UT & Frame Rates

[Guest TPN_Turnip]

I was considering getting the Ultimate Terrain YSA and was wondering what kind of frame rate hit I would experience?TurnipSPECS:VISTA Home Basic 580 WATT Sunbeam PowerCrucial Ballistix 4GB(2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAMASUS P5N-E SLI LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 650i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 Conroe 2.33GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor Model BX80557E6550MSI nVidia NX8800GT 512 PCI-E 2.0SB LIVE 24250 GB WD SATA HD 120 GB WD IDE HD

[Paul_Yorks 97]

You will see lots of happy campers here with UTX - but just to balance the story, I have to say that the framerate hit for me was not good.I have a 3.33Ghz quad core rig, plently RAM and a GTS 8800 o'c - and have finally discovered nice blur-free frame rates in FSX. UTX Europe hit those rates unacceptably, for me.To be fair, I think this is partly because I fly a lot in the UK, and have Horizon's excellent photoscenery for UK. So having roads in the right place was no big deal for me - not only were my roads already right, but I can identify my house as I fly over it.And elsewhere in Europe I have to say I'm not well-travelled enough to care whether the roads are real. They look great in default FSX, so why lose any frames in UTX? More to the point - to get decent framerates in UTX I had to disable road traffic, and downsize night lights. Since all-road traffic and decent night lights were 75% of my reason for buying UTX, I said - no thanks.Now, if you don't have photo scenery, but want to fly e.g. by roads you know, I'd think UTX was a great buy. But even with a fast rig you won't get to run all the graphical niceties. Or maybe you will, if you spend more time tweaking for frames than flying, but I already got bored of that (hence the new system!) To be clear - I can land at KLGA with some road traffic under FSX with sliders middling and still in the teens frames-wise, in default FSX. Road traffic I love you. But UTX kills frames with it, and the docs that come with it concede that. Under UTX I get zero road traffic, as a result.I've asked Flight1 for a refund (fantastic service as always - one of the best places to buy; and it means you have no reason not to try it for 30 days!) But in short, I am so happy now with default FSX, I see no reason to have that affected by UTX. Maybe in a year a new system will make it worthwhile. Or maybe I just failed to fly in the right places to make the most of the new terrain; could be.Hope that helps - please treat my view with a pinch of salt, since 99% of the other posts here are positive, and I may just be an unusually unhappy minority. Still, having another view is good, I would say.

[Guest TPN_Turnip]

What are your specs? MB etcTurnipSPECS:VISTA Home Basic 580 WATT Sunbeam PowerCrucial Ballistix 4GB(2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAMASUS P5N-E SLI LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 650i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 Conroe 2.33GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor Model BX80557E6550MSI nVidia NX8800GT 512 PCI-E 2.0SB LIVE 24250 GB WD SATA HD 120 GB WD IDE HD

[quantumleap 1]

The majority of enhancements provided by UTX will have minimal FPS performance impact on FSX. The two features which have most impact are night lighting and road traffic.In the case of the night lighting it will depend on the area in which you fly in that large cities with increased amount of major roads will therefore have more night lighting and this can lead to up to a halving of framerates. This is at night only and there is no impact during the day by having them enabled.For road traffic, UTX adds more cases over default FSX where roads will have moving traffic. As such, the performance impact you see is related to the density of these additional cases and the level you have set for your FSX road traffic. Again cities will see the most impact, but in many cases if you have the FSX road traffic set between 10% and 15%, the impact is small.Remember that UTX is highly configurable, and the UTX Setup Tool provides a visual key as to the potential performance impact of the features you enable in its feature tree.Finally, after installing and UTX product (and actually any add-on to FSX) I would highly recommend a good defragmentation of your hard-drive on which it was installed.Jeff

[Guest TPN_Turnip]

Thx Jeff, That is exactly what I was after.TurnipSPECS:VISTA Home Basic 580 WATT Sunbeam PowerCrucial Ballistix 4GB(2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAMASUS P5N-E SLI LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 650i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 Conroe 2.33GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor Model BX80557E6550MSI nVidia NX8800GT 512 PCI-E 2.0SB LIVE 24250 GB WD SATA HD 120 GB WD IDE HD