As a mathematics researcher in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, I'm usually prone to stick to factual evidence when I deal with hardware and software. Unfortunately, I have come to the conclusion that flight sim (P3D 2.5 in this case) is not strictly deterministic, in the sense that, given the SAME initial conditions, it gives you different results in terms of stutters and rubberbanding (that bad visual feeling you have that your speed relative to the ground is going up and down).

 

"SAME Initial conditions" means same scenery, aircraft, date, time of day, weather, running services, no antivirus, and of course same PC.

 

The observed variance is there: this is no psycological effect: there are times when it is smoother and times when it is bad.

 

Sometimes I look back to old good times, when performance was consistently awful, but at least you knew what to expect.

 

Is anyone else experiencing any of this? And maybe someone has an explanation for it?

 

Tnx

 

Andrea

I have no explanation, but I think that what you wrote is true for everyone.

So much that I did not think about it anymore. I have my setup and I did not change it.

I've gathered no metrics,so my impressions are totally unscientific and subjective... but yes I have experienced that fluctuation, inconsistent fluctuation... it's jarring and destroys the "willing suspension of disbelief"

 

Conversely, ... going to sleep with a fan... Consistent...steady noise...you get used to it so you nod off ...

 

if you have consistently stuttering, or consistent glitch that is happening at a fixed rate, Then like the fan, your brain can overlook it, put it in the background, and move on with immersion.

 

Chas

Microsoft has a desire to support all sorts of applications, hardware, etc. There are all kinds of things runnig in the background at various times. It would be nice if we had a button sequence to turn off everything but processes that are essential to P3D (or whatever). You can personally stop many non-essential processes but which ones are they? If you make a mistake the next time you run your financial management program, or open the big photoshop project, bad things may happen. This is why they created Linux.

Hi Dick, 

 

There is a program called Alacrity that you can use to disable all non-essential processes when you start FSX/P3D. It is pretty effective, although I have to admit I don't find I need it anymore. 

 

The best part is that it will not allow you to disable services that should not be disabled, and when you exit FSX/P3D it turns everything back on.

 

Pretty clever bit of programming. I tried to do a donation-ware contribution, but the author is no longer on PayPal.