Hi Jeff,

Thanks for the tip. Looks like you have a lot of aviation experience in both the virtual and real skies. That's awesome.

I will keep it in mind. Mine is set to 3 at the moment. I'm running an AMD 955BE oc'd to 4ghz but with AMD, I'm guessing it's pretty much the equivalent of 3ghz i5. So I'm going to leave it as is at the moment.

I do plan to upgrade to an overclocked Sandy or Ivy bridge in a year or two.

 

I spent a few hours last week fooling around with my FS9 frame rate lock settings and I found a sweet spot. It sounds weird and doesn't really make sense, but for some reason, it works best in my system.

I just switched over from FSX to FS9. So far I only have REX, Ultimate Traffic, and a few add on aircrafts installed. My traffic setting is at 100%.

What I did was lock my frames at 60fps.

I did my tests using the PMDG MD-11. I fly PMDG and CLS aircrafts. With CLS, I'm always at 60fps, but PMDG jumps around from the low 40's to 60.

Though the fps won't stay at 60 most of the time with the PMDG, I get smoother performance with my frames locked at 60fps. I tried 30fps. Even though it stayed at 29-30fps the whole time, I was getting quite a bit of stutters. Changed it to 60 and it was a huge improvement. I don't really know why but I did the test many times with the same result everytime.

 

Just thought I'd share.

 

Also, I got a nice improvement using the compressed DXT clouds in REX. Using the REX weather engine, I used to get some bad stutters flying through very heavy clouds, but it went away after selecting the DXT clouds. The main difference I see is that the clouds look less sharp compared to using non DXT high res. But with DXT it has a smoother and softer look.

Changed it to 60 and it was a huge improvement

 

Many threads on Avsim suggesting to set Frame Lock at V Sync, or half V Sync. For many LCD/LED monitors this equates to 60/30 as you have experienced. However many advise otherwise ... go figure! :rolleyes:

My monitor has a V Sync of 60, so I had limited my FPS to 30 for quite a long time now. Today I doubled it to 60 and I recognized the same drastic improvement in smoothness as Maurice did.

 

There's only one problem: While I get mostly around 45-50 FPS, at airports with many 3D objects, landclass, additional vector objects and photoscenery + AI Traffic (for instance at LOWI with Aerosoft "Approaching Innsbruck" and Austria Pro) it will go below 30, so that FPS are below LOD_TARGET_FPS=42 value from FS9.cfg, what means (as I believed so far), that FS2004 decreases texture resolution. FS2004 will overwrite every manually edited value, because the value LOD_TARGET_FPS will correlate with the value UPPER_FRAMERATE_LIMIT in FS9.cfg. Setting UPPER_FRAMERATE_LIMIT to "0" (without limitation) I got less stutter than with a value of 30 and was able to edit LOD_TARGET_FPS to 20 manually without being re-edited by FS2004.

 

I'm very surprised by this fact, because setting an UPPER_FRAMERATE_LIMIT is recommended very often.

I wasn't able to observe texture behaviour long enough to report about this. (I will do this after my RW vacations starting tomorrow.)

 

By the way, I got a major improvement in FPS by changing my energy management setting in WinXP. I guess this fact is well known here, so that I'm "sending owls to Athens". To me it was new: I used to use AMD's Cool'n'Quiet feature and Windows' energy scheme "minimal energy comsumption" so that the maximal CPU frequency was applied only when it was needed. Setting the energy scheme to "Desktop" raised FPS in FS2004 by almost 10 immediately. It seems that the system wasn't able to regulate the CPU frequency according to FS2004s needs fast enough.

 

Best regards, Harald

Hi.

 

Thanks for the help Dave. Much appreciated.

 

I'm embarassed to admit I came to work without the result of my weekend experimentation. Tomorrow... :blush:

 

 

 

Many threads on Avsim suggesting to set Frame Lock at V Sync, or half V Sync. For many LCD/LED monitors this equates to 60/30 as you have experienced. However many advise otherwise ... go figure! :rolleyes:

 

The reason for setting FPS such that the monitor's refresh rate is a multiple of the FPS is this. The 'moving' image you see is composed of a sequence of still pictures; we all know that already. If you set its changes to coincide with the monitor's refresh rate then a number of changes of image will occur at the same time as the supposed 'off' period of the monitor. There will be fewer breaks in the image and your eye and brain will perceive a smoother movement.

 

The concept is something of an extension of reducing the moiree pattern for still images by alttering resolution.

 

I do set my FPS and refresh rate to coincide, though given the persistence of the phosphors' glow on my CRT it may not make any visible difference above a certain refresh rate. I suppose LCD screens are more susceptible to mis-matched values.

 

Suitable values may be (as I have) 36 FPS for 72 Hz, 60 / 60 or even 25 / 75 et c.

 

I find a refresh rate of 60 Hz quite uncomfortable, and if your system will handle it I recommend trying higher frequencies-- 36 FPS isn't much more demanding that 30, and at 72 Hz staring at the monitor isn't nearly as unpleasant.

 

There's an interesting low-tech article in Wikipedia under 'Flicker Fusion Threshold'. It goes some way to explaining why we see a more pronounced flicker in peripheral vision, and when our eyes move.

