Please help! the final straw

[Guest Raul_Hernandez]

Yes. Then try 1 tweak at a time from there.

 

The only one single tweak that all FSX users should make to their fsx.cfg is the [HighMemFix] tweak.... (not required for P3D).

 

Good luck!

[simmerhead 885]

Would you suggest deleting the cfg and making FSX build a fresh one?

 

Just rename the current one and launch FSX. Then you have a backup of the one you're using now.

 

The only tweak I'd add is HIGHMEMFIX=1 under [GRAPHICS] in the new fsx.cfg. Also if you use a widescreen monitor set WideViewAspect=True. Once you are up and running you could try some if the tweaks offered by Word Not Allowed and/or NickN if you feel adventurous.

 

http://www.simforums.com/forums/different-scenarios-different-settings-thats-how_topic41798_page3.html (third post from the top)

 

http://#####.wordpress.com/fsx-software-and-hardware-guide/

 

 

[stretch1365 40]

Hi all,

 

Well if my experience helps any, I'm glad to help.

 

I have FSX running with GEX, UTX, REXEssentials, UK2000 and TrackIR too, quite a handful for the most powerful colossus PC. Having said that, I get fps of around middle to high teens on the ground with PMDG's 737NGX, which I think of as the most detailed add on out there, and will surely sap your computers power. At altitude I'am getting high twenties to thirties fps with the same aircraft and that's running two monitors!!!

 

What am I running all this on, well before you laugh out loud just an average intel i3 with a radeon 5770 graphics card off the top of my head!.............I had my PC built by my local computer shop about 3 years ago so it isn't new and surely obsolete by now. It isn't overclocked, cooked, baked or watercooled as many seem to be but it works and well, and I think pretty good too.

 

I tried tweaking things once, Bojotes tweaking tool, well it caused more trouble than it was worth, lasted 5 mins before being resigned to the recycle bin. Jim (FireHawk44) has helped me in the past with stuff, he knows his stuff too, and others on here too. Thing is I have spent years now using fsx and it has always run great.

 

What would my suggestions be.

 

Get FSX working properly first. Windows 7 64 bit I think you said you were running, well don't install fsx in the program files, install it directly on the "C" drive, there are too many windows protection systems in the program files, messes the installation up when you add your addons. get the basics working before you install all the nice shiny addons.

 

Don't spend lots of time trying to get your fps to the highest possible, I have seen 50-60fps on youtube clips of fsx. The recommended setting of "Unlimited fps" is good advice, but a tip. In film making, a film runs at no more than about 21fps because the human eye will see that as a continuous moving image, less and you get a bit of flicker or stutter, more and you won't notice the difference, because the brain can't process the images any faster!

 

A good article appeared in PC Pilot a while back by Mathijs Kok from Aerosoft about settings for fsx, I followed these and got some good results. He was saying set traffic to no more than 20-30% for all aircraft and boats and cars, etc..................If your interested I could try and get you a copy. The main thing as well, don't expect too much and be realistic about what you can expect from fsx too.

 

AI traffic is another killer to your fps, maybe forgo lots of busy airport traffic at Heathrow and fly out of Birmingham instead with just the default traffic. If you want alot of addon airport scenery then try and addon smaller regional airports, makes your PC's work easier too.

 

I briefly mentioned this above, but seriously don't dive headfirst into making lots of tweaks to cfg files unless you know what your doing. Ok fsx will rewrite them if you mess it up, so they say, but it's not going to get fsx working a lot better, I think my only tweaks have been the "memofix" one mentioned above and "graphics texture set to 4096" which gives you high def textures and "wideangle_true" for my monitor...........the rest is bog standard as microsoft intended! I'am no expert to file tweaking so I leave well alone. I can add freeware aircraft and repaints to aircraft that kind of thing, but otherwise I don't tweak.

 

Ok well that's alot more than I was intending to write, I hope you get your fsx working properly, as it really is an amazing past time once it's up and running. If you want any more info I will do my best to help with my limited experience.

 

In the mean time, happy flying.

[IAF747 8]

I get stutters since I bought and installed US Cities Chicago and Los Angeles. They are awesome sceneries and you can see why. As I also have FSDREAMTREAM's KORD, it stutters when it decides to load the entire airport at a set distance from the airport, rather than loading parts of it. I could be wrong but that is my thesis.

[FlyData 8]

i also suggest starting with a clean .cfg file and following Word Not Allowed's tweaks.

