Performance tips for low FPS

[dwildkat 12]

Fellow simmers,

         There are a few of us, myself included, that have unfortunately experienced poor system performance with this marvelous bird. After searching these forums for a while I picked up a few tips here and there that, put together, seemed to give me a significant improvement in frames per sec and general smoothness. I thought it might be helpful to share them. Please note that i am no expert at performance tweaking. I do not guarantee that these tweaks would work for everyone. However I feel they are worth the shot especially if you're facing problems too. I also run fsx from a very modest machine, definitely nowhere near what would be classed as "high end". My specs are, AMD Phenom II x2, 6GB RAM and Nvidia GT 630 video card. That said here we go.

 

- First thing I did, delete my FSX.cfg file, have FSX generate a new one and apply ONLY these 3 tweaks;

   1. HIGHMEMFIX=1     (Seems most people know this one already)

 

   2.  [bUFFERPOOLS]

          PoolSize=0

         RejectThreshold=131072  (I don't know exactly what the rejectthreshold section does but it appears to be tailored to individual setups. What I did was use Bojote's FSX tweaking tool                       at http://www.venetubo.com/fsx.html , After generating the new FSX.cfg I went straight to the Bufferpools section, copied it and pasted in my newly generated FSX.cfg. NOTE: I did not use the FSX.cfg from Bojote's site. Rather I simply copied the bufferpools section alone and pasted in my newly generated FSX.cfg)

 

  3.  [Display]

        WideViewAspect=True (Also well known tweak I suppose).

 

The Above tweaks were recommended by Beta tester Frooglesim in a video he uploaded. He claimed to have achieved significant performance improvements using these 3 tweaks alone.

 

Now, for tips directly involving the 777. I gathered from these forums that the VC displays where quite demanding of performance. Some users claimed to have gained a few FPS after adjusting the VC displays FPS limit to 15 or 8. I personally stuck with 15 for all displays. 8 seemed a bit too jerky. You can find this setting in  PMDG SETUP- OPTIONS - PERFORMANCE of the CDU.

 

The most surprising tip I discovered was that the mouse cursor ate a large amount of FPS. I run FSX in the windowed mode and by simply lowering my cursor into the taskbar I would get back nearly DOUBLE the frames I was getting before. No joke!! Turns out this applies to all VCs in FSX but especially the PMDG 777 because of its high detail I guess.

 

I also suggest using the internal FPS limiter. It seemed to produce smoother results than when I tried a few external limiters. I set mine to 45 FPS.

 

Added tip for those with a modest setup like mine. Go to the FSX display settings - Aircraft and untick High res 3D virtual cockpit. I did not detect any significant change to the VC quality compared to leaving it ticked. 

So there you go. I hope these tips improve your 777 and sim performance as they did mine.  :smile:

[falcon999 24]

Locking frame rates to anything higher than 30 will not really buy you any improvements. You may see some visual improvements at 30.

[ArjenVdv 190]

There's no point of putting RejectThreshold in there if you set PoolSize=0. But yes, PoolSize=0 is a great tweak that will massively increase framerates. But nevertheless you'll still get FPS in the mid 20's sometimes. 

If you want smoothness - and many people don't seem to know about this tweak - download NVIDIA Inspector if you have an NVIDIA card. Go to the MS Flight Simulator X profile and set VSync to 1/2 refresh rate and leave VSync Mode on Standard. Now go to FSX and set the internal limiter to 30. Yes, I know the internal limiter decreases FPS but as long as you maintain 30 FPS it's completely smooth without a single hiccup. Using any other FPS limiter will not make this tweak have its effect.

However, there is a way of getting this tweak to work properly without using an FPS limiter, but that will work in PMDG planes only. You gotta go into the FMC to PMDG Options -> Performance and set the refresh rate of all displays to 60. Don't ask me why, I don't know why that works. If you set it to 15 or 30 you are going to need the internal limiter.