THanks for your ideas, Rob...I did play a bit with them last night. 16 bit setting in both windows and the application did raise frames. I then played with the process priority...on high I saw little difference, but perhaps some gain.Then I activated ASX for weather....This introduced stutters, and when in an outside camera, many seconds long lockups.All of which may make sense, its logical to my intuition.Just because I can't stop myself, I then set the process to "real time". LOL My advise is "DONT"! The fsx process went to 97%, everything else went to 0%, and the machine locked up tight!One hard reset later, and onward we go...tweaking, tweaking...merrily on!Best,Bob

This is why you don

"This is why you don

Would changing (increasing) the priority for fsx.exe cause problems for users of TrackIR, which uses its own *.exe ? One could see how this would decrease the TIR "head position" updates and lead to jerky views ?Longers

Hi,It might and real easy to check!Jimhttp://www.hifisim.com/banners/hifi-community-sigbanner.jpghttp://www.hifisim.com/

Hi Rob,Have you tried to do this and switch to other programs while FSX is running? It sure slows down the rest of the machine when set up this way. Even checking e-mail takes a heck of a long time.Jimhttp://www.hifisim.com/banners/hifi-community-sigbanner.jpghttp://www.hifisim.com/

thank you for the valuable tips Rob. But when I set priority mode to high, I could not start my RXP530 unit anymore. It took ages to load and the sim nearly came to a halt. After setting priority mode to normal, everything was smooth again. Just my experience running XP. Rodger

If someone finds changing the priority smoothes out FSX thenA. System is not set up correctly, very possibly background activity is present which the priority switch masks by reducing processor time to that activityB. FSX is not set up properlyWhat the user is doing is using a single setting (higher priority) to mask the true issue and if one uses 3rd party addons which need processor time they will most likely kill the performance of their sim or the addonIts a balancing act and I don't believe in such things as changing priority to fix issues such as stutters. I locate the OS issue, hardware (including BIOS), application, or the addon causing the problem and fix the issue the right way.If such a change works for you, that

Fair points. But in the absence of identifying how and why stutters are occuring, if high priority solves it then that is acceptable to me. I ought to add that I don't tend to answer e-mails while flying and I don't have to many addons which a priority setting might compromise. What I'm saying is that if FSX is more or less the only app running, apart from a few Win services, generally speaking it makes for a smoother sim on my system.OK?Rob

>>>>This is why you don

RobIf I had time I would offer to run through the system with you and try to locate the culprit causing your stuttersUnfortunately I am neck deep in work right now and do not have the spare time.I understand that finding a single setting such as a priority change which helps can be a relief however the issue it resolves is not priority and its not fixed. Instead it's masked until such time as you install something that needs that processor time. In example, I would not want my external weather application starved for CPU cycles since it does a much better job that the default FSX weather system. Assigning affinity to such applications is a good tweak. One should always assign the last core of the processor to any external running 3PD application in order to ensure FSX has as much of the first two cores as possible available to it.

Rob:I think that the ONLY holy grail for FSX is to utilize the sim on hardware that can run it they way you want to run it. Some points to consider to bring this all into perspective:1) If there were a "holy grail" fix for FS performance, Aces (Phil Taylor in particular) would have it pinned at the top of every forum. For the last two years Aces has been pouring over FSX, trying to fix performance via SP1, SP2 and given light to such settings as FIBER_FRAMES, etc that actually can be tweaked to increase performance by marginal levels. Over the last 2 years, nothing has been able to achieve FSX nirvana on a system that is lacking. Aces has admitted and found the sources of poor performace and are moving forward with eliminating them in Train Simulator and FS11. So what is the fix? RECODING.2) Expectations. If someone is running a P4 2.8Ghz with 1GB of RAM on Windows Vista no tweak in the world is going to make FSX into a high framerate, smooth, high definition photorealistic vision of flight....ain't gonna happen. If one is determined to use FSX then simply pull the sliders down until framerates are acceptable. Easy tweak. No FSX won't look that great, but it will run at very good frame rates.3) Service and application shutdown utilities do nothing worth mentioning. Look at your Task Manager and notice that all background services are at ZERO CPU usage and very little memory allocation. Most of them may use 1-5% CPU utilization every now and then but none of them should be at such a high CPU usage that it affects applications (unless you have a poor CPU or not enough memory -- in which case the true fix is to get more memory or upgrade the CPU). Common sense says to shut down all applications (email, antivirus, webbrowser, etc, when FSX is running.4) Never touch the priority flags!!! Windows has two settings: "Applications and Background". To get CPU utilization allocated to a higher priority, simply select the Applications setting. Windows does the rest. Raiding the application priority flag causes the application to steal CPU cycles from other processes and applications that require them. SO, if you use FSX, RC4 ASX and aircraft connected to FSUIPC you will be in a world of hurt. FSX will be smoother but everything else will become a stuttering mess and eventually lock up your system as they all fight to get CPU cycles left over after FSX hogs them all.5) Processor affinity allocation. Windows manages this on its own and apps manage this on their own (if multiprocessor aware). Remember that multicores are not seperate CPUs they are 1 CPU with multiple cores connected by shared buses to the motherboard. Hyper-threading and multicores are not the same as having 2 CPUs with multiple cores in which case sure, allocate FSX to CPU1 across all cores and then allocate applications to CPU2 across multiple cores. Otherwise what you do is allocate an application to 1 core, but then what's the difference between an application using 25% of 4 cores or 100% of one core? NOTHING, its the same thing because its the same CPU!6) AA in FSX. TURN IT OFF. You can never, ever render textures faster via software than you can via a dedicated GPU...hence the reason for a dedicated GPU. Turning AA on in FSX causes the CPU to do the rendering of AA, why add to the CPU cycles required to run FSX when you have a GPU sitting there ready to take that rendering and leave the CPU to do other things? Any $100 video card will suffice to render AA and the more you spend on the video card the higher the level of AA that can be had for a given resolution. Doing this in FSX will do nothing but slow down your system.At the end of the day, I found the holy grail for FSX, its called $4000 spent on my latest system build. Think of it this way, if you are overweight and someone sells you "magic weight loss pills" you will be just as fat next month as you are today. HOWEVER, if you diet, exercise and work hard, next month you will find that you have lost weight. If you diet, exercies, work hard AND take the magic weight loss pills you will still lose weight and you will find that it wasn't because of the magic pills, it was because you spent money, time and effort to achieve your goal.So, not to be flippant, but there is no holy grail tweak unless that tweak involves reconfiguring your wallet! :-)BANK_ACCOUNT_BALANCE=4000NEW_SYSTEM_SPEND=4000WALLET_SIZE_FLAG=0WIFE_YELLING=ONWIFE_VOLUME=MAXSLEEP_SPACE=COUCHFLOWER_BOUQUET_ORDER=12Warm regards,Mike T.

Mike T,Very, very, very well said!:-beerchug

Excellent post!!Jimhttp://www.hifisim.com/banners/hifi-community-sigbanner.jpghttp://www.hifisim.com/

Good post, Mike, some revelations like turn off the software AA! are shocking (how could I forget it myself from the dawn of AA?!). :)