Hi Again!

[Guest cornclose]

Thanks Chris. Oh dear, you mean it gets worse ?! I've been using the default 'Warm Front' weather as a test, at a particular airfield with a particular aircraft etc.The good thing about FU3 though is that you really can change one thing at a time to gauge the effect - it loads so quickly. If you were to do this in FSX it would take you years!_______RegardsChris Ehttp://www.circle-software.co.uk/php/html/images/logo.gifVisit http://www.circle-software.co.ukHome of X-Plane Photographic Scenery : England & Wales

[Guest colsie12]

I think I know the issue, just not how to sort it.In a .cfg file somewhere in the files we can find out how to make it benefeit dual cores etc. FSX is haveing this problem and people are starting new cfg's over on that sim because FSX wont use dual core without service packs.I am gonna look over these .cfg files properly this project may take time. And i cant even gurantee it as time well spent.

[Guest Seadog]

Hello ChrisAbout two and a half years ago on this forum, we were kicking around the same general topic. I ran across a reference to a program of yours called Sync FS - another member had it, but the terms prohibited him from uploading it to the Avsim library. I tried contacting you at Circle about it, but never seemed to get through, as I heard nothing back. Could you tell us something about it, and whether it might be useful in increasing frame rates? Thanks.-Seadog

[Guest cornclose]

Hi Seadog,I'm afraid I never got any emails from anyone that referred to this. They were probably killed by spam filtering as I get so many emails these days.Anyway, I remember Sync FS (I think I wrote a later version called FS File Performance Utility - FSFPU for short). I did indeed write it for FU3 primarily, but it was useful for other sims too. Rather than it solving frame rate issues it did help (at the time when hard disks were considerably slower) with stutters and blurries (FU3 not loading the higher res MIP maps in the scenery quickly enough). It was written for Windows 98 but I recall doing some limited testing with Windows 2000 aswell.Of course the idea has caught on since then, with numerous companies releasing specialist defragging programs, notably O&O software, but I suppose the idea I had back then was new and my utility perhaps was a first. Here's the readme from it :-http://www.circle-software.co.uk/utilities/FSFPU/Readme.htmThe release version was v1.13, but I notice I have version 1.14 on my projects archive now - no idea what's changed. You're welcome to try it if you wish._______RegardsChris Ehttp://www.circle-software.co.uk/php/html/images/logo.gifVisit http://www.circle-software.co.ukHome of X-Plane Photographic Scenery : England & Wales

[Guest cornclose]

Hi Colin,I'm affraid it's not quite as simple as that - for any application to make full use of more than one CPU, it has to be specially coded. The only things that will benefit from dual (or more) cores are things called 'threads'. Each process on Windows is made up of at least 1 'thread'. Most applications however usually have many more threads than this in execution - but the problem is that most of these threads are sat idle for most of the time, waiting on a response from another thread in the same process (or from other Windows components) before they can carry on.The net result of all this is that FU3, and pretty much any other flight sim, will have all of it's main rendering process in one thread, so it can never use more than one core at the same time.The reference to FSX using multiple cores was a new feature introduced in SP1 and further refined in SP2 (ie. the Acceleration Pack). But again FSX does not use more than one core for most of the main rendering tasks it has to perform, but rather it uses multiple cores for other background tasks such as scenery and texture loading, and in creating the geometry for this. This does translate into a smoother (and potentially slightly higher frame rate) experience in FSX.There are config items in FSX which allow the end user to 'lock' FSX to only use certain core(s) in a multicore system, which is actually generally a very bad thing, but I won't go into the detail of why this is so at this time.One thing I have noticed (at least on my PIV system) is that FU3 runs better when Hyper Threading is disabled (Hyper Threading was the fore-runner to todays true multi-CPU systems) so if any of you have a H/T system, I'd recommend that you at least try FU3 without it enabled. On my PIV system I gained an extra 1-2fps (measurable and repeatable).Then, earlier today I had a thought. Since FU3 was coded in 1999 (at the very latest, it was surely born somewhat earlier than that) it would not have been compiled to use any of the newer features in the more modern processors, such as 3DNow! or SSE/SSE2 etc. So I've been examining the disassembled code and there may be a possibility to patch some of it's floating-point calculations to use SSE instructions which are native to all PIII and later Intel (and AMD) CPU's. Whether this translates into a frame rate increase would remain to be seen. Watch this space... :-)_______RegardsChris Ehttp://www.circle-software.co.uk/php/html/images/logo.gifVisit http://www.circle-software.co.ukHome of X-Plane Photographic Scenery : England & Wales

[Guest Seadog]

Thanks very much, Chris, for satisfying my curiosity about Sync FS with that link to the Read Me. You certainly were breaking fresh ground with it. I've just begun using the similar file name ordering function in O & O Defrag, just recently acquired, on a test setup of FS9 on an older computer, with lots of scenery and mesh add-ons, and am just about to give it a first test run. Even more promising is Ultimate Defrag by DiskTrix, authored by the publisher of Computer Pilot magazine, which is said to do all that O & O does, plus allow files to be located on any precise area of the hard disk platter one chooses. My next test, therefore, will be to place the files on the outer sectors using that newer program. Once I am satisfied with that, it will be time to install other programs and apply the lessons to them on my new primary machine with a Core2Duo E6750 and 4 GB of RAM.And thanks for offering the program itself. The two I have seem sufficient for the purpose at this time.Doug, a/k/a Seadog

[Guest cornclose]

Success!I've found some vectorizable FPU instructions in FU3 (not many though) and I've rewritten them to make them use SSE Vector Extensions. I now have a patched FLIGHT3.EXE which yields about 1-2fps increase on my PIV. Any performance improvement is likely to be small unless the system you're currently running FU3 on is particularly poor with FPU calculations.Most AMD CPU's typically had faster floating point units than Intel CPU's (which was primarily why Intel designed the SSE instructions) so on some (particularly AMD) systems you might actually see a reduction in performance.In any case, if anyone would like to try it, drop me an email as it's something which shouldn't be released publicly (yet) for a variety of reasons._______RegardsChris Ehttp://www.circle-software.co.uk/php/html/images/logo.gifVisit http://www.circle-software.co.ukHome of X-Plane Photographic Scenery : England & Wales

[agtim 0]

Hi Chris,are you using W32Dasm for this job ? In bad weather, the water drop simulation will take a lot of resources too.:-wave Andre

[Guest cornclose]

Hi Andre,No, although I've used WinDasm before, I've used OllyDbg in this case :-http://www.ollydbg.de/_______RegardsChris Ehttp://www.circle-software.co.uk/php/html/images/logo.gifVisit http://www.circle-software.co.ukHome of X-Plane Photographic Scenery : England & Wales

[agtim 0]

Hi Chris, thanks for the link, it's looking very good :-)Just installed and started FU3.Well need more time to do something useful. With WinDasm I have tried to locate the AI generation loop during the start - but failled :-(Will try again with this tool :-)With WinDasm I located the processing on an INI file and params of the command line, nice for LG developer but not more.now first back to finish the Antonov 2 first:-waveAndre

[Guest cornclose]

What command line parameters did you find Andre ?_______RegardsChris Ehttp://www.circle-software.co.uk/php/html/images/logo.gifVisit http://www.circle-software.co.ukHome of X-Plane Photographic Scenery : England & Wales

[agtim 0]

I lost the info at a computer crash this summer, hope to find the files again on the old machine after re installation of windows .:-wave Andre