I have noticed that I seem to have poor frame rates when flying out of KJFK airport (New York). Sitting on the runway, 2D panel, I get about 7 FPS. Then climbing out, I still get 7 - 11 FPS. I continue to see these poor numbers for maybe 100 miles (not sure on actual distance. My scenery here is UT and BirdsEyeView.Now for comparison, flying out of KSFO (San Fran.) I get 20 FPS sitting on runway, and 20 - to over 30 once in the air. And this is over MegaScenery (Northern Cal), UT, BirdsEyeView add-ons. Again, I have only noticed the poor frames around KJFK, no where else. What could cause this type of problem? I suspect a scenery problem associated with the area near KJFK.How can I find the problem? Are there any diagnostic Utilities I could run?Thanks,Jim

It's the AI. With LaGuardia, Newark, JFK all in the same area plus the objects for NY itself you can't have AI maxed out in that area.

There is a known problem with FS9 in the New York area, it has been discussed briefly on the FlyTampa forum as the reason that they will not do any New York-area sceneries. Apparently MS is aware of it, and hopes are that it is fixed in FSX. In the meantime, we have to deal with it...

Any hints as to which thread discusses this?Thomas[a href=http://www.flyingscool.com/FC_StartJava.html] http://www.flyingscool.com/images/Signature.jpg [/a]I like using VC's :-)

If I remember right is is buried in one of the request threads...I am sorry I can't be more specific. Has been awhile since I saw it.

I know there was just a thread on this recently, but I don't remember anyone coming up with a solution. I get major fps problems in the NYC area with no addon scenery and zero traffic, especially at JFK. I know that traffic causes a problem, but I always turn that off and still get issues.

Turn off your extra autogen objects...Look under your default installation folder of FS9 for a folder called 'Autogen' and rename the '.xml' file located there (it's the only file in the folder by the way). A good example of the rename should be to change the extension to something like'.xml' to '.bak'. I'm at work now but I believe the whole file is called 'default.xml'. Microsoft claimed to address the framerate issue with this extra scenery but for some of us things are still better overall with disabling this file altogether. :-)

It was the AI adjustment as you suggested. I also use Ultimate Traffic, and had the setting for AI traffic set to 95%. With this setting I was getting between 7 - 11 FPS around JFK. So I reduced the setting to 7% and retested. Now my FPS were between 20 and 30 FPS!!! I had no idea the AI setting made this much difference. As I said, I only noticed this problem at JFK, and as you pointed out, so many airports near this location with AI traffic were pulling down my FPS.From now on, I will be more careful about this setting.Thanks to all who responded, as is solved my problem.Jim

Part of that problem Jim may be which AI traffic you are using. Commercial packages such as Ultimate Traffic and MyTraffic do not have FPS-friendly models. If you are using the freeware stuff by AI Aardvrk, Evolve AI, and others, the negative effects of the AI are lessened.Glad to see you found a solution that works for you though...Happy flying!

Actually the UT aircraft are much friendlier on framerates than the default. If you try to get the same number of default aircraft populating an airport like you would have with UT, FS9 would all but lock up. New York is just a problem area in general that's why FlyTampa won't touch the area... :-)

I have a 1gb AMD XP 3200+ Radeon 9800SE 128mb. Not exactly world leading.On my system, FS in general, including the AI, hits the CPU not the Graphics card. It is possible to over clock the Radeon by about 60% (more than Pro levels) and I see no improvement in framerates. Yet when I change a few carefully selected BIOS settings and o/c the CPU by 5% I see massive improvement of at least an increase of 10fps regardless of the graphics settings. AI, from my observation his the CPU, if I reduce AI from 100% to 50% I get a 10fps increase too. Reducing to 33% (my preferred level) gives me another 3-5fps. I have come to the conclusion that AI FPS friendliness is related to the number flightplans. It may well be the case that UT has fewer flightplans than MyTraffic and that explains the reason for the improvement. I'm running Just Flight's Traffic 2005 btw.My settings are 1280x1024, all sliders except water, MIP and cloud distance and cloud vis to the right and ground shadows turned off too. With display properties of 4x AA and 8x ansitropic and quality profile.

http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/147008.jpgUsing a program called filemon, these 2 files are trying to be rendered in the NY area are causing the stutters. These are 2 non-existant files and try to render ALOT! 40 times in a second, every 4 seconds!E: is my FS9 Harddrive partition.I believe it is the built in code in FS9 and improperly coded.

Hi there, I've had a look for those files and cannot find them and yet fps around New York are always down to between 3 or 4 to 10 (from 20 where I usually put the slider) so is there perhaps some other reason?Andy.

FileMon LIES TO YOU if you just read the data and don't understand the result.The key is the first file name - which is corrupted in configuration file - you just have to figure out which aircraft.cfg or other configuration file in your flight sim folder has the corruption.Of course the second file does not exist. There is nothing wrong with your setup and nothing wrong with FS - expect that it is programmed to search for alternate locations for files.The first search location for an effect is by the file name in the the effects folder. The second search is in the aircraft folder - yes - next to the aircraft.cfg file - or in a scenery folder next to the .BGL which calls the file.If FS does not find the effect file by file name, it then searches those locations again for a CAB - a type of zip file.Very seldom are files in FS located in the first, or even second search location. That is not an issue because once FS finds the file - it knows where to find it in the future.The problem is missing files or corrupt file names.FILEMON can lead you to make changes to make FS slower and more inefficientLight Map textures is one example. The most efficient use of light map textures is to place them in the main texture folder. This is the default method of FS. At some airports with AI aircraft - you can have 50-100 aircraft all using the same night light map texture.If you place all those files in the individual repaint texture folders - not only will you waste 50-100 MB or space on multiple copies of one file - you make FS load 50-100 copies of the same file into memory.If you place the file in the main texture folder - FS will load the one copy of the texture into memory and map it to multiple aircraft.However FILMON will tell you that FS is searching for the file and not finding it in the individual texture folder.You have to be careful with FileMon - it can be very useful in finding problems - like the corrupt file name in the example above. But it can also lead you astray quickly.

Thanks for the reply. I'll remember to maybe question filemon's onthefly results, but one thing I did notice is that fs9 doesn't try to render these files up in Maine/NB/NS etc.I've even seen it show a file of E:Program FilesMicrosoft GamesFlight Simulator 9.cab Weird. Oh well, lets hope FSX is better for the NY area.