Unhappy with framerates - please help

[HighFlyerPL185 0]

Hello there,

 

I am not sure whether I am posting this in the right place, but I hope someone can help me to increase framerates.

 

I have recently bought a new rig to replace my outdated dual-core computer, and I have built it with mind for FSX. Yet, I'm not exactly satisfied with my framerates, and seeing videos of other people achieving better results on similar rigs, I figured out that I'm doing something wrong. The rig is nothing amazing but in my modest opinion, it is a powerful machine to run games and FSX, and the parts for it were the best I could possibly afford. However, I have installed a bunch of addons, and I am looking to compromise between quality and performance. I have installed addons such as PMDG 737 NGX, GEX Europe, UTX, REX Essential and custom sceneries. All of the scenery addons run smoothly at around 30-40FPS, I'd wish for more, but I honestly don't complain about it, as it runs smooth enough for my liking.

 

The only problem is with the bigger sceneries, and one of them is the Mega Airport Madrid from Aerosoft. I seem to struggle to get past 15-20FPS mark, which is sadly a bit inadequate for my liking, as the performance isn't as smooth as I'd like it to be. The trouble here is that I overclocked my GPU to 4.5GhZ already :|

 

Here are the full specs of my computer:

 

Intel i5-3570K @ 4.5GhZ

ASUS GeForce GTX 560 OC 850MhZ

8GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600MhZ

120GB Corsair Force 3 SSD

1TB Western Digital Caviar Blue 7200RPM

Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

 

I have the following settings:

 

1. Used 'Bojote's FSX Tweak' to increase performance.

2. Used NickN's guide to FSX, installing FSX on the SSD rather than the main drive.

3. Used Nvidia's Inspector according to the guide and updated GPU drivers.

4. Going lower than what I already have on AI doesn't boost the FPS, and other settings don't seem to do much. This is what I have in FSX: AI, Cars and stuff = around 20%, Target Frame Rate = Unlimited, Very Dense Autogen, Terrain and Water settings as on NickN's guide.

 

Apart from these, it's worth noting about the overclock (maybe?). I know that temperatures can sometimes affect the performance, therefore at idle, the CPU runs at a temperature 32-34 degrees celsius. When FSX is running, the temperature raises to about 55-60 degrees celsius. I use the Noctua NH-D14 cooler to keep it cool.

 

I hope someone can help me with this as I'd really like to improve performance without dropping a lot on quality. I've spent quite a bit of cash on this computer, and the results are somewhat are kind of unsatisfactory - I think I'm missing one simple basic or something. I'll appreciate any tips and suggestions.

 

Thank you and kind regards,

Kamil

[mpw8679 428]

Check out Word Not Allowed's guide in the hardware forum. I get much better frames and fsx runs much smoother when I use his settings.

[mjrhealth 820]

Bojotes tweaks are only a starting point, you will need to do some reading than change a few settings. FSx default Ai are a frame hog. you are better off getting some add on AI. Otherwise like everyone else, its just down to trying one thing at a time till you find what best for your machine

[HighFlyerPL185 0]

Hey, thanks for the replies. I have addon AI, and most of the settings from Word Not Allowed's guide are in my fsx.cfg. I'm kind of struggling to think on what to cut down to leave quality at it's best.

[Fatback 84]

try renaming your fsx.cfg file and restarting fsx to create a new one. Then try Word Not Allowed's guide, and only Word Not Allowed's guide, and see how that works for you.

[ZKOKQ 984]

Bojotes tweaks are great for low to med systems. For high end systems, Word Not Allowed's guide for sure.

[Paul J 349]

The only problem is with the bigger sceneries, and one of them is the Mega Airport Madrid from Aerosoft. I seem to struggle to get past 15-20FPS mark, which is sadly a bit inadequate for my liking, as the performance isn't as smooth as I'd like it to be. The trouble here is that I overclocked my GPU to 4.5GhZ already :|

 

Here are the full specs of my computer:

 

Intel i5-3570K @ 4.5GhZ

ASUS GeForce GTX 560 OC 850MhZ

8GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600MhZ

120GB Corsair Force 3 SSD

1TB Western Digital Caviar Blue 7200RPM

Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

 

I know that temperatures can sometimes affect the performance, therefore at idle, the CPU runs at a temperature 32-34 degrees celsius. When FSX is running, the temperature raises to about 55-60 degrees celsius. I use the Noctua NH-D14 cooler to keep it cool. This is right on the money. No problem.

Kamil

 

Coupla things, Kamil:

1). Would you post a screen shot of your Nvidia Inspector settings, please?, alond with the driver version of the gpu.

