Try setting your graphic rez to: 4096 as your new 'default' setting.

[Sesquashtoo 2,846]

 

 

DX10 fixer has been the best thing to happen to FSX, and that has helped manage VAS a lot better, and it has a feature called Cloud Cull that helps reduce the overhead without losing the eye candy.

 

And just so everybody is clear....I run FSX ONLY in DX10 mode and Steve's Fixer.  The results as stated...are with this in play, not DX9.

[FLighT01 3]

Sesquashtoo,

 

I note your AffinityMask setting is a number I'm unfamiliar with. I've heard of using 14 with quad cores and 84 with 8 cores, but not familiar with 245.

 

I'm curious to know what configuration of cores that is for.

 

Thanks.

[G MIDY 101]

This is just my take on the use of 4096 textures/performance etc - In terms of performance I think the key to 4096 textures is the memory bandwidth speed and quantity on your GPU. If it is extremely high (beyond 256bit, Titan-Z is 768bit!!!) then your GPU can cope just fine with the loading/unloading of large textures. Memory bandwidth is like a channel which your textures must travel down to be shown in-game and if that channel is small then you are forcing large amounts of data through a small channel. This induces stutters, the most likely place you will see them is when using 4096 clouds where eventually with an intensive aircraft with 4096 textures, a runway with 4096 textures, you will run into trouble. It is worth running a test just to see how much VRAM is being used on your GPU. If it is constantly at it's limit then you will see stuttering in-game due to the choking of the bandwidth channel. If you see this at 4096 textures then you might want to consider reducing the size of key textures such as clouds or autogen because eventually you will run into a problem. Settings such as TML/BP/TBM are all designed to control the way in which FSX handles textures and memory. There is however no perfect formula with these and experimentation is the only real way to get things perfect.

 

This choking gives the illusion that your FPS is being affected when it isn't, it is the queued loading that is choking your sim. In extreme cases you will see this in the form of textures not quite loading fast enough, no SSD can fix this. If you take it far enough (with BP=0 where FSX is allowed to roam free) then you will crash FSX. This is NOT an OOM because of VAS it is a crash due to instability and starved VRAM. It will almost always happen in FSX due to incorrect usage of BP=0 and high settings. Another symptom of too high settings with BP=0 is artifacts with autogen. BP=0 will eventually cause crashes if your GPU cannot cope with the memory load FSX places upon your GPU. FSX does not know nor care how much VRAM you have with this setting, it will use all of it if it can and when it's gone it will crash. This does not mean you should not use BP=0, it means if you use 4096 textures and get crashes then you will need to control things either by lowering settings/reducing textures or by using BP=1 and an appropriate pools setting, the latter however will always reduce performance.

 

Personally I use 4096 textures to allow aircraft/airports to look as intended but my GPU cannot cope with 4096 clouds and the AA settings I want so I had to reduce them down to 256x256! I have also resized autogen textures to the absolute minimum, in fact autogen is mostly turned off on my system. I get mostly consistent 50-60FPS in most situations and have never OOM'd. Since I have been running DX10 I have also seen much better performance even with 4096 textures. Anyone considering 4096 textures must consider their system limitations and in cases where you might start really stressing your GPU, you need to reduce something somewhere or the sim does unfortunately implode either by VAS crash/BP=0 crash or simply you will just see stutter associated lowered performance. 4096 textures can seriously affect stability on a sim that is not optimized to accept them. A sim that perfectly accepts 4096 textures without crashes/stutters is one that is not being overrun at the GPU.

[voodoo101 21]

Steve, I think you are confused about what causes OOMs. It does not have anything to do with hardware directly, it does a bit indirectly. I made an easy explanation about it on another thread and it goes like this.

 

Imagine FSX as a bath tub, an empty bath tub to start but then you load a default aircraft at a default airport with default textures, now a bit of water goes in the bath.

 

Now you decided that the aircraft you want to fly is an add-on aircraft. This is represented by a buck with water in it. Dependant on the aircraft size and quality, depends on how much water is in the bucket, so you put that water in the bath. Add in a top quality airport, again the amount of water depends on the size of airport and quality, so that is more water.

You then keep adding buckets of water with each add-on you add like OrbX Global, REX Textures, Activesky clouds etc, etc., eventually the water overflows and you have an OOM. FSX is a 32bit application and can only use upto 4GB of VAS memory no matter how much memory you have installed.

 

Now the reason why people who have high end systems get it more then people with modest systems is this, they try to run more extras at higher quality. It is not surprising as anybody who has grown up with FSX has built new systems around it.

 

Years ago processors, memory and graphics cards where lower and we had to live with FSX sliders low, or less add-ons. Add to that the fact that add-ons was lower in quality, in fact many add-ons started off as free add-ons as people learned. As components increased and came down in price, so the sliders moved across to the right, the extra power could provide better frames at that quality, however what people didn't know was that the higher they went, the more VAS memory was used. This wasn't a problems because people was not reaching the limit and what you don't know, don't hurt you.

 

The problem now it that we have come to a point where the higher quality textures don't hurt our frame rate and we want the quality let FSX match the DX11 games of today, but we have now hit another limit. Along with the fact that P3D is DX11 and I feel that things will only get worse as developers push the envelope further.

 

To make an example: A roads but for a car is built in the 60's. You drive it down the road at it's top speed of 60MPH, but you want more. A new engine is designed and you fit it. You are now driving down the road at 90MPH. Then a new engine is built and you can drive at 120MPH, however by the time you get to 120MPH you have run of the cliff at the end and OOM. Yes you can keep adding but to stop at the end, no matter what you have under the engine you can only get so fast.

