FX-5900.... cracking the ton in FPS.

[Roger Mazengarb 0]

G'day all,What does the "fountain of youth", "unicorns" and "blistering FPS in Fly!II" all have in common? Answer: They all have their origins well and truly entrenched in mythology! :-)At least that would have been my answer before last week. With a fair amount of trepidation I parted with the money ($$$$$) and purchased a new FX-5900PV 128 MB video card. Installed the card and loaded the Nvidia 44.03 drivers and fired up Fly! II.OMG What had I done. - instant freeze.installed DX-9. Well the best I can say is it worked but very stuttery.What this? no T&L! Oh well that wasn't exactly working right on my old card.Oh no!!! CTD, BSOD or instant lockups would occur for no apparent reason. :-eek :-eekAh my salvation - The Omega drivers! Nope problems still persisted.I was all set to return the card to the shop when ; What's this a new set of drivers ( 45.23 )turn up on the Nvidia site.Downloaded and installed the new drivers and the transformation was absolutely stunning. All the above faults have disappeared. I'm over the moon with both the quality and performance of the card. :-jumpy :-jumpy :-jumpy The attachment is a screenshot at 37,000 ft just after top of climb in cruise with AP engaged on a flight from Cairns to Sydney. ( card set up in performance mode).Cheers,Roger @YSSY

[Guest Colins2]

G'day RogerNice one :-)I shall have to take a look at the prices over here.Colin

[dkohl 0]

Can you run a few tests for us? Can you do some screen shots with heavy TerraModels scenery? Also, run in a mountainous area with both TerraScenery and TerraModels airports, along with some good puffy clouds. These areas are the most demanding, especially when combined with clouds.After those tests (with some screen shots and FPS please), send along your Fly.ini and Render.ini settings.Would love to see the performance difference with your card vs. mine (GF4 Ti4600) in these demanding situations.Thanks.-DK----David KohlFly! II v2.5.240Dell 8200 P4/1.8G, 1024MB RAM, Nvidia GF4 Ti4600 v44.03, WinXP Home Edition SP1.CH Pro Pedals and Yoke USB.

[Roger Mazengarb 0]

G'day Dave,Don't expect too much. :-) Fly! II can bring this card to it's knees just like any other if it gets really loaded up with polys.The card has three settings;High performancePerformanceQualityI don't have any 3rd party mountainous scenery but will have a look around for some original stuff. I do have Socal (Larry's favourite).I will hunt around and try to show screenshots that you can emulate on your machine. If your Geforce 4 has 128 MB of memory then any increase, if there is one, will only be marginal. I came to this FX straight from a 64 MB GeForce 2 card. I'll post a few screenies tomorrow night.Cheers,Roger @YSSY

[Guest chezz]

Hi Roger,Did you enabled the card's AA & FSAA?chris - rpll

[Roger Mazengarb 0]

G'day Chris,> did you enabled the cards AA & FSAA ? >No Chris they were both disabled and also texture sharpening was disabled as well.Card set up as High Performance Fly! II settingsvisibilty 60high texture radius 6medium texture radius 20computer aircraft 0Cheers,Roger @YSSY

[Roger Mazengarb 0]

G'day David,Only scenery I have is San Francisco and Socal so I have taken a few shots that you may reproduce on your machine. I seriously doubt there will be a noticeable difference. My terrascene of YSBK has 39 hangars and 15 static aircraft produces 45,000 polys and cuts the FPS down to 13 FPS !. Only just flyable.The render ini is the one auto generated by Fly! II. I might do a little tweaking but I'm not sure it will make much difference.Card setting High Performance FSAA - off A filter - off texture sharpen - offFly! II settings visibility 60 high detail 6 medium detail 20 computer aircraft - 0Attachment #1 Flyhawk at KSFO ( 28R ) #2 Flyhawk over KLAX (Socal) #3 as above with clouds ( 1 layer of broken ) #5 & #6 clouds over the Swiss Alps near Inter Laken.My system.AMD XP2400+512 MB ramFX5900PV 128 MB DDR ramMag 996PF monitorCheers,Roger @yssy

[Guest tonyc]

Roger, your medium and high texture radius are at their maximum. At an aiport with lots of buildings, these settings will bring down your fps. Try medium 6 and high none. You wont see the difference, yet the fps will double.tony

[Roger Mazengarb 0]

G'day Tony,Yes I realise that. I was just using those settings as a setting for testing purposes.One strange thing I noticed is that reducing visibility from 60 to 40 or 20 actually causes a small hit on the fps. I tested my old geforce 2 card with a graphics test program called "Final Reality" and got 10.98 reality points. With the FX5900 the result was 11.02!!! That was an awful lot of money for a 0.04 increase in performance. This leads me to believe that the main factor differentiating graphic card performance in Fly! II is the ram on the graphic card and not the chip.Also I tested the FX-5900 at first with DX8 installed. After installing DX9 I retested and got exactly the same result even though according to the sales blurb the card is supposed to be optimised for DX9. I can't formulate exactly what the effect of polys is on FPS. On some screenshots I get 13 FPS with 45,000 polys and on others 35 FPS with 105,000 polys? Go figure? There are definately other factors at play that I have no idea about. :-) Thinking of getting a new graphics card?? Go for ram!Cheers,Roger @YSSY

[MGS 0]

Hi Roger. I've been pretty happy with 128 Meg with the ati 9700 pro. For me, probably the only big change in the render.ini has been to up the 256-565 slots to 81. Framerates haven't been much of an issue--about 75-85 fps in the 172 over default with 60 mi vis, med 12 mi, near 3 mi no ai aircraft. The worst case scenerio I have had is the night approach at Miles Carey's KBFI from the south (forget the runway, probably 36), where I get 28 fps with 4x AA and anis filtering at 4. My system is 2.53 GHz (1GB), latest ati drivers and directx9. Maybe someone has another approach which will bring the latest cards to their knees.