FS9 is STILL the #1 flight simulator for 'heavy' operations!

[Dillon 2,197]

Yes, the market is that small and it is the same small number of users that post in similar threads. They love their FS9 setups and there is nothing wrong with that!

 

The 'whole' community is small at this point thanks to the user rift between FSX/FS9 that started with FSX's release back in 2006, the price of admission to fully enjoy FSX for new users, Steve Ballmer closing Aces, and lack of interest in aviation in general today... Hey wait a minute, aren't you that admin guy over on Flightsim.com?

[JSkorna 137]

 

 

Hey wait a minute, aren't you that admin guy over on Flightsim.com?

 

No, that's my twin!

[georgetyrrell 7]

This post has my head wrecked. I bit the bullet having been away from simming for two years. I said to myself 'right, time to move on and progress' , stupidly stupidly stupidly I deleted my cache of airports , aircraft, utilities etc that I had filed beautifully in folders in my hard drive for ease of install. Don't even get me started on my AI folder!! I started the learning curve of Fsx trying to catch up on what the tweaks were and what I needed hardware wise to upgrade. Using Kostas guide and performing some time consuming but simple OS fixes I've gotten Fsx so it looks really detailed and full. By fluke more than anything. I've got Orbx PNW and it is breathtaking at times. But the CTDs are hard to take. The OOM errors and the pauses and texture reloads. I'm still running a 32 bit OS and it's just not enough. I've not done too much to it that I'd lose anything significant if I went back. This OP has me thinking am I just trying to flog a dead horse. I miss my 747. I miss my LFRD. I miss all the freeware gems that I used to discover. I haven't read an fs9 forum topic in nearly 3 years so I don't know what effect newer hardware has had if any on fs9. I don't know if there are new tweaks or ways to setup that alleviate the issues we had years ago. I've got a an I7 920 and a 660 gtx. So am I better maxing fs9 rather than compromising on FSX? Have blurries / popping textures been eliminated ? What frames do fs9 ers aim for as a benchmark to fluidity these days? I see a sticky in this forum re texture issues that can , when gone through, cause significant gains in performance. Do they work? The thoughts of installing the amount of addons and utilities for fs9 does give me a headache, but if one thing FSX has taught me to accept a simpler sim. To focus on the basics to enjoyment which is the point to point flying fulfilling my fantasy as an airline pilot. Do you all have both installed or are you solely fs9? Have many not bothered at all to switch?

[tf51d 284]

 

 

When someone figures out the ground texture problem in FS9 the difference between FSX and FS9 becomes that much more of a grey area.

 

It's not a "ground texture problem" Its a design issue. FS9 by design is limited to 4M texture resolution where FSX default is 1m textures, and has the capability of going down to 7cm textures. It also can support 4096x4096 textures, which give it even more clarity. The difference between the 2 sims  is not as noticeable at high altitude, but is very noticeable down low.

[LAdamson 240]

Both. No reason to give up the good stuff for FS9. I prefer FSX overall. It's that texture resolution that was just discussed

[Reason 20]

No, that's my twin!

 

lol

 

They say fs9 is no longer profitable although Carenado sees it differently

[HaraldG 559]

 

 

There has been several new add-ons over last year or so in still to come for FS9.

 

In my perception, there were actually a lot of new products for FS2004 in 2012 and in the beginning of 2013, mainly sceneries. I bought FS2004 sceneries introduced 2012/13 from (in alphabetical order) Aerosoft, Drzewiecki Design, FlyTampa, LatinVFR, OrientalSim, Scansim, Taxi2Gate, Thai Creation, TropicalSim and perhaps some more. In many cases, these products were developed for FSX and FS2004, but at least...! So these companies do either behave altruistic (that should be miraculous), or there actually is the possibility to make money with FS2004 add-ons.

