Some Changes Ryan Made to My FSX

[signmanbob 592]

Thanks for sharing this, Robert. Yes, there is something different on your system and that is the huge amount of photo scenery activated which accounted for about 1 GB of VAS unavailable for your flight simming experience. I was surprised at the cause of your OOMs; I learned a lot from that topic, be assured. Just to second you, the TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD gets changed easily by different tools, but can be checked even from inside the game for example, as stated, if a FSDT (demo) airport or GSX is installed. Again, thanks for letting us know and you truly deserve an enjoyable FSX experience after all your former frustration.

 

Thank you Oliver. I'm really enjoying it now. FSX has never run so good and smooth since I started adding my first scenery and payware aircraft.

The fact that Ryan would spend three hours with me, to help me get FSX working, just leaves me humbled and so appreciative.

The first thing that he did was look in my SceneryConfigEditor and start shutting off MSEv.2.  

That instantly added 1Gig of VAS to FSX.

I didn't realize that activated photoscenery would pull down FSX if you were not in the area where it is.  Ryan says it does so because photoscenery is matches real land and not repetitive like Ultimate Terrain, which uses the same scenery in different ways to where one doesn't notice it that much.

[Woc 21]

Thank you Bob, for share so useful info. This should be a pinned thread.

 

 

Sent from my iPad with Tapatalk HD

[Tabs 2,790]

Glad I could help guys - just want to caution as I did in Bob's earlier thread though that I'm *not* offering to do what I did to his machine to anyone else's right now - I just don't have the time to do it with as many people who've asked since then, especially in the middle of 777 testing.

He had a unique problem and I saw an opportunity to help deflect some of the concern that the NGX (and forthcoming 777) make FSX unusable due to VAS/OOM issues. He's posted pretty much everything that I did here and really this should be enough for anyone else in a similar situation to figure out what's happening with their own machine and resolve it. The main thing to take from it is that FSX allocates VAS to scenery areas that aren't even being displayed in the sim. The photoscenery stuff is always going to be the worst for this because every single LOD cell in those entire state areas has its own unique texture to take up space. There's no reuse of textures for efficiency via the landclass system like there is with most any other scenery product. (Orbx FTX stuff, UTX, GEX etc)

A couple people have already asked me via PM and tickets if I think the new Orbx FTX Global that's coming out is going to cause VAS issues - at this point I do not believe it will since it's based on the normal FSX landclass + efficient texture reuse model. I'm planning to get it myself too because it looks amazing in the previews. One thing I'll say if it's anything like the other FTX regions though is to just watch your autogen levels if you're flying the NGX or 777 or whatever over it, they have a lot more of it than the same slider setting does in default FSX scenery. (They mention this in their manuals actually too)

Large addon airports do affect VAS in a minor way but I didn't see enough of a change to warrant turning the ones I'm not flying to off personally. If you really are right on the edge despite disabling other things, it's something you can use to get a little bit back though. The SceneryConfigEditor app makes it very easy to create groups where you can turn them all on or off with 1 click.

[Bozdog 63]

Bob & Ryan, thank you both very much for this info. In the past I have changed my NVidia settings and always suffered degradation of text quality for improved performance, eg the writing in fs passengers and the menu bar looking blurry. I have amended my settings to the same as yours in inspector  except for leaving Maximum prerendered frames at 1.  The result  Text is fine and Frames and smoothness remarkably improved.

 

Thanks again, really appreciate you sharing

 

Regards

Steve

Sorry forgot to ask  do you have

anti aliasing   ticked in fsx?  I am guessing the value =1  means yes?
 

[Tabs 2,790]

You do not check AA in FSX if you're using Inspector in the "Override" mode.

[Boatinman 1]

I want to personally thank you for allowing me to store some of my short term memory in your 64gb!

[signmanbob 592]

I want to personally thank you for allowing me to store some of my short term memory in your 64gb!

Ha, ha...it may get lost in there  :biggrin:  That's the RAM Sea. 

[LRW 42]

It made a big difference for me.  Over the last 2 years I've seen my system gradually lose fps until, last week, I was getting 10-15 fps at any add-on airport, like FSDT's KLAX or KJFK, and LatinVFR's updated KMIA.

 

 I decided to try these settings as-is on my rig starting with a KMIA-KTPA hop in the NGX.  I got 25-30 on the ground (more 30 than 25) and 30-35 aloft (lot of clouds that day).  

 

For my next flight, KJFK-KLAX, I went back to TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD=4096 because I thought I noticed some loss of font quality on the CDU's (which I park on my 2nd 1440x900 monitor).  I was at 30 fps at the gate, but FSUIPC started its warning beeps almost immediately.  I killed the AI traffic in UT2 (which I normally have set at 100% scheduled and 0% GA).  The beeping stopped and I saw 25-30 the entire time at JFK.  I cheated and used 4x for most of the cruise phase.  When I was on final to 25L the warning beeps started again, but I held on and made it all the way to the gate at 25-30 fps and no OOM.

 

I don't know that I really saw any difference between 2048 and 4096 but I'll probably do some more comparisons.  I'll also play with some other settings because I'm seeing more aliasing of horizontal lines (especially intersecting taxiways) and some stutters and flashes while looking around.  But I can live with those while I'm getting 30 fps at some of the heavy scenery.  It's like I just gained an extra GHz.

 

Thanks for sharing!