Jim,
 
I'm not upset at all with you at all, just a little confused.
 
First of all, I did not know that the Hardware/Software Guide was superseded AVSIM FSX Configuration Guide? I believe AVSIM still posts the HW/SW Guide on the website, or it is at least on a page somewhere out there on the Internet that says it is on AVSIM. I used Google to find it.
 
So no I'm not upset at all, if you could please kindly direct me (link) to the AVSIM FSX Configuration Guide it would be most appreciated.

 

Sorry if I came off upset, I wasn't, I was just comparing one guide (obsolete) with a later one (current).

 

Bill Clark

Not a problem Bill. I accept the apology though. I have a lot of respect for you after meeting you in Wichita and it was disappointing to see you questioning everything I have said or done. The links to the HW/SW Guide were removed recently. We had a system crash last month and other Admin functions got put to a lower priority. Sorry for the confusion. The AVSIM FSX Configuration Guide follows the information provided by PMDG, starting on Page 21 of the 777 Introduction Guide. It may or may not be correct. Guidance has to be taken from somewhere and I think that's the best guidance I have seen anywhere. As you know, guides are guides that try to steer you in the right direction. That's what AVSIM is trying to do here with the FSX Configuration Guide AND the AVSIM CTD Guide. Too much information in a guide for thousands of computer configurations is not my idea of a good guide as people get confused when something does not work properly. That's why AVSIM decided to place some of the tweaks that can be used in FSX and what they will do if you decide to employ them. NickN has a great FSX Computer "Bible" he just released (and continues to update) and I have been following a lot of his guidance. If you read his "Bible" you will see that he believes there should be no tweaks to FSX except maybe a BufferPool tweak and maybe one other but those are for older systems. Our chipsets and computers have gotten much faster and powerful since FSX was released in 2007. The tweaks were mainly to squeeze out better performance in our older computers. Thanks again for your apology and cheering me up once again knowing we are still friends.

 

Best regards,

The default is system managed size when Windows is first installed.  Then one goes and starts changing things and maybe messing things up.  As I provided on another topic, here's an excellent blog on the pagefile that I found some time ago - http://lifehacker.com/5426041/understanding-the-windows-pagefile-and-why-you-shouldnt-disable-it.  Hope this helps.

 

Best regards,

 

Could I ask what is perhaps a silly question but one which I have not seen addressed elsewhere? I have Win 7 installed on my C drive (SSD) and FSX on my D drive so should I select both of these drives to be system managed or just the one with Win 7?

 

Many thanks,

Bill

Could I ask what is perhaps a silly question but one which I have not seen addressed elsewhere? I have Win 7 installed on my C drive (SSD) and FSX on my D drive so should I select both of these drives to be system managed or just the one with Win 7?

 

Many thanks,

Bill

A good question. I have my FSX scattered all over on several drives and, after reinstalling Windows 7 and FSX, I had enabled the page file for my main Windows drive but not my other drives (my default it is set up automatically for all drives). Previously, I had found that having the default setting to automatically set up a page file for all drives caused some problems so I had changed to set up "System Managed Size" individually. I loaded up FlightBean KIAD and saw all kinds of major, major stuttering (some long pauses). FSX was on my C drive and KIAD was on my D drive. When I enabled "System Managed Size" for my D Drive, the stuttering went away. I then set up "System Managed Size" for each drive.

 

Here's a good article about page file sizes I think is interesting - http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch001293.htm.

 

Best regards,

Just to add a little perspective, I absolutely agree the PMDG guide/AVSIM guides are great, but there are no absolutes when it comes to FSX (or, for that matter as I'm finding, Prepar3D). You have to learn and experiment carefully with your system. Being conservative with settings and expectations helps.

 

For example, I don't use nvtweak, but I have used the standard Nvidia control panel, as well as FSX settings. I had set FSX to limit to 30FPS, and also Nvidia Vsync to adaptive(half-refresh rate).

 

I now suspect both do the same thing, and fight with each other if you use both methods. I set FPS to Unlimited in FSX, and have some smoother flight areas, as a result.

 

I also have ORBX's freeware air traffic, and have to limit my AI traffic to 16-22 for congested areas. YBBN during rush hour you need a full coffee pot with all the incoming/outgoing with these settings. On my system. ATC can barely keep up! Some people suggest 75 for AI traffic, which on my system with my particular software combo would be utter madness. Otoh I run water at High 2.x with REX heavy-duty wave animations, DX11 HD clouds in P3D and 4096 DXT clouds in FSX with no problem. With TEXTUREMAXLOAD=4096 in FSX.cfg, even (generally not advised).

