Simviation Forums

:( Really need help on how to improve framerates in my FS2004 Sim.
Here's my settings:  Terrain Mesh Complexity:  60
                               Terrain Texture Size:   High
                               Terrain Detail:  Land & Water
                               Water effects:  Low
                               Scenery Complexity:  Very Dense
                               Autogen Density:  Dense
                               Add-on Dynamic Scenery:  Dense
                               Dawn/Dusk tecture blending
                               Ground Scenery casts shadows
                               Sun Glare
                           Global Weather Quality:Medium High
                           Sight Distance:  60 miles
                           Cloud Draw Distance: 40 Miles
                           3 - D cloud percentage:  30
                           Detailed Clouds
                           Cloud coverage Density:  Medium
                           Target Framerate:  30
                           Display Resolution: 1024x768x32
                           Render To Texture
                           Transform & Lighting
                           Anti-aliasing
                           Filtering:  Bilinear
                           MIP Mapping Quality:  4
                           Hardware - Rendered Lights:  5
                           Global Max Texture ize:  Medium
                           
My Machine is an: Asus P5P800 Motherboard
                           Pentium 4 3.0 GHz Processor
                           1 Gig PC3200 RAM
                           2X Seagate 120 Gig SATA 7200 rpm
                           8 MB Cache hard Drives
                           Chaintech AA6800G
                           256 Meg AGP Video Card
                           Onboard PCI Sound
                           Onboard Gigabit LAN
                           CDRW Drive
                           ATX Case with 480 Watt Power Sup.

Long description, I know, but I want you guys/gals to know exactly what kind of Machine I have, and what my settings are.
What am I doing wrong? Framrates locked in at 30, but as soon as I come close to: Chicago / Dallas / Atlanta / New York City / Boston, framerates go down to 11, 9, 6, all the way down to 3, at that point you can not really land or take off, it stutters way too much......grrrrrrrrrr  >:(

HELP  anybody,   Thanks        John
                                 

I'd say turn off ground shadows, and maybe knock down the settings that adjust the number of objects displayed.

Other people probably have better suggestions though.

Good Luck!

Sounds like you've got a good machine, MUCH better than mine and I don't have that trouble (with settings lower than yours above of course).

I'd suggest turn down the dynamic scenery (a real frame rate hurter) and i've seen other people suggesting to turn of the Anti-aliasing, whatever that is! I'd also reduce the global weather and check how much AI traffic you have as well, 50% is more than enough.

What Graphics card do you have???

With a computer like yours I would expect it to run awsomely.

But, I got a new computer
3.4ghz with Hyperthreading
X850XT PE
2gig 533mhz RAM
And it ran like crap when I played it at first

Just tweak it all around, check your driver settings, and try putting some of the sliders on performance in the drivers.

Another way to improve fps is get rid of AI traffic, I have mine totally off.


Also, if you are using reality XP things, turn off hyper threading for the game when it is running, do this
press Alt-COntrol-Delete, and then
go to processors, right click on fs9.exe, then click Set Affinity. DeSelect the Box that sais CPU 1, then press ok and Maximize flightsim again and fly :D.

Also, check if theres viruses on your computer, and end as many applications straining your cpu as you can.
Norton Anti Virus can slow it down allot btw

If you don't want some of the applications you just ended to start up again when windows starts, press, Start>Run>Then Type Msconfig in the box.
In the start up tab, deselect things you don't want.

I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE TO YOUR COMPUTER


Hope this helps, cya

If you do get more performance, and want the ground texture to load faster, do this:
Back up fs9.cfg
Open up fs9.cfg
Find the lines
[DISPLAY]
TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=40 --- change the 40 to around 400

Open your fs9.cfg file, and modify the following lines to
TERRAIN_DEFAULT_RADIUS=9.500000
TERRAIN_EXTENDED_RADIUS=4.50000

^^ That could reduce performance so backup your fs9.cfg before you do it

cya

Anti-aliasing smoothes the edges of the objects; turning it off would hurt the eyes...  :D leave it on and work on other settings (my two cents).
I have similar problems with a similar hardware, and I too started a similar topic a few days ago.
It seems that AI traffic is indeed a major cause of fps dropping. To prove it; I have tried to lower all the eye candy display settings and it didn't give me more than 2 or 3 fps!

2 thing that pop out at me:

Antialiasing- unselect in FS and then set AA level in your graphics card setup utility-here you can select the AA level and get the best trade-off between smoothing and FPS.

Display Resolution- reduce to 16 bit (1024x768x16)- this still provides 64K colors which should be enough.

As mentioned, AI traffic can take a heavy toll in high traffic areas so reducing that can help.

Dave

Already been mentioned, but in my own case, turning off all shadows (both aircraft & ground) helped tremendously.  

I'd say turn off ground shadows, and maybe knock down the settings that adjust the number of objects displayed.

Other people probably have better suggestions though.

Good Luck!

With the greatest respect Mobi, it's not a solution to degrade the performance of the program so much you might as well be running it on a 400Mhz PIII.

Clearly there's a problem here to be dealt with.

Firstly, have you installed and configured FSAutostart. If you haven't you're wasting your time posting any data on FR at all because nobody knows what junk you have running in the background.

Do that and then tell us what you get.

Also, if you have got all the latest junk in the way of auto updates from Mr Gates and his boys, he's probably got more control over your PC than you have so it's no wonder it's running like a donkey.

I've just reinstalled from scratch because my XP just fell over...again. I thought I'd do an experiment. I keep details of the benchmark tests I have done with my various installs. The last test I did showed my current card falling considerably below a 6600GT I had. I installed ONLY SP1a and ran the test again. This time my card was about 12% FASTER. This must be based on relative system speed as the cards themselves are the same.

Draw your own conclusions...but I'm not installing anything other than what I've already got. You can stick all your patches and 'security' updates

Thanks everybody that replied so far, Hey Mobius, if I turn the ground shadows off, and knock down the settings in display, sure, I get better framerates, but the problem is I might as well go back to FS98, and I don't want tha.

Now I have a question for RollerBall:  What id FSAutostart? never heard of it,  is that a program I can download? if so, where do I find it?

I never did mention anything about AI traffic, I do have quite a bit of that installed, love to watch traffic, don't want to fly alone.

Thanks to all you good folks, and thanks in advance for help on my new question, RollerBall

John  

Here you go. It's self-explanatory but shout if you need help. In the beginning we all try to turn off too much and things fall over but experiment a couple of times, watch the errors that come up in the FSAutostart loading screen (ie services that won't shut down, so just remove them from your 'shutdown' list) and GUARANTEED you'll get a faster running sim

http://www.kensalter.com/forum/forum.asp?FORUM_ID=14

John_HR,

Hi.

With the greatest respect Mobi, it's not a solution to degrade the performance of the program so much you might as well be running it on a 400Mhz PIII.

It's no problem, I really had no idea and frankly don't have the foggiest idea why I responded in the first place.  I agree though, my system is almost exactly the same and I don't really have any problems at all, probably something bigger, but I really don't know.

GoodLuck!!