After about six weeks of trying, I seem to have hit rock bottom in trying to get my new PC running FS9 the way I think it is capable of. It's been driving me nuts and really detracting from my enjoyment of the sim so I figured it's time to ask for help.

 

There are multiple issues so i will start with just one and use a different thread for some of the others.

1. I am getting perfect visuals - I absolutely love the way it looks. And without AI my FPS are in a range between 50-60 (very complex scenery) to the hundreds (default). But even with using only about half of the AI I used to have in my old installation, I get a huge FPS drop. At many airports it is still okay - as long as it doesn't go below 27 fps it's irrelevant to me. But at some, especially really bigs ones like FSDT KORD/KDFW or Aerosoft LFPG it can drop down into the teens. I get huge fluctuations and that results in a stuttering effect. The problem always involves a complex airport in a metropolitan area where there are often other major airports and lots of AI traffic. Turning off AI instantly results in FPS in the 50-80 range

 

a. I have defragged (Ultimate Defrag) --- checked every AI aircraft individually ---- checked every traffic file invidiually ---- checked every airport individually. Yeah, a lot of hours!!!! There is no single source of the problem. Done the alpha channel, mipmap routine. I do not believe there is anything in the aircraft or scenery that is causing the problem.

b. I have tried every FS9.cfg tweak I can find on here. Like I said, I'm getting amazing visuals - crisp, clear - I couldn't ask for more. But nothing has helped with the AI issue.

c. I have played with the NVIDIA settings and that has helped in some ways, sometimes dramatically. But it still hasn't nailed the AI FPS drop issue - though I suspect that's where the solution will be.

d. I do all my testing using the default Robinson R22 which has no discernible impact on frame rates

 

The thing is that there is nothing in my new installation that didn't already function well on my old one - including almost twice as much AI in the old one. (And a lot more addon sceneries as well).

 

My specs are in my profile. I am 99% sure the solution is going to come by doing something to help my system do things better. (I am using the standard NVIDIA Control Panel) If anyone can help I would be very grateful. In the meantime I am doing all my flying from smaller regional airports. Loving everything about the new PC in those situations but some time I'd like to fly into Paris, London, New York etc without wanting to throw the whole d--n thing out the window!

 

Cheers

Ian

Looking at your specs, your PC should eat FS9 and spit out triple digit frames.

 

I see two video cards, are you running them in SLI as that will not work for FS.

 

Your other post reads as if you are using the same 2 HDD as you had in the old computer.

 

If you took a HDD with all your FS stuff on it out of one computer and put it in a new PC without actually installing FS then there is no registry entries for FS in your new machine.

 

Several of the issues in your other thread read like they might be registry problems.

 

Hope you get it sorted out, that PC is an expensive paper weight.

 

regards,

Joe

As N60 suggests.I would suspect various Registry problems...

 

New PC = New (empty) Hard Drive, with everything re-installed on it. New Windows installation, followed by a new installation of all your various Hardware and Software Programs, correctly placed on the Registry.

 

Start from scratch, with a Formatted Hard Drive!

 

Its what a do with every new computer build/re-build.

 

It takes forever, but at least everything is where it should be!

 

Paul.

hey Ian try this maybe:

 

 

[DISPLAY]

UPPER_FRAMERATE_LIMIT=0

TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=400

TextureMaxLoad=30

[TERRAIN]

TERRAIN_ERROR_FACTOR=100.000000

TERRAIN_MIN_DEM_AREA=10.000000

TERRAIN_MAX_DEM_AREA=100.000000

TERRAIN_MAX_VERTEX_LEVEL=21

TERRAIN_TEXTURE_SIZE_EXP=8

TERRAIN_AUTOGEN_DENSITY=5

TERRAIN_USE_GRADIENT_MAP=1

TERRAIN_EXTENDED_TEXTURES=1

TERRAIN_DEFAULT_RADIUS=4.000000

TERRAIN_EXTENDED_RADIUS=4.000000

TERRAIN_EXTENDED_LEVELS=4

 

 

 

 

i have these settings and all is good.

As N60 suggests.I would suspect various Registry problems...

 

New PC = New (empty) Hard Drive, with everything re-installed on it. New Windows installation, followed by a new installation of all your various Hardware and Software Programs, correctly placed on the Registry.

