I've convinced myself that FSX is a poorly implemented software package that combines fairly unoptimized coding and poor utilization of resources. I think its all about the marketing really, but my thoughts are not of concern right now... I wanted to discuss something that I tried, thinking I was tricking the way the MS makes sure any system needs upgraded in order to get decent performance. That was my intent anyways.... but again, not the point, it's just how I arrived at my latest test. Here's the beef.I down clocked my whole machine tonight, video card, ram, and processor. My 2.4ghz stock speed became 1.8ghz. I uninstalled / reinstalled FSX and started the game. It gave me a nice default configuration that looks like crap but flew fairly smooth. Then I shut down and reconfigured my hardware.When I restarted FSX after restarting, I found I was able to push the sliders higher than I was before and still maintain stability. I've loaded configs that I had saved, configs that gave me the almost satisfactory balance between flyable and visually appealing.... and I was able to turn even those up a notch more that I was before.So I have to ask. Is FSX doing something insane here? Personally I think that its not a real marketing ploy, just a side-effect of the new dynamic performance system that seems apparent in this sim. When you let it determine the settings for the first time, it is setting some limits internally that MS have deemed to provide a good experience... a little on the low side, but ok. It's hard to explain what I mean... but I'll try. Sliders may not be generic. What I mean, is that the sliders may not affect the sim the same on every machine. Clouds for instance, the lower the processor the lower the capabilities for really good looking clouds. So instead of making the slider go from 0-100, it actually scales it to 0-40 (say on a low end AMD 2500). This means, that when you throw 100% on the slider, your really only hitting 40% of the softwares true capabilities.I suggest this because of one reason. Some low end processors would just completely die of heart failure if the slider is put at 10%, so why not make the slider reflect a fraction of what his machine is capable of. This means that as this user slides it back and fourth, he is seeing subtle changes in framerates between the 0 and 100% marks. If it was hard defined for every machine, it means that moving the slider one notch would be the difference between 10fps and 1fps.Not only would this type of machine dependant scaling help the user experience, but I think it would actually help to give the user the absolute best that his/her system is capable of.... but then again, MS seem to have lowered the bar on what they think we actually enjoy looking at.... thus the reason why this seemed to work.So I think that MS have got this dynamic performance system going here. Your sliders do not always equal my sliders, because sliders may be scaled according to what your hardware was detected as being during first run.Maybe some others could try this out as well and report their findings, personally, I think I gained about 8fps from doing it. (benchmarking in the air over an exact spot every time from a pre-saved flight)btw: For anyone who remembers the performance graphs I was doing last week, a little update. FSX is still the only one giving truly random and erratic feeds, Company of Heroes is a close second though, but by close, I mean I could fit an A380 between them..... Most other games seem to give fairly trend driven counters even though they too are quite demanding. CoH was erratic to the point where you couldn't quite see any trends, but it lacks the high contrast jungle that FSX gave.... quite fun to watch really. I forgot to try the FSX demos, I may do that one soon and see what happens, because one of those ran half decent on here.

hmmm... a more likely explanation would be that you didn't set your sliders exactly the same last time you ran your "air" benchmark, no? ;-)folks who care to tweak have put hours by now into replacing textures and making mods. anyone willing to uninstall and start from scratch?it might be easier to focus the search on the location of the mysterious "scaling factor". if it persists it is written on disk

Kev I think FSX was designed to drive us Bat..... :-batty. Only kidding I think it really has more to do with ACES going with the big powerful single cpu as compared to the multi-core cpus. I guess by the time mult-cores were becoming more main stream they did not have enough time to change or rewite code.

Wow. That is an interesting theory. I think in reality though that any form of dynamic interrogation never was on the table for discussion. I too have found that it appears there are differences in performance from one flight to the next with all things being equal. I believe that memory management may be a contributing factor in all of this. So much is happening when you are in flight and so many variables come into play that the only thing that seems to makes sense of these differences is memory. How these objects are referenced, utilized and reutilized. I think that much of what Aces may do, will fall into an optimization strategy. They now have some time I believe to take a closer look.RegardsBob

