What's happening to the simmers!

[Tim_Capps 474]

Here's the complaint I have. Reviewers are going to be forced to maintain two sims: FSX and P3D!

[SpiritFlyer 987]

There's one good reason not to do a review...

[n4gix 4,955]

First off congrats on the wedding and thanks for trying concerning testing.  I'm going to upgrade my CPU to 3.33ghz.  I'm also going to invest in a video card with around 2-3gigs of on board vram..

Just as an aside Dillon, but what PCIe support does your current motherboard have? If it is at least PCIe v2.0 it may work out well for you. PCIe v1.0 just won't cut the mustard...

[Dillon 2,198]

Just as an aside Dillon, but what PCIe support does your current motherboard have? If it is at least PCIe v2.0 it may work out well for you. PCIe v1.0 just won't cut the mustard...

 

 

When you say won't cut the mustard, what exactly are you meaning?

[meshman 109]

Think driving on a three lane freeway. Now imagine that two of the three lanes of that freeway are closed for repair. How's the traffic flow for each of those scenarios?

[n4gix 4,955]

When you say won't cut the mustard, what exactly are you meaning?

The physical slot for the card is different, as well as the bus bandwidth. I'm not at all certain you could even find a modern graphics card that will work in a PCIe 1.0 x16 slot...

[Dillon 2,198]

The physical slot for the card is different, as well as the bus bandwidth. I'm not at all certain you could even find a modern graphics card that will work in a PCIe 1.0 x16 slot...

 

 

Don't think I have a problem.  Bought a new card and it's working perfectly.  B)

 

THX...

[Jeff H 63]

Dillon, the issue I see with your system is that your CPU clock speed is quite slow and the FSB is pretty narrow.  More than anything else, those two things have the greatest impact on Flight sim performance.  You can see my specs in my sig, and when I do choose to use FSX, which is rarely as I'm a FS 9.995 guy, it sails along pretty respectably.  When I run flightsim, my system runs at about 3.9 GHz and the FSB runs at about 2000.  It does make a huge difference in both versions.  You have a Dell so your overclocking potential is probably limited, but it would be worth a look.  
I know you weren't soliciting any advice, but your specs caught my eye immediately so I thought I'd offer my experience. 

 

Cheers!!  :smile:

[SierraHotel 987]

The simple answer is that the "civil" is being systematically removed from civilization!

[Dillon 2,198]

I'm still happy with FS9. With Sascha's new world textures, its like a whole new sim. If GePro was a step above default, Sascha's textures are about 2 steps above GePro. And being a FSX user, even 'low and slow' flights look better with it then FSX.

 

Along with all the add-ons that are available which alre probably more then FSX and P3D put together, and on a platform that is still probably the best, I have no reason to change....ever.

 

 

But just don't tell me I'm holding back the flight sim world because of it.

 

 

OOM's and CTD's and 18 FPS on approach to payware airports ('smooth' eh?) is.

 

 

Which we fs9's don't get even on 'cheapie' machines.

 

You know what's weird is in my effort to update my system to run P3D v2 (looking at least as good as FS9) I stumbled across and oversight that's hindered the look and performance of FS9 on my system for years. I must have had DX9 installed instead of DX10 or 11. Upon updating DX11 and installing fresh drivers for my current video card (NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250 w/1gig Memory) FS9 runs amazing even flying into NYC. The visuals are sharper than I've ever seen them which makes FS9 look like a whole new sim. How DX11 can affect performance and visuals to this point is amazing. I've spent the last few days test flying to places like London, KLAX, and NYC just to see if I can make my system struggle. As always the NYC area at dusk is the most problematic but still there's a noticeable increase in performance and the look of the sim. The only way I can make since of this is I was running a DX10 video card with DX9 on the machine. Now that I have DX11 it's making all the difference. Clouds no longer pose a hit on performance when there dense and the most demanding add-ons run without a hitch. I can kick myself for missing something like this for so long now I'm looking to move to P3D v2 it's hard because like you said the shire amount of add-ons for FS9 make it a mature platform that's second to non. FSX doesn't have the airports FS9 has. I found the new card I bought for P3D v2 doesn't display FS9 textures correctly so now because FS9.75 seems new once again (how many times has that happened since 2003) I might wait and enjoy FS9 a little bit longer to allow P3D v2 to get a few patches and add-ons to start being made and adjusted for full compatibility with the new sim.

 

 

Dillon, the issue I see with your system is that your CPU clock speed is quite slow and the FSB is pretty narrow.  More than anything else, those two things have the greatest impact on Flight sim performance.  You can see my specs in my sig, and when I do choose to use FSX, which is rarely as I'm a FS 9.995 guy, it sails along pretty respectably.  When I run flightsim, my system runs at about 3.9 GHz and the FSB runs at about 2000.  It does make a huge difference in both versions.  You have a Dell so your overclocking potential is probably limited, but it would be worth a look.  

I know you weren't soliciting any advice, but your specs caught my eye immediately so I thought I'd offer my experience. 

