My observation is that if you tracked the expertise and experience of members concerning techniques and knowledge to squeeze every frame per second possible out of FSX you would end up with 5% of members at the very top of testing and knowledge 5% at the bottom of cluelessness and not caring and 90% of us in the middle who "kind of" know what's going on, get bleary eyed reading conflicting observations, look up acronyms that fly around back and forth between the top 5% that only they understand and sit and watch our screens wishing we could have just 5 more frames per second so that Airbus on the take off roll we're watching from the cockpit doesn't look like one of those cycling animated neon signs above a restaurant with only 4 different positions.

 

I call this 90% in the middle the "Just know enough to be dangerous" club, and I have been a life member for a LONG time The primary traits of this, my kindred group are thus:

 

1) I don't really care what its called or what it does, I just want +3 Frames per second out of it.

2) I don't want to scour 17 different websites to gather 5 sub 5k programs that guarantee great results. I just want a setting in the FSX.cfg file that I can type in one line and is set to either 1 or 0 that gives me +3 frames per second

3) I don't want to hear the words "It depends" or "Experiement with different numbers between 1 and 5,000,000" or "requires a good balance" I just want +3 Frames per second

4) I don't want to spend any money I just want free +3 Frames per second

5) I don't want to see any sentence talking about +3 frames per second that has the word "but" in it

6) I don't want to read the phrase "FS9 forever!"

7) I don't want to read a doctoral dissertation, only the realize there is only one line I needed to read to get +3 Frames per second

 

Of course, there is a large element of tongue-in-cheek about this post, but I think many of us (maybe even 90% ) can find some personal truth in some part of the message contained therein. It's important to understand on some level what the adjustments you are making in FSX.cfg really do or how they interact with other things, and even what they are properly called, but it is also a truth, self evident by the number of posts and their content on this website that FSX Flight sim people are a bit like Harley Davidson riders; 10 hours of cleaning and modifying, to 1 hour of riding

 

In answer to all of the above numbered list, I offer humbly the "stuff" below for the unwashed masses. This assumes that just about everyone here (It's a prerequisite to even being included in the 90% unwashed mass) has knowledge of the absolute basic POSITIVE changes to the FSX.cfg file, a skill that comes only slightly after even being able to consistently FIND the FSX.cfg file. Things like "himem=1" etc etc that you get reading the FAQ things on FSX performance.

 

I will keep this list down to 3 things that in my PERSONAL experience (is there really any other kind?) have helped me get those extra 3 frames per second (and more)

 

1) Turn OFF SLI/Crossfire

I use a i7-980x 6 core processor with two GTX 590 video cards (each of those is 2 GTX580 processors) so in some definition, I have a quad GTX580 video system. I run 2 monitors each at 2560x1440 resolution with FSX at the highest level of antialiasing (set from inside FSX menus). I've tried this at 12 different airports that I fly (each with custom scenery aerosoft/fsdreamteam/flightbeam) in every case wether sitting at the ramp, taxiing, flying over, etc etc. I get a 15-20% increase in frame rate with Crossfire OFF than with it ON. Is this an absolute scientific certainty backed up with tons of data? No, I just watch the little red number in the upper right corner when you hit shift-z two times. It's higher when Crossfire is OFF, always. What is FRAPS anyway? Isn't that a drink at Starbucks?

 

2) Use Affinity mask! and screw Hyperthreading!

I repeat, USE AFFINITY MASK and turn off hyperthreading. Oh, there are about 129 threads about how to set your multicore CPU to run specific processes on specific internal processors, and many of these include how its so easy to determine using Integral calculus that simply entering Affinity_mask = 27381273282423400293942834 will keep FSX running only on core 2 and 4. I don't know about you, but translating hexicode and then interpreting the numbers backwards makes me want to scratch my eyes out. Use the caveman method, while FSX is running in windowed mode, hit ctrl-alt-del, start the task manager and then look at "processes" It's easy to see what's what... Right click on the FSX process first and set that to run on every processor except 0 (the first one)

 

Then if you're like me and you have processes for Active sky, Delta Virtual Airlines ACARS, Couatl (Why did they name it THAT?!), EZDok etc etc, set all of those OTHER processes to CPU 0 (the first one)

 

So what you have is FSX running on all other processors EXCEPT 0, and every other FSX related process running on CPU 0. This gives me a small boost to frame rate, but primarily what it does is greatly reduce those interminable stutters and hesitations in animation because CPU 0 is the default where windows does its systems "things". So avoid using that CPU with FSX processes like a Japanese person wearing shoes in the house.

