Hi all, I've been experimenting with the various settings in Demo 2 of FSX whilst waiting patiently for the release in the UK. With default settings and the FPS limit set at 30 I was getting around 24 FPS with the Learjet on the RW at St Maarten. I then set the FPS to unlimited and found that the FPS on the RW at St Maarten increased to around 30 FPS and the sim felt generally smoother. Not sure what causes this however I suspected that by limiting the FPS it allowed the CPU more cycles for rendering scenery etc. I've checked for any ill effects such as blurred textures but didn't find any. Has anyone else tried this. Core 2 Duo E6700 @ 3.2Ghz, 2Gb Ram, ATI X1900XTX.Terry

This is sure to cause a firestorm and have people directing us to a blog by a developer wearing a funny hat talking about fibers/threads ect.I have always ran unlimited and thats what has and still works best for me.Let the fun begin..............

Unlimited works the best for me too.http://mywebpages.comcast.net/geofa/pages/rxp-pilot.jpg

And unlimted gives me the stutters. Set at 29 for the moment.L.Adamson

Unlimited works best for me in FSX. Seems I did better in FS9 with it locked. I'll have to go back and take a closer look!

Yes I found the same but my feeling were it did not made a difference on how the sim looks and feels on either settings. Actualy I'm not too concerned about the fps as long as it remains 18 and over. What I'm realy after is fluidity. I'm still tweeking for the latter. Presently not bad but not as good as would like. And here its about the same with either settings IMHO.I prefer flying low and slow. So having the trees and building autogens is of importance to me but so is fluidity. Mutualy incompatible? I don't think so. Some compromises. Most likely ;-)But to answer your question specificaly, yes I have made the same observation.Hugo

Re stuttering, I left filtering at bilinear within the game and set 4AA and 8AF on the graphics card. I did notice some stuttering or frame skipping which greatly reduced by lowering the AA to 2 and AF to 4. I never considered that it might have been caused by the unlimited frame rate but I'll give it a try.

Hi Hugo, I agree with you, fluidity is most important. I suppose thats why we all try to tweak the settings. I just found that when landing a St Maartens on the Demo mission, with the FPS limit at 30, the actual FPS dropped to around 14 which made the landing a bit choppy. With unlimited FPS the actual FPS remained above 20 and felt alot smoother.

I noticed the same thing in Demo 2: when changing from unlimited to a limit of 16 FPS the actual indicated frame rate falls (when the frame rate is less than the limit, obviously). I did a check in FS9 and this did not occur.It may be that in FSX there are many fast frame rate surges that are capped by the limit, so the average appears lower when the limit is applied.I'm fairly sure that the sim runs smoother with the frame rate limit applied.Best regards, Chris

Wait, I thought a developer said that capping the FPS allowed more CPU time to clear out the blurries. But alas, what works is what works. Perhaps it actually TAKES cpu time to manage/control the ups and down of frame rate to constant.I guess that line in cfgFIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION=0.33 (or x)is the place to balance fps/blurries

I've tried the unlimited setting in Demo2; the result was a higher posted frame rate in general but this also induced stuttering that I did not like. A locked frame rate of 20 is rock steady on my system and in ALL areas; no blurries, silky smooth, looks great. I could probably bump this up even more, but it's so smooth at 20 I don't really need to.My system: 3.2P4; 2gb system ram; GF6800 256mb; 250gb hdd.Using Matt's autogen trees fix #2; here are some of my setting preferences:1280x1024x32 res; bloom off; water @ 2.x low (I love this look best); autogen max; scenery complexity max; texture settings max; terrain mesh @ 38m & 100% complexity; terrain res. @ 1m.AI traffic: cars @ 15%; ships-ferries @ 100%; leisure boats @ 33%. With these settings I can also use whatever weather I choose with no effect on frame rate, smoothness, etc.When I get retail on Tuesday I will of course see what happens with those same settings and tweak a bit more if necessary; I see the possiblity of perhaps having to add the autogen building line to my CFG file and reducing the number of buildings per cell a bit to help frame rate in large cities. Then again, maybe I won't have to. I'll find out soon enough. BTW Mike (tdragger) or anyone else if you know the answer, if you read my post here I'm curious as to how large an area is the "cell" setting in the cfg file for autogen? 1/2 mile, square mile, etc??Hope my info helps some of you who are wondering what settings different users have set. One more thing to those of you perusing the forums and reading all of the negative posts about FSX. If you have a decent system (I'll leave it for you to decide what a decent system is) with adequate system ram and an adequate video card, don't let the pessimism deter you from getting FSX. I think the autogen settings may be what is boggin down most people's systems along with the aircraft and traffic AI, but if you add Matt's autogen fix #2, and possibly the ACES team autogen cfg settings lines and tweak them a bit to your satisfaction, and can accept lower AI settings as well but still enjoy some AI, you should get acceptable performance on your system and I believe you *will* enjoy this upgrade to Flight Simulator. :) My opinion, of course, but I stand by it.Have fun!

That reminds me; I was reading up on some of the old FS9 tips and tweaks, and one of them was about how setting filtering and antialiasing on the video card worked better than in the sim. Does this appear to still be true for FSX?

Hi Geof,The good news is that for some locking works better and for others, Unlimited works better. At least we have a choice! Cool. For me,Unlimited works better in Demo2.I just got my retail FSX today. Will install over the weekend.Can't wait to bail from Demo2 and use the real deal!JerryG