2). Would you then copy/paste your fsx.cfg into a second notepad page, then cut out the rubbish, and then post the meat of that copied fsx.cfg here, please, so we can better see just what you've followed from Nick, and Bojote, as some of those suggestions are a little out of date.

 

At this moment I reckon your GTX 560 (correct me if you meant that it was a 560Ti) is the bottleneck. At 4.5 gig - a 560, and unlimited fps - you are going to stutter in heavy scenery. Period. There are a number of fixes, but let's see what we're up against first - OK?

[HighFlyerPL185 0]

Thanks for the reply Paul, here you go as requested, hope this helps. I have the GTX 560 and not the 560Ti version. I wanted a better card, but that was very close to a maximum I could afford.

 

 

 

And some of the settings from fsx.cfg:

 

[bufferPools]
PoolSize=0
RejectThreshold=131072
[GRAPHICS]
AC_SELF_SHADOW=1
AIRCRAFT_REFLECTIONS=1
AIRCRAFT_SHADOWS=0
ALLOW_SHADER_30=1
COCKPIT_HIGH_LOD=1
D3D10=0
EFFECTS_QUALITY=2
ForceFullScreenVSync=1
ForceWindowedVSync=1
GROUND_SHADOWS=0
HIGHMEMFIX=1
IMAGE_QUALITY=0
LANDING_LIGHTS=1
NUM_LIGHTS=8
See_Self=1
TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD=1024
TEXTURE_QUALITY=3
Text_Scroll=1
SHADER_CACHE_PRIMED_10=1693500672
SHADER_CACHE_PRIMED=1693500672
[Main]
DisablePreload=1
[JOBSCHEDULER]
AffinityMask=14
[TERRAIN]
AUTOGEN_DENSITY=4
DETAIL_TEXTURE=1
LOD_RADIUS=4.500000
MESH_COMPLEXITY=91
MESH_RESOLUTION=24
SWAP_WAIT_TIMEOUT=2
TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_TREES_PER_CELL=350
TEXTURE_RESOLUTION=29
WATER_EFFECTS=6
[sCENERY]
DAWN_DUSK_SMOOTHING=1
IMAGE_COMPLEXITY=4
LENSFLARE=1
MAX_ASYNC_BATCHING_JOBS=3
SmallPartRejectRadius=4.0

[drewsaw2 3]

Hey Kamil,

 

Hang in there partner, I know how frustrating it can be. I started many threads last year about my performance when I got my new system. Thankfully I'm pretty satisfied with it now, and I have a similar system as you.

 

I don't think this will give you reduces frames, but I don't believe you need both Bufferpools settings. I use BP=0 only.

 

Are you having problems with stutters? The vsync fix helped clear most of those up for me. If you have a 60 ghz monitor, in your inspector settings under Vertical Sync change it to 1/2 refresh.

 

I have also set me internal frames to 35 and external frame limiter to 30. Thats seems to be the sweet spot for me so give it a shot. Every system will be different but the more you start testing these things the faster you'll get it running good.

 

I also deleted my cfg that I got from the Bojote tool and started from scratch using Word Not Allowed's guide. This has already been recommended here, and you SHOULD at least read through it. It helped me enormously.

 

I sometimes see 15-20 fps in busy airports with weather and and NGX too. That is asking a lot from your system. Might consider turning some sliders down.

 

Chances are your performance issues are a combination of some things. The hard part is slowly eliminating and adding things to find what works. Try not to go overboard on the tweaking though. Doing more tweaks because things aren't yet working isn't the way to go.

 

Looking forward to your progress.

[Midnight Music 252]

PMDG planes are very tough on the FPS, especially in the VC. Here's a little tip I use. When taxiing a PMDG plane around a heavy airport, I use the 2D panel, it is less demanding of the FPS. Once I get to the runway and either am ready to take off or have taken off I switch to the VC, which I prefer. It helps a little.

 

Lee

[Nuno Pinto 1,394]

The only problem is with the bigger sceneries, and one of them is the Mega Airport Madrid from Aerosoft. I seem to struggle to get past 15-20FPS mark, which is sadly a bit inadequate for my liking, as the performance isn't as smooth as I'd like it to be. The trouble here is that I overclocked my GPU to 4.5GhZ already :|

 

Make sure you are running version 1.02 of Madrid Barajas, the two previous versions have FPS issues (with FSX SP2 or later).

[Noel 4,483]

Thanks for the reply Paul, here you go as requested, hope this helps. I have the GTX 560 and not the 560Ti version. I wanted a better card, but that was very close to a maximum I could afford.

