FS2004The first 40 minutes of any flight are good. I get 15 to 19 fps with my Pentium 4, 1.5. Not bad and very smooth.Then, the fps drop to 4, 5 or 9 and there is a lot of pauses (stutters?).Something is overheating? Couls it be my GeForce FX 5200?Any solution? Thanks.

I had crashes until I set up a desk fan to blow into my case. I had tried many many different things prior to that. Haven't had a crash or performance decline since. Also, I recommend rebooting your machine before each flight.Good luck, Adam

Hi.There is a bug in FS2004 which affects the rendering of autogen. Autogen "accumulates" over time, as you fly. Once autogen objects are viewed, they get "stuck" in memory and still use CPU resources, even when you're far away from the object. This causes framerate to deteroirate over time. It is not really dependant on the amount of time you fly, but rather, the distance, and if you pan/turn a lot it will be more severe. You can trigger the slowdowns within minutes if you slew or fly a very fast aircraft or if you fly back and fourth over the same area. The problem usually shows up after flying for a while, however. Especially on final approach, because the autogen only accumulates AFTER it has been viewed for the first time. As you make lots of turns and heading changes on final, you will turn so you face the previously accumulated autogen and framerate will take a nose-dive.I was one of the first to see this problem, and after I posted about it here, many far more experienced FS users and developers have also looked into it and came up with more details on the problem.If Microsoft cared about the problem, they would have releasd a patch by now. Since they haven't, there are currenclty three things you can do yourself, to work around the problem. Do one of these to improve performance:1. Disable autogen or set it to a very sparse setting-OR-2. Periodically "refresh" the scenery by changing Autogen density to None, then back to Extremely Dense. This will clear "stuck" autogen but it will continue to build up again right away so you need to do this quite often. You can assign a hotkey to refresh scenery.-OR-3. FS2004 features three types of autogen. The first is the standard, generic autogen buildings, trees etc. that were also present in FS2002.Aditionally, FS2004 adds two new types of autogen:The second type of autogen objects are defined in the FS9Autogendefault.xml file - these objects are "additional" autogen buildings such as fast food houses, gas stations etc. to add more variety to the generic autogen scenery.The third type are "vector objects". These are telephone poles, high voltage towers that line up with roads or follow the high voltage lines (also new for FS2004).The bug only affects the two "new" types of autogen while the generic FS2002-style autogen still works fine.You can disable the new autogen, and use only the very generic and ugly FS2002-style autogen objects.Depending on what you fly, this may or may not be a good solution. Those who fly choppers or small GA aircraft (R22, Cub etc.) will notice the lack of variety of the autogen objects. Thsoe who fly larger GA aircraft, turboprops and jets will probably be fine without the new autogen.You can disable the xml-defined autogen such as fast food houses by deleting or renaming the file FS9Autogendefault.xml. You can also open the xml file in Notepad and disable individual autogen objects if you don't want to delete them all. Note that you will need to remove a lot of objects before you start noticing an improvement in framerate.You can disable vector objects (high voltage towers, phonelines etc.) by editing FS9.cfg:Find the line:TERRAIN_USE_VECTOR_OBJECTS=1To disable, change the 1 to 0, then save the file.Usually, only disabling one type (xml or vector) will be enough to get acceptable framerate on fast systems.One of my first posts about the problem:http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...ing_type=searchAnother thread on the problem:http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...ing_type=searchScenery design forum has a few topics about this:http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...ing_type=searchThere is a remote chance that the FS community will be able to fix this bug once the SDK's are out. The best, of course, would be if MS fixed this with a patch but it looks like we have to wait for the $70 Flight Simulator Patch 2006 for a fix from Microsoft.

I've used the desk fan trick too, after taking off the side cover.It works if your machine is marginal on cooling like mine was.I buy machines now with all the fan upgrades I can get.On external USB 2.0 hard drive enclosures, pay a little more and getone with a good fan in it.... Same reason. Bafo is junk.....I just leave the top off of one (Bafo), and they replaced another one under warranty. And I hear that one starting to go out again.Bye the way.... These USB 2.0 external drive units are great, and fast too (for what they are). And they hot swap without reboot on XP.Bob (Lecanto, Fl)AMD, Athlon XP, 1800+MSI, K7T266 XP ProPC 2100 DDR, 1024 MBXP, Home Edition Elsa GLadiac 920, GF3/64Mb andPNY, Verto nVidia TNT 2-M64/32WD, 100 MB, 7200, Ultra 100Sound Blaster, Audigy MP3+CH Prod, VPP Yoke - Sound CardCH Prod, Pedals - Sound Card

I haven't had any problem with "degenerative" autogen (for lack of something to call it). My autogen is at "very dense" (I think...I'm at work now) and I've finished flights of up to three hours. I know there have been some posts about the same problem. It seems there are more problems with the high end video cards. I'm running a P4 2.0 g processor, 512 ram and a Nvidia 5200. My frame rates are constantly 24-30 (locked at 31)with most sliders 3/4 to max. Flights are very smooth, no stuttering or shimmering. I usually don't use the clouds too much cause that does take the frame rates down. I guess if this is not happening to everyone....how can it be a bug in the program?

Hi Jimmi,Thanks for the very detailed explanation and the solutions to the problem.Gorzi (EDDH)

This autogen problem only occurs, once you turn back into the direction where you just came from, e. g. doing a circle to land procedure, a pattern or similar. If you just fly directly from A to B and do a straight in landing you probably won't realize this bug. Also a turn right after take off won't effect performance. Wolfgang

You say you're doing flights of three hours. This probably means you're flying jetliners? Those are usually flown in a straight line from A to B with not many turns, especially if you fly IFR and do straight-in ILS approaches.Try flying something like the C172, and fly e.g. from Tacoma Narrows to Seatac, fly the pattern a few times, then fly to Everett, then back to Seatac, using the virtual cockpit to look around, and about 0.6x zoom and you will probably notice the problem - Framerate when you fly past Seatac the second time will most likely be signficantly lower than when you passed over it the first time.The problem is very real, and I hope the scenery SDK will allow us to change the release distances for autogen to something more sensible than the current 24-30 miles.