Scotster

CPU is an i7 6700k overclocked to 4.2Ghz. GPU is a GTX1080 running stock clocks. Memory is 16GB DDR4 RAM. FSX is installed on it's own SSD drive with all the addon's and updates etc. CPU temps are approx. 70C (it's a laptop) at full load, no throttling to note. All 4 cores of the CPU will run between 90 and 100% during a flight. GPU temps are rock solid 49°C as it's barely being used. I had a bit of a play around today. I started messing with the bufferpools figures. My smoothest and best performance always came from Usepools=0 but now I'm seeing the best results with Usepools=1 with a PoolSize=120000000 (I think, might be +/- a zero or 2). I messed around with LOADS of figures, they would all hit approx. 90FPS +/- 5 but that figure saw the GPU up at 50% utilisation. I still don't think that's the answer though as when it was running at its strongest the GPU was being taxed as the temps were up to 65°C.... even with up to 50% utilisation the temperature doesn't go over 49°C so I believe that may just be an effect of the buffer itself. Something else I just remembered. I also started messing around with the Texture_Bandwith_Multi setting. I had defaulted this back to 40 a while back as I wasn't really noticing a difference. Today I decided to start typing in crazy figures. With Texture_Bandwidth_Multi=400 I saw a 10fps increase. Not sure why that's happened.

Hi there, I'm not entirely sure when it actually happened. I only noticed during a bit of testing. When I first started out I worked like crazy to get everything set up perfect, once it was I backed everything up. From there I've installed Steam, installed games, they in turn have installed updates, etc, etc, etc. I took everything out but it made no difference. I then completely wiped my PC and started from scratch. I still can't get it to work the way it was previously. It's very strange, I must have completely fluked upon the setup and now I can't replicate it :(

All of a sudden I have a strange issue with FSX. I'm still managing reasonable frame rates but nothing like I was previously. I'm not really sure what's changed but I am using Windows 10 which updates itself a LOT and I have also installed a few other games that may or may not be having an effect. The trouble is that I feel like I may be looking for a needle in a haystack. Previously I was using approx. 60-80% of my GPU and the frame rates were through the roof. Now I'm using a maximum of 36% and the frame rates are much lower than they were previously. I have not changed any CFG files at all, in fact I actually restored a backup I had just to make sure. CPU usage is exactly like it's always been, approx. 100% across 3 cores and around 90-100% on one core. Has anyone came across anything like this before? Just looking for some pointers before I go to town with my install. Thanks Scott

I did a small comparison video tonight. I maxed the settings as much as I dared (everything maxed other than Building Shadows, Water was set to 2.x low, traffic was set to 50% vehicles and weather was simply set to fair to save any issues). LOD_Radius was set to 8.5 just for the testing. The UsePools=0 tweak is by far the most noticeable. The VSync can definitely be seen before the UsePools tweak but it's harder to notice it afterwards. I still do see a slight difference so I'll be leaving it in there.

Thanks Jim. Happy Flying That's the one Greg. I was working off of memory lol. I was close though I guess there was previously a benefit to using the buffer at the software side? Is it the memory capacity of the GPU cards that's making turning it off more advantageous?