 

 

 

And some of the settings from fsx.cfg:

 

[bufferPools]
PoolSize=0
RejectThreshold=131072
[GRAPHICS]
AC_SELF_SHADOW=1
AIRCRAFT_REFLECTIONS=1
AIRCRAFT_SHADOWS=0
ALLOW_SHADER_30=1
COCKPIT_HIGH_LOD=1
D3D10=0
EFFECTS_QUALITY=2
ForceFullScreenVSync=1
ForceWindowedVSync=1
GROUND_SHADOWS=0
HIGHMEMFIX=1
IMAGE_QUALITY=0
LANDING_LIGHTS=1
NUM_LIGHTS=8
See_Self=1
TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD=1024
TEXTURE_QUALITY=3
Text_Scroll=1
SHADER_CACHE_PRIMED_10=1693500672
SHADER_CACHE_PRIMED=1693500672
[Main]
DisablePreload=1
[JOBSCHEDULER]
AffinityMask=14
[TERRAIN]
AUTOGEN_DENSITY=4
DETAIL_TEXTURE=1
LOD_RADIUS=4.500000
MESH_COMPLEXITY=91
MESH_RESOLUTION=24
SWAP_WAIT_TIMEOUT=2
TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_TREES_PER_CELL=350
TEXTURE_RESOLUTION=29
WATER_EFFECTS=6
[sCENERY]
DAWN_DUSK_SMOOTHING=1
IMAGE_COMPLEXITY=4
LENSFLARE=1
MAX_ASYNC_BATCHING_JOBS=3
SmallPartRejectRadius=4.0

 

Wow, these look like some very conservative settings compared to what I'm on and I don't have nearly the horsepower you have. Good luck I think you must have a huge bottleneck yet to be identified.

[abandoned account 171]

Since you have already followed the common guidelines and you normally get 30-40 FPS with the NGX but 15-20 FPS in some specific situations, I don't think that starting from scratch or reading yet another guide repeating the already known tweaks is the best way to go. If the 30-40 FPS is in the NGX VC mode I'd say that the system is overall pretty well configured already. A scenery that decreases your FPS by like 20 FPS is not reasonable so I think you should try to find the root cause of this. My experience is that it's either something that is common for all those sceneries or that they're simply very poorly programmed in different ways (like many addon airports are).

 

Here is a long shot... have tried setting the "airport vehicles" setting to "None"?

I had an issue similar to yours before and in my case it was a couple of specific airport vehicle objects that took an insane amount of FPS. I usually got about 50 FPS in the NGX VC at the default airports and like 35 FPS at Orbx YBBN, but at some mega airports I got like 15-25 average with occational jumps down to like 3. This of course caused some really horrible stuttering. As soon as I was airborne the FPS went back upp to 50+ again.

 

Disabling the airport vehicles solved this but to find out what really caused this I disabled the individual objects group by group and later one by one it turned of that "veh_air_deiceservice" decreased the FPS by 15-20 (and my test flight was using "summer", go figure). Also, veh_air_loader_EU took another 15-20 FPS. Having removed those objects, I could now set the airport vehicles setting to "high" with virtually no performance decrease. I've not yet investigated this further so I'm not sure if those objects are default FSX objects or if they come from some addon.

 

You could also try different performance settings for the NGX using its FMC if you haven't tried that but my experience is that those really doesn't do much difference.

[severniae 78]

I'm going against the masses here. But have you tried with as few tweaks as possible? I've actually found that my system runs fater and smoother with less tweaks rather than more, but the first thing everyone seems to want to do as soon as they install FSX is find the FSX.CFG and change as much as they can.

 

I did use the auto-tweaker but I've since ditched even most of the additions from that aside from actually necessary ones such as highmemfix, shader, wideviewaspect and bufferpools - The rest I think I have pretty much as it installs. I'm getting 30FPS everywhere - set limited to 30 obviously. No external limiter just using the FSX slider.

 

I thin the way to approach tweaks should be done carefully - Don't add every one under the sun before checking to see what you just did hasn't over-egged the pudding! You wouldn't add 3 tablespoons of salt before tasting the soup..........

[HighFlyerPL185 0]

@drewsaw2: Thanks. In all fairness, seeing Word Not Allowed's guide, I imagine that it is very similar to Bojote's tweaks anyway. I have although removed it, and generated the new fsx.cfg and applied Word Not Allowed's tweaks to it, and there was no major difference in the frames - if not at all sadly.

 

@NaMCo: I have the 1.02 version of Madrid Barajas. The previous version ran on 5-15 FPS, which was annoying the hell out of me, and I guess it improved somewhat the frames.

 

@severniae: Hey, I have actually used an empty version of the fsx.cfg and only applied AffinityMask=14 to it, and the result was exact the same :(

 

EDIT: @tolip2: Just checked the Airport Vehicle density to None, and no increase there either :(