What makes my AI traffic drag FSX FPS down so much?

[Bryn 72]

Hello,I've been fiddling with FSX again today. It really is a great-looking sim and I usually get around 25fps sitting on the tarmac in the Level-D 767 at KSEA. Things are pretty sweet when I'm in the air. But it all gets unuseable when I turn on my full set of AI.You see, in FS9, I pulled together a really large number of AI aircraft (AI Aardvark, EvolveAI, FSP, TFS, etc, etc) to make up the Ultimate Traffic flights (as well as MAIW). In FS9, everything works great and their impact on my fps is minimal. However, when I moved these all over to FSX, everything grinds to a halt (FPS down to 9 or 10, lower at airports like EGLL). I think others have experienced the same thing. What I would like to know is whether any of the following would explain it:1. Old models not completely compatible with FSX2. DXT1 textures (I converted everything to DXT1 for FS9 and it worked great).3. FSX has a more computationally intensive AI system4. FSX is just lame at AIHas anyone had any good experiences getting a complete AI system to work well in FSX?Cheers,Bryn.BTW, my specs are a Quad-core 2.9mhz with an Ultra 8800 and 4mb RAM. BTW2: No matter how much I try to believe that FSX is smoother and 9-10 fps is playable, it just really isn't.

[Daveo 36]

The FSX AI really eats the cpu worse then termites in a pencil factory. As does the road traffic also. I run Ultimate Traffic with all the flight plans compiled and only keep the AI at 7% which keeps the LevelD happy.That gives me enough traffic to stand in the que for take off once in awhile or wait for some arrivals depending on the airport and time of day. Road traffic I keep at 3 as I really d

[mjrhealth 820]

Hmm ,hard one to answer. I run my ai at 80% and use bot WOAI and PAi as well as VOZ sets and usually run at around 15 to 20 FPS in YSSY which can get fairly busy thats with 80 planes in and around me. I think it has a lot to do with the models and textures. WOAI is replacing a lot of its models it seems and that should help, and yes it is processor intensive. Wouldnt it b nice to have a quad core with one core taking care of AI,....

[jwenham 1]

You may want to give Ultimate Traffic for FSX a try. It is'nt too hard on the system although the textures are not as good as the default AI aircraft but that isnt a show stopper for me. UT will GREATLY increase for number of AI, almost too much if you crank up the slidders not to mention the number of go-arounds and sometimes waiting for 10-15 min. to take off at real busy airports. I run mine at 50% airline, 10% ga. If I am flying to a big airport I will turn it down to 10-15 on the airline. You may even see a FPS increase due to the UT textures. Others may not like UT but for me its good. Flight 1 has a good video on their website showing UT.

[Guest Lith1um]

I use MyTrafficX. It has the option of running low/high quality models, and the option to enable/disable airport animations such as animated gates. They can have a big effect on performance.Another thing which is a big factor, imo, is airport vehicles. If you enable traffic toolbox and view the ai you'd be suprised at the number of ground vehicles. They count towards the budget. With 4-5 hundred aircraft it's not uncommon to have over 200 ground vehicles.Imo MTX is the best. It has historic schedules for past decades, and the aircraft to go with them. It also has more DX10 compatible "true fsx" models than any other package, and more on the way. Really, the features are too many to mention. And it seems to be constantly updated.It's really made the sky's come alive.http://mytraffic2004.com/mtx/screenies: http://forums.simflight.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=68221A custom paint from user Flying-W, http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/186459.jpg

[mjrhealth 820]

Alos the default AI are a real frame killer as they are the default [planes used as ai. You cna remove thme by deleting the traffic aircraft.blg out of the scenery/world/scenery directory. I just edited it to remove the comercial planes and kept the GA as its nice to have them around.

[Manny 1,293]

I have both. Ultimate Traffic as well as MyTrfficXBoth are performance killers.AI simply kills your Frames. Period! Manny

[RFields5421 1]

If you were getting 25FPS with no AI in FS2004 and added that much AI, your FPS would drop as low or even lower than the 9-10 you are getting in FSX.Your base level FPS capability in FS2004 is probably closer to 50 or 60, maybe higher.So you start FSX with less than half the FPS capacity to absorb the hit of AI than FS2004. That's a huge decrease in capacity right there.Of course the biggest issue is the number of polygons and textures. FSX simply has so many more than FS2004. Much more complex ground objects, much more complex trees, much more complex default buildings.Yes, the FS2002 and FS2004 models we used before do not perform as optimally in FSX as pure FSX models. But they are not that much of a performance hit.I'm not sure about DXT1 textures - they could be a contributor.FSX is pretty much the same with AI as FS2004. There really is not much of a difference in the way the system handles the AI part.The rendering is the change.One hugh issue is airport parking. Any airport in the London area is part of the single most intensive AI part of the Flight Simulator world - and EGLL is worst in the group. If you add a complex scenery like Aerosoft - you've got problems.The scenery doesn't have to be much of a hit to hurt, because the margin in FSX is so much smaller than FS2004.(EVERY addon is an FPS hit - you simply cannot add polygons, textures and complexity and not have some negative impact on performance. It may be very small, but if it's adding to the FSX world, it does have a performance cost. Note I said - adding, not replacing such as terrain and land class replacements.)Another major FPS hit in the London area comes from insufficient airport parking. You simply must added parking to every other airport in the London area to handle all the AI in your flightplans to avoid that taking 10% or more of your FPS away. Even planes out of view take CPU cycles, and those which are supposed to be at airports without sufficient parking run through the parking loop dozens of times, every couple minutes.If you are FPS challenges, definitely turn off airport vehicle traffic and advanced animations.Yes the FSX airports do not look any near as good with the jetways not moving and without all the baggage carts and pushback tugs.But having those vehicles on your airport at EGLL is like adding another 40 to 50 aircraft to be displayed. It takes a LOT of your processor and graphics power.