Apologies, I still can't quote your post..... I've tried no Bufferpools configuration in the FSX.cfg but it doesn't look as good or work as well with it being disabled. As I understand it from various sources that I've been looking through BufferPools=0 turns it off, BufferPools=1 enables it and Poolsize=xxxxxx is the setting of it. I currently have BufferPools=0 and Poolsize=0 iirc, this effectively loads directly from the CPU to the GPU with no buffer. The GPU I have can easily handle this better than the software can buffer it, so I believe this is why I'm seeing a positive impact. If the GPU wasn't as powerful the lack of buffer would likely cause serious graphical issues. The VSync tweaks definitely make a difference for me with my card, it's huge when it comes to panning. If I get a chance I'll do a video comparison. Obviously every system is different but I have a NVidia GPU. Regarding the FPS, I'm not sure if you understand just how powerful my system is. With my config set exactly as it is I'll see 100+FPS without it being locked. When it dips between 100 and 70 (over congested airports, towns, etc) I get a bit of tearing and glitching when panning and moving... hence why I locked it at 50 as it never drops below this. I'm guessing that 30 is for older systems with much older GPUs in place. Additionally, I believe the recommendation for 30 was for the 1/2 vsync option to be turned on as most screens refresh at 60. Unfortunately mine is 75 and I don't believe I can run at 37.5. I CAN overclock my monitor to 100 and run 1/2 vsync at 50 though, which is what I intend to play around with. My Main reason for the LOD_Radius was to try and combat the autogen popups that I'm getting. It doesn't seem to make any difference to that though and the 6.5 Radius, as expected, looks lovely so I'll definitely be putting that back down. I may even drop it back down to 4.5 if I can't see any difference. I was just running 8.5 as that's what I had it set to for my various VAS comparisons that I did. Regarding the logs, as I wrote previously, I'm struggling to find anything on Windows 10. I've been right through the event viewer and it's not catching the crashes that I was getting. Typically I've not been able to force a crash recently, other than a VAS one when I set the LOD_RAD to 15. I'm going to fly over Europe tonight using FSRecorder until I get a crash. Hopefully the flight will save and I'll be able to re-run it while logging to see if it repeats itself. Previously it was happening after 30-40 minutes of flying time, but it wasn't the VAS size causing the crash. My system is most definitely capable of running without any tweaks at all. It just works so much better with the ones I have employed at the moment. My aim isn't to get more FPS, I would be more than happy with 30 if it was silky smooth to be honest. My aim is to get the most realistic smooth flight that I can so that I can immerse myself in it Oh... I also like playing with techy things

I have gone through that and the CTD guide both cover to cover, they are excellent. However, in my only brief experience I have seen some of the information contradicted with my own eyes. Bufferpools is a great example. I found a guide on the bufferpools explaining all the settings etc and how the varied options should look. I went through loads of options last night, from removing it completely to trying 1000, 120000000, 400000000, etc. By far and away the best option was to disable it with Bufferpools=0. This, and some other findings, is what led me to posting up this thread as I was wondering how much of the information will need updated to bring new technology into play. Through my various playing around last night here is what I found for my system....... Bufferpools=0 was far and away the best on-screen visual. It tidied up a lot of spiking and black textures that I was getting with various other settings. It wasn't really noticeable during flight but when panning it was horrendous. ForceFullScreenVSync=1 and ForceWindowedVSync=1 are absolutely crucial to my install. Well, I think that's the case anyway. I honestly can't speak for the full screen as I was windowed all night when I was playing around. In windowed mode without VSync turned on the visuals are incredibly choppy when panning. It's not smooth at all. Enabled, it's perfect. I could be wrong but I don't remember reading about these tweaks in the setup guide. They are very important for me. I have the FPS locked at 50. When it was unlimited it was all over the place. Reading various guides it was suggested that modern GPU cards don't need the FPS locked. It was horrible for me without it. Between unlimited and VSync being off the screen was all over the place during any fast movements. Turning both of these on immediately made a huge improvement for me. I have a bit of a tricky situation with this one. My screen refresh rate is 75hz so I struggle to use the 1/2 vsync. There may be further improvements I could make if I overclock my monitor to 100hz then 1/2 the vsync while locking the FPS. This is something I will play with more. At the moment it looks great though so I'm not sure whether to leave it or not. FFTF had absolutely no impact that I could see. I guess that's down to the sheer horsepower of the modern CPUs. I had it everywhere from 0.08 to 0.40 and I couldn't see a single thing so I've just left it at 0.15 as everything looks great. I played around with the scenery configurator. I've still no idea what to turn on and turn off so I turned absolutely everything off that it would let me then enabled only the region I was in (Scotland). In that setup the game loaded in half the time, the VAS was 150mb less just on loading, and the VAS was almost 600mb less when loading into the game. There's definitely a LOT to be said for configuring the scenery properly. I just wish there was more information on this. I'll keep playing around though to see what works and what doesn't. I've set the LOD_Radius at 8.5. I went for a brief 40 minute flight and the VAS didn't go above 3GB with the above settings. The REAL test is going to be tonight as I plan to let it fly for as long as possible over Europe. I still have no idea how to log any crashes but I'll see how the above goes tonight. PS, apologies for not quoting everyone in the reply. I did try to but there seems to be some sort of block with the WYSIWYG post editor. My work must be blocking certain features for security reasons. I can't copy and paste for example

