TheGrunt

This. A solutely beautiful plane and I'm just scratching the surface. Ai crew and Heidi make this airliner like no other. Because of crew this complex piston engined plane doesn't overwhelm you at the start. I have B17, but I haven't flown it yet,.and my favorite plane is yet to see . So far out of three other A2A Accusim plane that I own (Spit, P40,P51) Strato is the best. Work of art.

Actually I haven't run FSX in windowed mode, but I use Prepar3D in windowed mode all the time. I started to use it mainly because of the annoying ATC window flash in fullscreen mode which made ATC pretty much useless and could eventually lead to OOMs. I use autohotkey and macro from library to get "pseudo" fullscreen and it works perfectly. As for performance, I don't notice any differences. I actually like windowed mode more than fullscreen as it is a lot easier to jump to windows and browse internet or put some music playing in the background. As I said, I haven't experienced any sort of negative aspects using windowed mode. If I'd start to use FSX again, I for sure would test the windowed mode first and if I don't notice any negative things It would be my choice, even though ATC Window doesn't cause trouble in FSX.

You need GPU crunch, if you are going to use multimonitor setup and with 670/680 you can stick up to four monitors to one card. I'd leave 580 alone today as you can grab GTX670 for about the same price.

GTX680 or 670 is the best choice, latter is bit cheaper with pretty small performance difference. Though I must say that I just changed to GTX670 from GTX480 and I hardly notice any improvement running 30 fps locked. With single 1080p display, today's best high end GPUs bring very little compared to 480/570/580 cards. For me, those parts of the scenery where FPS dropped below 20 with 480 more or less do the same with 670. I expected some of the FPS hit occur with hig polygon count and suspected that GPU upgrade might help to fix those, but I was wrong: 99% of the cases it still is CPU bound, a thing which I don't always understand. You would think that adding lot's of addons with mostly just static polygons, houses etc. causes mainly load on the GPU. But apparently this is not the case with FSX/ESP/P3D. I think that this just relates to how the engine was coded. Rendering engine uses one single thread in CPU and it is running on the loaded 1st core and that is after some point GPU really doesn't matter as you struggle with this heavily loaded CPU core. Good thing with this is that you probably have some headroom with high-end cards when you use 2 or more displays. When I get a bigger desk, I'll probably go with dual or triple monitor setup and with those resolutions GPU really starts to matter.

I have same flickering with REXE. This doesn't occur always, it really depends how clouds are positioned and what is the angle. I haven't fiddled with REXE settings that much to find out if flickering can be cured. It really isn't that big problem for me as it occurs in certain occasions. I experienced same with FSX also.

Actually it isn't that long time ago when Nvidia stopped chipset manufacturing. nForce 900 series for Phenom II and Athlon processors came somewhere around 2009. I myself have had two nForce 2 400 Ultra mobos for Athlons, one nForce 3 Ultra for Athlon64 and two 650i SLI motherboards for Core 2 Duo. All of those were really nice boards at their time and I didn't experience any problems with them. It was little sad that Nvidia quit manufacturing those and now processor manufacturers are only major players for mobo chipsests. If I remember correctly, during the 2009 Intel threatened to sue Nvidia for copyright infringement related to some Intel bus patent and Intel claimed that Nvidia needs to licence the technology if they wan't to manufacture Intel compatible chipsets. At the same time, AMD sales figures were on the downhill slide and there was just no demand for the Nvidia AMD chipsets so company dropped chipset business. In hindsight, I think one big reason was also to change focus to mobile low power APU's (Tegra etc.), which probably has a lot higher business margin. I've understood that mobo manufacturing isn't the biggest goldmine, so just producing chipsets for mobo manufacturers in market dominated at that time by processor manufacturers was probably far less profitable. To the 670, I'm anxiously waiting my GTX670 FTW to arrive. I made my choice between 680 and 670. I didn't even consider the 660ti because the price difference beteween EVGA GTX 670 FTW and most of the 660ti cards was just about 40 euros or so. Some 660tis were even more expensive.

I've managed to do my defragging fine with UltraDefrag. Main points: it does good job, is blazing fast and completely free. I just don't see a reason to pay money for a program that does just defragging as there exists more than adequate free defragging utilities.

