Best settings for photoscenery loading

[Jim Young 2,356]

can you please confirm the rest of your settings, perhaps post your .cfg file.

 

 

Hi Mark,

 

Here ya go!

 

Hope it works for you too!

 

Best regards,

Jim

[markturner 0]

Thanks Jim, would you mind just also confirming the other settings I asked about, as these are also very important to the result you see...will keep you posted..!

[Jim Young 2,356]

Hi Mark,

 

I suspect you are talking about NI settings.  Mine are set at the default settings set by the Nvidia Techs for FSX.  I have tried several different settings as recommended by many others on the DX10 Forum, Word Not Allowed's, AVSIM Software and Hardware Guide, NickN's, and Tabs over at the PMDG Forum and the default works the best (for me) (for DX10 and Photoscenery).  I almost use Photoscenery exclusively now owning 98% of MegaSceneryEarth V2 States, FTX/Orbx stuff.  My philosophy is to let FSX "breathe" and not place settings that place a lot of strain on the installed hardware.  A lot of people are making up special FSX.cfg's just for DX10 and many are disappointed with DX10 because it is not rendering things the way they think it should be rendered.  DX10 is an unfinished product in SP2/Acceleration and the Microsoft team envisioned users to simply turn DX10 on and off without changing the fsx.cfg and the display drivers.  When Steve's DX10 release was first published, I used the default FSX.cfg (no tweaks whatsoever except I did have the highmemfix entry which is really not a tweak).  Absolutely stunning textures.  Since then I have gone to almost total photoreal scenery and like DX10 solely because of the additional immersion factors with shadows in the cockpit and rough, white capped seas and water.  It all works for me but every system is different and I think it is the eye of the beholder that determines whether textures and scenery look great or not.  Hope this helps.

 

Not sure who Lars is....  I'm guessing it's SAAB340?

 

Best regards,

Jim

[markturner 0]

Hi Jim, in that case it sounds like you are running your set up almost exactly as I run mine. You mention the default settings, How would I achieve those? Sorry for the dumb question, but if you are changing nothing for FSX in NI, then does not the standard Nvidia control panel take precedent?  See here: http://www.simforums.com/forums/nvidia-control-panel-and-nvidia-inspector_topic36908.html

 

How would I arrive at the base settings? I am unsure as to whether I need to use NI or not....

 

Re the direct x10, I have tried following the setup guide in this forum and can see no real improvements, in fact performance is worse. I would very much like to try your method, you standard fsx .cfg was used when you first started using DX10, do you mean that you just let it rebuild a new one and set your settings in game, nothing else? (apart from HIGHMEMFIX=1) 

 

yes, Lars is SAAAB340..

 

Thanks, Mark

[Jim Young 2,356]

 

 

Hi Jim, in that case it sounds like you are running your set up almost exactly as I run mine. You mention the default settings, How would I achieve those? Sorry for the dumb question, but if you are changing nothing for FSX in NI, then does not the standard Nvidia control panel take precedent?

 

In the NI setting or display driver settings, you select FSX as the program you want to change the settings then look up in the top of the NI setting page and select the green icon.  That will make sure the settings are set to the default as set up by Nvidia for FSX.  NI has more capabilities for "tweaking" your graphics card.  More than in the display driver settings at least.  This is why a lot of people use it.  To me, it has that placebo effect where people think they are getting something special and they really are not.  The NI settings for modern games might work better but FSX was made with older GPU's and I think one can do more damage by trying some of these modern settings like AA at 4x's Sparse Grid Supersampling.  I say let the sim handle the AA and AF using your modern video card and you will be better off IMHO.

 

In the Nvidia display driver settings, you select the FSX default simply by clicking on the Program settings tab and selecting FSX.  If Restore is not grayed out, you'll need to hit that button.

 

 

 

Re the direct x10, I have tried following the setup guide in this forum and can see no real improvements, in fact performance is worse. I would very much like to try your method, you standard fsx .cfg was used when you first started using DX10, do you mean that you just let it rebuild a new one and set your settings in game, nothing else? (apart from HIGHMEMFIX=1)

 

I use the same fsx.cfg settings for both DX9 and DX10.  There are a lot of people who think they need to have special settings for DX10.  DX10 is a simple upgrade in DirectX technology and does not need special settings.  As far as performance increases, it is proven that DX10 will give you more performance increases.  It was proven by the Microsoft developers and some others (the developer of FSDT products has publically stated how and why DX10 improves performance; think in his Vancouver forum).  DX11 would provide us with even better performance but the software is not coded for DX11 (some say maybe Lockheed Martin might do it if they are able to get the FSX code from Microsoft some day).   

