Hello guys, Erick here. I just joined the forums, so sorry if my introduction was not the best in the world, heh..

 

I've been reading the forums for a while when looking for tips and tricks on how to make FSX run smoothly.

However there is something that confuses me so far.

I see people talk about getting respectable framerates at low clock speeds from their CPU, usually 2.8, or 3.0GHZ from AMD dual cores.

I also note that FSX is mainly a CPU bound application, and I have read that upgrading a GPU does little to no difference, I find that hard to believe, but then again the people I've seen say that just say ''No, it won't help'' but they really don't give any explanation to why it won't work. I mean, if the game renders, and uses shaders, obviously a GPU upgrade would benefit the frames right?

 

I have a couple of questions I would appreciate if you could answer, or lead me to find the answers for please.

 

- What exactly uses CPU power and GPU in fsx?

 

- My FPS counter shows FSX running 24-47fps, but even so there are occasional jumps while the scenery appears, is this slow rendering from part of the GPU?

 

Sometimes while I run the game, and I move to locked spot, and rotate around the aircraft, I get some image tearing for a second in the form of black vertical lines.

My processor is overclocked from 2.7GHZ stock to 3.2GHZ and could go up to 3.4, however my ''game'' play is still a little jaggy. Specially when in flyby mode and clouds come into play, it drops my fps to 8-14fps

This leads me to believe at least in theory that since most issues seemed to be rendering subjects, my game would benefit highly from a GPU upgrade, but I just want to be extremely sure before I do an investment for a new GPU.

 

My specs are as follow:

*CPU: AMD A6-3670K @ 3.2Ghz

*RAM: 8GB Kingston HyperX Blue 1333mhz

*Motherboard: GA-A75M-S2V

*GPU: Sapphire HD6670 1GB DDR3

 

Thank you for your time, please ask for any information about my system or game configuration if needed.

 

-Erick

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Your CPU is a major bottle neck I know this based off what helped me with frame rates. I have a HP desktop so I have no way to overclock since my mobo won't allow it. so I was stuck at 2.8ghz with an Atholon II X4 (and crappy frames) so I decided to upgrade my CPU to a 3.6 ghz Phenom II x4 Deneb. It really changed things I went from being barly able to run any autogen or fly in clouds ect just like you to being able to run full everything with smooth gameplay aslong as I stayed away from big citys and even then I just have to drop the autogen to normal. I can run MyTraffic 2013,PMDG 737NGX, REX, And ORBX PNW along with a few of their airports with smooth play. Best thing you could do is upgrade you CPU in fact newegg has a 3.7ghz phenom II x4 right now for $139 if your interested. I'm upgrading my video card from a 1GB gts 250 to a GTX 560TI 2GB and I'll let you know once I get it installed if it helps any with my big city frames. Also try lowering you cloud draw distance and turn off light bloom both of these kill frames!

Your CPU is a major bottle neck I know this based off what helped me with frame rates. I have a HP desktop so I have no way to overclock since my mobo won't allow it. so I was stuck at 2.8ghz with an Atholon II X4 (and crappy frames) so I decided to upgrade my CPU to a 3.6 ghz Phenom II x4 Deneb. It really changed things I went from being barly able to run any autogen or fly in clouds ect just like you to being able to run full everything with smooth gameplay aslong as I stayed away from big citys and even then I just have to drop the autogen to normal. I can run MyTraffic 2013,PMDG 737NGX, REX, And ORBX PNW along with a few of their airports with smooth play. Best thing you could do is upgrade you CPU in fact newegg has a 3.7ghz phenom II x4 right now for $139 if your interested. I'm upgrading my video card from a 1GB gts 250 to a GTX 560TI 2GB and I'll let you know once I get it installed if it helps any with my big city frames. Also try lowering you cloud draw distance and turn off light bloom both of these kill frames!

 

You are recommending me to build a new computer because Phenom and Llano are two different sockets. Since FSX is the only simulator and game in my computer that does not run at constant 60fps I really don't see the point in building a new computer just for FSX. I -could- upgrade to an A8 3870K since it is also FM1 socket, and has a base clock of 3.0 Ghz. thuss possibly being able to overclock it up to 3.8 or maybe even 4ghz if temperatures allow it.

 

However, since my current clock speed (3.2ghz) does indeed help my gameplay but does NOT solve skipping when scenery loads I still don't know if most of the jagging is from slow GPU rendering or poor CPU performance. By the way, light bloom is off. The main killer for me is 3D clouds though. Game runs smooth with clouds off.

I have an AMD Phenom Black dual core, 3 years old now, with an HD 5870.

 

I have all sliders maxed except water which was at mid setting, no bloom or flare. You seem to be doing better than me with your 24-47 fps, possibly your better GFX card.