I've installed pretty much every single RTMM scenery and enhancement (CIRP is probably only one I don't have) and I remember that not a single one of them requires Ultimate Alaska X. Required sceneries are pretty much Tongass Fjords X and ORBX Pacific Fjords. Some of them require ORBX PAKT, but this is only with few stuff dedigned for Ketchikan area. It is important that required object libraries menitoned on RTMM instructions are installed, because otherwise most of the RTMM stuff doesn't work. Ultimate Alaska, howewer, is not required for any stuff found on scenery page as I said, I've installed all of them released till mid september. I myself have Tongass, Pacific Fjords and PAKT and with those I was able to install everything.

Yes, that is good workaround without any noticable disadvantages (at least I haven't found any). I actually like it, because it is easier in windowed mode to put some backraund music playing and access other programs. I forgot to post the solution here, so glad you did it!

My finnish scenery is based on FinlandX, which is great package. I also use Fscene and Leclerq textures with it. With this combination sceney looks IMO pretty nice. I have right now just this one screenshot showing a bit of scenery from height. Definitely huge improvement from default overall.

Hmm, didn't suffer from any problems myself, so probably going to skip this one as it is optional. Thanks for the HU though. Just noticed on the Aerosoft forums that some are experiencing also bad FPS with it. For me, it practically doesn't slow down at all and during that Spitfire cruise for example: I was hitting my 30fps wall constantly. P3D is my platform, dunno if that matters at all.

Here is few screenies I took a while ago when I took A2A Spitfire for sightseeing the EFHK. Really marvelous looking place!

You too, no hard feelings here :smile:

Of course not. I'm just interested why this FSX DX10 stuff is so interesting to you to present for us here. You've made your stand about P3D pretty clear before though. If you are not interested in P3D I just can't see much of a reason arguing here on P3D forums. For example, I'm not that intersted in X-plane, I sure go visit the forums now and then but I still don't flood anything about the greatness of FSX in there just because "Avsim is for all members no matter what sim". Keeps discussion on the rails, you know. I still fail to see why you are so interested what someones opinion, right or wrong, is on P3D forum, a sim that you, as I understand don't use. As an example, I don't bother to care what X-planers think of FSX or P3D. Like those two are the same thing in your example, but you are of course entitled to make such comparison. I have no need to continue with this subject.

1. Those air traffic controllers, who think that my Stratocruiser is P-51: "Please expedite your turn..." 2. Those air traffic controllers, who like to keep me bysy for no reason: They just don't make sure I fly to the heading my flight plan says, but in IFR decide to zig zag me. Thank you very much, but I know how to operate my plane in cruise. 3. Those Air traffic controllers who decide to give take off clearance to another aircraft while I've just been cleared for landing and coming in final. It sure adds excitement to a sim when some A320 passes past you by a dozen feet on a head on course. 4. Those drunken airport vehicle drivers who are so blinded that they don't see my Stratocruiser being pulled back and therefore crash to it. You would think that there is some sort of regulation who they take to work on airports, but in FSX world apparently there isn't any. Drunk drivers are also the main reason why crash detection is banned in FSX world. 4. Those road builders who decide to make roads over runway. 5. Those car drivers who decide to use that road, even though planes are taking off and landing constantly.

Could you still tell me why you bother so much about this subject in P3D forum? Are you sure you don't have something to say about EULAs too?

Traffic addons with maxed out settings really suck FPS out of the system when you are in major hubs. New York area is perhaps the worst with heavy autogen in general and then three big airports JFK, La Guerdia and Newark in close vicinity. I don't have a clue how heavy TrafficX is compared to others or what your settings are, but this is just in general. Second, AMD's Bulldozers aren't the best possible processor especially for gaming and FSX compared to Intels core i5 and i7-lines. It lacks performance especially when you have programs which are heavy on one thread. Bulldozer chips get their best performance when all 8 cores have load. Interner is full of bulldozer benchmarks, so you can search for your self how Bulldozers compare to different intel processors. In many cases differences are huge and bulldozers lose even to preceding Phenom and Thuban line of processors. Third, although quite sufficient, your GPU is not top-of-the line units many here are using. Especially heavy AA and bad weather with some HD cloud textures load heavily your GPU and rendering huge amounts of AI planes don't help either. All in all, yes traffic addons in general are heavy on fps. Also, your rig although decent is not among the best, so I wouldn't be surprised that at least in some conditions you lag 10-15 fps behind those who use some Sandy or Ivy i7 processors clocked to 4.5-5GHz and use GTX480 or better GPUs. Some tweaks make also difference, mainly bufferpools and affinitymask settings.

