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Guest JohnEGPF

Interesting FSX observations

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>>However, with the new photo real textures-turning the autogen>up covers these textures with autogen-so you really can't see>them well-and I feel reality at altitude > say 150 ft. is thus>lost.I agree. I turned auto-gen off while flying over photo-real city areas, as you mentioned the other day, and preferred it that way. Just looks more real with some altitude.>>Imho there is nothing that needs to be fixed here-but it would>be nice to have a way to leave autogen on for next to the>earth and then have it vanish at a certain>altitude-performance and reality would be thus enhanced. Yes, that would be a good option too.Overall, I'm more pleased than not with FSX. Could never run the sim until yesterday. L.Adamson

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Guest htwingnut

The comments about dual core sounds more like an excuse than an opportunity to get it done right. Programmers, especially Microsoft, should be at the forefront of this technology (multi-core / CPU) considering they've made OS's (Win2000, Server 2003, etc) that manage multiple CPU's.Programmers better get used to it because this technology isn't going away, if anything it is going to get more complex with quad cores coming to fruition real quickly. I'm tired of excuses, and for once would like to see a developer who is charging the customer a decent sum of money to actually deliver something that works well out of the box.In this case with FSX, just running the autogen as a separate thread sent to a separate core would have probably greatly improved overall performance. And the developers had to know that was the bottleneck, but made a bad decision, if it was even a consideration to have been a decision to make!That being said, I like FSX because FS9 ground textures looked like crap. I am hoping that autogen issues will be addressed by MS in short order. I can't imagine that changing ground textures as someone had stated, would improve performance because that is strictly a video card task, and my video card isn't being taxed much by FSX.

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>A comment about autogen...>The lower settings for autogen in fsx make it about the same>as the highest autogen settings on fs9.>>There really is no mystery-if you crank fsx autogen all the>way up-it is drawing 10 fold the objects fs9 did. If you run>at normal to low fsx autogen settings (which would be about>the same as fs9 at high) , you should get about the same>performance as fs9.>Maybe... But I get 100FPS with FS9 in the same condition. not 15FPS.Manny


Manny

Beta tester for SIMStarter 

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Guest htwingnut

First things first. I know I am a newb here at these forums, so "HELLO". That being said, I have been an avid flight simulation enthusiast since I was probably 10 years old, which puts my flight sim experience going on about 24 years now. My PC is no slouch - Athlon64 X2 4800+, 2GB DDR500, 7900 GT Superclocked (eVGA). I am running at 1024x768 resolution.I was frustrated with FSX at first because I made the bone-headed mistake of not moving the frame rate slider to "unlimited" this resolved lots of concerns as I was only getting 10fps with all settings at minimum (duh!). Setting it to unlimited opened up the frames to vsync framerates (60fps - 16ms response LCD).I can say right now that video card performance is *NOT* a factor here. With autogen, this program is entirely CPU limited. I can pretty much max everything, put autogen on none, and frames are in the 30-40's. Turn on autogen and forget it - 8-10fps in the air, with nearly impossible rates on the ground.I really hope that this can be resolved with a patch because I can't see myself being able to upgrade my system (as my the 939 pin AMD's aren't getting any faster) in the near future. But I don't think anything short of a 6000+ equivalent will be able to manage this well.

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>Ok I see two beta testers offering opinions which are>appreciated. My question is does MS listen to the beta>testers? Does MS know the machine specs of the beta testers? We can't really respond to that question.But, I've been involved in many beta tests and, in general, the results of beta testing is just one of many factors that help the developers decide when a software product gets released. Other factors (such as timing of Christmas shopping season, demands of the accounting department, etc.) are somtimes the primary driving force.I'd just like to add, that I do think FSX does have great potential. The improvements over FS9 do go way beyond "eye-candy". It's just going to take us all a while to get our hardware upgraded and software tweaked to the point of seeing a lot of the improvements.Matt