Brilliant, thanks for that. I know I definitely have 2048 textures so I'll set it to 4096 to make sure I cover all the bases and take it from there. I'll remove Texture_Bandwidth. I didn't realise they were linked, that's great. Is there a benefit to not having FSX manage the buffer? I take it that effectively throws everything at the GPU as it becomes available. That sounds like it could cause glitching depending on what's going on. I'm sure I've seen an article on the BufferPool so I'll have a good read through it and experiment with some varied settings. FFTF I guess is completely custom depending on the processing grunt. It almost sounds like I should be aiming closer to stock rather than lower. I'll have a little play with this too. Thanks for the info

With the settings as I have them this is what it looks like. It's fairly smooth and it'll hit 50+fps all day (I had it limited but it would easily go 90+ without the limit. I wanted to under-load the GPU if possible. The trouble I am having is the odd crash so I would really like to nail that down if possible. From digging around various posts apparently it may not be possible to have it this visual while being able to do 2+ hour flights. I see a lot of people tend to save every couple of hours and then reload FSX to clear the VAS etc. I'm happy to give anything a go though, I guess I just want to have my cake and eat it BTW, the above video shows nicely what I mean about the trees and scenery popping up just below the aircraft. It'll happily load up the Turbines from 20+ miles though haha.

Hi Bert, Thanks very much for the pointers. I've actually been using FSX for a while in near Vanilla mode and it has generally ran quite well. I just want to make the most out of my hardware and getting it to look as realistic as possible while attempting to keep it running well. With regards to the LOD_Radius, why is 8.5 very high? And the Poolsize=0.... is there up to date information on why these should/shouldn't be set? No need to apologise for my bad practices, to be honest I don't think there are very many people that actually understand them. Most of what I have read seems to be from people who have previously read them as good practice rather than actually understanding them... if you know what I mean. I totally understand lowering the likes of the LOD_Radius when the VAS is getting close to CTD levels but while within operating range I would like information on why it is bad.... other than just because it is Thanks for your help. Scott

