Sure, I agree with Glenn, you can see the difference between 20 and 30 frames. However, the difference becomes less as you fly higher and the scenery moves slower. But try taxiing around an airport and you will easily see the difference, or flying close to the ground, because the scenery is moving far faster. However, I have done, like many others, dozens and dozens of tests, probably hundreds, but I always, always have returned to locking the framerate. Even if it works initially, as Paul said, there WILL be times when frames begin to drop, and then the proverbial hits the fan, because FSX is trying to effectively maintain as high a framerate as possible when it would be preferable for it to load scenery textures faster.

I have pretty much the same system as you and get spectacular performance, no blurries - crisp to the horizon, no stutters, 100% AI traffic (all custom AI traffic), clouds out to 120nm...in other words I'm running FSX the way it was meant to be run. Mind you good peformance to me means 100% AI traffic at high detailed 3rd party airports with PMDG or LDS aircraft...I don't fly default aircraft or land at default airports. I also use GEX clouds at 4096x4096.

 

For me *******' autotweaking tool made an absolute stuttering mess of my rig when starting from a clean install so it took about 1 month of trial and error to get the following. I can guarantee you that the settings below probably won't work with other chipsets or NVIDIA cards or lower end ATI cards. With that said, let's get started:

 

1 - Delete your fsx.cfg and start FSX so it builds a new clean one from scratch so we clean out anything else you may have in there. Load up FSX at KSEA with the aircraft of your choice and take note of your current FPS. Then move to step two:

 

2 - Add the following:

 

[bufferPools] <--add this section

UsePools=0

RejectThreshold=262144

 

[Graphics] <--add the following to this section

HIGHMEMFIX=1

ALLOW_SHADER_30=1

 

[Display] <--add the following to this section

TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=120 <---this value gave me a 10FPS jump and eliminated stutters

 

 

[JOBSCHEDULER] <--add this section

AffinityMask=14

 

[scenery]

SmallPartRejectRadius=4.0

 

That's it for fsx.cfg. (I've attached a copy of my fsx.cfg file so you can look at it).

 

Now boot up FSX and change the following:

 

A) Turn Water down to low 2 - using water on high is a MASSIVE frame rate hog when set and this setting gives the right effect for flying at high altitude.

 

B) Turn off Building and Aircraft shadows. If you want to run AI traffic at 100% Airplane shadows rob FPS and are simply unnecessary.

 

C) Move the rest of your scenery sliders to 100% (except water - see "A" above)

 

D) Use anisotropic in FSX to eliminate Blurries, your system can handle it now.

 

Next tweak your Catalyst Control Center Settings

 

A) AA = 4x

B) AF = 16x <--gets rid of your burries

C Tessellation = AMD Optimized

D) Catalyst A.I. = High Quality, check enable surface format optimization

E) Mipmap Detail = High Quality

F) Wait for vertical refresh = On (clears up some stuttering)

G) Anti-Aliasing Mode = Adaptive Multi AA

 

Now...go fly and thou shalt tweak no more!

Hey Mike, one thing that needs to be mentioned, is that not everyone can use the BufferPools tweak without experiencing serious graphical spiking. So

Turn Water down to low 2 - using water on high is a MASSIVE frame rate hog when set and this setting gives the right effect for flying at high altitude. Sure, it is a framerate hog, but if you want to gain from the bufferpools tweak and I mean the added smoothness too, then it is often necessary to run with the high water setting of High x2. As I said, not everyone will experience graphical anomolies with the tweak, but it is essential that anyone experimenting with the tweak is also aware of how to cure any of the downfalls of using it. :smile:

@MikwT.

[bufferPools] <--add this section

UsePools=0

RejectThreshold=262144

 

Using BufferPools=0, Mike, is the same as reducing the RT to zero. Every object gets its own dedicated buffer and there are no shared buffers at all.

RejectThreshold setting is pointless if you have Usepools=0 enabled.

Of course.

Paul, that was a nice way of saying "Dave, you have your numbers screwed up"! Too many zeros. Should have been 1MB was changed to 4MB, for >512MB card.

 

Mike, I like your settings except he has a ATI card. I can't use usepools=0, too much spikes and stutters. I use:

 

[bufferPools]

UsePools=1

PoolSize=8388608 // 4MB Default 4194304

RejectThreshold=524288 //524288, 262144, 126976, 98304

 

Dave

:lol: naaaah - I ain't that subtle, Dave! - and I've messed up a lot worse that that, my friend!

 

Your BP is exactly the same as those which I found to be the best, Dave - though I'm using DX10. Makes a big difference on how much load she'll take.

 

All the Best,

 

peej :drinks:

(lol dont quote me on this but try setting them at 30 and then 20 and tell me if you see a difference)

 

All respect to this post but I can see a massive difference in 20 and 30FPS...

I essentially lock frames, but not with the in game frame lock as I find it will reduce performance further if frames wouldn't be above the locked value. I set unlimited. I also don't use external limiters, as I find I get more stutters. I get the smoothest flight without any performance loss by setting VSYNC at half refresh rate standard mode in Nvidia Inspector. The OP though appears to have an ATI Radeon so I don't know if that would be an option for him.

All respect to this post but I can see a massive difference in 20 and 30FPS...

 

Of course you can Ben. Totally ignore anyone in this thread who tells you you can't. They are sadly misinformed.

 

It is said that 25 frames per second is smooth to the human eye... it is, but only in cinematography!!! This is due to the blurring nature of cinematography.

 

In computer graphics 20 FPS is not smooth.

 

I wouldn't touch the sim if I only achieved 20 frames per second.

 

Flew from Stansted to Geneva yesterday, in the QS Avro. Sim never dropped below 35+ FPS. Now that was smooth all the way. :smile:

 

P.S. I used to be a professional photographer. I know something about this stuff.

I can without any problem differentiate between 30, 60 and 120fps on the 120hz screen and 120hz refresh.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

1) LOCK frames, really do it. Set it to something like 20. Your eye can't realistically see more than that (lol dont quote me on this but try setting them at 30 and then 20 and tell me if you see a difference)

 

60 FPS is perfectly smooth and I prefer that. 30 FPS is so-so, but 20 FPS is terrible. How can you claim that?

 

By the way, am I having a problem with the frame lock or what? I need to set it on unlimited, else I won't get frames high enough. For example, I get 60 FPS with unlimited, 57 FPS with 60 lock and 25 FPS with 30 lock. Is there any way to use the frame lock and consistently achieve that FPS?

Yes - most sliders all the way left OR an 8GHz processor with a GTX980 Extreme.

I can without any problem differentiate between 30, 60 and 120fps on the 120hz screen and 120hz refresh.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Me too!

 

I know some individuals are more sensitive to such things, but I have no idea how anyone can regard 20 FPS as smooth.

 

My ex wife would gladly sit in front of a CRT monitor at 60Hz and not notice the flicker...weird.