I recently upgraded from an ATI 4870x2 to a GTX 660 Ti, partially because my old card was starting to die (couldn't hold the factory overclock), and partially because I was hoping for some kind of improvement in FSX fps. There was a good improvement, 2-3 times more fps under certain circumstances with a massive increase in image quality due to the fact that FSX never caps the GPU so AA / AF don't hurt fps anymore, but I'm still CPU bound and capped in the most complex areas at around 13-15 fps, which, even though its much better than the 5-9 I was getting before (heavy, complex aircraft in an extremely complex addon scenery with heavy duty clouds... I've always gotten much better in other places, but this is my test situation), is still fairly slow. I'm still tweaking things in the hopes of improving that, but all of this has reminded me of the single greatest gain / loss of fps in my FSX experience, which was when I went from Vista x64 to Win7 x64. Though Vista was chock full of problem and I don't think I would ever go back, I got about twice the FSX fps with that operating system (about 23-30 in the same test area from above) than I've ever been able to get in Win7. Is there a way to tweak Win7's performance so that I can reclaim some of that lost fps? Though I cannot seem to find the thread, I think I did already ask this years ago when Win7 was fresh on the market and I had first noticed the issue, but no one was able to offer any kind of solution back then. I'm kind of hoping that enough intellectual water has flowed under the flight sim community's collective bridge to have had someone come up with a solution after all these years.

 

Thanks.

Though Vista was chock full of problem and I don't think I would ever go back, I got about twice the FSX fps with that operating system (about 23-30 in the same test area from above) than I've ever been able to get in Win7.

 

Must be a red herring I hope, but you have me wondering. I'm still on Vista 64-bit and have no troubles, and am usually shocked to hear how relatively (overclocked SB/IBs) meager sounding performance gains are enjoyed by these titans compared to my lowly 4 y/o Core 2 Quad overclocked to a paltry 3.8Ghz. It must be there, the perf boost and it certainly sounds like there is appreciable gains, but it's not earth shattering. I can hop in the NGX and fly out of lesser terminals and see 22fps during taxi and no problems locking 30 after takeoff--of course I'm usually in lesser places like KDEN. In the FSDT Hawaiian terminals in the NGX it's closer to 27fps. Fabulous IQ and smoothness is very good there. W/ lesser aircraft like the QW757 I'm often at 24 in big terminals, etc. Almost all my sliders are hard right. Monitor 1920x1200 w/ some stiff AA/AF settings, and jeez I'm on a 280GTX. 512mb bandwidth might be helping. Anyway, I wonder what you are seeing there. If there is a penalty, perhaps that's why my machine sounds pretty dang good compared to what the big guns are seeing. Oh mind you, I know they have a decent edge, but still...

 

I'm tempted to keep Vista64 when I do the big upgrade next year: Haswell here I come! Water cool that sucker too!

Must be a red herring I hope, but you have me wondering. I'm still on Vista 64-bit and have no troubles, and am usually shocked to hear how relatively (overclocked SB/IBs) meager sounding performance gains are enjoyed by these titans compared to my lowly 4 y/o Core 2 Quad overclocked to a paltry 3.8Ghz. It must be there, the perf boost and it certainly sounds like there is appreciable gains, but it's not earth shattering. I can hop in the NGX and fly out of lesser terminals and see 22fps during taxi and no problems locking 30 after takeoff--of course I'm usually in lesser places like KDEN. In the FSDT Hawaiian terminals in the NGX it's closer to 27fps. Fabulous IQ and smoothness is very good there. W/ lesser aircraft like the QW757 I'm often at 24 in big terminals, etc. Almost all my sliders are hard right. Monitor 1920x1200 w/ some stiff AA/AF settings, and jeez I'm on a 280GTX. 512mb bandwidth might be helping. Anyway, I wonder what you are seeing there. If there is a penalty, perhaps that's why my machine sounds pretty dang good compared to what the big guns are seeing. Oh mind you, I know they have a decent edge, but still...

 

I'm tempted to keep Vista64 when I do the big upgrade next year: Haswell here I come! Water cool that sucker too!

 

This is what I'm talking about... My system should theoretically be beating yours, but its not. I have a Quad-core Q9550 clocked to 3.8GHz, 4GB RAM, A brand new GTX 660 Ti, and am running lower resolution than you at 1680x1050. Even with tweaks and some reduced sliders, I'm pulling less fps than you. I really do think its got something to do with the way Win7 handles apps, which is why I'm hoping that someone has identified what that is and how to correct it in the intervening years since Win7 hit the market. I'm almost sure that if I set up a dual boot with vista, I'd be able to show much better fps with that than anything I've been able to get currently.

The only thing though is that so many people have made the switch to Win 7, even from Vista, that you would hope someone else would have noticed this quite quickly. In fact it would be near miraculous that the 'enthusiasts' certainly would have using various benchmarks etc. I have to guess this is a red herring--we'll see if anyone else chimes in here.

Even with tweaks and some reduced sliders, I'm pulling less fps than you.

 

You have to be really careful about these comparisons though. Unless you and I have exactly the same scenario to run, and I mean exactly, it's just very hard to make legitimate comparisons with a high degree of confidence. I was on the same screen res as you and it did seem like I had a wee bit better performance, but even that's anecdote. Right now I'm just impressed as heck w/ how my machine runs. I do try to be careful/smart about what kind of flights i set up w/ regard to matching the specifics of the scenario w/ a plane I know can handle it. I can truly say, right now I'm only slightly tempted to upgrade--it's just too good. But then again, you won't find me taking off out of KSEA in the NGX in ORBX PNW scenery. I know up front it's not an option.

