Something is sucking the life (FPS) out of FSX

[mwilk 1,106]

For about the last month or so, I've been having problems with lower than usual framerates in FSX. It was especially bad at UK2000 London Heathrow where my frame rates went into the lower teen or single digits. In an act of desperation I uninstalled all of my addons and FSX, reformatted my hard drive and reinstalled FSX, UTX, GEX and FS Genesis mesh along with My Traffic X and UK2000 Heathrow. I fired it up but got the same result. I used the Aerosoft Airbus as my test plane. On runway 9R with 30% AI, I was getting around 12-13 FPS. One thing I did notice was that when I paused the sim my FPS doubled. I also noticed that sometimes my textures are slow to load when the sim fires up. I'm currently running a GTX480. I'm wondering if the old girl is starting to give up the ghost or is there something else going on. If I have to buy a new GPU, so be it, but I don't want to make that investment and then find out it didn't do any good. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

[William J.S.S 173]

I noticed this when one of my sticks of Ram was going out.

[mwilk 1,106]

William,

Thanks for the reply. That possibility never even crossed my mind. I'll have to run memtest to see if there's a problem.

[rjord 3]

I find that there is generally no need to do a format of a hard drive to fix an issue with FSX. When I had FSX when push came to shove and I had problems with every flight, the most I would do is uninstall FSX plus addons, reboot and then reinstall..... but not a format.

 

My recommendation is that you track down the issue step by step........

 

Run fsx without addons and make sure the frame rates are what you expect.

 

Then install one addon and test that..... and when happy install the next and test both addons.

 

This way you are more likely to see what is causing your frame rate issues.

 

Roy

[PIC007 82]

Are you running FSX in full screen or windowed mode? If windowed, be sure that the FSX window does not touch the taskbar, it will kill perfromance.

[Spook 96]

Simple. Auto hide task bar.

[mwilk 1,106]

Jay,

I run it full screen. Roy, thanks for the suggestion. I'm leaning more towards a software issue only because my video card performs fine in other programs that I run.

[GGLurch 10]

I see that you have oc your PC. Noticed any messages when booting up? Maybe your mainboard is in "safe-mode", deactivating any oc settings?

You can check performance using the freeware CPU-Z. It will show you oc settings and actual processor speed. Make sure you have FSX running (window mode) so you're not getting fooled by dynamic oc.

Or use PRIME95 for a load test on the CPU and memory. Also nice to evaluate CPU temps (use REAL TEMP freeware for that).

 

Nico

[PinkJackal 86]

Sometimes I think it was better if FSX wouldn't exist!!! There were no performance issue because FS9 run very good on modern computers!!! :rolleyes:

[mwilk 1,106]

Well,

I ran OCCT for an hour to stress test my system. It passed with flying colors. PJ, that's why I leave FS9 installed for times like these where I'm having issues with FSX. At least I'm still able to fly while I figure out what the issue is.

[HighTowers 1,434]

Here is what I did to troubleshoot. With a fresh fsx.cfg do all the tweaks from the hardware and software guide or said offsite well-known party and then Load up Fsx with a default plane in KSEA with no weather no AI and lowest settings. Keep unlimited FPS rate for now. Fly around a litttle. Note your FPS is probably in the 80-90s. At least mine was. If you went to another airport this might even be higher but Seattle is a good test bed.

 

Now add NGX or another quality plane. Note the fps each time. When you load weather be sure you have loaded the a lower texture resolution first. Then start moving slider settings up slowly. One of these things along the way will tank the FPS and gives u the indication to back down a notch.

 

I now run ngx with 1024 weather textures and settings near Max and AI at 80% into KSEA on around 16-20. That's good enough to me because its smooth enough to control properly. Which means almost anywhere else should be a little higher.

 

This helped me anyhow

 

 

[1mikel151 71]

Sometimes I think it was better if FSX wouldn't exist!!! There were no performance issue because FS9 run very good on modern computers!!! :rolleyes:

 

But then i would have to deal with sub par, outdated visuals :lol:

[virtualstuff 751]

For about the last month or so, I've been having problems with lower than usual framerates in FSX. It was especially bad at UK2000 London Heathrow where my frame rates went into the lower teen or single digits. In an act of desperation I uninstalled all of my addons and FSX, reformatted my hard drive and reinstalled FSX, UTX, GEX and FS Genesis mesh along with My Traffic X and UK2000 Heathrow. I fired it up but got the same result. I used the Aerosoft Airbus as my test plane. On runway 9R with 30% AI, I was getting around 12-13 FPS. One thing I did notice was that when I paused the sim my FPS doubled. I also noticed that sometimes my textures are slow to load when the sim fires up. I'm currently running a GTX480. I'm wondering if the old girl is starting to give up the ghost or is there something else going on. If I have to buy a new GPU, so be it, but I don't want to make that investment and then find out it didn't do any good. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

Check especially with texture add-ons if the texture size has been changed, can bring even the fastest hardware on it knees...

 

For example runway textures of the default airports or the detail1.bmp file etc... ;-)

[Jimmy RFR 406]

Now add NGX or another quality plane. Note the fps each time. When you load weather be sure you have loaded the a lower texture resolution first. Then start moving slider settings up slowly. One of these things along the way will tank the FPS and gives u the indication to back down a notch.

 

+1

 

I highly recommend this methodical approach to installing addons. I use KSEA as my testbed as well. I actually have a specific save file that I use with autopilot, and run a Fraps fps test on a 60 second flight headed past KSEA towards downtown. I usually run the same flight test with the same settings three times to eliminate the odd flight where a random result occurs.

 

I use this approach to not only chart the effect of any scenery addons that apply to that region as well as specific planes, but also to chart the effects of various fsx.cfg tweaks and video card settings.

 

I created a spreadsheet that has columns for all of the in-game settings, cfg file settings, and video card settings, and then i simply add a row for each fraps result, noting what settings where used for each column. I then keep adding rows as I add scenery or planes, or tweak or change settings.

 

This approach was slightly time consuming, but enabled me to very effectively determine the ideal settings for my system, setup and install.

[mwilk 1,106]

First of all. Thanks to everyone for your help and suggestions. It's always helpful when you have a number of brains to pick when trying to figure out where the problem lies. I think I may have made some progress. After I did the reinstall, I used Word Not Allowed's recommendations for the FSX.cfg. For whatever reason, it just didn't work for me. Before spending a bunch of money on a new video card, I thought I'd give Bojote's cfg utility a try. Lo and behold, it got my performance back to where it was. At UK2000 Egll, with most of the gate full of AI and using Opus FSX real weather, my FPS are in the mid 20's with smooth performance. I haven't had the opportunity yet to do a complete flight and not all of my addon airports are installed yet, but at least there is some progress. I still might get that new video card (if I can sneak it in past the wife). Thanks again for your help.