 

Best regards,

D

I find a refresh rate of 60 Hz quite uncomfortable

 

I agree 60 on a CRT is way toooo slow and, like you, I used to run at 72 or 75 depending on that monitor's spec.

 

Another curiosity ... it is claimed better results arise in FS9 if frames are locked, yet FSX benefits from setting frames to unlimited. Ah Microsoft. :P

My problem, partly, is that I seem to be in a small minority of people who fly in windowed-mode, so Vsync and fs9.cfg entries shared here don't necessarily help unfortunately. I find myself with some different values certainly.

"sending owls to Athens"

 

lol

So, let me sum this whole thing up .......

 

There is NO universal fix for your blurries/stutters. Never has been, never will be. That which can be fiddled with has been fiddled with for the last 10 years. It is what it is. Unless FS9 is completely recoded, there will be blurries/stutters. Do I hear an Amen out there?

 

.....and to all ...... a good night!

 

gwillmot

Unless FS9 is completely recoded, there will be blurries/stutters

 

I beg to differ. I once paid good money to a consultant, who shall remain unnamed, to set up MY computer to run FS9 effectively. He succeeded. Because of hardware changes that is no longer the case. However I can assure you all that it is CERTAINLY possible for FS9 to operate without blurries of any kind. I have seen it, experienced it for an extended period of time (and all over the virtual world too) and when I finally complete my computer upgrade will have absolutely no hesitation in employing the consultant once again.

Hi.

 

I think Gwillmot is right in a way- there is no universal fix of the one-size-fits-all variety. Still, I'm certain it's possible to build a PC of a high enough specification and to apply suitable tweaks to cause the highest resolution textures to load with no delay. I've noticed that texture detail decreases outwards from directly below the aeroplane: high-res LC with roads followed by high-res LC with blocky roads, followed by low-res LC, followed by lower-res LC, followed by misty generic textures. It seems that up to a point it's possible to extend outwards the spread of the higher resolution textures but the distance for each LOD is capped. The capping appears to be hard-coded: inserting bigger values into the appropriate lines of the config file has no further effect.

 

I'm sure it's not possible to extend the highest resolution out to the horizon but, dependent on the hardware, it is undoubtedly possible to reduce loading times to the barest minimum, and probably also to eliminate stutters.

 

Where I have lots of scenery objects and AI (LICJ) I found that reducing the number of pre-rendered frames from 8 to 1 made only a slight improvement of about 1 FPS. The reduction did seem to smooth out some of the fluctuation in the frame-rate, suggesting that with my previous setup of 8, everything frequently had to pause (or stutter) while the CPU caught up. The CPU is still running flat out but presumably now it has slightly fewer tasks to complete.

 

I cleaned all the old rubbish out of my hard drives, cleaned up dead registry entries (ta very much Jouni Vuorio), ran Peter Nyman's DXT3Fixer, rebuilt all my scenery.dat files and defragged the hard drives. The result of all that work was much more spectacular-- the old 9 or 10 FPS at LICJ rose to about 16. I also temporarily reduced the max FPS to 24 and that too seemed to smooth things a little more, though there was a distinct flicker in the corner of my eye.

 

 

 

 

Arrivals and departures at quiet stock airports with heavy autogen (I used DAOO) gave 22 - 43 FPS unlocked at a setting of 8, and 35 - 45 FPS at a setting of 1 pre-rendered frame. There was also an unexpected fluctuation in the load on the GPU.

 

 

 

 

En-route, reducing the pre-rendered frames to 1 seemed to allow ground textures to load and to reach the finest detail more quickly, though that may just have been my perception.

 

Finally, mid-Atlantic I had about the same FPS regardless of the pre-rendering: 55 - 80. I suppose the CPU, not having to deal with scenery, AI or weather, had a much lighter load. Oddly,the GPU load was much higher. I had a couple of brief flashes of ninety-something FPS but I suspect this flight established the overall limit of my PC.

 

 

 

 

GPU usage varied according to which flight I loaded but, contrary to what I expected,decreasing the pre-rendering didn't give a consistent increase in GPU usage. Maybe that depends on the texture type, colour depth, detail et c.

 

So... Am I right in believing that the text in my Nvidia control panel only gives half the story in stating that high pre-rendering will smooth the image's flow? Is it that if the processor & motherboard can't keep up with the GPU then reducing the number of pre-rendered frames will ease the load on the overworked hardware, and that if you have a bells-and-whistles base with a struggling graphics card then the more you can pre-render the better?

 

My GPU is obviously under-utilised...

 

(ASRock P4i65G (repaired one evening at work- see my interests), Intel P4 at 2.8 GHz and 2 GB RAM... all saved by a GeForce 7950GT... 3 physical drives: one for FS9 and other games, one devoted to the page file and one with two partitions for the OS and everything else)

 

... so I've opted for no pre-rendering at all in FS9 and it seems to work very well. I'm not sure there's much point in locking the FPS, except to tie it to the refresh rate, as my processor is so slow that the limit is redundant in busy airports where it could have been of use. Locking does, however, allow LC textures to load more quickly so maybe, maybe not...

 

I think I'll use the same setting for X3, my other favourite waste of time, as big battles tend to become a slide-show, with a noticeable lag in control inputs too.

 

Cheers,

D

 

p. s. I'm also embarrassed by my inability to spell embarrassed...