FSX, will great FPS ever be achievable consistently?

[Bert Pieke 7,584]

What is missed in these "fps" discussions, is that when the computer is overloaded, it does not gracefully start reducing framerates while keeping everything else running smoothly.

 

It is like traffic in a city. When traffic clogs up, the average speed that you can travel at is reduced, but more importantly, you are into stop and go traffic..

 

That is what is most noticeable in FSX also, things are just not smooth anymore..

 

Control inputs, scenery display etc, everything has slight lags and the whole experience is degraded.

[Adam T Lutley 12]

Over the last 12 months I have spent time effort and money upgrading my aircraft, scenery and equipment to enhance my flight simulator experience. I'm still not receiving good fps all the time and really it's frustrating. I'm hoping if I post my info then people will be able to offer advice and info on how I can improve my fps if its possible. Here's the specs:

 

HARDWARE

i5 3.3 overclocked to 4.4

Twin frozr GeForce 570 2gb

8gb ram

1tb SATA drive with a seperate partition for FSX

 

FSX

fsx delux and acceleration

******* 'Bojote' Altuve CFG tweaking tool

Uiautomation.dll

Bufferpools tweak set to 40000000

Fsx fps set to unlimited and 3rd party fps limiter in place (40fps)

Run from batch file a friend set up for me

Running ORBX England

Running UK2000 scenery across all areas + bristol xtreme and Manchester xtreme

Running Rex weather

Running ultimate traffic 2

Using PMDG 737ngx

 

 

That's my full set up. My fps is great in all UK2K airports except the Xtreme or any London area when flying pmdg when they drop to 10/15fps. Also at airports such as Amsterdam schiphol where I'm running 0 scenery add-ons the frames drop right down. If anyone can suggest helping me improve to just a steady 25+ at the airports would be great. I would love to enhance my experience without the extra cash but maybe it just isn't achievable and ill have to buy a new system?

 

 

My full system specs are posted in my profile. I have an I7 3770K OC'd to 4.5 GHz and a EVGA 670 FTW 2Gb GPU with 2 SSD's and my sim bogs down at major airports using complex payware aircraft such as PMDG, 3rd party airport scenery, Traffic 360 Etc. My traffic settings have the highest effect on performance. Airport road traffic especially. Interestingly, It doesn't seem to make any difference what setting I have it on whether low or high. turning it completely off gained me at least 5 FPS. My AI traffic I have set to 37 %. It seems to be a good compromize between performance while still having some decent "eye candy" my sim now stays above 20 FPS in all situations and almost always well north of 30 FPS. FSX is simply too outdated to take advantage of the latest advances in hardware.

[TheGrunt 44]

When Lockheed Martin completely redevelops P3D i,e true 64bit, improved autogen, night lights improvements, proper weather engine that can imitate real life METARs with accuracy and no delays in order to simulate weather as it happens in real life, take advantage of GPU, real life physics, default scenery improvement such as landscape, able to run on all available cores, GPUs & rams (spreading out work load equally) and last but not least... give us some amazing fps 60+ (we're talking 4.3ghz 2500k or better)!

This is all is now just a dream. V2.0 which comes out probably late this year or sometimes 2014 will bring DX11. 64-bit is somewhere in the hozrizon, but according to LM boys in their forums, redesigning the ESP code to 64-bit is tremendous job as there are parts in the software that are just ancient and dating from deep 90's or even earlier perhaps. Or when have you heard assembly code being used in a otherwise rather modern program like FSX? It is difficult to believe that there really is assembly, but that is how they stated.

 

Of all the other features you mentioned, I've never heard dev team mentioning of those features. LM team is pretty cautious announcing about the developement plans and DX11 with V2.0 is pretty much only confirmed "big stuff".

