FS9: overall, a bad experience

[Guest rmce]

I just feel guilty! It all works!I buy Fs9, install it, have to tweak Tri/Bi-Linear filters, and eveything is fine.P4 2.8, 512 Ram, GeForce 420, Flat Screen Monitor.I deleted Fs2, and have the default 737 with Bruce Benaways panel, happily flying the world with full AI, ATC, real weather, etc etc. No problems.I have my windows media player in the backgound doing my inflight music, ATC chattering away, rain pounding onto cockpit, crew talking to passengers, me talking to passengers, engines spooling up, nav bleeps, doors clunking open/shut perfectly placed left/right in sound circle, gear/flaps/airbrakes thundering away, all adding up to a delicious audio chaos!! Being there is what its about!Flight wise I have no problems. Steady 18-25, decending through clouds can drop to 15, so I just take a partial cockpit view at this point and framerate bounces back up.Its how we sim fly that is possibly the difference. I am into the 'flying' aspects and scenery is nice but not top of my list. Having said that, I ocassionally take a floater around Alaska and thrill to aurora borealias and scenery.Some add ons have dropped my rate, so I get rid of them! All I want now is my Dreamfleets 737 back for Fs9, and good wingviews. I am not sure but I may be easily pleased, but pleased I am. RonaldGlasgow

[Guest cwright]

>I guess my point is that while I do have sympathy for the>problems you are having, you have to look a little wider than>just the software. For instance, I have NEVER come across this>so called and much reported autogen "bug" that people keep>referring to and neither have many other people despite>autogen being maxed out for us all. It therefore cannot be a>"bug" because it does not affect all people. It is obviously>system specific and that is where the frustrations start. I looked into this problem in some detail. It's caused by a class of autogen objects with ridiculously large visibility ranges. An important characteristic is that the 'off distance' is much larger than the 'on distance', so you end up with a huge backlog of objects behind you, reaching back as much as 22 miles. This is completely consistent and probably isn't system dependent. However, it completely depends on the way you fly. If you take off and fly directly to another airport, you won't be affected by it. But if you take off, fly a few miles (in an urban area with lots of autogen) and then either look back or turn back to the airport, then you will probably see a big fall in frame rates. I wouldn't class this as a bug, but it is a serious defect that should be fixed in a patch. It can cause frame rates to fall by up to 80% A lot of people have reported this, so clearly it is a general problem. But it does depend on the type of flying you do. Best regards, Chris

[Guest cwright]

Larry, my present assumption is that this problem is not system-dependednt - it is caused by the visibility distances of a class of autogen objects, which I would expect to be the same on all systems. However, it depends on the way you fly. If you take off and simply continue flying to some other destination then you'll never see this problem. Try this little experiment. Take off from LA International and fly inland across the huge urban area. Set autogen to max. After flying for a couple of minutes, turn the aircraft 180 degrees. I'll be surprised if you don't see a significant drop. Now stop the motion (e.g. by hitting slew mode). Note the frame rate after it's settled down. Then reduce the autogen density by one notch. Return to the sim and then return the autogen to the original setting. Note the frame rate. Although you now have precisely the same autogen setting, you should note a marked increase in the frame rate. I'd be most interested - all in the interests of science! Of course, it has to be a standard setup, with the xml file present and vector objects not disabled. Best regards, Chris

[Guest Eurosky]

I still use Fs9 and i love it! :-cool IMO its the best sim, and my fps are even way better than with FS2002 (with a huge increase in quality) :9 I havent got worlds best computer, but I get 20 fps with my AMD1700 (768ram and gf4mx440) There is only one thing i hate, and thats the water, but in FS2002 it wasnt better :D I am still hoping some day there will be water like those new ones of Bill, but than for a videocard like i have :9

[JimmiG 244]

Chris,A test was conduected over at the Scenery Design forum some time ago. Basically, someone built a custom scenery area and tested the various autogen classes and doing some in-depth analysis. They came to the same conclusion - the visbility distance is way off. It's like the distances where decided by the tossing of a coin, as someone put it. I'll see if I can dig up the thread.It very much depends on HOW you fly, if you will experience the slowdowns or not.I didn't notice the problem at all for the first month or so of using FS2004. I was just trying the new planes, and weather, flying from A to B. I sometimes noticed a drop in FPS AFTER landing and driving around at the airport, because this would be the only time I actually turned so the area I had previously been flying over came into view, with all the extra load from the faulty autogen. I didn't bother cheking into it since it tended to only happen on the ground and I thought it was related to the joystick or something.My first real encounter with the bug was when I was taking off from Portland Troutdale, OR and headed south. It was a short flight in a C172 or 182 (don't remember which) but when I reached the destination after a short flught southbound, I was instructed to land on a runway which had me enter downwind southbound and then turn north for final. As I did this, all the left-behind autogen came into view again and I was faced with a challenge far greater than any IMC landing could have presented - I had to land the plane with a framerate of 6-8 FPS with a crosswind.Some time later, I experienced problems again. This time when practicing some helicopter flying over Seattle with the R22. When I started, everything was running great. I had almost max details set, and framerate was probably around 25 FPS, very smooth. However, as I flew back and fourth over the city, practicing helicopter flying, I noticed that the framerate was constantly decreasing. At the first pass over downtown Seattle it was perfectly fluid. The next time, it was very jerky and slow. That was when I realized something wasn't right.