Is there a way to tweak Win7's performance so that I can reclaim some of that lost fps?

 

You won't see a change in performance in Windows 7 because you don't have the old FSX.cfg you had for Vista 64. The OS's are very similar with Windows 7 fixing a lot of bugs found in Vista. It also manages memory better than in past OS's. Have you looked at Word Not Allowed's excellent guide for tweaking FSX? It's pinned at the top of the Hardware forum. NickN's excellent guide on 'Setting Up FSX and Tuning It' is still very valid with Windows 7 (he even has a section for Windows 7 64 bit at the top of his guide which makes some modifications). Higher FSX settings in the FSX.cfg or in the display driver settings will reduce performance. I know that I had high fps and FSX load times until I installed MyTrafficX. Not that this software is bad as they all reduce performance because FSX, at startup, loads every AI aircraft and every flight plan around the world if you have the AI slider set to 100%. You'll have flights going on all over the world. So, reducing the AI slider to around 30% will help. I thought my photo scenery would bring down my fps but I barely saw any difference. It was AI traffic that affected my system the most. Cars on the streets will seriously affect performance too. I set mine to about 10% and I think that's probably too high as you can't see much when at FL320 but it's still affecting performance.

 

Hope this helps.

You have to be really careful about these comparisons though. Unless you and I have exactly the same scenario to run, and I mean exactly, it's just very hard to make legitimate comparisons with a high degree of confidence. I was on the same screen res as you and it did seem like I had a wee bit better performance, but even that's anecdote. Right now I'm just impressed as heck w/ how my machine runs. I do try to be careful/smart about what kind of flights i set up w/ regard to matching the specifics of the scenario w/ a plane I know can handle it. I can truly say, right now I'm only slightly tempted to upgrade--it's just too good. But then again, you won't find me taking off out of KSEA in the NGX in ORBX PNW scenery. I know up front it's not an option.

 

Unfortunately, you are very correct about system to system comparisons because of the complex nature of FSX. When you start throwing add-ons into the mix, suddenly, almost no two setups are exactly alike, which makes real comparison impossible. That being said, it might also explain why not many other people seem to have experienced this: Perhaps something in my setup, whether hardware or software, handled Vista better than Win7 and as a result, that change did have a negative effect on my game results. The problem is, if it really was very specific to me, or perhaps those that it might have effected never installed Vista before Win7 (I only had my computer about a year before Win7 came out, so its possible someone else bought the same rig, but with Win7, thus nullifying the comparison again), a solution might exist, but the chances of finding it are low.

 

You won't see a change in performance in Windows 7 because you don't have the old FSX.cfg you had for Vista 64. The OS's are very similar with Windows 7 fixing a lot of bugs found in Vista. It also manages memory better than in past OS's. Have you looked at Word Not Allowed's excellent guide for tweaking FSX? It's pinned at the top of the Hardware forum. NickN's excellent guide on 'Setting Up FSX and Tuning It' is still very valid with Windows 7 (he even has a section for Windows 7 64 bit at the top of his guide which makes some modifications). Higher FSX settings in the FSX.cfg or in the display driver settings will reduce performance. I know that I had high fps and FSX load times until I installed MyTrafficX. Not that this software is bad as they all reduce performance because FSX, at startup, loads every AI aircraft and every flight plan around the world if you have the AI slider set to 100%. You'll have flights going on all over the world. So, reducing the AI slider to around 30% will help. I thought my photo scenery would bring down my fps but I barely saw any difference. It was AI traffic that affected my system the most. Cars on the streets will seriously affect performance too. I set mine to about 10% and I think that's probably too high as you can't see much when at FL320 but it's still affecting performance.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Returning to the theme of different systems handling things differently, I tried adjusting the AI traffic and road vehicles down from 59% and 20% respectively, to 20% and 10%, both at the same time and then individually, but saw very little, if any change in performance (maybe a single fps improvement). This was done sitting on the ramp at EDDF, so there were plenty of AI aircraft and cars in the vicinity. I'm not sure why there was no change, but it may have been because my GPU was capping out at about 40% utilization, so the added rendering didn't have much effect on it.

 

As far as tuning goes, I generally use the Auto-tune tool since its given me the best results so far. I did start with a fresh fsx.cfg and attempt to enact some of Word Not Allowed's tweaks, which did help, but were not able to produce equal results to those I've gotten using the tool. In the past I also have used the guide put together by NickN, but again, the auto-tweak tool seems to produce better results on my machine. That being said, its been some time since I've read through that particular one and I know he updates it fairly frequently, so I might have another look at it to see if something has changed in the meantime that will work to improve performance.

 

On a separate note, I'm starting to think that my system bottleneck is no longer my video card, as it was before, but rather my CPU / RAM. This is because my CPU is often running at near 100% load and I'm using 3.6ish of my 4GB of RAM. I do have plans to upgrade to newer tech in the next year or so, with at least 4x more RAM and whatever the best new processor / motherboards are at the time, but I'm still wanting better performance out of what I've got now to tide me over until then.

Cars on the streets will seriously affect performance too. I set mine to about 10% and I think that's probably too high as you can't see much when at FL320 but it's still affecting performance.

 

Everyone says this and yet I just don't see much impact amazingly. I set mine around 20% or 0%, hardly a difference if any.