 

Maybe if Microsoft had continued the Flight Simulator line then we would have all moved along. Maybe if the developers had taken to X-Plane 10 64bit then we would have jumped ship years ago. Maybe if P3D becomes completely DX11 compatible and the developers follow suit then 64bit wont be as big of a problems. If it becomes 64bit then all your add-ons become useless anyway.

[Sesquashtoo 2,846]

Sesquashtoo,

 

I note your AffinityMask setting is a number I'm unfamiliar with. I've heard of using 14 with quad cores and 84 with 8 cores, but not familiar with 245.

 

I'm curious to know what configuration of cores that is for.

 

Thanks.

Well, yes..84 for a HT enabled quad core is the one that all the charts calls for.  I was reading for the better part of a day, all the opinions, findings, user-reports, blah, blah...and decided to try this one. It is working really well...minimal stutter also in P3D, etc...so I changed from 84 to this 245.  I have it also in P3D as well.  Try it out...it won't blow anything up...and see if there is a perf for you above or at least equal to the 84 setting.

[SolRayz 392]

AF=245 is 10101111

So this means all logical cores plus last two virtual cores used(even though FSX does not us HT cores).

 

This AF setting should result in the same performance as AF=85 tbh.

[N1G 88]

I think we are assuming that the texture engine and all things associated was correctly coded. Good chance it was not, so maybe this holds some water.

 

Bob

[Steve Dra 7,588]

Thanks for the detailed explanation Craig.  I read the bathtub analogy somewhere here before, and it makes sense.  And your analogy about the better our PCs get the more performance we "logically" want from FSX...sometimes forgetting its a very old piece of software never intended to perform at the levels we've reach with years of tweaking.  Heck, when it came out back in 2006....having 2gb of ram labeled you as a power user and being persecuted as being a zealot, LOL.  Now we're walking around with more than that on our phones!  Look at this link to see where we were in 2008 with regards to default ram: 

 

I love your old car/roads analogy, and if us silly simmers would only accept the fact we've just about reached the limit of what this 8 year old, 32bit app can do, we could all spend less time tweaking and more time flying. :)  Then again, tweaking is an actual hobby all in itself. :LMAO:​  

 

 

That is a great paint job Steve. Will be adding that to the hangar. I notice and cannot say for sure, but a lot of flyers who seem to OOM a lot are those with more than 1.5 GB VRAM.

 

Thanks Julian.  All I know is that I get good performance on my system.  Well...good is a relative term...I'm fine with the performance I get which is 30fps (locked) in outside views in moderate weather, no stutters/lag 95% of the time, then only for a millisecond, lower frames (17-22) in the very details 4096 PMDG 777 cockpit...but the key is that it is smooth! 

 

I hope everyone can eventually find FSX nirvana in their quest to get this beast to submit to our will. :Silly:  

[Bert Pieke 7,585]

AF=245 is 10101111

So this means all logical cores plus last two virtual cores used(even though FSX does not us HT cores).

 

This AF setting should result in the same performance as AF=85 tbh.

 

245 is actually 11110101 - using conventional notation..

 

85 is  01010101

 

so yes, with 245, the last two cores have two threads each enabled (HT).

 

Whether that results in better texture loading is open to debate.. ^_^

[Bjoern 1,157]

A 3.75 hour continuous flight is not a placebo effect, but a rubber-meets-the-road hard tangible! ORBX regional usage to boot! My .cfg file is no feature 'lite weight' in conjunction.

 

But it's a 100% success rate for 1 person, which is statistically questionable.

If you can get, say, 100 simmers to test this and 60 say that your finding has improved their VAS usage, then you can say that it's a successful tweak.

[ejoiner 21]

I for one would like to know for sure.  I have always dialed back my texture res because of the statements made in the past that higher res textures did cause fps hits.  I'll watch this thread for more.  Thanks for the info!

 

It amazes me that this many years into FSX, with all the growth in PC capability, that we are still chasing the holy grail on FPS and OOMs in a 50 dollar piece of software.    I myself have hundreds of dollars i add ons, and gigabytes of installed terrain, mesh, aircraft, airports, etc. etc.     I think we are all crazy.

[SolRayz 392]

I set to 4096 for testing purposes last night, and noticed no perceivable differences in performance. Running 4096 runway/taxiway, and 1024 clouds in REX Direct in DX10.

 

Not sure what that proves.  

[voodoo101 21]

The reason we all love FSX is because we have grown up chasing the holy grail of FPS and OOMs. It has become part of the hobby as much as the pre-flight. That challenge of getting FSX to run smooth with all your add-ons. The hope that you can squeeze the one extra frame out of it. The hope that you can fly further. It got to the point that I spent more time under the FSX hood then actually flying.

 

If we wanted to just load up and play then we would all be playing Call of Duty on a PlayStation.

[FLighT01 3]

" It amazes me that this many years into FSX, with all the growth in PC capability, that we are still chasing the holy grail on FPS and OOMs in a 50 dollar piece of software.    I myself have hundreds of dollars i add ons, and gigabytes of installed terrain, mesh, aircraft, airports, etc. etc.     I think we are all crazy."

 

:lol: I agree, because I know we are!

[tf51d 284]

The reason we all love FSX is because we have grown up chasing the holy grail of FPS and OOMs. It has become part of the hobby as much as the pre-flight. That challenge of getting FSX to run smooth with all your add-ons. The hope that you can squeeze the one extra frame out of it. The hope that you can fly further. It got to the point that I spent more time under the FSX hood then actually flying.

 

If we wanted to just load up and play then we would all be playing Call of Duty on a PlayStation.

...and when we do hit that glorious goal, we add another addon that knocks us right back down!!