 

About the 32 vs 64-bit capabality, people really should stop seeing it as something magical. Programs with 64-bit word length don't in any way mean better performance. It is true, that in some cases it can be more efficient, but in general statement that 64-bit has better performance than 32-bit is just plain wrong. It usually requires that programs use large 64-bit integers, FPs or SIMD registers. This usually means that performance is better with heavy multitasking, HPC solutins such as cloud and cluster computing and with heavy calculations such as encryption or encoding/decoding. With game type 3D applications? Not really that much. There is a reason, why most games are still 32-bit applications and if memory isn't going to be problem, there is no need to code it to 64-bit. With games, biggest improvent with 64-bit is definitely that programs can utilize 64-bit registers of the hardware and thus use far larger memory space which, of course, we are capping with heavy addons all the time. DX10 or 11 alleviates the situation somewhat, though.

 

About processor performance the problem with FSX/ESP/P3D is that it is multithreading badly. I mean really badly. It is basically loading one core helluva lot with its main thread, which hogs the performance down. Now, when FSX came it was running with C2D architecture at best and was barely playable at default back then. With every new architecture announced (both CPU and also GPU), we have been gaining pretty hefty performance increases, but it comes not only from single core raw computing performance, but also out of multicore computing and by new extensions which FSX can't utilize. FSX is just plain old. We also tend to put new more and more complex addons into the sim and thus when we and 3PD devs gain more power under the hood, we feed more load to the sim eating away some of the valuable FPS we would otherwise gain.

[tf51d 284]

What am I missing? the moons appear to me to stay in sync against a stationary milky way at 5 and 60 fps with both running at the same speed of 100 pix/sec.

 

I'm sorry, I meant my reply for spesimen which you replied to. His post contained a link of bouncing blocks which if you watch a while, goes out of sync. Your link (The moons) do seem to be more in sync, and the 60FPS is noticeably smoother in that one!

 

Edit: Playing around with the settings from your link, taking off motion blur makes a big difference, and makes the difference in smoothness, a lot less noticeable between 30 and 60 at 1000px/s and almost undetectable at slower speed. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe FSX supports motion blur?

[G-BANX 1]

I would just be happy achieving a steady 30 fps doing everything. Be it VC whislt taxiing or flying through clouds or whatever. But it looks like I need to spend around 2k on a new machine and still make the tweaks lol!

[SteveW 1,792]

I can easily spot the difference between an 85Hz refresh and a 120Hz refresh monitor. This has nothing to do with frame rates in FSX. FSX is designed from the ground up to utilise pre-rendered frames. If you have pre-rendered frames then the sim can continue providing consistent fps when the going gets tough. You need time between frames to pre render, the fps limiter is set up to do that, not just cap the fps, but to set the sim fps below that which it can keep consistent. If you set limited fps at 30 and you see 26fps all day then you've not done anything but cap fps once out of range of complex scenery. When you use the fps limit you will see a big initial drop in fps because you are making frames you don't see. If I set below 14fps panning or looking out the side window appears to be stepping. When I increase to around 18-19fps the sim appears more liquid, this is around the point where it's easy to ignore the slow fps. FSX chokes PC's on the last slider settings to the right, even on the latest greatest, and fastest of PCs. Leave tweaks alone they can only rob you of fps, if you run your .cfg through a tweaker program you will find no shadows or less trees. On my i7-960GTX480 any adjustment to bufferpools reduces the fps or does nothing, depending on the scene. Exactly the same with my i7-3960xGTX680, but that itself is around 3/2 the throughput of the 960. OC'd machines of this class don't particularly improve the fps if you want maxed sliders in FSX, you need all parts of the system improved, the non OCd 3960 hardly ever sees >3Ghz. If you don't have maxed sliders you will see an improvement in fps, but then even the 960 does 90fps with sliders set to 2/3.

[mgh 89]

but I don't believe FSX supports motion blur?

 

I don't think it does either.

[goates 576]

 

I don't think it does either.

 

Few PC games from the same era as FSX do. Most have only added the feature in the past few years, long after FSX was developed.