FSX on ASUS P4C800E Deluxe, P4, 2.8Gig.

[Capt_Gabe 0]

Santa gave me FSX Deluxe, its now late February, hundreds of hours tweaking, a new RAID 0, a new graphics card, a new Vapochill CPU cooler, a jump from 1 Gig to 2.5 ram, a BIOS flash, a CPU tuned up from base 2.8 to 3.47 Gigs (and a 3.4 Gig CPU on the way, with more overclocking in mind), lotsa forum searching and now, late Feb., I'm happy with FSX. Santa cost me a lot though.... :-)My quite old system:ASUS P4C 800E Deluxe MoboP4 2.8 GHz, 2.5 gig RAMSapphire ATI X1950 PRO 512Mb graphics, AGP !!380 Gig RAID 0 drivesCreative SB Live cardHANNS-G HW191D TFT screenMicrosoft forcefeedback 2 joystick.I've been all round the world to get this to work at a level I can now accept, but I'm very disillusioned with the way FSX has been done, those minimum specs on the box are a joke, and I dont care how big your computer is or how much you know about CPUs, GPUs, RAM, etc, FSX is a dog to get going well, I cant understand why M.S. did it this way, like others, I can max out FS20004 settings no problem, when are these SUPER FSX compatible computers coming out? The ACES team should have slotted in Prozac prescriptions with the discs in that box....I got lot of help from this, and other sites, I'm very grateful to all of you posters so I'm trying to give some back here.There were a few crucial things I did, I made a clean install of XPhome SP2 with all the updates, theres no other software running on this RAID0 except Grisoft AVG antivirus. I renamed the default.xml to .bak (took it out of action), I applied a mix of all the tweaks i read about to my FSX.cfg file (and I'll include the whole file below). While I was tweaking I had installed Matt Foxes Autogen file (thanks Matt Fox) but after I got to a good touchy-feely point, I reinstalled FSX (repair option), replaced the FSX.cfg with my own, renamed the default.xml to .bak and now its whizzing in most places. New York and those other high detailed locations still cough along a bit too slow, but in most other places i've very acceptable FPS rates (24+) and great eye-candy, taxi-ing (?) can be slowish, but I can see the Hotel Sofitel name in CGD Paris, and thats good nuff for me!! Two very significant changes happened, the first when I rolled back my Graphics driver to 8.321.0.0, the disc driver was junk, the second when I started overclocking, more CPU hertz really improved things, more than the 512Mb GPU. And turn OFF hyperthreading!!! I read somewhere: FSX will utilise multicore processors, but only in a small way, most of the FSX application runs in a single thread, so if you have a single core, dont hyperthread it, that uses more cycles than it will save. All my display acceleration stuff is done through the card, the FSX settings are minimum acceleration, but the card default choices (Best quality/Best performance) are not the best, so I tweaked them too, although I'm not overclocking the GPU/memory, yet.... I had lotsa bad sound problems too, rolling back the graphics driver sorted this out!!!! Guess my PCI bus was getting hammered or something.I'm not suggesting these settings are the best or wisest, they just make FSX run PDG for me on my system, at FL150 over the english channel my FPS goes over 100 sometimes, but near ground its usually 20-30ish, depends on weather, aircraft, location etc. Glass cockpits dont do me any FPS favours.Thanks especially to Mango (http://www.fs2004.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=92413&hl=autogen), his info got me off the blocks bigtime.I've attached my fsx.cfg file, its named 167644.txt, you can just copy/paste this into your own if you like, after backing up your own of course.If anybody wants my BIOS or Graphics Card settings, give a holler, I can post them too.My Settings:Graphics:Target Frame Rate: UnlimitedResolution: 1440x900x32Filtering: BilinearAntiAliasing: offGlobal Texture Resolution: Very HighLens Flare: OffLight Bloom: OffInformational Text: ContinuousAircraft:3D Virtual Cockpit: On2D Panel Transparency: ZeroAircraft Casts Shadow on Itself: UntickedAll others: TickedScenery:Level of Detail Radius: MediumMesh Complexity: 86%Mesh Resolution: 38MTexture Resolution: 1MWater Effects: Low 2.xLand Detail Textures: TickedScenery Complexity: DenseAutogen Density: DenseGround Scenery Shadows: UntickedSpecial Effects Detail: MediumWeather:Cloud Draw Distance: 60 MiThermal Vis: NoneDetailed Clouds: TickedCloud Coverage Density: LowTraffic:Airline Traffic Density: 74%General Aviation traffic density: 77%Airport Vehicle Density: MediumRoad Vehicles: 10%Ships and Ferries: 52%Leisure Boats: 48%Aircraft Labels: All except User Aircraft and Tail Number are ticked, cycle rate is 5 seconds.

[Guest abulaafia]

with that card you should set FSX to trilinear==Marten:Weber==P-D920 3.3MHz 2GB RAM WinXP ATI X1900+1024MB 2xSATA250 2xVIEWSONIC 19"author of http://library.avsim.net/esearch.php?FileName=bbgrfs.zipscreens on http://s141.photobucket.com/albums/r45/abulaafia/

[Guest fundies]

Sounds like a familiar tale. I have spent over $700 australian dollars "tweaking" my computer to try and get fsx to run the way it should. It still cant handle autogen around busy airports/cities like countless others, but I love flying with autogen off, eveything else more or less on max. settings, frame rate set to unlimited I seem to get up to 75fps most of the time (except near busy airports/cities) and superbly smooth, stutter free flight. To be honest, I couldnt be bothered with autogen scenery anymore, its not worth the heartache.Pentium D945 3.4ghz overclocked to 3.7ghzSparkle calibre 7900gs 512mb2gb ram o/c'ed.

[Capt_Gabe 0]

>with that card you should set FSX to trilinearThanks for that! I think i got an extra few FPS, perhaps its just clearer weather. Do you know why it should be set to Trilinear, um, any other suggestions ?Cheers.