FSX Settings

[jscottnjs 0]

Hi all,

 

Please forgive me if this is not in the correct forum!!

 I'm kinda new to FSX and not really a computer whiz, but was wondering is there anything (settings wise) I could do on my PC or FSX its self to get the best out of it. I currently have installed ORBX Aus, ORBX AI traffic, OZx textures for Australia, Qualitywings BAe 146 and the Aeorsoft Airbus X extended installed. My system is a ASUS M11AD, Core i7 Pentium dual core, chipset intel H81 with NVIDIA GT620 2GB and 12GB of ram using windows 8.1. If someone could make sense of all that you are a genius. I am getting about 15FPS and just looking for some tips to improve the simulator. I don't know much about the FSX settings and they are turned up to High and ultra high.

 Thank you very much

 

[alexjameshardy 0]

Okay. Long story time.

 

Firstly, you are going to have to balance your settings in FSX.

 

Go to settings and then click on customise. A new window will appear and you will have more options. If you play on full screen, which I don't recommend, then make sure you choose the correct screen resolution. Then choose your anti-aliasing. Bilinear or Triliniear will work best on your system. Then you have your global options. For your setup you can keep your global texture resolution on Very High. Have lens flare and advanced animations on, bloom off. Also check advanced animations. 

 

Moving on to the next tab, you will want to have high quality VC checked, and aircraft casts shadows on itself/shadows on the ground off. 

 

Onto the scenery tab, this confuses a lot of people, and I still don't understand it. However, the advice I can give you. Level of detail radius, medium. This dictates how much is loaded around you. The settings below that are up to you, however, higher settings will impact performance, badly. I'd recommend keeping them somewhere around the middle. Water effects, low 2x, 1x is not nice and high 2x is a killer of fps. Autogen and scenery complexity are up to you, see what works best. Special effects on high.

 

On the weather tab, change your draw distance to 80 miles. Here's a good time to advertise weather programs. Flying with real world weather from a program like ASN, Opus or REX can make flying a whole lot better. This also fades the horizon out and gives you a much better quality of weather, including clouds, with roughly the same performance.

 

Lastly, the AI traffic tab, turn it all off. Unless you want some other planes in the sky when you fly, but I fly on Vatsim so I have everything off. Cars especially, they're awful on performance.

 

Fun part. Press Windows+R, and then type %appdata% (with the percentages) and then click on the Microsoft folder, then FSX, and then open FSX.cfg with notepad.

 

Tweak 1: Open Task Manager, go to Performance, and then click on CPU. Check how many physical cores there are, and if hyperthreading is enabled. Input the information here (http://www.gatwick-fsg.org.uk/affinitymask.aspx?SubMenuItem=hardware) and then you will get a new piece of text that says [JOBSCHEDULER]AffinityMask=X. Take this line and paste into the very first line of your config.

 

Tweak 2: Under the [MAIN] heading, paste "FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION=0.2" into it. Seeing as you have Orbx, keep it at this setting or higher, although 0.2 should work fine.

 

Tweak 3: Under [GRAPHICS], paste HIGHMEMFIX=1.

 

There are more tweaks available, but I don't want to bombard you. A quick google search will find you some reliable stuff.

 

Just so you know, I get an average of 19.5fps, capped at 20, on the PMDG NGX, with an i5-4220u at 2.3Ghz, Intel 4400HD graphics and 8GB RAM. Also running 2 screens and multiple other programs, just in case you think this isn't something that doesn't help.

 

Last tip, tweak for performance, not eye candy.

 

Good luck

[jscottnjs 0]

Wow thank you so much this will help dramatically thank you again. Just one more thing do I turn antialiasing on or off? and again thank you so very much

I forgot is it better to cap your fps?

[alexjameshardy 0]

Anti-Aliasing should be on.

 

FPS caps are a must, however there's two ways. You can use the FSX internal limiter, and you can use external limiters from Nvidia Inspector or a small program, however I stick with the FSX internal one.

 

To see what the best applicable setting would be, download Fraps. Then use the benchmark feature, showing the MinMax Average. Start up a flight in the most intensive area, for me this would be UK2000 Heathrow in the NGX, and fly a circuit while doing the benchmark. Make sure your frames are unlimited for this and then do the benchmark. After this, view the benchmark and limit it to just below the average FPS. Although it may not be perfect, a smooth stable sim is better than a beautiful jerky sim.

 

Let me know if you need anything else

[jscottnjs 0]

Thank you ill give it a go