HiDoes everyone here use this tweak in the cfg with a GPU of 1GB or more ? Are there any downsides to using this and does it increase your virtual memory ?Thanks

Mine is a Radeon 6950 with 2GB and I use it. Haven't seen any downsides and I don't think it has something to do with the virtual memory.

It doesn't have anything to do with virtual memory. What it does is tells FSX to bypass the command buffer, and throw every render command directly to the GPU to draw rather than pooling it. The result is often a faster frame rate, because the GPU no longer has to wait until the buffer is full before drawing the frame. However, you can run into problems if your GPU is not fast enough to process all the commands the CPU is throwing at it, and this often manifests itself as visual artefacts and spikes. It's very much a trial and error tweak. It works wonders for some, but not for others.

My videocard hass only 512 meg of DRAM and I've been using usepools=0 for some time. It does really increase performance giving better framerates and a much smoother sim.You really need a card of 1024 meg plus for it to be completely stable though, but so long as I don't use ultra high settings and too high a LOD_radius at detailed addon airports, it's OK.IAN

Wow, I just tried this tweak for the first time, setting bufferpools to 0.It gave me a nice improvement fps wise, especially during takeoff, landing, taxiing.My videocard is a 1gb EVGA GTX 460.I ran GpuZ during the flight, and the max video memory that was used during the flight was 376mb.May be too early to tell for me, but it would appear this is going to be a nice tweak for my system and FSX.

Edited February 12, 201214 yr by dburne

I've started to use this tweak again on a new build: i5 2500K overclocked to 4.4, 8 GB DDR3 RAM, and a 570 GTX. It definately improves smoothness with the only downside being that I occasionally see brief white flashes on the outside terrain when changing views. This happens only on terrain with high autogen and scenery complexity and is presumably due to texture loading delays. The flashes are so brief as to be only a momentary distraction.Might there be a tweak that I've overlooked to address this minor downside? Overall, it's not enought to drive me to stop using UsePools=0

The only other tweak that I know of is the HIGHMEMFIX=1, in the [GRAPHICS] section, Wayne - this gets rid of some of the flashing problems, but there's nothing wrong in doing aUsePools=1PoolSize=8388608RejectThreshold=131072 // 524288 // 262144 //PoolSize=0

UsePools=0 causes a lot of instability on my system. If you find yourself getting increased CTD's, start looking for them here.

UsePools=0 causes a lot of instability on my system. If you find yourself getting increased CTD's, start looking for them here.

Really, really strange how FSX is so very rig dependent. I too have UsePools=0 and it has been, without doubt the best tweak I have ever used! It has increased my framerate by about 20% and also improved smoothness big time :(

Edited February 12, 201214 yr by Rockliffe

Really, really strange how FSX is so very rig dependent. I too have UsePools=0 and it has been, without doubt the best tweak I have ever used! It has increased my framerate by about 20% and also improved smoothness big time :(

Same here, I just ran my second flight with the UsePools=0 tweak, and I am very , very pleased. I run REX2 OD, with the 2048 HD clouds - previously the only major stuttering I would get was when I was in the clouds, especially when viewing externally. I had some fairly dense clouds on this flight, and it was so much smoother. My video memory use got up there though with the clouds, I think my max video memory used was about 780mb on this flight.Not seeing any artifacts or strange anomolies though, looking really good so far...

If you have a powerful GPU, I'd highly reccomend it. It will give you up to 20 extra FPS in some scenarios.

The only other tweak that I know of is the HIGHMEMFIX=1, in the [GRAPHICS] section, Wayne - this gets rid of some of the flashing problems, but there's nothing wrong in doing aUsePools=1PoolSize=8388608RejectThreshold=131072 // 524288 // 262144//PoolSize=0

Thanks, Paul, and I've already got the HIGHMEMFIX=1 tweak in there. I'll try the other approach under bufferpools just for fun. Overall, I'm very pleased with how this rig runs FSX.

BP=O is the best tweak there is for my pc (and my previous ones also). It's also the only real performance tweak I use.

Yeah, she's a strange mistress. I see jumps in performance as well, but just couldn't keep it stable.

Here's a bit of a chart to demo some possible expectations with say, a 4.4-gig proc and a 480 combination:- Proc Speed____470_______480_______560______570______580 4.00_________0________0_________0_______0________0 4.10_________0________0_________0_______0________0 4.20_________0________0_________0_______0________0 4.30_________BP+SRT__0_________0_______0________0 4.40_________BP+SRT__BP+SRT____0_______0_______0 4.50_________BP+MRT__BP+SRT__BP+SRT___0_______0 4.60_________BP+MRT__BP+MRT__BP+SRT___0_______0 4.70_________BP+LRT__BP+LRT__BP+MRT__BP+SRT___0 4.8_________BP+LRT__BP+LRT__BP+LRT__BP+SRT___0 4.90_________BP+VLRT_BP+VLRT_BP+LRT__BP+MRT__BP+SRT 5.00_________BP+VLRT_BP+VLRT_BP+VLRT_BP+LRT__BP+MRT BP_=______0_______=___0______BP=0,_with_no_RejectThreshold SRT_=____131072__=_BP+SRT___BP=1,_with_a_Small_RejectThreshold MRT_=____262144__=_BP+MRT__BP=1,_with_a_Medium_RejectThreshold LRT_=____393216__=_BP+LRT___BP=1,_with_a_Large_RejectThreshold VLRT_=_ 524288__=_BP+VLRT__BP=1,_with_a_V._Lge_RejectThreshold This indicates that a 4.4-gig / 480 combination could use a BP=1, with a reject threshold of 131072: It could be BP=0, but if the graphics were set high, then it might be better to set the RT at 262144.As you can see - the 580 can be overpowered by having a 5-gig proc. It's all a matter of balance.The RT figures are only based on 'round' pc memory sizes i.e. 128k, 256k 348k and 512k, and can be any number you might want to experiment with - sort of 'fine tuning'.Hope this helps.. :(

Edited February 12, 201214 yr by Paul J