 

Start from scratch, with a Formatted Hard Drive!

 

Its what a do with every new computer build/re-build.

 

It takes forever, but at least everything is where it should be!

 

Paul.

Thanks Paul and Joe. Using brand new HD's - the D drive is 1Tb. I did completely new installs of all programs and addons. The only things I directly moved over from the old rig were AI aircraft and traffic files - and I tested each one of them individually when I did so. Moved over a few sceneries that are no longer available, but none of them are involved in the fps problem which started before I installed them.

Joe - I have wondered if the dual video cards is an issue. I confess I don't know what "SLI" means. What I can say is that when I first started, I had one monitor on each individual video card. FS9 didn't like that when I would try to undock and move a window over into the other monitor so as of now, both my monitors are running from the same video card and the other is not being used. I'm sure I am far from using its full potential so any help would be appreciated. Just remember - I'm an old guy and though I'm competent on a computer, I am lost when it comes to the more esoteric stuff...

Thanks guys

Ian

Personally I use system mechanic. It has a very good defrag program, mrprogram allignment, reg fix program, and HD optimiser. Plus options to turn off all the background processes that are pointless. The other thing with getting a new system, is before I ever think of installing new programs, I take a couple of days to clear all the preinstaled junk. This includes junk in system folders. When you are running FS what processes are running? If it isn't a registry issue, then maybe FS is fighting other processes... Also did you try changing the selected card in the FS display settings?

I wonder if defrag profoundly affects that much.. in fact I doubt it thou I do it very often with Diskkepeer.

AI traffic.....you may have well answered your own question, I would start w/ that as all else appears to be okay

 

I would suggest that things were lost in the transfer as will happen, just a thought, good luck w/ your new beast

It's possible that you need to update your directx runtime libraries.

Get the latest complete package from here: http://www.microsoft...ls.aspx?id=8109

Win7 comes with directx11 installed but I've had to install earlier versions to make certain games work, and FS9 is using directx8 if I'm not mistaken.

The download contains all versions up to now, so if something is missing it installs it, otherwise it leaves your system untouched.

 

If that doesn't help it would be useful to know how much antialiasing you're using. To high a setting here can make your fps plummet.

Ian,

 

Since AI seems to be the source, here's what I know of AI in the past. Sometimes a lot of CPU cycles are wasted when AI aircraft are continuously calling for textures or effects that are not present in your install. Despite the power of your processor this might be an issue depending on whether or not this is in fact happening and how many aircraft are involved. Are you sure all your old effects are present? I've seen many past instances of AI aircraft having .fx files named in their aircraft.cfgs but missing from my effects folder.

 

Generally, I highly recommend 'Process Monitor' http://technet.micro...s/bb896645.aspx to get a handle on what's happening when your system slows down. It's predecessor helped me find a number of issues in the past. I think you can tell it exactly which programs to monitor - fs9.exe itself is a good start. And don't be put off by the 'esoteric stuff' this program can do - once you set it up that table will clearly show what fs9 is bogged down looking for or failing to find etc.

 

Hope this helps

Thanks for the continuing input everybody. I am following up on the suggestions. So far no big change but it's going in the right direction as several suggestions have resulted in improvements. I continue to think it's something that's missing - something that came with my older PC (which was still Win 7 64 bit but purchased three years ago) that isn't on this one. But I also agree that the AI traffic is clearly a source of the problem too. So I am probably going to have to go through the "one at a time" process to try to eliminate anything that is sucking up the memory when it loads...

 

I truly appreciate the support you've all given me. And I definitely don't want anyone thinking this has been an unmitigated disaster. In so many ways FS9 is awesome on the new rig - it's only at certain airports where it grinds down into the low fps range. I'm going to find the problem soo, I am sure

Cheers

Ian

Airports in airport center hot spots like New York, Chicago, LAX, where there are clustered airports within the AI range use lot's of ai rendering on the CPU. Win 7 will catch some of the complex math and pass it to the better math unit on the GPU. (This has been documented in published benchmark testing.) FS does not do too much in the way of GPU calling processes so this math trap helps. FS highly CPU clock dependent. On your new system you should have the Intel utility to setup your CPU/RAM clock multipliers and those should be checked. There might also be a performance setting in Win or the BIOS regarding clocking changes based on demand. Make sure any power management for conserving battery resources in Win is turned off. That's for laptops. They can slow down the clock speeds.