 

May I please suggest:

 

Go here and get your fsx.cfg modified:

 

http://www.venetubo.com/fsx.html

 

Limit your fps to 20 or 30 in-game or use an external frame rate limiter utility (search this forum), and set anti-aliasing on in-game, sedt CCC to 'application controlled.' Don't waste time with trying to set AA using CCC, unless you already are for other games.

 

Don't use high water settings.

 

Then, stop tweaking and worrying and just fly the sim for fun. Get some quality addons and spend the tikme learning to fly the aircraft and admiring the scenery.

 

I've taken FSX off my pc and now fly Prepar3d. And I'm shaping up for a big upgrade, our dual cores have had their day.

 

You m ight like to drop Bojote a small donation for the tuning service... he's done FSX flyers a lot of favours.

 

Best wishes,

I have an AMD Phenom Black dual core, 3 years old now, with an HD 5870.

 

I have all sliders maxed except water which was at mid setting, no bloom or flare. You seem to be doing better than me with your 24-47 fps, possibly your better GFX card.

 

May I please suggest:

 

Go here and get your fsx.cfg modified:

 

http://www.venetubo.com/fsx.html

 

Limit your fps to 20 or 30 in-game or use an external frame rate limiter utility (search this forum), and set anti-aliasing on in-game, sedt CCC to 'application controlled.' Don't waste time with trying to set AA using CCC, unless you already are for other games.

 

Don't use high water settings.

 

Then, stop tweaking and worrying and just fly the sim for fun. Get some quality addons and spend the tikme learning to fly the aircraft and admiring the scenery.

 

I've taken FSX off my pc and now fly Prepar3d. And I'm shaping up for a big upgrade, our dual cores have had their day.

 

You m ight like to drop Bojote a small donation for the tuning service... he's done FSX flyers a lot of favours.

 

Best wishes,

 

Hi thank you for your reply.

 

A couple of hours ago I found by surprise that having my FPS set to unlimited per someone elses recommendation was causing a lot of my lack of fps, but as soon as I set it to 30 it went incredibly smooth. Even with clouds on.

However, the image tearing, and some jerkiness while scenery loads is still present.

Ah, good about the limiter. 'Tearing' is lack of vsync, which if you have done the Bojote tweaks will be cured unless you are running in DX10 preview mode (with Acceleration or SP2 installed). Go back to DX9 and you should find the tearing goes, so that you can pan your vew without that.

 

The jerkiness whilst scenery loads, do you mean the sim hesitates as new auto gen scenery is drawn?

 

I imagine but am no authority, that is a factor of our weak CPU not upto the task of feeding the GPU.

 

I may be talking through my hat here, and I hope someone with better understanding than me will step in here and educate us, but In your fsx.cfg there should be an entry...

 

FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION=0.23

 

Your value might be 0.33 or similar. values between 0.1 and 0.33 are available, the lower the value the faster things go, but the GPU can't keep up and the scenery looks blurred. I found that value just gives me crisp smooth rendering and max fps.

 

FSX is ever so slightly flawed, and only now are i5/i7 users with GTX580/660ti/680s finding nirvana at 30 fps.

Best wishes

Really, I personally advocate reading all about both Word Not Allowed's and *******'s tweaks, and then run your config file through the tuning service, but then just try one tweak at a time. Some may make very little difference to your system, while others such as the FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION tweak may simply be a godsend.

 

For testing, set yourself up a short autopilot flight over somewhere like KSEA, pause it and save it as the default flight. You'll find that as you tweak and tune, that having an identical, predictable flight to gauge both framerates and stutters by is absolutely essential. I recently did a reinstall of FSX, and spent a considerable amount of time applying one tweak at a time until I found a combination that worked best for me. I was then able to accurately judge the impact of every addon installed, along with most of my addon planes.

 

Also, more recent advice here tends to be towards a minimum tweaking philiosophy. But take into consideration that many hardcore simmers on here have built themselves dedicated FSX machines, highly overclocked, with the hardware (Intel & Nvidia) that is known to work best with FSX. My machine is slightly better than yours, but having a straight AMD box, I am all too familiar with being able to get top notch performance in other games & then getting surprised by lackluster out of the box performance in FSX. I now get acceptable performance, but it did require extensive tweaking and testing to see what worked for my pc, and it still does mean making sacrifices in dense areas with both autogen and traffic density.

 

One last suggestion - the shader 3 fix by ******* worked wonders for my AMD gpu, and allows me to run in very heavy weather with very little of a framerate hit.