>>Sliders may not be generic. What I mean, is that the sliders>may not affect the sim the same on every machine. This is possible I suppose, but my gut hunch is thatthe scenery is the same for any machine, regardless of power. If your theory was correct, mine should have run well out of the box. It didn't really.. But... Partof that was my AGP aperature was too low, so it's hardto gauge. But I still think all copies act the same on any given machine as far as density, etc.. If the sim changed density on install, you should be able to see the "tweaks"in the cfg files. But you don't.. All are the same. People are doing this manually though with the autogentree and building cfg changes though. Anyway, like I say, I don't really think anything is changed from machine to machine. The sliders are whatadjusts density, and all boxes should show the same density for a given slider setting, unless manuallydegraded in the cfg files. MK

Clouds at 100% on this machine and my other machine look strikingly different.This is a 2.4ghz machine, the other is 1.3ghz. Even though they both are at 100%, the 2.4 machine looks very dense indeed, while maintaining a nice overall cloud texture.On the 1.3 machine textures look the same, nice and fluffy... however the density of the clouds is certainly a lot more sparse. Again, both machines are set to 100% Cloud Details.This leads me to believe that FSX will scale sliders to suit the machines overall capabilities.Autogen is different though, it is dynamically generated and displayed using the fiber_frame setting. You can set it to 100% but it will only show what it can in the allotted timeframe given the PC's basic throughput at load. I believe that while some sliders are dependent on fiber related loads, others may be machine locked.Anyways, just a theory anyways, I saw a definite increase in performance when I did my 'test', only other tests on other machines will really tell if it was a fluke or not.... could very well be.

let me make sure i got this rightyou are suggesting that we uninstall fsx, "cripple" our machines to broadcast a lower processing capacity, install fsx, then bring our machines back to specsfsx will always remember the machine it detected during the installation and scale itself accordinglythen you're saying that the difference between the two boxes you operate is in the density of cloud distributionso the "fooled" fsx would be simply giving us dumber scenery and weather, something we can already control using the sliders, and your eight-frame gain would come from lowered configuration settings, whether the lowering was explicit or implicitno?

That's what one would think really.... But even though your basically fooling it into giving you lower capacity setting scalers, the results are astounding. It's almost like it more or less adjusts the 'bar' to where it fits better rather than where MS says it fits better.The autogen system still works as it always does because it depends on free frame time to generate. The settings that aren't dependent on fiber time are the ones that get dumbed down.That's another thing, even though this theory would essentially lower the maximum levels for each effect or setting, the world actually looks better. What I think is being directly affected is the complexity of the main software loop, meaning that FSX skips over entire sub functions if it knows it will render the sim unflyable. For instance, the physics engine can take in a lot of factors to provide ultra realistic flight models, but at a price. As the processor capabilities lower, FSX decides to chop out code that it deems as being a 'bonus'.This I think, is why it may both work well for me, and look decent.btw, my world looks better now than it did before too.... all sliders on MAX. So I'm not sure why it does this even though I've essentially lowered the overall quality in doing this. No clue at all.

hmmm... i'm skeptical, but i'll watch this thread for a while :-)ps. how do you know the only thing you changed in the bios was the clock?

hehe, I'm skeptical too, s'why I've asked if others out there are prepared to wipe up FSX and try it. It's not something I'd usually recommend, but if it helps, then its worth it.> ps. how do you know the only thing you changed> in the bios was the clock?Because I only changed CPU, DDR, and HT settings.

Another likely explanation is that no two situations are the same, even if you think they are, unless perhaps you are dialing in no weather, same place, same time of day, etc. This has always been a red herring in FS9--to believe something you did actually improved performance because you thought you were comparing apples n apples, when in fact you were flying in two different situations. This is my belief anyway.Noel

What I think is>being directly affected is the complexity of the main software>loop, meaning that FSX skips over entire sub functions if it>knows it will render the sim unflyable. For instance, the>physics engine can take in a lot of factors to provide ultra>realistic flight models, but at a price. As the processor>capabilities lower, FSX decides to chop out code that it deems>as being a 'bonus'.Hummm. Ya know what, I think this is being done by the sim while running , rather than a different install setup.The reason is, I've oft seen the sim dumb itself down if the resources get low. I can't really explain why the cloudswould look different going by puter speed alone. Seems only a video deficiency would cause that.. ?Are you using the same exact cfg files for each to make sure some graphics setting is not different?MK

Sounds interesting, I know I have gone from the 'WOW" factor to "What the "&^%#&%^$"?. Interestng thoughtsMike