 

Just have to keep at it, and understand the trade offs. Not going to fly an F22Raptor at downtown Drziewecki Designs Manhattan with these settings, at Mach 1.2, unless I want to make FSX exit super-quickly! OTOH with a simple, slow, Nemeth Designs chopper, I can almost land from a hover at a coffee shop on 5th Avenue with those same settings, as long as I use FSUIPC chimes as a hint that I'm nearing overload, and don't fly in from too far away (for some reason there's a particular direct route from KEWS1 in NJ to the tip of Manhattan that really fills up VAS fast, if I fly around that direct path, though.... can do it!).

 

No single, general setting will cover everything. Learning what mix for what types of flight ON YOUR SYSTEM is a big part of the fun of this stuff, yes, even with P3D. Have found ways to OOM that as easily and badly as FSX if I want to.

 

 

 

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

thanks for the heated effort here guys, going to change my setup to system managed page file see how it affects VAS usage.

It will have absolutely no affect on VAS usage. VAS is VAS. I cannot believe how confused many are getting on this. Did you read the AVSIM CTD Guide on OOM's and VAS? What about the PMDG Intro guide for the 777? Here is a quote from the guide so we can have it right here for everyone to see (from page 21, PMDG 777 Intro Guide):

 

"FSX is a 32-bit application. Even under the recommended Windows 7 64-bit operating system, the FSX.exe process always faces the same mathematical limitations that all 32-bit applications do. One of these is a 4GB hard limit on something called “virtual address space” (VAS). When FSX crashes with an error message saying that your computer has run out of available memory (commonly called an “OOM” in the sim community), it’s actually talking about VAS, not physical memory like the amount of RAM in your system. Customers who have huge amounts of RAM like 16GB or 32GB are often baffled by this message for good reason – they certainly aren’t running out of physical memory. Microsoft probably should have made the error say “The application has run out of virtual address space.” instead of the vague “memory” term."

 

"VAS is effectively a preallocation of everything the simulator can potentially access during a flight and will fluctuate over the course of using the simulator as you fly between different areas. Note that VAS is *NOT* the same thing as the “virtual memory” swapfile that you can set the size of in the Windows system options – they are two very different things and having a large virtual memory swapfile does not protect you from the 4GB VAS limit. The mathematical limit itself comes from the definition of “32-bit” – a bit is the most basic data structure in computer science and it can have two values, a 0 or 1, which can mean all sorts of things like true or false, on or off etc. This is why at the core a computer executes “binary” code. The amount of VAS a 32-bit process can access can be calculated by raising the number of possible values for each bit (2) to the power of the number of bits available (32). So 232 equals exactly 4,294,967,296 bytes (not bits). When you do the rest of the conversion math this value comes out to exactly 4 gigabytes of potentially addressable memory for a 32-bit process."

 

"The reason we recommend using a 64-bit operating system like Windows 7 64-bit is due to the fact that it can give FSX.exe that entire 4GB block of VAS. In 32-bit Windows the default is a maximum of 2GB of VAS for FSX and 2GB reserved for the operating system. This can be increased to 3GB for FSX through an edit to the boot environment configuration (“the 3GB switch”), but this is still 1GB lower than you’ll get with the 64-bit version of Windows and it makes both OOMs more likely and OS crashes more likely because it reduces the amount of VAS the OS itself has to work with. 32-bit versions of Windows can also only ever access 4GB of total physical memory, so if FSX is using 3GB itself, there’s not much there for the OS and other applications. 64-bit Windows does not have this limit and with a lot of RAM you can essentially run as many other applications outside of FSX (browser, weather apps, flight planners etc) as you want with no effect on the system. There is literally no reason not to run the 64-bit version of Windows 7 on an FSX simming PC.

 

So I hope this helps those who are having trouble understanding the Windows memory management system.  I found it very confusing too but PMDG (and Word Not Allowed) got me on the right track (and now I don't drink anymore :lol:). 

 

No single, general setting will cover everything. Learning what mix for what types of flight ON YOUR SYSTEM is a big part of the fun of this stuff, yes, even with P3D. Have found ways to OOM that as easily and badly as FSX if I want to.

That is well stated and exactly what I have been trying to say but maybe not as effectively. I've been saying there's "no magic bullet" that will allow everyone to turn up their settings to the max and not have any issues whatsoever with FSX. Many think there's a tweak out there that will allow them to do just that. Not true.