Yes, I have ASE_DATA -folder in my Prepar3D\Aerosoft folder. Probably came with EFHK as I haven't noticed it before. Over hour ago I started a flight with A2A CoTS Stratocruiser from EFHK to EDDT, and wow! This is worth every penny! I couldn't notice any drop on FPS, smooth as a silk on takeoff and level of detail is just amazing. This was probably one of my most immersive flights so far. Terrific plane, airport was just like it should be and it fit nicely to my souped up Finland scenery. I've seen those same views from plane windows many times and now I was flying there. These moments are the salt of this thing, the driving force to do this stuff. Tomorrow I'm going to look more closely the details of the airport, but it is good. Really good.

Here beer in restaurant is easily 6 €. What is expensive, is very relative.

Looks sooo sweet! Downloading as I write :Party: Shop link: http://en.shop.aeros...10d74qrrhshttl3 Here is the product description copy-paste: Mega Airport Helsinki Vantaa, the premier work of the new developer team A-Flight in breathtaking quality for FSX and Prepar3D. Enjoy this accurate and high detailed rendering of the major airport of Finland and the main hub of Finnair. Day-and night textures as well as textures for all seasons including snow banks in winter reveal the special Nordic atmosphere. New rendering techniques allow a superb graphic quality without taking effect on performance. Up to date charts and a manual in English and German complete this Mega Airport package. Features: Complete new development for FSX and Prepar3D Highly detailed representation of the airport Helsinki-Vantaa Includes all buildings and structures Seasonal ground textures including snow banks for winter Custom made, extremely high-detail ground/pavement textures for accurate representation of the real airport Built in shadowing techniques that does not degrade performance like the default shadowing engine does Accurate photo scenery of the Helsinki-Vantaa airport area Detailed navigation systems (ILS, VOR/DME, NDB, ATIS) Complete and accurate taxiway and runway details Realistic night texturing and lighting Compatible with Airport Enhancement Services (AES) Compatible with standard-AI traffic and AI-Traffic Add-ons (for example MyTraffic X Tweaking Tool Manual in English and German, with up to date official charts And here are few screenies from Aerosoft site:

FPS gain may not be that much, I haven't actually measured it, but increase in smoothness (which usually means more constant FPS or higher min FPS) is perfectly clear. I searched RC forum a while a go and it seems to work fine with P3D.

Benefits of jumping to Lockheed boat probably depend on many things. Hardware is of course one, but addons used plays of course big part too. For me, the difference was bigger than I expected. FSX ran fine on my rig, no problems there, but P3D was still far better. It just doesn't run better but texture shading and crispness make it simply better looking too. Difference is subtle but clear. Only annoyance with P3D is the lack of start up screen, which I hope is addressed in a few weeks when Steve gets his P3D version of Ideal Flight out. ATC window is another issue, but I can live with it now, when I realized that I can run P3D in windowed mode with "Pseudo" fullscreen script. This leaves that annoyning screen flash away and so far I haven't found any performance decrease running in windowed.

I found this thread in A2A forusm addressing your problem: http://a2asimulation...lit=ils#p223990 You are probably one of the two people in the thread complaining about ILS issue. In general, I can't find any other remarks about non working ILS on the forums. Not a single user complaining outside of that thread. So, you really think that there is no possibility that the problem is in your end (some scenery or addon problem) and it is certain that problem is caused by A2A bug which practically means, that no other simmer of the hundreds or thousands of B-377 users have just noticed it or then they never use ILS? As Lewis replied in thread: End of story. A2A can't fix your install, so probably deleting Strato was right thing to do. By the way, ILS works fine here also.

In short: FSGenesis is IMO one of the best scenery additions you can get for flying outside the ORBX scenery areas (or some other scenery with HQ custom mesh).

First your laptop's I5 processor kicks with turbo to 3.2GHz. I don't remember if that is with only one core load, but still I don't think there is much room to be gained there. Youll soon bump into a heat problems as laptops cooling is pretty poor and designed mostly for what it is. Extra heat generated inside the case out of the manufacturers specs can easily cause instability and even may break some your components at least in long term use. Laptops are more like heat enclosurses compared to desktops. Second, I don't know about your Dell, but there are very few laptops out there which really make processor overclocking possible (outside of the built-in turbo, of course). Overclokcing discrete GPU chips should be possible in most cases, and that is the are where you might get improved results. Still, I doubt it, because CPU is the area in your case where you would gain most, but as I and some else said, your rig being a laptop is a limiting factor.