FS9 has got me a little confused, performance-wise

[barneycanoe 0]

I've got a two-year old laptop with a T6500 processor and 1GB of ATI video ram.I am running FS9 and FSX. FS9 is about 40GB in size with all my addons (GE PRO, FE, UT Canada, AS6)and FSX is about 30 GB (UTX). Lots of payware, Carenado, Dreamfleet and Flight 1)Trying to decide which I should really concentrate on, I recently applied all of Nick's tweaks and tips which gave me a considerable boost in FSX, to where I can hand-fly the Super MD- comfortably out of Seattle (KSEA), around the circuit and back to a landing with smoothness throughout.Yesterday I fired up FS9 and put some nasty weather in it, flew from Banff, Alberta in the Carenado 182 and was getting 50 fps with it locked at 50, but only about 23-27 in the VC. If I put the limiter at 60 I can get get 60 outside, but if at unlimited it still stays around 60. THese higher frame rates often fluctuate momentarily between 30-40, 30-50, 30-60etc.What really puzzles me it that when I duplicated the flight in FSX, I was getting about 30fps with the limiter set at unlimited, inside, outside, VC, etc. Nice and smooth, with about the same set of clouds.I am running 1920x1080 on an external monitor and in-game AA with fs9, and NO AA with FSX. Turning off AA in FS9 does not make a difference.I would have assumed that tweaking everything for FSX would also help FS9. I can't figure out why FS9 is not showing more improvement.One thought I have had is to re-install FS9 from scratch as maybe over the years it has become too bloated.Any thoughts would be appreciated as my time investment in running both is starting to wear and I'd like to settle on one if I can.Anyone with similar experiences with the two sims?RegardsDaveOntario, Canada

[ronzie 21]

Are you running AS65 with both FSX and FS9? Any other add-on differences? (I think AS65 can run with both FS9 and FSX, don't recall. I have it for FS9 and don't use FSX.)Have you bypassed FS9 and FSX in all of your security add-ons? Same types of AI applied for traffic density?In AS6 are you using high performance clouds?Do you also have the FS9.1 patch applied?Be sure your FSUIPC 3 is up to date from:http://forum.simflight.com/topic/66139-updated-modules/

[barneycanoe 0]

AS6 for fs9 onlyClouds are fs9 default sizefsuipc updated to latest, 9.1 patch applied.Just wonder if through adding on so much scenery I have somehow got something that is degrading performance.I just can't get over how much better FSX is after NIck's tweaks.

[ronzie 21]

Is that a separate video card? What operating system are you running. How much RAM in your laptop.Here's a free utility you can use to show processes, physical ram in use, etc. One thing you want to be sure is that you are not using so much memory that paging to disk is occuring (page faults) due to not enough physical ram being available dedicated to FS.http://technet.micro...ernals/bb545027and get this;Process Explorerv15.12 (January 12, 2012)It will run in a separate window that if you do not have two monitors you can just alt-tab to. Be sure in FS you have it set not to pause on task switch if you need to alt-tab to see this. Right click on the column headers and add a page fault column. I'd also add a virtual size column.I see now that getting here may require a Windows Live log-in. Let me know if you have difficulty getting this.See how much ram is available before starting FS9. FS9 will use all it can get. FS9 and FSX does most of its rendering in the main CPU so the more objects within rendering area of your aircraft the more processor load and ram it takes. Win 7 may alleviate this to some degree depending on your laptop architecture.http://ark.intel.com...-800-MHz-FSB%29states a clock rate of 2.1 GHz. Since FS9 can not use both cores that is a fairly slow clock rate for high fps. The active apps during running FS appears to be FS itself plus AS6. If you do not need Internet access while running FS try downloading weather in AS as an archive, not real time. (I do this anyway to get the weather for the time of the flight in that location. I use the flight time, not sys time in FS so weather matches the time of day.) You then can shut off your Ethernet access port (since you are running all on the one PC) by right clicking on the Ethernet local port icon in your sys tray and clicking disable and then it is safe to stop other processes regarding security to reduce the load on your CPU and ram.You might get better suggestions in the hardware support forum here.In FS turn off reflections and aircraft generating shadows to reduce graphics load. Adjust visibility to something you really need as well as cloud and scenery detail distance.Search in this forum for terrain.cfg settings for best performance.

Edited January 18, 2012 by ronzie

[barneycanoe 0]

Some great suggestions there, thank you!Dave