries, with full ovals. Thanks my friend!! I never realised that the frame rate setting affected those variables, thats a really important point. That learned, do you recommend re using your .cfg tool ? what setting of FFTF do you think I can run to to really max out performance? i have a i7 [email protected] and a gtx 580 now ( Could not alter my sig to show new machine for some reason...) Cheers, Mark

That learned, do you recommend re using your .cfg tool ? what setting of FFTF do you think I can run to to really max out performance?

Try playing with the FFTF value, try someting between 0.33 and 0.75 and see 'where' terrain loading speed starts to degrade.Running UNLIMITED in FSX offloads terrain loading from the main thread and moves it to the texture managers, thats why you do get better performance when running unlimited, unfortunatately the side effect is the dreaded blurries. Thats why TextureMaxLoad is the only thing that can help you when running UNLIMITED, TBM is useless in that situation (is not even used by the FSX code when running unlimited)I would recommended the tool, yes.. but in your case I would simply ignore the UNLIMITED FPS warning.Also, make sure to run the MINIMUM FFTF value you can without degrading texture loading.. you have to find your sweet spot.

Does anyone run with ground scenery casts shadows... and dense or higher scenery and autogen sliders? Just wondering if I will be able to max out the sliders with a 4ghz processor and nvidia 580

Try playing with the FFTF value, try someting between 0.33 and 0.75 and see 'where' terrain loading speed starts to degrade.Running UNLIMITED in FSX offloads terrain loading from the main thread and moves it to the texture managers, thats why you do get better performance when running unlimited, unfortunatately the side effect is the dreaded blurries. Thats why TextureMaxLoad is the only thing that can help you when running UNLIMITED, TBM is useless in that situation (is not even used by the FSX code when running unlimited)I would recommended the tool, yes.. but in your case I would simply ignore the UNLIMITED FPS warning.Also, make sure to run the MINIMUM FFTF value you can without degrading texture loading.. you have to find your sweet spot.

Excellent. So how high can we go with TML? I'm using 60 with good results. Can I go even higher?

Does anyone run with ground scenery casts shadows... and dense or higher scenery and autogen sliders? Just wondering if I will be able to max out the sliders with a 4ghz processor and nvidia 580

Yes