 

First of all, your graphics cards should be the same for SLI application. It is kind of a parallel operation I believe. The article mentions a single output but I believe both monitors should remain on the same card.

 

http://en.wikipedia...._Link_Interface

 

You can also for now try running with SLI disabled running on one card only for comparison. Have you checked your Win and BIOS settings? I think SLI requires a separate ribbon connection between both cards and settings in the card drivers.

 

To check your resource loads I recommend running:

http://technet.micro...ernals/bb896653 process explorer

which shows the CPU and RAM loading in polled real time for running apps and processes. You can check for starved resources just in case. In column settings set up paging and virtual and physical RAM draw. Run it on your second monitor. Procmon gives you summaries in time used where proc explorer uses CPU percent and RAM use MB by process and totals. Set up the various resource graphs above and below the column headers and status lines.

 

In Win 7-64 each 32 bit app gets its own address space. I think someone mentioned that Win 7 makes the 32 bit app large address aware without employing the .exe header modifier to accomplish that.

 

The idea is performance wise to nail down if it is the video processing or FS CPU (and daughter proceses) rendering. I notice in your profile you are using four monitors meaning you are using four viewports, two on each card, unless you are using one card as a single wide viewport. Multiple viewports tend to load down the GPU and each viewport gets its share of GPU RAM.

 

The only thing mainly changed in your new system is the use of SLI and that might be a prime suspect.

 

I'd look up SLI and multi-monitor configuration in the hardware forum here.

 

Not knowing how you use your four monitors and as long as you already have your older PC if any of your apps use FSUIPC consider using Pete Dowson's WideFS to run some of your apps on your old PC as a last resort.

 

FWIW on my old P4 3.2 GHz on XP32SP3, we are running basically the same apps in real time In some instances you are getting the the same performance. Have you tried running FS by itself at busy airports? If so, try KORD as that is one of the worst ai cluster densities. AS65 and RC do not take much in resources. As far as RC you do get disk loading when it concatenates audio phrases for buffering long audio items such as CD and ATIS. In RC make sure Display.txt is disabled and avoid Prerecorded chatter - just use Ai Chatter with Interactive AI enabled which limits audio to the user aircraft and ai present.

Hi Ian,

Just a word, as I had this issue before. your AI do they have Shock wave lights in the .cfg? if that is true, make sure that you have the 3d Shock wave light installed. other wise just remove the setting, and use the normal one.

I had to bang my head against the wall for some times, until I realized that I did not install the A2A lights, and all my aircraft where configured to use it. That brought my performance to the single digit. After the installation all went back normal.

So I don't know if you use the A2A light, but just a point of referral.

Good luck

Hani :rolleyes:

I see two video cards, are you running them in SLI as that will not work for FS.

 

SLI works quite well for FS provided you force it through nVidia Inspector. I have been using it on my laptop for years for both FSX and FS9.

I'm having a similar problem with AI traffic slowing things down significantly on my new computer.

At KORD, with traffic explorer reporting 402 aircraft, fps fluctuates between 20 and 25, 18-23 when I'm looking right at the largest number of aircraft at the United terminal. Without ai, it's anywhere between 50 and 150.

At KJFK, with traffic explorer reporting 477 aircraft, fps fluctuates between 14 and 18 when looking at the main terminals. With no traffic, FPS hovers around 60-80.

At EGLL, with traffic explorer reporting 431 aircraft, fps is between 13 and 20. With no traffic, fps hovers between 50 and 80.

 

My rig is an i5-3570K that has been overclocked to 4.3 ghz, 8 gigs of RAM, windows 7 64 bit, and a 1 GB GTX 670 video card. Do the numbers above make sense? I realize that I have a very high amount of AI traffic installed, and that a performance hit is going to come from that, but I'd like to check to see if that slowdown is more than it should be. It's still fairly playable at the big places like this, and doesn't break a sweat anywhere else in the FS world; so it's not really a crisis.

 

thanks