Hi All,

 

Just finished building a new PC for FSX and i'm testing the frames to see if the new hardware is any good, but i'm not sure if i'm getting all i can out of my new system. I currently get between 15-35fps at Dubai (OMDB) with the new Dubai Rebooted from FlyTampa and Airbus X Extended (in detail: 21 on takeoff, 15 past the terminal with traffic, 32 above Dubai city). Do you think this is as good as I will get or is my rig capable of getting much higher fps with more tweaking?

 

Additional info:

 

 

Hardware:

i7 3770K @ 4.5GHz (HT off)

Asus P8-Z77LX

NGTX 560 ti Twin Frozr II OC (latest driver)

8GB Corsair Vengeance Ram 1600MHz

Corsair H100 Cooling (Processor kept below 60c running fsx)

Samsung 500gb 7200rpm HDD (OS)

Samsung 1TB 5600rpm HDD (storage)

Intel 530 series 180GB 6GB/s (FSX only drive)

Corsair 700W PSU

Thermaltake Spedo Case

Asus VE278 27" 1920x1080 Monitor

Saitek Cyborg Evo

Turtle Beach X12 headphones

 

Software/Addons:

FSX SP2

Dubai Rebooted v2.1

Airbus X Extended v1.03

Ultimate Traffic 2 @ 50%

Contrails Pro

REX OD+

ENB Series

EZDok camera

Accu-Feel

Mogwaisoft Shade

 

I have also tweaked the fsx.cfg, fsx display settings, and NV Inspector to the same as in Word Not Allowed's Guide. The only thing i changed was setting the frame limiter to unlimited in fsx as i noticed a slight improvement when doing this.

 

Please tell me if i can do anything else to get better results or if i should be happy with the setup i have achieved.

 

Many thanks,

James

I would like for you to try 3 other areas and report back. KJFK flying over New York. KLAX flying over Los Angles. and KSEA over Seatle. Write down each FPS you experience, then post them indiviually for each area, then ADD ALL 3 TOGETHER and Divide by 3.-- this is will be your baseline average.

 

 

I will suspect that with some extra tweaking, maybe some lowering of your scenery sliders, that you could easily get your FPS up to the steady at 20-40 range instead of 15-30. So far your FPS is perfectly fine.

The only thing i changed was setting the frame limiter to unlimited in fsx as i noticed a slight improvement when doing this.

 

It's not reccomended setting the limiter to unlimited, sooner or later you will start experiencing blurries and get slow texture loading....

I would like for you to try 3 other areas and report back. KJFK flying over New York. KLAX flying over Los Angles. and KSEA over Seatle.

 

Ok will do this, does it matter which aircraft i do it it? is default cessna ok?

 

it might also be worth mentioning that i flew the dubai scenery with clear skies.

default cessna is fine. do keep in mind that certain payware aircraft if you fly them WILL affect your FPS and WILL make it drop due to higher resolution textures (the more polygons in the texture, the lower the frames are going to be) so... even with an extra tweaking or 2... you might see a reduced FPS down to around 10-15 even if your default Cessna is up around 20-40.

Just did a quick test with the default cessna. In the virtual cockpit i get an average of the following frames at each airport/city with clear skies and 50% traffic:

 

KJFK & NY - 27.5

KLAX & LA - 33.8

KSEA & Seattle - 41.4

 

Overall base average = 34.2

 

I also saw some strange "spiking" scenery... trees spiking upwards especially when taking off and looking around in the VC. I didnt notice this happening at the Dubai scenery... (could be bufferpools tweak?)

 

pics of the display settings:

 

GRAPHICS:

AIRCRAFT:

 

SCENERY:

WEATHER:

TRAFFIC:

 

NV INSPECTOR SETTINGS:

 

FSX.CFG TWEAKS:

 

[JOBSCHEDULER]

AffinityMask=14

 

[bUFFERPOOLS]

Usepools=0

 

[GRAPHICS]

HIGHMEMFIX=1

 

[DISPLAY]

 

TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=40

UPPER_FRAMERATE_LIMIT=0

WideViewAspect=True

 

[Main]

FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION=0.2

Just did a test flight from Athens to Dubai. frames are good but still having issues with scenery spikes and strange blocky/stripey ground scenery. I took this screenshot from the VC which shows the scenery problems:

 

 

Anyone know what could be causing this?

here is just a suggestion of mine (my specs are to the left under MY PC). these are only a suggestion that with your rig should have you hugging the 40fps mark all the time.

