Hello everyone,

 

I really missed playing MS FS after abandoning PCs many years ago so I thought I'd try to get it up on my Mac and had limited success that I thought I'd shared.

 

I first brought it up on my iMac (5 year old machine; 1 3.3 Ghz Dual Core; Bootcamp with Win 7, did the tweaks mentioned in several places to the OS) and installed FSX with RC and UT2. I got decent graphics performance, with 20FPS until I loaded UT2 and then the AI traffic seemed to really kill things.

 

So I thought (from what I'd read everywhere) that AI cost lots of CPU so I'll install it on my Mac Pro (3 Year old machine; 2 2.66Ghz Quad Core with 16GB of RAM). Turns out, with AI traffic on, I only get about a 10% increase in performance. Again, without AI, I do quite well on FPS with very nice, high settings.

 

So, my next attempt will be to move off of UT2 and try WOAI traffic and see if that improves things.

 

Anyone else have suggestions or stories/experience to share?

 

-- DK

I'd like to try compressing the textures down. Is there an automated way to do that or do I have to do each one by hand?

Just an update for anyone using Mac hardware:

 

I get beautiful frame rates (20-15, which I find acceptable) with graphics set to Ultra High, and Traffic set to 100%. I did this with two major changes: 1) I got rid of Ultimate Traffic 2, which was just killing my frame rates. It sucks. Don't use it. (2) I configed my FSX.cfg using http://www.venetubo.com/fsx.html -- did some cool magic. Now things are fantastic!

I believe it is not necessary or recommended to run 100% traffic w/UT2, as the level of traffic loaded surpasses all other traffic programs by a wide margin and is therefore not an equal comparison.

I believe it is not necessary or recommended to run 100% traffic w/UT2, as the level of traffic loaded surpasses all other traffic programs by a wide margin and is therefore not an equal comparison.

 

Yes, that's definitely true. I had UT2 at 50% traffic. Even so, with about 6 airplanes at SFO, I have frame rates of 10FPS with graphics turned down to low-medium. With WOIA, I have about 12 planes at SFO with graphics turned up to Ultra High and have frame rates of 15-20FPS.

Interesting. I can't recall if there's a large difference in AI workload or if it's just the quality of the plane visual model that accounts for the difference between UT2 and WOAI. What graphics card do you have?

Interesting. I can't recall if there's a large difference in AI workload or if it's just the quality of the plane visual model that accounts for the difference between UT2 and WOAI. What graphics card do you have?

 

The Mac tower is loaded with the ATI Radeon HD 4870.

 

I have to imagine it has to be more than just the models. After all, WOAI just adds files to the existing configs and UT2 actively monitors so you can reset traffic, start/stop, increase and decrease. And considering that if you go into the menus, UT2 loses all the traffic and respawns it, but WOAI doesn't, it must be using different mechanisms.

The Mac tower is loaded with the ATI Radeon HD 4870.

 

I have to imagine it has to be more than just the models. After all, WOAI just adds files to the existing configs and UT2 actively monitors so you can reset traffic, start/stop, increase and decrease. And considering that if you go into the menus, UT2 loses all the traffic and respawns it, but WOAI doesn't, it must be using different mechanisms.

 

Hi Digant,

 

I became a MacBook Pro user this past Christmas and enjoy it a lot. Office 2011 for Mac is quite good. The MBP is quick, intuitive, long battery life, 22sec boot up time, instant shut down, so it's hard to beat for general computing. But I will keep a PC for gaming, which at this point is FSX mostly. Hard to really address FSX w/ Mac options as it were. I miss a few Windows features (home/end/print keys), but overall, I'm very happy w/ this laptop.

Hi Digant,

 

I became a MacBook Pro user this past Christmas and enjoy it a lot. Office 2011 for Mac is quite good. The MBP is quick, intuitive, long battery life, 22sec boot up time, instant shut down, so it's hard to beat for general computing. But I will keep a PC for gaming, which at this point is FSX mostly. Hard to really address FSX w/ Mac options as it were. I miss a few Windows features (home/end/print keys), but overall, I'm very happy w/ this laptop.

 

You should try FSX with dual boot on Mac Pro. I've seen some videos on line and it can work.