 

Regards, Harald

[Dillon 2,197]

This post has my head wrecked. I bit the bullet having been away from simming for two years. I said to myself 'right, time to move on and progress' , stupidly stupidly stupidly I deleted my cache of airports , aircraft, utilities etc that I had filed beautifully in folders in my hard drive for ease of install. Don't even get me started on my AI folder!! I started the learning curve of Fsx trying to catch up on what the tweaks were and what I needed hardware wise to upgrade. Using Kostas guide and performing some time consuming but simple OS fixes I've gotten Fsx so it looks really detailed and full. By fluke more than anything. I've got Orbx PNW and it is breathtaking at times. But the CTDs are hard to take. The OOM errors and the pauses and texture reloads. I'm still running a 32 bit OS and it's just not enough. I've not done too much to it that I'd lose anything significant if I went back. This OP has me thinking am I just trying to flog a dead horse. I miss my 747. I miss my LFRD. I miss all the freeware gems that I used to discover. I haven't read an fs9 forum topic in nearly 3 years so I don't know what effect newer hardware has had if any on fs9. I don't know if there are new tweaks or ways to setup that alleviate the issues we had years ago. I've got a an I7 920 and a 660 gtx. So am I better maxing fs9 rather than compromising on FSX? Have blurries / popping textures been eliminated ? What frames do fs9 ers aim for as a benchmark to fluidity these days? I see a sticky in this forum re texture issues that can , when gone through, cause significant gains in performance. Do they work? The thoughts of installing the amount of addons and utilities for fs9 does give me a headache, but if one thing FSX has taught me to accept a simpler sim. To focus on the basics to enjoyment which is the point to point flying fulfilling my fantasy as an airline pilot. Do you all have both installed or are you solely fs9? Have many not bothered at all to switch?

 

 

First off I never bothered to switch. The community has spent years tweaking getting a version to run right then a new version comes out only for us to start all over again. The only version that ran well on first install was Flight so MS at least know the importance of this with the lesson learned from FSX. To answer your questions above FS9 today is everything and more concerning your questions. There's 'NO' OOM issues anymore if you use Windows 7 64Bit, the thing basically runs well right out the box these days on hardware that's 3 years old and up, and we're all here to help you if you have problems. On your computer the sky is the limit with framerates and visually FS9 can be made to look like FSX with only two exceptions (water reflections and high res city texture tiles). I believe we'll have the city textures tiles fixed at some point. I've given up believing those that say what's not possible in FS9. REX/Activesky proved we can have the sky and weather environment looks of FSX, FlyTampa proved we can have detailed airports on the same level as FSX add-ons, Feng proved the overall look of FS9 can rival FSX, and Carenado proved we can have GA aircraft with all the eye candy of FSX models in FS9. So to directly answer your questions if I hadn't already:

 

1. I don't know if there are new tweaks or ways to setup that alleviate the issues we had years ago?

 

New hardware has alleviated tweaking in FS9 (which should have been the case with FSX these days). The only thing I can think of is you'll need to extend terrain detail in the FS9.cfg file.

 

2. Am I better maxing fs9 rather than compromising on FSX?

 

Yes...

 

3. Have blurries / popping textures been eliminated?

 

Yes...

 

4. What frames do fs9 ers aim for as a benchmark to fluidity these days?

 

Sky is the limit. All I see is fluid these days so I haven't bothered to look at framerates in a while. Today it's best to run FS9 with the framerate limiter maxed out, you couldn't do that years ago. You'll get better performance than me (whatever that means concerning an i7 machine). As a marker for you my system is a Dell T3400 Duo Core 2 x 2.66 1333 FSB.

 

5. I see a sticky in this forum re texture issues that can , when gone through, cause significant gains in performance. Do they work?

 

Yes they work as many can attest to. I get great performance without this and I know this could benifit my setup. The great thing is I don't have a large enough problem to make me spend time hunting textures down versus flying. If this were FSX there's no doubt I would have had this applied along time ago with marginal results.

 

6. Do you all have both installed or are you solely fs9?

 

I've tried FSX many times on friends computers that actually had a setup to envy. I haven't bothered switching because I don't have the time to muttle through setting it up. FS9 runs great and outside of the two FSX features I mentioned above looks like FSX. I need a sim that's a great performer over a visual extravaganza. Visuals are great but as the Rolling Stones once said, "You can't always get what you want but if you try sometimes you might find you get what you need" which says it all about FS9 and the goal of simulating GA and Airliner flight.