 

These are my personal thoughts on setting up FSX and know many might disagree but I have been almost living at the CTD Forum here and have seen a lot of crashes and many are due to wrong tweaks or wrong settings in the FSX.cfg.  Everyone seems to be trying to squeeze every little bit of eye-candy out of FSX and I think we need to stop this tweaking and go fly.  On the tweaks that I decided to place in my config, I did a lot of research on each (think one or two installed) and they really do work.  Bufferpools=0 and the Terrain Autogen tweaks work (but I rarely use autogen unless I have FTX/Orbx enabled; you don't need it for photoscenery).

 

Hope this helps!

 

Best regards,

Jim

[markturner 0]

Hi Jim, well, I am mystified....I spent most of last night trying various settings. No matter what I set, I cant get my FSX to run at 40FPS smoothly. I also set NI as recommended by you. 

 

I copied your  .cfg file in inserted my own trusted files and deleted yours, changed the second video card setting to match my second monitor and tried that - result = 23 FPS    I tried my best performing DX9 .cfg file, which has all the entire I referred to above, this gives me approx 35 - 40 FPS most places,  and about 90% acceptable good texture snap in on the photoscenery and then just changed DX10 preview to 1 and tried that as per  your suggestion - result = 20 FPS

 

I even tried starting again from scratch with a new .cfg file. This struggled to give me 25 FPS with all the normal settings and no tweaks added. 

 

it seems  no matter what I try I cant get better performance. Its really irritating me now, as got better performance than this on my old PC. No autogen, no traffic and PC specs like mine should have no problem in maintaining a solid 40 FPS,,.........

 

I have a  .cfg file that is pretty good, so its not stopping me flying or anything, but I cant help wondering where my missing performance is......

[RickB1293 9]

Hi Mark-

 

I've been following your posts and here's my free advice (which is well worth the price). I use Real Temp's i7 Turbo GT 1.30 and Real Temp GT 3.70 to benchmark my systems. Both of these programs give you great performance specs that can either be watched on your second monitor or logged to a file of your choosing. I build computers for both FSX and AutoCAD 3d apps. FSX is the hardest to tweak because the platform hasn't kept up with the improvements in hardware. It allows limited optimization because many of the robust tools supported by your CPU and GPU aren't available or coded for FSX. Here are a couple of hardware suggestions. I apologize if you've been through them but hopefully they'll give you some help if you haven't.

1. Try to increase your CPU overclock. I run my i7-2600K at 4.5GHz with an H100 cooler and stay around 4.0-4.3 running FSX in either DX9 or DX10. Temps stay in the 50-60C range so I don't push the CPU as hard as it can be pushed. Most OC sites don't recommend running steady state at much over 80C so check your performance at a busy airport and see where you end up. If you find abnormal temps you may want to consider a full size tower, if you don't have one already.
    
2. I didn't notice your power supply spec but make sure it can handle your system. With the GTX580s SLI and the i7 950 modestly OCd you'll need at least 800 watts with the proper power rails. PSUs rarely put out 90% efficiency so remember you have a 75 to 100 watt light bulb smack in the middle of your system. That's a lot of heat. Check ASUS for their recommendations, they are right up to date on the changes in PSU product  development.
   .
3. What temps are your GTX580s putting out? If they are in the 80-90C range you might want to increase your fan speeds so they run at 100% at 80C. If they still run hotter you may want to check your fan I/Os or your case layout. Two 580s in SLI can play havok with air flow within the case making it hard to cool everything. I see your using the Sabertooth M/B which is usually a very cool board. I don't have any experience with SLI installs but temperature can and does hurt performance on high end OCd systems.
    
4. Is there a reason that you want to lock FSX at 40 fps? Try cutting this back to 30 which still very smooth and it also teams up with your monitor's refresh rate if you have 60Hz, which is pretty typical. I haven't seen many systems that can hold 30fps at busy airports with AI cranked up. BTW, you'll know when you've hit the wall hardware wise when your case fans start running so fast that you'll need a couple of books tto keep the case from launching.
    
5. I really haven't seen a great deal of difference in performance between DX9 and 10. If you find the sweet spot using DX9 your system shouldn't need much of a change going to DX10. Remember that DX10 isn't fully supported by FSX so many of the isoteric .cfg settings just aren't supported. Find a DX10 site or contributor that you trust and stick with his suggestions.

I run a little faster CPU but my 560ti can't keep up with your 580. I currently run FSX with most of the sliders to the right following suggestions on this site concerning AI scenery, weather radius and AI traffic. I run a whole stable of addon aircraft as well as REX Ess+OD, MegaSceneryEarth photorealistic scenery and FSDT airports. I hold 30 fps every place but the busy airports where I hold 20-25 fps with the eye candy on. The biggest drain on the system is from the REX WXPlus during stormy or cloudy weather bu they are working on a SP to help. I'm sure you know that SLI isn't supported by FSX but it is very useful if you have to multitask with other GPU intensive apps while running FSX.