 

don't touch your FSX.CFG after you apply this test set of Settings.

 

Graphics: Target framerate = 40

Bilinear Filtering

 

aircraft: Turn on Aircraft casts shadow on ground

 

scenery: mesh complexity = 75

Texture resolution = 1/2 way

Water effects = Low 2.x

Scenery Complexity = Extremely Dense

Autogen = Normal

 

Weather: Cloud Draw Distance = 60 miles

Cloud coverage density = Medium

 

Traffic: (mainly up to you) but Put a checkmark by Tail number, so that you can see

the tail numbers for the craft around you.

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried changing the settings but there wasn't much change. The frame rates i'm quite happy with - i'm getting between 15 and 35. I think the main problem atm is the ground textures take ages to load up. I'm quite dissapointed because I bought a 6GB/s SSD drive for FSX in the hope that the textures would load up quicker, but so far they load up slower than my old PC where i had a basic 5400RPM HDD!

You'd be surprised what a heavy load traffic can put on everything; I dial mine way down and it helps, a lot. I also use traffic settings when I'm using default FSX ATC to set the rate at which I get interrupted during ai comms dialogues, the lower the air traffic, the less you have to wait to reply to the FSX ATC system messages.

I was gonna say add UsePools=0 under BUFFERPOOLS, because this usually increases frames massively, but that's not the problem. As your FSX.CFG seems OK, try the following settings;=:

 

1. Disable light bloom if not already disabled.

2. Put water on HIGH 2x

3. Max out all scenery sliders but disable "Ground scenery shadows"

4. Disable all aircraft shadows

5. Disable boat traffic (usually causes big drops even when not around water and boats)

6. Disable all road traffic

7. Disable all AI traffic in UT2. Usually UT2 causes the FPS to be cut in half, so I suspect this to be the culprit.

8. Disable shade and ENB.

 

With your system in a heavy airplane like the PMDG 737NGX or Aerosoft Airbus X, you should at least be looking at 40-50 FPS on the default airports, even as big as KLAX or KJFK, and at least 30 FPS on nearly all Aerosoft Mega Airports. In the default Cessna, FPS should be at least 60 and mostly above 100.

To achieve 100% smoothness, try Word Not Allowed's VSync tweak, but it'll only work if you can achieve 30 FPS in nearly all occasions.

 

I just saw that picture, something is seriously wrong. I doubt this is a software problem now. Something in your PC might not be installed correct, some pin bend on the socket, video card not attached properly, defect motherboard. Considering low FPS is not your only problem becuase you're also getting slow texture loeading and scenery spikes, I think something in your PC is defect. First you should be looking at at least double, maybe triple FPS, your texture loading should of course be way faster than on your old PC, and those scenery spikes are beyond something I've ever seen. I only see some flashes or spikes close to the ground in default planes, but up high in the air, no, ever seen anything like that.

That scenery error in the picture doesn't happen anywhere else - only around Dubai. Apparently it has some conflict with Orbx England which I also have installed, but there isn't a fix AFAIK. Also the spiking was due to water not set on high x2 with the bufferpools tweak, so i've corrected that. I just ran some more tests, turned off the traffic but makes only about 5fps difference so i'm not that bothered because traffic is a must have. I feel like I've tried every trick in the book when it comes to tweaking with the fsx.cfg file and nvidia inspector, and I believe that my hardware is more than capable of running fsx with reasonably high sliders. But perhaps my overclocking is not right or something isn't right with the hardware as you say. I'm a bit of a noob when it comes to overclocking so maybe someone with more knowledge could point out if my voltage is too high or something??

 

 

I ran a cpu stress test with Intel Burn Test and was stable on standard for 10 tests. Also the cpu temps didnt go above 60c during a test flight.

do you think my graphics card is good enough?

 

My current FPS scores while taking off in Airbus X, with 50% UT2 traffic, ENB & Shade, EZdok:

Orbx England & UK2000 Manchester Xtreme (18FPS)

Orbx England & UK2000 Bristol Xtreme (24FPS)

NL2000 & AS Schiphol X (14FPS)

FlyTampa Dubai Rebooted (17 FPS)