Good grief...I love the fact that all we have to do is reconfigure our entire systems or make potentially harmful changes in the file structure of our machines to get FSX to work. This version, like the past ones, has been optimized for systems that don't yet exist. Pass for me for now.http://www.my-buddy-icon.com/Icons/objects/red_3d_plane.gifAlex ChristoffN562ZBaltimore, MD

>reconfigure our entire systems or make potentially harmful> changes in the file structureI was the guy that brought light to the fact that the LargeSystemCache tweak was dangerous... remember. This isn't dangerous at all, nor does it really mean more than 3 minutes to change some BIOS settings, something lots of gamers do all the time while looking for performance benefits. > optimized for systems that don't yet existHow so? No software developer has ever released a package that will ONLY work well on next years systems.... esp since they don't have a way to test and make sure their code is actually optimized and flawless because there is no equipment to do it on....FSX also uses some optimized XP functionality, it uses optimized DX9 shaders, it uses optimized DX9 based code, was built on DX9 based systems, tested on them too, and released to a DX9 market. Why is it that it runs like crap on 90% of our systems??? Because their idea of optimized code is that it didn't cost an arm and a leg to develop in comparison to the amount of sales the product is going to make.When the DX10 patch comes out, then it is a NextGen product, because it will actually support tomorrows technologies.... for now though, it supports DX9.Seriously, if some people ARE getting decent results on even older machines, how can one suggest that the reason someone else with a top-of-the-line machine gets crappy performance is simply because FSX is NextGen?!?!?!?!Plain and simple, FSX is substandard code. It's an awesome sim with some awesome benefits all round, but it is hindered by the fact that many people have to bend over backwards to get it to run smoothly.... not all... but I would have to say a majority. (I say that because I believe that some people who are getting decent performance have actually settled on lower graphical performance... which to me, is unacceptable.)ACES have admitted that there are performance related issues that they need to figure out, so yes, FSX is definitely not optimized. What if they wait till the DX10 patch to release a fix for these bugs, that could be a few months away!!!! Don't we deserve something a little sooner in return for all the bug reporting, system specs, and testing that the community have done and reported on? ACES development personnel are now working on the next project already, as stated by Phil Taylor... does this mean that any fixes to FSX are on the backburner? They got our money, shouldn't we expect them to make it a priority? A lot of people are actually convinced that this software is sluggy because our top of the line systems aren't tomorrows systems. People are settling on lower settings, some even content with graphics not that much better than FS9 even. Because of the false sense of happiness these people have wondered into, the ones who do realize that the software needs a fix is losing out because ACES have pulled the wool over their eyes. If more people were to see the light, and actually speak their mind on the product, maybe ACES would actually do something and fix it promptly. It's a lot like school photos these days. You guys seen the quality of most school photos lately? They are poor quality, printed using a normal every-day home-use printer, and not even processed in the least, straight from the 6MP digicam to your hands with minimal workload. Many parents are happy with these.... most parents love them. Why? Because these people simply forget that years ago, schools would have an actual photographer come in to take the shots. Weeks later, the school would receive a batch of photos that were professionally 'mastered'. People forget about the good old days when a professional service was actually good quality, they forget that they are entitled to a decent quality of service for the price we pay.I'm ranting again. :( I won't hide my displeasure at this piece of software, but I also won't hide the fact that once optimized, this simulator will blow away everything that came before it... FSX is an incredible piece of work, but we should expect that either it work well, or that it gets patched soon, BEFORE the DX10 patch. Again... it works well on *some* older machines, so there is no reason it shouldn't blister the screen when run on most of todays top of the line equipment.ACES have a responsibility to us all. The fact that they pretty much said that they are moving on to other projects shows me that fixing FSX is just sitting on the back burner. I don't think it's outrageously irresponsible to be at least a little miffed at them. EA did the same thing back in the day. The company that gave us the blockbuster Medal of Honor:Allied Assault released a 'nextgen' product, it was called Pacific Assault. It failed miserably, it ran like crap, was never patched before most people already moved on to Call of Duty. They too said that their software was optimized for tomorrows hardware, yet people with lower spec systems got decent results while newer systems just sat there choking. The community wasn't fooled by it either... but unfortunately EA released the patch AFTER most people had given up hope and moved on. Pacific Assault got a fraction of the following that the original Moh:AA had....