[tf51d 284]

If The AI activates the Jetways, like the default aircraft does, that will drive performance into the ground, while all the Jetways within 120 miles engage on FSX startup. If the Exit statements in the aircraft.cfg file of your AI aircraft are setup for FSX, I strongly recommend, you modify them to be FS9 style. (Remove the 3 coordinates at the end of each exit statement). You can also just delete the exit statements completely, but if you also use the aircraft as a user A/C like the default A/C you won't be able to open the doors of your A/C. Edit: Another thing that eats frames is Water (Keep that at 2XLow) and Ground shadows, turn them off if they are on, Aircraft shadows are ok though. On my system, with the LDS-767 at KSEA with 100% WOAI AI aircraft, and a few user installs. This includes, most of the major airlines and their regionals in The US, Europe and Asia, Some in Central and South America, and Africa, as well as a number of lesser know airlines around the world. I get between 18-25FPS at KSEA (Depending on where on the airport I am. Closer to 25 at the Runways, and 18 near the gates! This is on Windows XP FSX SP1.

[RFields5421 1]

That was true in FS2002 and FS2004.However, the Microsoft default aircraft have always been very LOD friendly aircraft, better than almost all AI specific aircraft.But after all the default aircraft visual models were revised in SP2 of FSX, their FPS impact is now lower than many AI specific models.

[RFields5421 1]

As much as I support and use Ultimate Traffic - in FSX it's not up to the standards of the other programs.UT still uses mostly second generation AI aircraft from Project AI. Those aircraft are just too old compared to the My Traffic or Just Flight Traffic aircraft. Even though they are definitely better visual models than many of the My Traffic aircraft.But none of those commercial package models can come close to the low impact, detail of models and quality of repaints of the fourth generation AI models from AIA, EVAI, DJC, MWAI, AIMalcontent and TFS. Even PAI is starting to have some third generation and fourth generation models available.The World of AI packages are still without a doubt the most FPS friendly and best quality AI aircraft available.The unfortunate part is the WoA and PAI can only provide 250-300 airlines, so you need something to fill the rest of the world.For that I use Ultimate Traffic, but I replace the provided models and repaints as soon as possible.

[HUSSAR 258]

Hi Bryn,I have found that removing the sound and panel lines if the .cfg has helped somewhat as well. There is quite a bit of editing involved but I noticed an increase in perf on my system.

[RFields5421 1]

In FSX, you need to remove the Panel folders so the AI aircraft does not appear in the Select Aircraft window - and slow down loading of that window.

[Bryn 72]

Thanks everyone for your suggestions.Over the last few days I've been playing around more with FSX. I converted all of my bmps to dds files (DXT1). And I removed all of the sound= and panel= from the aircraft.cfg file.Still, I couldn't get over how much AI drags down FPS. So I did some more testing. And here's where I'm at.Firstly, I set all of my settings to very very low and parked at KJFK. I get around 110fps there with nothing on. Turning on airline AI, and everything plummets. Remember, everything else is absolutely minimal, so this should be surprising in itself.But, what I found particularly interesting was that FPS were still around 70-80 fps if I was not looking at the aircraft. If I was looking at the aircraft at JFK, frames would crash to 25-30 fps.So I wondered whether this was consistent across all AI types.I turned off airliners and turned on airport traffic. Yep, same problem.I turned off airport traffic and turned on road traffic. This had a surprising result. The impact on frames from turning on road traffic was relatively minimal. Things hovered nicely around 100fps.So what is it about airplanes and airport traffic? Well I don't know. What I have noticed, though, is that even with global textures set to minimum, airport traffic and airliners still have crisp textures, but road traffic has the expected blurriness. Why do the aircraft and airport traffic textures remain sharp? Is this a clue to the fps problem?In short, though, my finding so far is that the problem looks like it is with the drawing of the aircraft. I accept Reggies points about the AI and FSX system generally, and while it appears that certainly lowers framerates, but I don't think that's the killer. As I said, look away from the aircraft or airport traffic and things are pretty good. The killer seems to be in the drawing of the aircraft and, perhaps, the textures.Bryn.

[Guest wcs33]

Historical Schedules & Customizing with MTXThanks for your interesting information about MTX.You, and site, talk about "historical schedules"...do they have the matching aircraft? I'm specifically interested in the L-188 Electra, and service by both Eastern Air Line and Reeve Aleutian Airways.Can one use/integrate customized historical traffic via the MTX menu? How does that work?Thanks so much--I visited the MTX site, but could not find any discussion about historical traffic use.