Simmers,

 

The situation that I'm talking about was happening at FSDT KIAH, but I've seen similar at T2G OTHH, Aerosoft EGLL, etc... Now, I've been doing a lot of reading about OOM's since I got my new system (specs listed with my profile), because they're starting to occur more and more often now. I understand wholly that they're an inevitable part of FSX being a 32-bit system, and that it doesn't really matter my system, if the VAS limit is exceeded, it's going to crash. I just wanted to see if this is normal, or if there's something I'm doing that could reduce the issue in any way. Basically, I'm getting FSUIPC warnings for OOMs before pushback, while just sitting at the gate (so, in other words, with nothing else loaded than the airport which I'm at). The most recent time I've had this was at the gate at KIAH, with the PMDG NGX, FS2C, REX and FTX Global. LOD radius at 4.5, REX clouds at 1024, autogen at dense and AI limited to 100 aircraft, my VAS being at around 3.8 GB. FFTF was somewhere between 0.2 and 0.3. To rectify this, I decreased the autogen to dense, and set my TML to 2048*2048 (I've been flying with that since), though I was still around 3.5GB without even taking off. Is that normal for the addons I listed? I even started getting warnings at T2G OTHH in the T7, an area that should be, all in all, rather low on the usage. If you want the rest of my fsx.cfg, I'd be happy to share.

 

Thanks for any and all help - sorry for the confusing wording of the post.

 

Regards,

 

Derek

I have never seen it running out of VAS before pushback. You have to investigate. Is it the tweaks in your FSX.cfg? Only you can find out and that's easy. You can move the fsx.cfg to a temporary folder, restart fsx and let the config rebuild and then make your scenery slider adjustments, AI, etc. (don't forget to add the highmemfix=1 parameter in the graphics section and the AI line in the Main section (like SimObjectPaths.6=MyTraffic\Aircraft so you can have AI. Once done, restart FSX and try the flight again. You can also go into the fsx.cfg and comment out all of your tweaks if you know what tweaks you added. To comment out a tweak, just add two slashes in front of it (i.e., //BufferPools=).

Be careful with REX as I have already brought my system to its knees by changing the Texture Compression Algorithm from DXT5 to the max 32 bit. It was not pretty. I would leave your texture resolution in REX at 512 for your clouds too. Let TML 2048 or 4096 handle your resolution. The good thing about REX are the cloud textures. They are better than the default.

Do you use ASN or are you using the REX weather or the default weather program? Be careful changing any of the options in ASN as they affect performance (as the program will tell you before you make the change).

If you have any photoscenery installed and it is enabled, it will load even if you are not going to use it during your flight session. Make sure it is disabled or you will run out of memory very soon after starting up FSX depending on the amount you have installed.
 

my VAS being at around 3.8 GB.

This is confusing to me. You have 3.8GB's at the gate and then when you takeoff you have 3.5GB's? If I am understanding you correctly, that's normal. Are you using the FSUIPC VAS monitor or the Process Explorer monitor? I use the FSUIPC VAS monitor and I show around 3.5GB's when taking off. I have my VAS usage logged to the FSUIPC.log and it shows me what I started out with, what was used during the flight, and what I had left when I finished FSX. I use this log to see if I can improve my VAS usage. For instance, the other day I had an OOM on a short flight from Omaha to Denver. It turned out I had accidently left some photoscenery enabled in states I was not going to use during my flight. I disable those and I had over 1GB of VAS remaining when I finished subsequent flights.

You might be interested in using the Process Monitor. I have instructions for setting it up in the AVSIM CTD Guide where only FSX and FSX addons are loaded. That way I can see what is being loaded at startup and during a flight. I can monitor it during the flight as I have another monitor but, if you don't have another monitor, you can simply shutdown Process Monitor when you complete a flight and then look at the Process Monitor log (which will be massive but it will show you what was loading). You might see something loading that you don't need.

Hope this helps.

Best regards,

 

 

This is confusing to me. You have 3.8GB's at the gate and then when you takeoff you have 3.5GB's? If I am understanding you correctly, that's normal. Are you using the FSUIPC VAS monitor or the Process Explorer monitor? I use the FSUIPC VAS monitor and I show around 3.5GB's when taking off. I have my VAS usage logged to the FSUIPC.log and it shows me what I started out with, what was used during the flight, and what I had left when I finished FSX. I use this log to see if I can improve my VAS usage. For instance, the other day I had an OOM on a short flight from Omaha to Denver. It turned out I had accidently left some photoscenery enabled in states I was not going to use during my flight. I disable those and I had over 1GB of VAS remaining when I finished subsequent flights.

 

Sorry about that - very confusingly worded on my part. What I meant to say was that I was at 3.8ish, and then I reduced the settings a fair bit, which left me at around 3.5. I've been checking by means of Process Explorer and VMMap.

 

 

 

If you have any photoscenery installed and it is enabled, it will load even if you are not going to use it during your flight session. Make sure it is disabled or you will run out of memory very soon after starting up FSX depending on the amount you have installed.

 

No photoscenery enabled as far as I'm aware, but I'll take a look and make sure that's correct.

 

 

 

Do you use ASN or are you using the REX weather or the default weather program? Be careful changing any of the options in ASN as they affect performance (as the program will tell you before you make the change).

 

I do use ASN, with fairly conservative settings (60nm cloud radius, 5 layers, etc.), though I'll take another look to make sure there's nothing I've missed.

 

 

 

Be careful with REX as I have already brought my system to its knees by changing the Texture Compression Algorithm from DXT5 to the max 32 bit. It was not pretty. I would leave your texture resolution in REX at 512 for your clouds too. Let TML 2048 or 4096 handle your resolution. The good thing about REX are the cloud textures. They are better than the default.

 

I'll take another look at my REX settings. I thought they were alright but I'll take another look. In what way do you mean it brought it "to its knees by changing the Texture Compression Algorithm from DXT5 to the max 32 bit"? Is there a setting to select the texture compression algorithm? If so, should I keep it on DXT5?

 

Thanks for all of the help - it really does make a difference (or at least it seems like it will).

Regards,

 

Derek

In what way do you mean it brought it "to its knees by changing the Texture Compression Algorithm from DXT5 to the max 32 bit"? Is there a setting to select the texture compression algorithm? If so, should I keep it on DXT5?

It brought my system down to a crawl and it eventually ran out of memory but I also had the REX cloud settings set at 2048. I have only two tweaks in my FSX settings.... LOD_Radius is set from the default max of 4.5 to 6.5 and my Texture_Max_Load is set from the default max to 4096.

 

Best regards,