 

My forays into Northwest's Level-D simulators a few years ago put FS9 into perspective for me. I saw the visuals real pilots were training with and FS9.75 is light years ahead of that (their training sims had FS2000 visuals). After flying the 744, DC9, A320, I felt perfectly fine with what we had with FS9 which still holds true today. When the time comes where Microsoft ditches their idiot Steve Ballmer and get's back to business I believe Flight Simulator will make a come back. Too many people in the aviation industry are ###### about Steve's move. Only a complete 'idiot' would discontinue something major aviation vendors like Lockheed were looking at (we can see stupidity on display with Windows 8) but that's a topic for another day...

[Dillon 2,197]

It's not a "ground texture problem" Its a design issue. FS9 by design is limited to 4M texture resolution where FSX default is 1m textures, and has the capability of going down to 7cm textures. It also can support 4096x4096 textures, which give it even more clarity. The difference between the 2 sims  is not as noticeable at high altitude, but is very noticeable down low.

As I said above what is not possible in FS9 and only possible in FSX has been disproved over and over again. Someone will figure it out...

[georgetyrrell 7]

Thanks  Dillon for taking the time to make that reply

[Dillon 2,197]

Thanks  Dillon for taking the time to make that reply

No problem. It kills me how many want to bury FS9 in favor of an option that's so bug ridden. I believe Microsoft will bring back Flight Simulator in an updated form we all would like but Steve Ballmer would have to leave first. In the mean time I hate people feel they have to work with crap because so many voices say so. We have options out here (like Windows 7 instead of Windows 8) and for those that want to just enjoy simulating flight there's alternatives. You'll see for yourself when/if you get FS9 up and running again. What I've outlined in this thread will get your sim looking like FSX the fastest. From there you can get all your planes and scenery re-installed. Hopefully you didn't delete all your freeware offerings for FS9 as there are more than a few offering that didn't make it back after the Avsim hack.

[Bjoern 1,157]

FS9 is perfect for laptops, as these tend to pair powerful CPUs with rather weak GPUs.

 

Also, the sim looks suprisingly nice witout anisotropic filtering and at minimal anti-aliasing settings.

 

 

 

As for stability, I've manged to crash the whole sim with a single, wrongly formatted texture. And with duplicate AFCADs. Other than that, it runs just great though.

[Ahmed Hassanin 7]

All that talk is making me want install FS9 again, I don't think I can manage without the NGX though..

[FLEX1978 373]

No problem. It kills me how many want to bury FS9 in favor of an option that's so bug ridden. I believe Microsoft will bring back Flight Simulator in an updated form we all would like but Steve Ballmer would have to leave first. In the mean time I hate people feel they have to work with crap because so many voices say so. We have options out here (like Windows 7 instead of Windows 8) and for those that want to just enjoy simulating flight there's alternatives. You'll see for yourself when/if you get FS9 up and running again. What I've outlined in this thread will get your sim looking like FSX the fastest. From there you can get all your planes and scenery re-installed. Hopefully you didn't delete all your freeware offerings for FS9 as there are more than a few offering that didn't make it back after the Avsim hack.

Out of curiosity what specs do you have Dillon? I get the same FPS in fsx as I do in FS9 both are locked at 30

[rayharris51 5]

Hey I have a 5 year old PC (core2duo 3GHz) with an ancient GTS250 graphics card and 4Gb of unmentionably old memory.

 

I enjoy 20+ fps in Orbx SAK and PNW with Beech Duke and Twin Otter in FSX, as much as I do in exactly the same areas in FS9, but with iFly 737s, in Glacier Bay, Tongass and Misty Fjords (which incidentally are epic in FS9).

 

Don't get depressed if you can't do everything in FSX on awesome h/w, it seems v few can at least not those outside NASA. Both Sims are massive achievements on domestic h/w. When they work they give immense satisfaction and enjoyment. When they don't well...you'll need med insurance (if you're not British). They haven't sussed that Flight Sim related stress shouldn't really be treatable on the NHS yet.

 

But neither of these Sims would be up to as much if wasn't for the amazing community of flight sim experts, designers, artists, graphics experts, IT and aviation professionals, that we are so lucky to have with us. I simply don't know any area where such a varied and skilled group of people work to help their community globally as our lot do.

 

So thanks....

 

 

Ray