 

For example, you have poolsize=0 and usepools=0 with a reject threshold. These setting are redundant and non-complimentary. Just use the Usepools=0 in the Bufferpools section. You don't need the "forcevsync" seetings in the .cfg. Go to Nvidia inspector and set vsync to 1/2 refresh rate ("standard " mode) and limit FPS in FSX to 30 (which looks like what you have in your .cfg). Also, pre-rendered frames in inspector should be 3, not 0 (at least that works for me and what is in the guide). Affinity mask in .cfg should be 14 if hyperthreading is turned off. 84 is OK if HT is on. The smallpartrejectradius and allowshader_30 settings are leftovers from bojote tweaks. You shouldn't need them (especially the shader_30, which is primarily for ATI cards).

 

Good luck!

 

--Don

[Robert McDonald 167]

I have one thing to suggest: do not have your scenery cache flush itself after every flight, because over time if you fly the same areas, I believe the scenery 'builds' and thus renders more quickly because it becomes more and more cached due to repetitive flights in the same airspace. Mind you this is only a guess, non-scientific, not-verified, and no warranty! I also cut autos and boats to nil, and limit the Ai artificial aircraft as well.

 

You need to remember the more you ask your system to do all at the same time, the more likely it is you will encounter frames hits!

 

Dense scenery areas (example LOS ANGELES) plus add-on airports, high-eye candy planes (example PMDG 737NGX), texture upgrades (GEX, UTX) and then toss in the weather monster (REX Essential Plus) and maybe three or four pieces of flight control hardware (with their drivers), and then try 3 monitors... well, you see what's happening here! The lowly quad-core trying to muscle its way through all of that high-end graphics, flight dynamics, and monster screen activity... it's incredible it even runs AT ALL, much less the stutters and bumps and jumps we've all come to experience with FSX and/or P3D.

 

Part of this is simply that FSX itself is 32-bit ancient code not optimized for today's high end Graphics cards and multi-core processors.

 

The 'tweaks' you read about are more or less trial-and-error configuration alterations made by people much like you, trying to squeeze the best possible performance out of there system.

 

YouTube videos themselves are highly suspect. It's not hard for a skilled editor to 'chop out' the odd system freezes or stutters, or to film at 1/2 of real speed and then speed up in post-edit. All sorts of manipulation is possible with the higher end video editing software that's out there.

 

So it's really hard to judge whether your system is "all it can be" or if it needs additional work. Most of us remember the day we first installed Windows 7 (or 8) on a new PC, before we piled on all the garbage... how FAST and SMOOTH it was!

 

FSX 'bare bones' (same with P3D) looks and runs pretty darned smooth with the default aircraft and NO add ons of any kind.

 

Then, like the guy building a skyscraper with playing cards, things rapidly deteriorate as you pop more and more accessories onto the flight deck.

 

While most of us spend a LOT of time wishing for the "next version" of FSX (we had such high hopes for "FLIGHT"), the task of creating the entire world in photo-realistic extremely high-resolution graphics and have that world be able to rotate on all axis' with no distortion, lag, shudder or other issue is a MONUMENTALLY complicated and difficult task, far outside the ken of mere mortal Flight Sim enthusiasts' skill sets and/or budgets! The "developer" of the Next Generation platform for flight simulation that offers the greatest hope (in my view) is XPlane10 - even though they are way behind FSX at present... XP10 has a 64-bit version already in BETA, and that's the FUTURE. When you're talking 64-bit (or 128 bit) you are opening up a much faster throughput channel, and able to use stunning amounts of system ram to hold all that graphical content.

 

My 'dream' simulation would be as realistic as looking out the window of a real commercial airliner, and seeing the ground personell as real people, not animated stick figures. The passengers would be film clips of REAL PEOPLE, not animated cartoons. The scenery would be impossible to tell apart from videos shot by people with high-end camcorders out of their passenger window... that's my dream. At 63 years old, NOT LIKELY in THIS pilot's lifetime, but possibly one of our younger members will live to fly at that level.

 

When REAL WORLD simulators cost $23 Million USD, our expectation of our little Intel or AMD boxes needs to ratchet down several notches. What I wouldn't give to fly in Quantas' training simulator, even for 30 minutes! WOW. That'd be really something, and whilst I'm wishing, I'd wish for the B787 Dreamliner full-motion simulator.

 

Plan B: I would wish to be a cameraman for JustPlanes. That's the REAL DEAL!

[LHookins 3,115]

It's not hard for a skilled editor to 'chop out' the odd system freezes or stutters, or to film at 1/2 of real speed and then speed up in post-edit. All sorts of manipulation is possible with the higher end video editing software that's out there.

 

Ohhhhhh... the video equivalent of producing artwork at twice normal size then reducing it to hide imperfections. I hadn't thought of that, but it's a great idea.

 

Hook

 

... who used to be a draftsman in the ink-on-vellum days.