 

Cheers!!  :smile:

Thanks for the feedback. Seeing as in these initial days of P3D v2 my only concern was to get the sim up and running where I can look at it is the only goal at this point. I'm not looking to run the sim looking better than FSX. I just want it to be on par with FS9 or a little bit better if that's possible. I don't need the water to have full detail or autogen to be extreamly dense. Just something to get me by until I have money to upgrade to some decent hardware for the sim. Call me crazy but for my low expectation and the fact I can currently run X-Plane 10, Aerofly FS, and Flight looking great I believe P3D v2 to run acceptably well on my system. FS9 like I said above is ridicules at this point. If I keep settings to what my machine can handle I believe P3D v2 will not disappoint like FSX did. We'll see though.

[Dillon 2,198]

The simple answer is that the "civil" is being systematically removed from civilization!

 

It's funny the whole point of this thread is being contradicted somewhat by those of us currently helping each other.

[Dillon 2,198]

Interesting on the DX11. I might try that, Dillon.

 

Maybe a few patches later and solid, smooth unhindered performance with no OOM's, ctd's and decent fps make me consider trying P3D.

 

Just a shame they rush these things before they're near perfect. Because you know us simmers demand perfection!!

 

 

Your going to have patches needed for any new piece of software.  Once the product get's out in the hands of the masses fleshes out problems once thought weren't there.

[cmpbellsjc 2,963]

 

 

Dell Duo Core 2.66 1333FSB - Windows 7 Pro 64Bit 4Gigs Ram
NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250 w/1gig Memory

 

 

 

I've always found FSX very easy to run.  The only tweaks I've done is run the cfg through the bojote automatic tweaker and add BP=0 and it runs with zero issues on my low end PC.  I'm not sure why a lot of people are having problems with it

 

You know Maurice, I have never had any issues running FSX either. Back in the early to mid '00s I was running FS9 on an old Dell and I was involved in the endless tweaking of FS9 that you hear people these days doing with FSX. For the life of me I just couldn't get good performance out of that Dell I was using.

 

Then in April '08 I decided enough was enough and went out and build a new rig with an E8400 that I later overclocked to 3.85ghz, 2GB ram and a GTS250 (same one Les is using), along with XP32 bit. I actually built the rig with the sole purpose of sticking to FS9 mainly because I had been reading all the horror stories at the time about how bad FSX performance was.

 

I had decided at the time to seek the assistance of the late Michael Greenblatt from FS-GS to assist me in setting up FS9. He agreed but strongly and I mean strongly recommended me to do FSX rather than FS9. After a bit of banter back and forth with him I decided to go with FSX even though there were hardly any good addons with it at the time.

 

Funny and amazing thing was, FSX ended up for me not being as bad as I had read on the forums at all. In fact it ran great once I did all the necessary things like mipping AI, scenery and stuff like that. I ended up using that rig all the way until July of this year. But, even until the end of that rig and when I had been running the NGX and similar a/c on it, I never had any CTD's or any of the other bad things you read about people getting with FSX these days. Surprisingly I never had an OOM (actually had 1 after the NGX prior to SP1) with only having 2GB of ram, but the sim worked flawlessly. The only thing holding me back was the texture swap time when I would switch from VC to external or external to VC. It would take a second or two to load the textures back. Heck, I used to post screens once in a while from that rig showing that I was getting 25 to 30 FPS in the NGX going into FSDT's JFK, with a ton of AI and some people couldn't believe it.

 

The only reason I built a new rig for FSX was to go to Win7 64 and get 8GB of faster RAM and get faster HD's. That being said, I am now on a 2700K and haven't even overclocked it yet since I completed my install and set up, but with my vast array of addons I use from PMDG, FSDT, FT, UT2, UTX,. etc, my performance is so good I barely even feel inclined to go thru the steps to OC it, even though I eventually will.

 

To this day with the rigs most of us have, I still have trouble understanding why there are people having so many issues with FSX. I've been using it for going on 6 years and have never had a CTD and had one OOM when the NGX came out before they released the first service pack. Yet I read about people still getting all kinds of weird CTD's, OOM's and it really makes me scratch my head wondering when in the heck they are doing

 

I'm not really that inclined to make the move to P3D until it matures a bit and the majority of the addons not only have an installer for it, but also are properly ported to take advantage of it. Plus since I am mainly a user of PMDG products I am interested to see what their pricing policy is when they do the P3D licenses. If they end up being a few hundred dollars or more for each plane I will most likely just stick with FSX until I see a better sim come out in the future that offers the same amount/quality of addons I have in FSX for the same type of prices. 

[Holdit 551]

 

 

All I was asking for is some respect to others, it's sadly lacking in the world today unfortunately. If there is an opinion to be aired, please do, I'm not suggesting we stop commenting but also put the reasons why you think that way. "I don't like X because A,B,C isn't right" instead we get "I don't like X because it's rubbish!" mmmmm I don't think it's much to ask for us all to switch on the brain before making comments, is it!

 

It seems to me that simmers have an internal "Bandwagon Affinity" slider - and with some people it's shoved all the way over to the right. They can't have something new without simultaneously developing zero tolerance for what went before, even if nobody's asking them to keep using it.

 

I never did own FS9, but I was always interested to read about people who were still happy with it, and I've wondered on more than one occasion whether, in view of my low-end system, I shouldn't "upgrade backwards".  The extra stuff available with FSX swings it for me though. As for those who are still with FS9, fair play to them and long may they continue. It's a big sky, and there's room for us all.