fsx-se FSX-SE Dramatic FPS Drop On Subsequent Flights

[Havoc556 0]

Hi all,

 

I'm having an issue with FPS on FSX-SE. Now, whilst I realize everyone's experience is different due to set ups, I would be really interested in hearing if people have had any similar issues.

When I start my first flight of the day I am getting around 45 - 60 FPS (I have disable FPS limiters in NI so I can see the max, its normally set to 30). I am using the usual compliment of addons, ORBX, Carenado, REX with Soft Clouds ASN.

If I then exit the flight and reload the exact same situation I only get around 10 - 13 FPS. Nothing has change between the two flights. Weather, times, location, traffic etc are all identical. This will continue for every flight I load and the only way to recover is to restart FSX. Which I guess is OK but not a solution ,especially when online.

Any thoughts would be appreciated, thanks in advance.

 

[Jimm 437]

I suspect it has to do with VAS (Virtual Address Space).  There are a great many discussions here at AVSIM that discuss VAS usage and how to maintain a stable sim and decent framerates .  If you are exiting the flight and going back to the main menu and then reloading the flight, FSX is not releasing the memory.  Best solution I know of is to completely exit FSX and then restart, which should work for you.  You may also want to make sure that you are not loading scenery in areas that you are not flying.  

 

As an aside, if you have a decent system set up, don't concern yourself with frames (or as many would say "chasing frames").  Just pay attention to how smooth or rough the simulator is running.  Frequent stutters and slight pauses can indicate that perhaps your sliders are set too high in your settings in FSX.  If your sim is running smooth but you notice framerates are low, don't worry about it.  It took me a very long time to get over that and just look at how smooth everything runs.

 

One more thought, if you find that things get too nozzed up, you can always delete your fsx.cfg file and let FSX re-create it.  You may find that your sim runs a whole lot better.

 

-Jim

[Havoc556 0]

Thanks for the advice Jim. Restarting the sim works for me and I'm back to good frame rates. It is a pain to do that after every flight, especially if I'm just testing out aircraft and scenery etc.....guess I'll just have to make my flights longer... .   It really is easy to get caught in chasing the numbers so now fraps is off and I'm looking at smoothness. I will do some reading concerning VAS just to educate myself.

 

Thanks again.

 

Kris

[Jimm 437]

Thanks for the advice Jim. Restarting the sim works for me and I'm back to good frame rates. It is a pain to do that after every flight, especially if I'm just testing out aircraft and scenery etc.....guess I'll just have to make my flights longer... .   It really is easy to get caught in chasing the numbers so now fraps is off and I'm looking at smoothness. I will do some reading concerning VAS just to educate myself.

 

Thanks again.

 

Kris

It is an unfortunate process with FSX in having to restart the sim but at least you get a much more fresh start.  P3D works a little differently (they did something "under the hood") to allow for restarting a flight within the same P3D session, which is nice.  I understand your frustration, believe me.  If you happen to have a lot of scenery, airports and traffic, it can take a while for the sim to load and if you are testing aircraft, settings, etc., it eats away at your time.

 

By default, in my setup in P3D, I get the framerate display in the upper corner, but after a minute or so, I turn it off, just because I now know that smoothness of the sim is more important than trying to get max frames, which can be an exercise in futility. lol

 

Glad I could help you out.  VAS is a huge subject here and after you wade through the replies, you'll find some good, well documented advice.  The long and the short of it is that VAS is always an issue when flying with a 32-bit simulator, it's all a question of if and when.  I have personally noticed that I get no OOMs in P3D as opposed to frequent ones in FSX.  This is not to say that one is better than the other.  As many will state that everyone's computer setup is different, I can take comfort that I have things setup just right and this Goldilocks is NOT screwing around with it anymore. Hehe

 

-Jim

[Havoc556 0]

Thanks again, really helpful to know.  I have my sim almost as I want it in that I can turn up, start up an fly....most of the time. I don't mind the wait so much though I do need to learn how to manage and layer my scenery more efficiently. I'm sure there's tonnes on that subject around here somewhere.

 

Thanks again Jim.

 

Kris

[vortex681 806]

You may also want to make sure that you are not loading scenery in areas that you are not flying...

 

-Jim

Jim, my understanding was that FSX just reads/inventories the entries in the scenery.cfg when a flight starts rather than actually loading the textures. I was under the impression that scenery was loaded in at a preset distance around the aircraft as you fly along. Is this wrong? Surely you would rapidly run out of available memory if the whole world tried to load each time you started?

[Boeing or not going 578]

What orbx scenery do you have? There is a lot of maintenance to do if you have vector. You need to get the latest version and the latest library files installed. You need to run the airport scanning tool in the vector configurator so it disables the vector afcad files of all the addon scenery afcad files you have. If you have Orbx regions, you need to manually go through and remove the afcad and cvx files for each addon airport you have. As an example I have Flightbeam KSFO, and I had to go into the Northern California Orbx scenery folder to remove the 2 KSFO bgl files. You should make sure your region has the latest patch and the latest library files installed. FTX Central v2 should be run after everything is installed as well. This is a big cause of degrading performance and vas issues. Also you should get DXTFixerX from the avsim library to scan all your texture files for a bad alpha layer.