 

My biggest suggestion from a hardware standpoint is keep all of your devices as cool as you can. No amount of tweaking can overcome a hot CPU or graphics card. FSX doesn't push a system as hard as the current batch of D3DX11 games and apps do. You have plenty of horsepower so maybe just take a look under the hood and make sure the system can breath. Again, if you've gone through these steps I apologize but I've been away the site for awhile and missed some of the discussion. Please post any questions and I'll try to get back to you ASAP.

 

Rick Bertz

[markturner 0]

Hi Rick , thanks for the advice, I have checked my setup and all seems OK temperature wise etc. Last week I tried a fresh install of FSX and have had great success with this. I can now get a pretty solid 30 FPS and great scenery loading, so must have been something up with old install...

 

One weird thing with the new install however....I have ste my FPS to be llimited within FSX to 30 FPS. However, if I open a window within the main screen and undock it, I immediately get double the FPS..what the hell is doing that?? Not complaining though....!

 

Cheers, Mark

[SAAB340 28]

Sorry I'm late replying. I didn't revisit this thread until now.

 

 

Lars , I also wanted to see what you thought about the use of the TBM setting? You dont mention this and I find it is also vital to how well textures load. I use 400...your comments on this would be appreciated.

 

 

 

You will absolutely notice a big difference in the snap in time of crisp textures using pure photoscenery by increasing this above 120 value.

 

 

Glad to hear that you got it sorted with a fresh install Mark. I think I checked TBM 40 and 80 before and saw no difference for texture loading. I might have another look at it now using higher values.

 

 

In regards to FFTF, the tweak is useless with your quad-core 950 - http://www.simforums...479.html#170479 (as verified by NickN and Phil Taylor, lead developer for FSX). I know that some of the experts, like Word Not Allowed's Tweaking Guide, recommend FFTF, but the information is wrong. Get rid of it (unless you have an old single core cpu).



AF=249. This setting is truly puzzling to me. As Word Not Allowed stated in his tweaking guide, AF for a quad core with HT off should be 14; with HT on, 84.

 

FFTF can have an impact. It changes how fast textures load, and how high your FPS will be when you can't maintain your framelock. However when you can maintain your framelock it doesn't make a difference.

 

When it comes to the affinitymask and hyperthreading this can greatly change how fast you load photo scenery textures. I do recommend using HT=on and AM=249 if you're a fan of photo scenery and have a quad i7. I've now built a new rig with SandyBridge-E and I use it with HT=on and AM=4089 with great results with 60cm photo scenery. I still wish I could have more and faster cores to speed up texture loading even more, but I notice a big difference from my old Lynnfield i7 and its starting to look really, really good even flying really fast, low level with a high LOD setting. Yes, it still gets a little bit blurry at high speed, but as soon as you slow down texture loading catches up again.

 

These screenshots shows well how different affinitymasks and hyperthreading on/off greatly change how fast phototextures load. I saved a straight and level flight @ 640KIAS or Mach 0.9 in the stock F18 heading straight in to the Scottish highlands using 60cm photo scenery with a 5m terrain mesh. This is how it looks out of the window after 6 minutes:

 

 

Paused, fully loaded is how it looks when all the ground textures has loaded and are as sharp as they can get after I paused the flight

HT=On AM=4089 is the fastest texture loading you can get on a hexa core with HT on

HT=Off AM=63 is the default texture loading you'll get on a hexa core. (HT on or off doesn't change the default texture loading speed)

HT=On AM=249 is the fastest texture loading you can get on a quad core with HT on

HT=Off AM=15 is the default texture loading you get on a quad core. (HT on or off doesn't change the default texture loading speed)

 

Time to fully load when paused is the time it took for all the ground textures to sharpen fully when I pause the flight.

[Jim Young 2,356]

 

 

Time to fully load when paused is the time it took for all the ground textures to sharpen fully when I pause the flight.

 

Interesting post.  I just got a new system and don't use any tweaks in the Fsx.cfg except the LOD_Radius is 6.5 and the Texture_Max_Load is 2048.  My other fsx settings are as recommended by the MSE V2 developers except my fps are set to unlimited.  My NI settings are set to the default for FSX.  I recently took a flight from Boise to Seattle and here are some pics over the mountains east of Seattle using MSE V2 Washington as I descended to the glideslope.  I'm going to try some GA lower altitude flights soon.  The fps in the first pic is 112, the second 96, the third 123, and the fourth 76.  I'm happy with the results.  I have the same Haswell system as NickN (I got mine first :lol: ) except memory frequency.  HT is disabled.  I tried Nick's settings at the post here - http://www.simforums.com/forums/gtx-780-settings-discussion-haswell-revealed_topic46112_page1.html.

 

 

Thanks for taking the time to explain your testing.

 

Best regards,

Jim