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Geofa, I ran two of the beta test builds just like you are doing. Medium settings with a small sample of AI. I even turned off the airport vehicles and road traffic almost totally. This does give very acceptable and smooth frame rates here. I ran without bloom and water at a medium setting which still is a HUGE improvement over FS9. To me it's a crippled sim without this extra "stuff". On my P4EE at 3.6ghz, 2G of ram, Win XP Home, and a Radeon X800XL it was very good. I have NOT installed the last demo, nor the Retail release as of yet. I am just going by what I have seen. It actually seems that the Retail version has something big going wrong that was not a problem for demo users concerning autogen so comparing these two versions is tricky at best. I agree that the autogen is far superior to FS9 at even the lowest settings, your statements are correct. What worries me is that folks with much faster machines than mine are seemingly very dissapointed with the low settings required to fly at a reasonable frame rate. I think most of us do agree that there should be some autogen available for the low and slow croud and something to look at on approach and on the ground. No autogen is not acceptable for me. I would like to be able to run with sparse or something equal to FS9 with reasonable frame rates and no stutters. I also don't agree with your comment about the comparison between the two sims and frame rates. I can run FS9 on this box with full autogen easily. When FS9 came out I could not, but at least I COULD run it at the two lowest autogen settings and get decent frame rates, right out of the box. I got rid of 2002 almost immediately due to that. I just don't see that happening here. I believe we are going to need the NEXT CPU levels, and post DX10 video cards to run this really well even at medium settings. It's a shame really and I see big problems for the casual users as I stated above.

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Could you run fs9 with full real weather downloads without getting a hit? That was the biggest complaint when fs2004 came out-and I can still bring fs9 to its knees with a real weather download.You don't get more without a penalty-that is the name of the game.In the screen shot forum someone posted shots of fsx with different autogen settings-that is exactly the kind of performance I see on my rig. Actually-all are acceptable-and all can be changed on the fly depending on the type of flying one wants to do.We always need the next cpu/video card for the fs series-its been that way since fs1.http://mywebpages.comcast.net/geofa/pages/rxp-pilot.jpg

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Guest Coneman

The autogen slider seems to control mostly the structures, and on low settings it doesn't even come close to max in FS9 (this is the latest demo). I'm convinced most of the frame rate hit comes from the trees, and they don't seem to be affected by the slider, unless it's full off, then the sim is very smooth. So there are a number of things I don't understand:1. The beta testers never noticed the huge performance issues that are evident? And if they did MS just plowed ahead?2. Why the autogen seems to suck the life out of the sim. I don't see it as being vastly different from FS9, although there are more tree varieties. It's a huge step backward in peformance, for little gain in appearance.3. Why the slider doesn't control both the trees and structures. Or the option of separate sliders would be helpful.4. Why should we settle for having to fly with no autogen, when the issue may be with the coding? I'm certainly not going to part with $70 to go back to FS2000 style flying, no matter how nice the ground textures look. That's progress?Cheers,Todd

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Beta testers can not comment on the process.For me the trees are the biggest improvement in the autogen and I'd like lose the other stuff like buildings that cover the photo real textures. Go fly in different regions-the tree differences and variety including turning colors at different times are amazing. As far as the slider not controlling trees-are you sure about that? I agree-it would be molto useful to have a slider to control the trees/buildings seperately-great idea!Then I am partial to trees:-) http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...g_id=1699&page=http://mywebpages.comcast.net/geofa/pages/rxp-pilot.jpg

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"Could you run fs9 with full real weather downloads without getting a hit?" Nope. But I could run the default AI at about 30-50% and turn on the autogen to sparse and normal with decent frame rates with user specified weather. It was a marked improvement over 2002 here, especially the sky and weather effects, even at the lower settings. I owned a mid-range performance box at the time and upgraded about 6 months after FS9 came out. Something else worth mentioning here was that I could run most of my add-on aircraft very well and minimal fixes were required. We will see how that one plays out soon I think. I cannot agree that with this release it's the "same old mantra". There is too large a performance gulf betwen what we saw with high end machines then and now. Just wait until folks start trying to add AI, scenery and detailed aircraft add-ons. These forums are going to be very busy! The one thing this sim has going for it is the quality of the default aircraft, overall they are superb. The missions are great too, but I still want and need my autogen. What fun is it searching for baby elephants in Africa with no Acacia trees? Or flying an Amazon resupply mission across a desert of flat textured rainforest canopy? We can just agree to disagree Geofa, your entitled to your opinion. I just think the majority of us had hoped for better. This was after all hyped to be better on most fronts even at lower settings. I just don't see that as being true. I'm sticking with my FS9, just purchased the Portland scenery and I am absolutely floored! It's fantastic!Hornit

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I couldn't agree more! Look at the popular screen shots in the forums and Autogen is what makes them so good!

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What hardware upgrade do you see on horizon that makes you hopeful? There aren't any other than quad cores!! They will do jack for FSX!

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