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Guest brewmaster

FSX and vista performance

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I've been curious about how FSX will run on vista, and lately I've been doing some benchmarking on my system.I have Win XP Pro X86 and Vista Ultimate RC1 X86 running in a dual-boot configuration on the smae hardware (Athlon 64 3500+ 2.21GHz, NVidia NF3 250+ chipset, 2x512 PC3200 200MZ x 5, 2-3-2-6-1T, ATI 9600XT @ 1280x1024x32).differences are that vista and vista-FSX are on a 7200 SATA drive, while Win XP and XP-FSX are on a 10000 dual SATA RAID0."let application decide" set for both AA and AF in the ATI CCC.I created a flight in FSX demo using the Baron 58, at 1400 local clear weather. I then recorded a flight with .5 sec data for a flight from the default field, around the island, and then landing back at the airport. The recording lasts about 10 minutes and includes periods at the airport, over the island, and over water.For each run, I set the display settings I wanted and exited FSX demo, then restarted, loaded my flight, and then started the video replay. I set the view to "aircraft view/tail" and collected 1 sec FPS data using Fraps99. Frames were set to unlimited. FSX was in full screen mode with menu displayed.One thing I've noticed is that the terrain sliders didn't really hit my vista performance too much. the scenery slider didn't eitehr -- could be that there isn't that much scenery in the demo though. autogen definately gives a big hit -- so far I am up to "autogen normal" and dipping into the teens in FPS. Also, I have left the water at "1.X high".At any rate, I then repeated a couple of the runs in Win XP which I graph here Green is FSX in Win XP, magenta is in Vista: http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/156899.jpghttp://forums.avsim.net/user_files/156900.jpgNote that the high - FPS areas are viewing over water, and the lower areas are over land.It appears that as I move the sliders right the performance of each system is converging -- that might mean that my graphics card is becoming the limiting factor. I will do some more testing with higher sliders until I get to slide show and see how things turn out.scott s..

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Thanks for that Scott.I am interested in what you are doing.Its timely, I was thinking, If I should go ahead and install the VISTA RC1 instead of Win XP.Manny


Manny

Beta tester for SIMStarter 

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Guest D17S

XP vs Vista . . . My 2.4 ghz/512ram/IGP345M-video laptop was running the PMDG 744 w/the 2D cockpit (with XP/FS9) at 10-15 FPS with with absolute min settings on everything. In the same configurations, Vista RC1 takes it to 2-3 FPS. Completely unusable now. Even the default airplanes don't get much better than 5 FPS.I think Vista is gonna need a gig of ram to run right, all by itself. With the sim shut down and just bouncing around doing normal stuff (with Vista's 'eye-candy' settings to off), the whole system has become a total slug. Everything is slow. Sure wish I could shut off that indexing. My harddrive light never goes out these days! Remember the transition from Win98 to XP took us from a standard 256 to a required 512 meg O ram? The upgrade requirement appears to be happening again. Gonna need a gig, but . . . Now add FSX? Looks like running Vista/FSX is gonna take 2 gig . . . to keep things operational while the sim is running.

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Yup, Vista needs a minimum of 512MB, that is why your hard drive is running heavily. Useful drivers are only just beginning to appear for Vista, some are worse than others (latest nvidia ones are slower than the vista-bundled drivers apparently), the OS itself is very responsive and stable as you would expect from a release candidate.PS. Nice post Scott. Graphical comparisons go a long way to showing the big picture. There appears to be some hard limiting factor at around 75 fps in vista (as well as the overall lower perfomance of course), could this be a vsync setting?


Bernard

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Guest Dupo24

vsync taps out at 75-78fps depending on the system...i believe

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I will have to take a closer look at the CCC driver settings and make sure there isn't some difference that is causing the 75 FPS apparent limit. Thinking about this I realized that when I installed Vista RC1, it put my video refresh @ 75 Hz, and in Win XP is is 60 Hz. I will inspect and do some sensitivity testing to see if there is anything going on there. This is on a 19" LCD.scott s..

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Guest allcott

Trouble is, none of this is worth a hill'o'beans now that we know for sure that FSX in its release form has lots of enhancements, fixes and improvements over any of the betas. Is testing beta software on beta software going to prepare us in any way for the real thing, on a Vista RTM? Interesting stuff in its own way yes, but until the driver situation is sorted - and I don't think that will happen until AFTER Vista is released, I don't think I'd go near FSX with Vista. And I keep hearing ominous sighings from our techie people at work that 4 meg of RAM is really the `sweet spot` for Vista. Lord sakes the upgrade is going to be expensive!Allcott

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Guest

4 megs of ram huh? my old 486 ran somewhat mediocre on that much ram ;)

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Guest allcott

I blame the lateness of the hour and the strnegthness of the cideerrrr. :-beerchug4 gigs is what you need.Allcott

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Guest jbrians

If you turn off the whiz-bang aero-glass UI stuff in Vista, I believe you should get the same performance on Vista as XP.

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Thanks. I since went back to my vista system and noticed that my "wait for vertical refresh" setting was 'off unless aplication requests", I changed it to off but that didn't change anything. I did some more testing and can confirm that my frames are locked to vsync, and I can't figure out any way to unlock them with the current ATI beta Catalyst driver.As far as "why test beta app with beta OS?", I suppose something could change in the gold FSX that would result in differences between XP and Vista performance, but so many posters are writing "wait until version 1.1 of Vista is out, wait until DX10 hardware is cheap, etc." I was curious about vista as an FSX platform, and so far, I see no reason to dismiss it out of hand, and there are some advantages of Vista (maybe not for running FSX). scott s..

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Guest Sean Reeder

vista drivers are still not tweaked al the way yet so performance isnt what it will be on final release

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Guest brewmaster

For what its worth,I have also heard that Vista RC1 is still running in "debugging mode" which chews up quite a bit of RAM. Not sure how much that effects the results, if at all, but certainly worth taking not of.I have been pretty happy with Beta FSX in Beta Vista, cant wait to see how it goes when both are final versions.Brew

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