I've recently bought myself a top end laptop in order to play, amongst other games, FSX. I'm at the "tweaking" side of things now where I'm just trying to get it running absolutely perfectly so that I can enjoy it for flying rather than trying to fault find. I have a LOAD of questions so I thought I would just start a general thread and throw them all in here in one go. I hope that's ok and I apologise for the following War & Peace Firstly... I've played around with FSX for a couple of years now. I've never had a particularly high end Laptop to play it on and I've never had any space for a conventional desktop PC (I've got a high end desktop but it's used as a server). This new setup has really opened the doors to me with regards to addons (ORBX, REX, etc, etc). PC Spec: i7 6700k running constant OC @ 4.2Ghz GTX 1080 8GB GPU (notebook) 16GB DDR4 RAM FSX installed on a standalone SSD Software: Windows 10 x64 FSX Acceleration FTX Global Base FTX Global Vector FTX Global Open LC Europe FTX EU Scotland Terrain FTX EU England Terrain FTX EGHI Southampton Airport FSRecorder Process Explorer Current FSX.cfg Tweaks: AffinityMask=84 HighMemFix=1 Texture_Max_Load=8192 Texture_Bandwidth_Multi=120 WideViewAspect=True Upper_Framerate_Limit=50 Fiber_Frame_Time_Faction=0.10 LOD_Radius=8.5 Poolsize=0 Display settings: 1080p 32bit Global Textures max Lens Flare selected Advanced Animations selected High Res cockpit selected Aircraft casts shadows on the ground selected Aircraft casts shadows in itself selected Aircraft landing lights illuminate ground selected All scenery at max other than Mesh which is at 5, Water which is at low 2.x and Autogen which is very dense. Weather is similar to the guide as is the traffic At the moment the simulator runs beautifully visually but every now and again I get a CTD. At first I thought this was down to an overload on the virtual memory but using process explorer I’ve ruled that out (Maximum I’ve seen on it is approx. 3.5GB). During my various checks etc I’ve noticed that DXDiag.exe runs as the screen freezes then quits as I get the CTD. I can’t see anything at all in the event viewer, it’s as if nothing has gone wrong. Through the various browsing around and searching I found one thread that mentioned this (which I’ve had some guidance with) but I thought it was worth mentioning. So onto the queries: Am I missing something with the event viewer? For whatever reason my crashes aren’t being logged on it, not that I can see anyway. I’m going to try Process explorer logging to see if I can get anything from that. Is this sort of crash also common place? I always see mentions of DLLs failing etc and causing issues but to have no notable issue at all seems strange to me. “Texture_Max_Load=8192” – This is a strange one for me. On a guide I read previously it said to set this at whatever memory your GFX card is. I currently have an 8GB card so I set it to 8GB. Through looking around it appears that this is in no way GPU related and is more to do with the definition of the textures being loaded on the screen. I guess that 2048 is definitely more than enough for this setting? “Texture_Bandwidth_Multi=120”, “Fiber_Frame_Time_Faction=0.10” and “Poolsize=0“ – What exactly are these settings? I understand that all the guides suggest various settings for them but most of them have been written many years ago with massive leaps coming from GPU cards. I understand that a lot of the advances are null and void due to DX limitations but it would be nice to understand these settings a little better with regards to what they actually refer to. Regarding the LOD radius, is there any issue with having it set at 8.5 (or higher) while the VAS remains permanently below 4GB? Are there other limiting factors to this setting? All the information I have read directly correlates to the VAS allocation with minimal referencing to other potential pitfalls. Is it possible to have trees and buildings load sooner? Is this to do with the LOD_Radius setting? The reason I ask this is that no matter what I have it set at the trees, lights and buildings seem to pop into view right in front of the plane. The radius doesn’t seem to have any effect on when these items pop up. As much as they look amazing once they are there they are pretty distracting in some areas. I would be happy to have less of them if they would load up quicker. With regards to the scenery configurator. I’ve been having a bit of trouble getting my head around this. I understand that ORBX uses a lot of photographic scenery (I don’t know this for certain) and I should only select areas that I’m intending to use when on a flight as it will impact the loading time and the VAS space. What exactly should I be selecting? Should I deselect everything and then only select the region(s) that I am using, or should I select the Global Base, Global vector, OpenLC AND the regions that I am using? Are there any guides on this? All I have found is instructions to only use what you need, but nothing telling me how to figure out what I actually need (there’s loads of 00xx options for example that I believe may be the FSX original scenery). I read in the guide that turning off Hyperthreading can be beneficial to the VAS space. Is that still the case? I don’t think there is anything I use Hyperthreading for right now anyway so I don’t think it will be much of a loss to try it anyway. My plan of action for just now is to make a few changes to my FSX.cfg file. I’m thinking along the lines of the following: AffinityMask=84 HighMemFix=1 Texture_Max_Load=2048 Texture_Bandwidth_Multi=120 ( I have no idea if I can easily push this higher with my current HW) WideViewAspect=True Upper_Framerate_Limit=0 Fiber_Frame_Time_Faction=0.10 (I’m not sure what to do here) LOD_Radius=8.5 (As much as 6.5 is recommended for VAS purposes I’m not close) Poolsize=0 (I have no real idea what this does, it looks pretty though) From there I’ll install FSUIPC and start flying around and playing around in various areas until I get a crash, I’ll then try to reproduce that crash and from there I’ll see if I can get it logged to find out what caused it. If you have made it this far well done and thanks for sticking with me. I apologise for hitting everything at once but I thought I would cram it all into one thread instead of making loads of them and trying to keep track of them all. I’ll update this thread with any of my findings and any eureka moments I come across.

Thanks for the reply. During that test I had absolutely everything I could at max. I also had the LOD_RAD at 8.5. The flight would last approx 4 minutes. I then ran another test with the LOD_RAD at 6.5. That flight lasted approx 30 minutes. It's as if something is "filling up" but I've been monitoring the VAS and it's definitely not that. I actually have almost 1gb of headroom in both cases. I'll keep playing around and see what I can find, I'll also try your suggestions. Thanks

I know I'm chiming in on an old thread here but I'm wondering if there was any resolution? I've been tearing my hair out trying to get my install working perfectly but I keep getting CTD crashes. Tonight I decided to run in window mode, open up Process Explorer to monitor the VAS used (Approx 3-3.2GB). I also used shadow play as I had noticed Process Explorer picking up on something closing (red line). As ever, everything was going great (20 minutes into a flight) then all of a sudden CTD. No warning, nothing at all. I've had a look in the event viewer under Custom Views but there's nothing in there at all relating to the crash. The ONLY thing I have to go on is from when I reviewed the recording from Shadow Play. It shows that DXDiag.exe briefly opened and closed at the moment of the crash. I can only assume, after a lot of searching, that it's exactly the same problem described by the op. Any help would be greatly appreciated. System info: 6700k i7 processor GTX 1080 8GB (Notebook) 16GB Ram Windows 10 x64 Install is on its own SSD drive Thanks