frames go from 50 fps to 1.0 fps

[Guest skyman78]

Hello again all you friendly flight simmers. Okay here is my question. Lastnight I took off form Glasgow airport in my Virgin 747-400, I was climbing through 19,000ft with my fps @ 40-50 with AS2004.5 latest build, clouds all over the place, when all of a sudden my frames went to 1.0, as i got to 20,000ft. This was not the first time this happened, x( then what i did is i slewed forward for a bit and then my frames when back up. Next I set my gps to direct to KLAX which showed that it would take 8:45min, this should put me an hour or so out of KLAX by the time i woke up at 11:00 am, well not exactly. I wake up at 11:30 thinking I overshot KLAX, not in the slightest, my gps said I was 5:14 minutes away and I was In canada! My fps were at 1.0 nd active sky was writing station data. This is very frustrating as I was hoping to finally comlplete a flight in my 747. My question to you is, what do you think the problem is? I have a 2.5 ghz p4 with 512 ram and an ATI Radeon 9600XT card This is a relatively new problem, could it be the area I am flying or should I get more ram? I know someone out in the Fs world can help me as I have never posted without a fix. Thank you for your time and patience in reading this somewhat long post. Thanks in advance for the help that I will get. Rod

[Bert Pieke 7,584]

Whatever it is that is causing your fps to go down the drain, I very much doubt it is your 512 Meg memory configuration.Search the forum for "Memory Leak" and see what you find... I have no experience with Active Sky, but does this ever happen without it?Also, try to alt-tab out of FS when this happens and run the task monitor, using ctl-alt-del and check the performance page for memory usage.

[Guest kickin_chicken]

There could be lots of problems causing a huge FPS hit. I don't have AS2004, but I fly real weather with lots of clouds, and I can maintain a fairly good 15-25 fps. In fact I flew into La Paz (13,000' altitude airport) with thunderstorms for the RTW race team and my FPS were the LAST thing I worried about. In fact, I had NO PROBLEM regarding framerates during that ordeal.So, what could the problem be... I run an AMD 2800+ with 512megs on an Asus board with the same ATI 9600XT video card. Now, I don't have the latest drivers for either the board or the card. I have a set of drivers that works, have never given me a problem, and I don't plan on changing for any reason. ATI Drivers:ATI CATALYST 4.9, 09/09/04Nforce Drivers:4.24 full installAlso, I run Flight Sim at 1024x768x32bit, no filtering or AA (in flight sim graphic options). I have Very Dense scenery/autogen, full aircraft textures, high land/med water textures, and lock the framerate at 25fps (23fps for multiplayer). I fly mainly payware FSD or Eaglesoft complex aircraft that I've converted most of the textures to DXT3 format. I have the ATI Control Panel drivers installed with the Overdrive (graphics GPU) set to MAX (ie: 526MHz). I have the system memory running at 200MHz (DDR = 400MHz) and the CPU running at 333MHz (that is, I'm not overclocking the board, memory or CPU at all). My computer case and CPU temps are all normal. I run the desktop (and flight sim for that matter) using the ATI Control Panel settings of 2x AA and 8x Ansiotropic filtering. This is pretty tame by most standards. I have no problems (knock on wood!) with Flight Sim regarding framerates. Now, maybe you should check some of your settings and see if you can match what I have, like lowering AA or Filtering or not overclocking your CPU (if you are). Another thing is that I have AI Traffic set to 55%. I know on my system that moving the slider to just 75% KILLS my framerates, to the point that I notice that they are slower. I also have FS Skyworld installed and I'm using "reduced quality" clouds (I forget what set). I don't notice the 'lower quality' but gain a lot in framerates. Maybe try using older (or newer) drivers for your motherboard/videocard. Maybe try lowering your flight sim graphics or display resolution. Keep trying some of the stuff I have posted here. Nothing is a bigger drag than 1 fps!! Good luck, I hope this helped.PS: Disable your anti-virus/webmx/napster software. Anything that runs in the background should be disabled if possible. I know that Norton AV will occationally make a call to the 'home server' to check for updates. Not a problem usually, but if you have flight sim FULL-SCREEN (which I recommend if you don't), sometimes the computer will 'split time' between the Norton AV notification (which is like "There are new Updates you can download") and flight sim. That would cause a huge hit in framerates.

[Guest skyman78]

First of all thanks for your quick responses. I checked to see what all processes i was running and I had 41 or so. I took a screenshot of them all and was going to post but the jpg is too big. I was wondering if I could email it to someone sot that they could give me a better idea of which i could do without while running fs9. I did notice that I was using 571m while using fs9 and active sky by themselves and I only have 512 ram so it has to go to the harddrive to get the rest and that I think would give me a decrease in framerates while active sky was writing all of the data. Soif someone could give me another hand it would be great. Thanks again in advance.Rod