Wow X-Plane looks pretty good in those snaps.

Luis,I'm no expert either, but I'm guessing your LOD=small setting might be a significant reason why you are getting such great results.I'm going to try that setting on my computer and see how or if things improve.Right now with LOD=medium I get frame rates averaging 12-20, but occasionl single digits especially at large airports.Maybe the Koreans put some kind of magic in your computer!:)-Rick----------- My System -----------P4 @ 2.53 GHz / 1GB RAM / NVIDIA GeForce 6800XT, 256MB / Windows XP Home

Precisely, Bill. In the spirit of full disclosure, I did not hide anything in those screenshots. Everybody can see the exact quality of the display and the functioning of the pagefile and the RAM and video memory. Nothing up my sleeve (except my arm).People with low-powered computers can easily run FS X without much tuning - all I have done is to keep LOD radius down, and this limits the amount of memory that is used. Also, by waiting a bit at the start of FS, much that is not needed goes to the pagefile, thus freeing up memory for any present needs.And I have never saturated video memory in a flight, so nothing goes into the "bit bucket".I repeat, to all those who do not have 2 or 3 thousand to blow on hardware (me!), just fly FS X and be happy. http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/159075.gifBest regards.Luis

Now... THAT's what I call CORRECT landing lights!And I'm talking about X-Plane! I don't have it, but from what I see from the screenshots it's the most accurate lighting I've seen.In the night, with no lights, you can't see any tarmark unless there is a full moon giving some ambient light.X-Plane seems to have the best night representation for the scenery. I agree the cockpit lighting is ugly.And to the point. Couldn't ACES/MS/Whoever use the proper light shader to give us CORRECT lighting for landing lights, apron lights etc???!!!That's what I call eye candy, not if my aircraft reflects to the water or I if I can count the pivots on the side of the fuselage!Ouf... got it off me...George DorkofikisAthens, Hellashttp://online.vatsimindicators.net/811520/1704.png

>>I'm experimenting some weird behaviour when I fly from an>>agricultural area (or forest or whatever quite void) to an>>urban or big airport area : the sim shows up a dialog>telling>>it can't load a file ... then I start loosing my textures>and>>the sim starts running whimsically.>>Somehow, one of the textures required was either left out of>the French version's installation routine, or has gotten>deleted.>>There is a utility program called FileMonitor which will tell>you specifically WHICH texture file (or files?) is missing. >>http://www.softpedia.com/get/Programming/O...s/Filemon.shtml>Thanks Bill: it was a good shot, indeed ! I was missing some textures files and after a run of the dvd "repair" function I finally could go in the previous offending area. Strange enough the firts install was incomplete and it didn't throw any error ... !?!I also used the utility you mentioned and I discovered, thought the sim worked fine, that many texture files were missing, some ai cfg and a dll called uiautomationcom.dll which i couldn't find anywhere on the dvd !!! I suppose some missing files are the leftover of the cleanup for the release version ... Thanks again,laurentC

I actually like FSX's landing lights the best...

Yes, the sim is a pig that wastes resources with nothing to show for it. I am going to return my copy and buy it again in 2 years for 5$ off some poor kid who didn't know better... Not to mention that none of the favourite addons would appear to be ported to FSX in the near future because now we get the same old tirade: ms - 100% backward compatible so we had to make some sacrifices in the levels of improvement over fs9. developers - completely NEW engine, EVERYTHING new, will take us months/years/if ever and we will have to charge you possibly to update it because it is all so different. the user: 4fps yo on a top 5% benchmarking system that costs more than what ACES earns for a yearright..

Hi everyone !I was browsing the Web trying to find a fix for a weird PC problem when I read this topic.I don't own FSX (only tried the demo) but at least I'm a real FS9 fan, managing a small pilots team...The point is, I recently upgraded my hardware, and using MemStatus to do a "before/after" comparison, I just found out that FS9 was using 0% of the graphical memory !!! This in 2D mode, while showing a small 8% in 3D mode... OUCH ! When everyone complains about their graphical memory being eaten by FS, and the system RAM being used to compensate, I have the opposite problem !*Let's go for the specs :ASROCK 4COREDUAL VSTA - VIA P880 ULTRA chipsetINTEL CORE2DUO 64201GB RAM : 512 SAMSUNG + 512 PQI (so NO dual channel)SAPPHIRE RADEON X1650PRO 512 DDRXP PRO on SATA HD (but SATA/PATA/IDE driver due to BIOS configuration)NGO optimized drivers 7.3 with CCC 38712HYPERION 5.10AATI TRAY TOOLS 9.6.4 (after applying some AA, AF settings, I don't start it automatically with windows)*Let's go for some tests based on MemStatus (sys mem used before launching games -around 340 MB- is excluded from results) :FS9 2D MODE___sys mem 350_______________vid mem 0FS9 3D MODE___sys mem 88_______________vid mem 8CFS3__________sys mem 374______________vid mem 65Vietcong______sys mem 390______________vid mem 49Call Of Duty___sys mem 320______________vid mem 0As you see, the best achieved is 65MB with CFS3... If someone could first, help me understand the process of memory usage, and second, help me change this weird balance, I would be a happy simmer again ;-)RegardsLarry OneWgCdr Sqdn FAFL342 Lorraine Group