AMD will do fine for FSX it may not give you max setting for FPS in massive amounts, and I have FX 6100 3.3 clock and OC to 3.8 with AMD HD 7750 graphic card in 3d it does fine. Got UTX and Carendo planes looking pretty for most part. Intel does have better chips no question hands down, but AMD is sufficent to use with FSX and keep tweaking to a minimum when you start deal with FSX. The things is I agree not worth buying a super computer just to run fsx. The best to get most of FSX and Xplane just to have desktop dedicated to that purpose but I know its impratical for most and understand why.

 

*GPU: Sapphire HD6670 1GB DDR3

 

Have his card in old qaud pretty good low end card

Ah, good about the limiter. 'Tearing' is lack of vsync, which if you have done the Bojote tweaks will be cured unless you are running in DX10 preview mode (with Acceleration or SP2 installed). Go back to DX9 and you should find the tearing goes, so that you can pan your vew without that.

 

The jerkiness whilst scenery loads, do you mean the sim hesitates as new auto gen scenery is drawn?

 

I imagine but am no authority, that is a factor of our weak CPU not upto the task of feeding the GPU.

 

I may be talking through my hat here, and I hope someone with better understanding than me will step in here and educate us, but In your fsx.cfg there should be an entry...

 

FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION=0.23

 

Your value might be 0.33 or similar. values between 0.1 and 0.33 are available, the lower the value the faster things go, but the GPU can't keep up and the scenery looks blurred. I found that value just gives me crisp smooth rendering and max fps.

 

FSX is ever so slightly flawed, and only now are i5/i7 users with GTX580/660ti/680s finding nirvana at 30 fps.

Best wishes

Oddly enough my Vsync is on in CCC, and the fsx.cfg has no line that allows me to edit any sort of vsync rate.

And the config is also void of the Fiber Frame line, my cfg has been edited by bojotes modified for weeks, but his settings were giving me too much lag so I don't know if it was removed?

Really, I personally advocate reading all about both Word Not Allowed's and *******'s tweaks, and then run your config file through the tuning service, but then just try one tweak at a time. Some may make very little difference to your system, while others such as the FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION tweak may simply be a godsend.

 

For testing, set yourself up a short autopilot flight over somewhere like KSEA, pause it and save it as the default flight. You'll find that as you tweak and tune, that having an identical, predictable flight to gauge both framerates and stutters by is absolutely essential. I recently did a reinstall of FSX, and spent a considerable amount of time applying one tweak at a time until I found a combination that worked best for me. I was then able to accurately judge the impact of every addon installed, along with most of my addon planes.

 

Also, more recent advice here tends to be towards a minimum tweaking philiosophy. But take into consideration that many hardcore simmers on here have built themselves dedicated FSX machines, highly overclocked, with the hardware (Intel & Nvidia) that is known to work best with FSX. My machine is slightly better than yours, but having a straight AMD box, I am all too familiar with being able to get top notch performance in other games & then getting surprised by lackluster out of the box performance in FSX. I now get acceptable performance, but it did require extensive tweaking and testing to see what worked for my pc, and it still does mean making sacrifices in dense areas with both autogen and traffic density.

 

One last suggestion - the shader 3 fix by ******* worked wonders for my AMD gpu, and allows me to run in very heavy weather with very little of a framerate hit.

 

I read Kostas guide, but it makes no sense to me, more than 90% of his tweaked parameters are not in my cfg file, do I have no manually add them? He only says so for vsync, I am a little confused here.

Go here and get your fsx.cfg modified:

 

http://www.venetubo.com/fsx.html

 

This should have put:

 

ForceFullScreenVSync=1

ForceWindowedVSync=1

 

under the [GRAPHICS] section...

 

...and also:

 

[bufferPools]

UsePools=1

RejectThreshold=131072

 

Try Usepools=0 as well

 

You have used the Bojote service haven't you?

 

Best wishes,

Go here and get your fsx.cfg modified:

 

http://www.venetubo.com/fsx.html

 

This should have put:

 

ForceFullScreenVSync=1

ForceWindowedVSync=1

 

under the [GRAPHICS] section...

 

...and also:

 

[bufferPools]

UsePools=1

RejectThreshold=131072

 

Try Usepools=0 as well

 

You have used the Bojote service haven't you?

 

Best wishes,

 

I have, but in all honesty it was terrible.It made more harm, and it never included those lines whatsoever.

Is your mobo not am2+ or am3? Socket because a am3 processor will work on a am2+ mobo

fsx.cfg goes in:

 

users/appdata/roaming/microsoft games/fsx

 

NOT your main game folder.

 

I know you've asked about hardware and got shunted in here, but I think that's a shame because your actual concern is about fsx performance not about hardware, which you seem to understand as well as most around here.

 

Best wishes.