FSX Laptop Performance Question

[ferrari308guy]

Hi all- So I recently purchased a Dell XPS Studio 17 laptop with the following specs:i7 2820QM A 2.4 Ghz with Turbo Boost to 3.4Ghz16GB DDR3 RAMNvidia 555M 3GB Video CardDual 500GB 7200RPM Hard Drives I didn't buy it for gaming, but I was secretly hoping that it would be able to run FSX pretty decently, as I had read that some laptops are able to run the game ok. After installing the game and the addons (GEX, REX, ASE, PMDG747, Level D 767...etc.) I was pretty disappointed at the performance I was getting. The FPS were in the mid-teens, and the game was completely unplayable, as it stuttered like no other. I have done a few hours worth of tuning (CFG tweaks and defrags mostly), but haven't been able to improve the performance one bit. So...the question is: will this laptop even be able to run FSX decently, or should I just give up now and not even try. By decently, I mean being able to run the Level D 767 or PMDG 747 in the high-teens FPS wise with no stuttering, which I'm not even close to right now. I have all my FSX stuff stored on one hard drive, and everything else stored on the other. I thought that this would help performance-wise, but clearly it hasn't done anything for me in this case. Also,, since Dell ships its laptops with all sorts of un-needed garbage on them, I was considering wiping the OS and starting anew, but I don't want to undergo that if this laptop can't run FSX anyway. Any advice would be appreciated.-Phil

[dazz]

Try to figure out what's holding you back. It's either your CPU or your GPU. Where are you getting 10FPS? What was the weather like? traffic? Scenery sliders? Autogen? What was your AA set to?, and water?- If you completely disable AA, set water to the minimum, clear all weather (clear skies) and you get good performance, then it's your GPU, and you'll need to make some compromises thereIf you still get poor FPS, then your settings are too much for your CPU: scenery complexity, traffic, autogen... That's almost the best possible CPU you can get in a laptop, so I'm more inclined to think it's the GPU that's limiting you

[ferrari308guy]

Thanks Dario, I'll play around with it. I was going most of my testing at KBOS with medium-high settings. (Dense autogen and scenery. Zero AI Traffic, AA is set via Nvidia Inspector)

[TechguyMaxC]

Thanks Dario, I'll play around with it. I was going most of my testing at KBOS with medium-high settings. (Dense autogen and scenery. Zero AI Traffic, AA is set via Nvidia Inspector)

Forcing AA on a mid-range laptop GPU is probably too much to ask of it. Try no AA first for sure.