[Noel 4,486]

FS9 is extremely sensitive to absolutely everything being set up *correctly*. I had this rig set up very very well, and all elements of FS9 worked very very well. Then, slowly, things began deteriorating--secondary to some of my very frequent tweaking. Don't know what happened, but it occured over a month or so, and the net result was crappy, though not terrible, performance degradation, in certain situations. This was most related to driver updates, undoing them, reinstalling them, etc ad nauseum. I went back to Cat 3.7s, reran DirectX install, even went to far as to reinstall the Cat 3.7s AFTER disabling Large System Cache in regedit (I read that can dink with your Cat drivers somehow someway), then reenabling after the 3.7 reinstall. All of a sudden, she's running liquid smooth again, taxiing freely in densely populated terminals, etc. There are still some weather conditions that lower frames to the low teens, but they are pretty rare once again, and respond to lowering cloud density to "Medium" from high where I usually leave that setting. I run at 1600 x 1200 x 2x x 8x and this guy really runs great. I do have a real problem with the vis layer amongst mountains at times as it looks unnatural. And the water reflections are not colored correctlyl, so I run the water reflection mod that some kind soul created, and it work good save the odd rotating patches. All and all, I think FS9 is a fantastic product, though not perfect.The moral to the story is: you can be fooled, even if you are a master PC tech, into thinking you've got everything trouble-shot, and tweaked for optimal performance. I am very thankful I restored prior perf with all the screwing around, since I was very unclear what went wrong and degraded performance, insidiously, over the last month or so. What was your machine specs, as in CPU speed, etc? On my machine, 98% of the time I'm fluctuating between 24.2 and 25 fps locked, and all is smooth. At high altitude, I degrease sight visibility (in weather settings) to 80 miles, and this helps make sure textures are detailed out to that point. Which reminds me, I wonder if there is another way to handle that . . .Noel

[Guest cwright]

>Chris,>A test was conduected over at the Scenery Design forum some>time ago. Basically, someone built a custom scenery area and>tested the various autogen classes and doing some in-depth>analysis. They came to the same conclusion - the visbility>distance is way off. It's like the distances where decided by>the tossing of a coin, as someone put it. I'll see if I can>dig up the thread. Jimmi, I think you're referring to my post! What you describe is completely typical of the problem. As I've said before, the significant point is that the 'off distances' are much larger than the 'on distances', so as you fly along far more objects are behind you than in front of you. Once you have flown into visibility distance of a light pole it remains visible up to 22 miles - if you were on the ground it would be far beyond the horizon. The problem can be fixed by removing the offending objects - but we shouldn't have to do that. I hope Microsoft will either fix it in a patch or release the information so we can fix it ourselves.... Best regards, Chris

[Guest thewarder68]

I second Noel's comments....As for the 'rotating' water reflections mod, there's a new version of those textures called 'calm water', available on AVSIM here:http://library.avsim.net/sendfile.php?DLID=38429They make a world of difference!Another thing I noticed that makes a great difference is to set your AA & AF preferences at driver level (not in FS9). This is also mentioned in some of the tweak guides. I have my Pro9800 128MB set at 4xAA and 8XAF.In MSFS I turned off AA, mipmapping at 4 and filtering at tri-linear. Once I did this at driver level I no longer had blurred textures and framerates improved significantly. Also horizon shimmering is much, much better now (still a bit but not disturbing (to me)). I do have the strange 'layering' in mountainous area issue, if anyone knows a solution to this I would welcome it....All in all very satisfied though.Greetings!Johan

[Guest Lurk]