 

Best regards,

Plus don't forget you can save different configs, so you can call one "Fighters," another "Tubes," another "NYCX," another "GA Countryside," etc. and basically have "presets" you load at the start screen that are optimal for your planned session.

 

If you want to you can then go into those (each is a subset of fsx.cfg, basically) and change things like TextureMaxLoad with editing, and have things exactly optimized that way.

To expand on Jim’s point, the page file contains the total of all pages in all the current processes on the PC that have  be written to disk. – not to just for FSX.  The size of  effective page file is limited by as free space on  disk drive.

 

If the page file is too big will does not change system performance. If the page file is too small for the current mix of processes the “system running low on virtual memory” error message can occur. The page file can increased to a sensible size That is not the same as the FSX  message “computer has run out of available memory”.

Hi Gerry,

 

That's pretty confusing. I don't even understand what you said. Page file has nothing to do with VAS.

 

Best regards,

i got OOM in the T7 in dx9 in dx10  not one single OOM with the T7,and i have used it a lot

Hi Gerry,

 

That's pretty confusing. I don't even understand what you said. Page file has nothing to do with VAS.

 

Best regards,

I never wrote that the page file had anything do with VAS. Another poster made that connection.

 

Indeed, I specifically wrote that   the page file error "system running low on virtual memory” is not the same as the FSX error the FSX  error  “computer has run out of available memory”. 

 

If the page file on your system is too big, the system will not use it any more or less—in other words, increasing the size of the page file does not change system performance, it simply means the system can have more committed virtual memory. If the page file is too small for the mix of applications you are running, you might get the “system running low on virtual memory” error message.

 

 

Source:  Windows Internals, Sixth Edition, Part 2 Microsoft Page 279 by Mark Russinovich, David A. Solomon, & Alex Ionescu

I dont get any ooms,  

 

I just did a 15 hour flight from CYVR to YSSY.

 

I used the

 

pmdg 777,  

fsdreamteam cyvr,

vancouver + v3

Orbx PNW

ORBX Global

Megascenery Earth Washington

Sydney VFR

Cls Sydey Pro

REX Essentials Clouds

ASN 

Xsplit 

Ultimate Traffic 2 (ai on 100 %)

 

and to top it all off, I was connected to vatsim via squakbox

 

15 hour flight, no oom, no bex errors nothing, perfect.

 

Reason being, I have my pc set up well, Its defragged nicley, and everything is installed correctly and slowly.

 

I have texture max load on 2056 

 

and I have dont have a load of crap installed on the pc, just flightsim.

 

When my buddies about 6 people) have asked me to come on their pc via teamviewer and have a look that their pc to try and get the same performance as me, i normally see a billion icons on their desktop and fsx installed in some mad weird location.  This is a huge "ahh here we go" moment for me, I normally know just by look at the desktop this is going to be a lost cause from the start

 

Ill then normally see 8 user accounts on the pc for various members of the family , and nearly always some crappy java based games on their desktops and scenery installed all over the place,   I thnen have a look down at the  hidden icons on the tool bar and see a while heap of rubbish thats being loaded up from windows startup.  

 

It is at this point, I tell them i cant help them unless they do a complete clean install of windows with no crap on the pc, Then i need 2 weeks solid to install fsx nicely and everything inthe right place, compressed and defragged,

 

I then tell them that junk is banned from being installed, and I normally get "but susie needs to have make a farm world, with spyware installed" on the pc and my brother ridger needs "tank commmander" put on the pc too..

 

It is then at this point I explain to them, why i cant waste 2 weeks of my life as they just dont get the idea of a good clean installation.

 

Reason being, I have my pc set up well, Its defragged nicley, and everything is installed correctly and slowly.

 

What slider settings do you use to run that lot?

 

 

I then tell them that junk is banned from being installed, and I normally get "but susie needs to have make a farm world, with spyware installed" on the pc and my brother ridger needs "tank commmander" put on the pc too..



It is then at this point I explain to them, why i cant waste 2 weeks of my life as they just dont get the idea of a good clean installation.

 

That is why I have always dual booted into a Windows install dedicated to FSX only

I had countless CTDs due to different reasons (mostly poorly set up and/or tweaked FSX and/or system) over the past years in FSX, but I never ever had a single OOM, no matter how long I fly, no matter in which plane I fly, no matter where (over which scenery) I fly. Maybe that's just me, but I think reasonable settings and a non "overtweaked" system and FSX are the key to success! ;-)