 

hyperthreading: just turn it off. using affinity mask above makes OFF even more justified the long answer is 30 pages long and includes a lot of "but" and "depend" words. The short answer is "It helps"

 

3) Just stick with DX9

LOTS of controversy here, but even though DX10 looks a LITTLE nicer and in some cases will run with a higher frame rate with the sliders pushed up a "bit" over DX9, do you really want to spend 25 hours tweaking (and cursing) vs 25 hours of flying somewhere? ANYWHERE?! If you REALLY want things to look a little nicer, do the above two things and buy REX or AS2012 for environments and weather. I know I know, I said not to spend money, but in actuality, just dumbing down and doing 1 and 2 and buying something like REX SAVES you money! unless you think 20 hours of your time is worth nothing.

 

As an addition, not really a bullet point number, I avoid using things like NVidia inspector and other equivalent ATI offerings to make base level changes to the video card settings. I went down that road and learned a LOT, but what it gave me in terms of FSX performance vs just using affinity mask and turning off Crossfire was essentially, negligible... It's fun to learn new things about hardware; It's funner to fly.

 

In short what does all of this mean? Well, for me, it's the culmination of a lot of hours spent tweaking, understanding, cursing, buying, saying "#####?!" and drinking lots of soda late at night only to realize in the end that doing two things gave me 95% of my performance increase, and all the esoteric, super whizbang configuration settings that make you the biggest computer nerd in a 12 block radius from your home (unless you live near an elementary school) weren't worth the trouble unless you really ARE a computer freak.

 

This is all meant in a non insulting, gender neutral way, and non judgemental way.

 

Oh! Look at that! My IRS just aligned! (I have it set to realistic alignment, 30 minutes)

 

See you in the air!

On the other hand Word Not Allowed, it could just be 1 or 2 poorly coded gauges that are putting FSX into a tight loop. You can find the offending gauge by commenting them out of the panel.cfg.

 

Cheers

jja

 

Good luck with that

 

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

 

LOL it was a joke!

 

Cheers

jja

On the other hand Word Not Allowed, it could just be 1 or 2 poorly coded gauges that are putting FSX into a tight loop. You can find the offending gauge by commenting them out of the panel.cfg.

 

Cheers

jja

 

LOL it was a joke!

 

Cheers

jja

 

LOL I know bud

 

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

 

 

Another thing Word Not Allowed - in your SLI testing did you find that it is better to run unlimited? It seems that my SLI setup likes that better than limited to 30fps.

 

Cheers

jja

Strangely, despite what is being said here, I actually *do* get a noticeable boost with SLI on a plane like the NGX. So though I didn't claim that SLI gives a boost universally in *every* circumstance, there are no circumstances that I have personally encountered where I wasn't seeing a benefit, all settings and situations being equal. I'm also running older Nvidia drivers too. In my experience, using drivers past past 2.6something appear to require larger transparency AA to avoid shimmering, and that really degrades my performance, so I've been forced to stick with the older ones until such time as I can upgrade cards.(which sucks for other games/sims like DCS).

 

What SLI is that exactly and what driver version are you running please KG?

Word Not Allowed - just a followup - in DX10 mode the VC FPS are 2-3x higher under SLI.

 

Cheers

jja

I also have an SLI rig. Two lesser cards (GTX 460). I am willing to test provided I understand the instructions. Word Not Allowed, please let me know if I can try any tests to help us understand how FSX and SLI behave together. Yes CPU is slower (3.0 GHZ) but I have 8 cores and a MOBO made for this stuff.

To put things in perspective

 

FSX, SLI, Antialiasing, DX9 and virtual cockpits

SLI Test Results

Word Not Allowed - my gpus are locked at about 33% usage at a 30fps lock. An unlimited test shows that cpu usage is at 50% which makes me happier for some reason.

 

Cheers

jja