Ok. I'm one step away from ditching the sim, if not flight simulation all together. I can't get stable results, no matter whether I tweak or not. Last night I discovered another graphical glitch: on certain mountain tops, a gap remains in the point where the different planes (surfaces) should meet. Maybe I'll try to post a screenshot. Add this to flickering horizon and "soupy" mountain fog, and believe me, flying becomes a pain. I also discovered that a disturbing flicker happens where clouds meet (or I should rather say "sink into") terrain (mostly hills and mountain ridges). What's the most part of flying IFR, and flying in general, if not looking outside the windshield? In my case, and from my point of view, the sim is failing where it should give the most. Flight dynamics and procedures might be as accurate as ever, but it's what you see when you fly that makes your experience unique. Fs9 is not working for me, and I'll post my system specs for one last time. But one thing I'm telling you for sure; I'm not going out there to give my money to some hardware company, be it AMD, ATI or anyone else, to USELESSLY TRY to improve my simming experience. It's either the sim working on my system or going off my hard drive. And I mean for good, because in a couple of years this crazyness will start all over again, and my video card will be good to play MsHearts.BTW, yesterday I was getting 8FPS flying from Turin, Italy to Bruxelles, at FL20000, over an exageratly flat and poorly textured Europe, with a moderate cloud front coming in from the west. 8FPS! I dont know. I'm kind of fed up.Thanks for your help. This is a wonderful community, regardless.lucaAnd on with the specs:AthlonXP 2600+Epox8KHA+1024Mb PC2100 DDR Ram256Mb Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9800ProCreative Sound Blaster Live!WinXP Home with only the necessary installed and useless services disabled

[dnunes 1]

>However, I finally took the>plunge and installed it onto a XP2100 GFT200 with pleasing>results (all sliders at max and fluid frame rates).>For my reference, will you explain what you consider "fluid frame rates".My system is an AMD XP2600+, GF4 Ti4800SE, 512MB, Windows XP Home. To ensure that I never come below 10-12 fps, I cannot have all sliders to the right: I have some of them to the right, some at 2/3.I have on-board sound (A7V8X-X motherboard). Do you think I could get an improvement with a sound board?Regards,

[mganz121 159]

I would have to say yes to a separate sound board. It cured my intermitent video stuttering.With regards to fluid, I am getting similar frame rates to yourself in heavy cloud and the stutters have disappeared. Frames sit around the 19 to 22 either below or above clouds and 30's at high altitude with little or no cloud. The cheap sound board I installed was a very good investment to improving my original FS2004 problems.Good luckDave B

[3Green 80]

Luca, I'm running a low end system, and have tried getting FS9 running to an acceptable level, but have given up with FS9 for now. That's not to say I don't like FS9 or am bashing Microsoft. I've expressed my frustrations with FS9 and most simmers instead of suggesting ideas, just replay with rude comments.. Not what these forums are for...I guess, everyone enjoys Flight sim for different reasons. FS9 looks fantastic, but I've had many problems with the 2D panel just killing my FPS. But, I would not give up Flight simming because I can't run FS9. Like I said, everyone enjoys Flight sim for different reasons, myself, I love flying IFR in commercial jets. FS2002 still performs this function very nicely for me. So don't stop simming if FS9 is not quite up to snuff, maybe fly FS2002 and enjoy all the great add-ons it has to offer....Here's my most recent flight.... You can't beat flight simming, be it FS98, FS2002 or FS2004http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...id=97379&page=2RJ.

[Guest Jaaky]

pls ignore

[Guest Jaaky]

>pls ignore

[Guest yarvelling]

Luca,Seriously, you must have a problem with your system setup....or your choice of aircraft may have a very resource hungry VC/guages!My system is similar to yours: Athlon 2600XP (333mhz), Gigabyte GA-7VE motherboard (400mhz fsb), 1gig PC333 DDR Ram, Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9700(non pro) video (heatsink/fan replaced and shim removed). I can fly pretty much anywhere IFR, aircraft dependant at a steady 30-35 fps (locked at 35fps). I always use real world weather, have most sliders to high/max, and run 100% AI traffic with Just Flight's FSTraffic 2002, and now with several new AFCAD's. The only faultering places are busy airports.....Heathrow will drop to 10-15. This is using most aircraft; some like the first V2 POSKY A330 with VC was unusable (5-8fps even in 2d cockpit view), but without VC it's up there in the 30's. Using the default aircraft, with 3rd party paint, the fps is up in the 30's. Heavy cloud can bring it down to around 20-25 fps in flight at times. I also forgot to mention, that this is all with 4x AA/ 8xAF set in the ATI drivers panel (currently using CAT 3.4's) and no part of my system is overclocked.You should theoretically get a few more fps than me just because your video card is faster, but I know that this sim is more CPU reliant, so it wouldn't be much more.You may want to go back to basics and ensure that you have sufficient cooling going on in your case (my PC is my own custom made), and if you haven't already done this, then I suggest you do.....remove that heatsink/fan assy from your video card, CAREFULLY prise off the shim that sits between the chip and the heatsink, and then resit the heatsink/fan assy. If you do a search at rage3d.com forums you'll see that there was a lot of talk on this subject....the shim that supposedly braces the heatsink against the chip actually holds it OFF the core, thus the core overheats and you WILL get crashes, and slowdowns. I learnt of this problem back in January when I got my card and since then it's NEVER given me any trouble!!If you already new about that issue, then I'm sorry, just trying to help ;-)