Bill I think your main issue is your lack of at least 2GB memory, as you pointed out FSX pushes out a lot more data than FS9 did, and as such needs the extra memory or else you'll page memory more often. Even with autogen at sparse, FSX has more than FS9 maxed. Here's my results for FSX for roughly the position of your test and also San Bernadino Runway 6. This is with scenery at extremely dense, Autogen at dense, though tweaked in CFG (600 trees, 800 buildings, also I have default.xml renamed, but it looks like SP1 fixes most of the performance issues with this file, so I may put it back. Weather is maxed. I normally fly with aorcraft shadows, which only costs about 1 or 2 FPS, but not Ground shadows, which eats more. I was doing something before though and had them off and forgot to put them back on. Also I normally fly full screen, but used windowed to get memstatus scores in) System specs are below and resolution is 1280x1024x32 (Limited by my projector) AA at 4X w/temporal AA (Off in game), AF at 8X w/high quality clicked, all other settings at high quality.http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/172257.jpghttp://forums.avsim.net/user_files/172258.jpg

>Bill I think your main issue is your lack of at least 2GB>memory, as you pointed out FSX pushes out a lot more data than>FS9 did, and as such needs the extra memory or else you'll>page memory more often.Thanks for the reply. Did you happen to notice the date of the original post? This is a very old thread from last year that was 'ressurected' by the fellow who posted just before your reply.All those screenshots therefore were taken with FSX RTM. Post SP1 and having bumped memory to 2.75GB has indeed been a blessing.Of course, the main point of my original post was to simply point out that FSX throws up to 100x more information into the graphics pipeline, so comparing "FS9 at full-throttle with every addon known to mankind installed" to "FSX at full-throttle" is still an apples-to-oranges comparison... :)

Opps sorry! I Should have been more observant!

There is no way that you can combine two graphics cards to give more memory even SLI will not do this but the need for graphics memory is becoming self evident. I think it would be better to invest in one 8800GTX with 768Mb memory than two cards with less memory. There continues to be some misconceptions regarding SLI around this forum. SLI does work with FSX but you won't see a performance improvement because graphics cards can only render the frames as fast as they are generated by the CPU. As FSX is CPU bound and users are not producing more than 60 FPS and then only for short stints, most good graphics cards can handle the grapichs processing requirements, or, put another way, SLI can't improve FPS because the graphics card is not the performance bottleneck. On the other hand if a graphics card has to start sharing memory with the CPU then its performace will deteriorate as it waits and manages textures from main memory.I have one 8800GTX which I bought after selling my 2 x 7900GTXs that I had in SLI. I get better graphics performance in all games with this single card. I have 16AA (program assist) turned on in FSX and there is no FPS drop. I can turn water effects up with no drop in FPS. I have also run two monitors in FSX with the 8800 but I don't do so normally because I prefer the VC cockpit and my TrackIR to fly with. There aren't many, if any, graphics cards available at the moment that have more on board memory than the 8800GTX but it is clear that, for FSX at least, the more Graphics memory available the better and Bill has demonstrated this in this thread. Thank you Bill perhaps those with the blurries and stuttering will realise that there is more to FSX tuning than the FSX config file. John

Looks like you fell for it to! The post your responding to is 6-7 months old!!

This is a very enlightening thread, and I'm very glad I come across it. Now I know I must go for as much video memory as possible.BTW: what's the card with biggest video memory now?

Hi Bill,How do you get 2.75 GB of memory?Could that also be an issue?Could you also speed things up by using "matched" interleaving memory?Thomas[a href=http://www.flyingscool.com] http://www.flyingscool.com/images/Signature.jpg [/a]I like using VC's :-)N15802 KASH '73 Piper Cherokee Challenger 180