[RCITGuy 35]

well don't install fsx in the program files, install it directly on the "C" drive, there are too many windows protection systems in the program files, messes the installation up when you add your addons. get the basics working before you install all the nice shiny addons.

 

Hey Dave...

 

Just read your post and wanted to say that in all my findings, this is totally not needed, and nothing to worry about.

So far I've now built 2 x Win7 x64 FSX rigs, loads of add-ons on both, and installing everything to the default locations has had zero impact at all.

 

Sadly, I've re-installed them 3 or 4 times now too due to varying hardware changes and general messing about experimenting (Nothing FSX related) and every time, everything just works fine, no problems at all using all the default install paths.

 

Just wanted to let you know, in case it helps...

[stretch1365 40]

Hi RCITGuy,

 

Yeah your right, when I installed FSX last time, when I changed Windows7 to 64bit I had alot of issues trying to install GEX afterwards. mmmmm "Kept coming up with unable to find path to FSX" off the top of my head. Anyway someone suggested installing FSX directly on the C Drive and I did that, but then realised the problems were caused by not installing SP1 and SP2 correctly, hahaha forgot to restart the PC after installing each service pack lol.

 

Thing is I left FSX on the C drive and all works and I haven't had any problems, so just left it there!

[ryanbatc 13,058]

Just rename the current one and launch FSX. Then you have a backup of the one you're using now.

 

The only tweak I'd add is HIGHMEMFIX=1 under [GRAPHICS] in the new fsx.cfg. Also if you use a widescreen monitor set WideViewAspect=True. Once you are up and running you could try some if the tweaks offered by Word Not Allowed and/or NickN if you feel adventurous.

 

http://www.simforums...1798_page3.html (third post from the top)

 

http://#####...hardware-guide/

 

Excellent post! The fewer tweaks the better (initially). This is exactly what I would do.

[stretch1365 40]

Hi JonnyGR4,

 

So everybody has been throwing their own pennies worth into the pot. I'm wondering how your getting on now?

 

I was just looking through your fsx cfg file you posted on here, well above lol and I noticed a couple of things that are recommended tweaks.

 

I see you have the "HIGHMEMFIX=1" in the cfg file that's always recommended.

 

I also noticed you have "TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD=1024" if you want to see high resolution textures in your fsx you should have this set to "TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD=4096" I notice from your cfg file you have PMDG 737NGX installed, if you look at the introduction manual that came with it there are a list of recommended settings for fsx...........One being this change I have just mentioned. Also I know you said you had REX installed, well you won't see those lovely high resolution clouds unless you change this. You have to watch this change though, because I have found that periodically fsx changes it back to 1024 without telling you, I think it's when you make major changes!!

 

I see as well you have "UPPER_FRAMERATE_LIMIT=30" you should have the frame rate limit set to "UNLIMITED" you can do this in your fsx set up screen as I am not 100% sure this is the same line in the cfg file. I'm not sure why this works as it does, but my fsx improved no end when I changed this. You would think having frame rates set to unlimited would make your pc divert all it's resources to drawing lots of fps instead of flying the plane, but it doesn't seem to! I think having it set to 30fps the pc works harder governing exactly 30fps instead of fluctuating as and when it has spare processing power.

 

Also I see you have "WIDEVIEWASPECT=FALSE" if your using a wide screen monitor you really ought to have this set to "WIDEVIEWASPECT=TRUE" changing this stops all your cockpit views and gauges from becoming slightly oval shaped or looking squashed as fsx tries to fill the wider screen with what would normally be seen in a normal ratio monitor (4:3) I think.

 

Lastly I noticed "WATER_EFFECTS=6" mmmmm well I have never had this set any higher than 2 sometimes even 1, there isn't much point going as high as 6, I would have thought, it makes your pc work far harder drawing all those nice waves which you can't see at 30,000ft............I guess it depends on what kind of flying you like to do?

 

One other thing I just thought of, regarding your stuttering pictures. Is this something which happens all the time or just every few minutes? REX when it downloads the current weather during a flight makes the picture stutter a bit on my pc too, but only during the weather download process..............Alternatively if it's doing it all the time I had similar when I tried DX10 which didn't work at all on my PC. I also had similar happenings when I played around with the filtering in the settings page and whether or not you have "Anti-Aliasing" set in fsx or set in your graphics card setup..............Just simple settings can make all the difference and you just have to try each thing until you find what works best for your system.

 

Well I hope these tweaks help someway. I'am not a computer whizz, so forgive some of my technical terms and phrases, which some here list, but I just know what works for me and if I can pass on anything to you which helps then I am only too happy to help.

 

Let me know how you get on,

 

Happy flying,