Can anyone help me on what my settings should be?

[tcco94]

http://reviews.cnet.com/laptops/hp-pavi ... mncol;psum

These are my specs. Its a laptop. Im in need of great help with my specs to get my FSX game running smooth. Although this says 2GB of ram and I have 3GB of ram and My processor is a AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-62 2.10 GHz

If you could help me you dont know how happy ill be!
Thanks

[ShaneG_old]

Hmm, dangerous topic!  No matter what gets posted someone will probably disagree, but here goes anyway:

No weather for flying, clear skies,
VERY limited traffic 15% or less, and NO cars or boats or airport vehicles, no traffic lables either.
autogen at med or less
water at low
stay away from big cities if possible
I would also lock the frames at 20 or less, but that seems up for debate here lately
These are the known resource hogs that I'm aware of and a good start for smooth flying.

Once again, just my opinion and we all know about those.
Hope it helps.

[tcco94]

Nah im not like that. I just wanted an idea. I had my traffic at like 40-50 because I thought that dint matter. I turned them down lets see how it works..
It seems like my specs are horrible huh

[ShaneG_old]

I wasn't refering to you in particular, It's just that this kind of topic is VERY opinion based as no two systems are alike, and they're not bad specs at all. Just not the greatest for FSX, but put FS9 on there and watch it rock! My system, while nowhere near the best, isn't all that bad, and I have to run similar settings to get 'smooth' frames.
It would be great if there was a utility or person you could give your specs to and recieve the exact proper settings for optimum performance.
 The best advice I can give I guess for this if you want high settings and smooth frames would be to pick up a copy of FS9, it can't be that much anymore and there is SO much out there to make it look very close to FSX, except the water, still looking for that magical touch.

[tcco94]

You know I always hear about fs9 being better with specs. If my specs are bad for FSX how come they will be so good with FS9  :-?...
Im still depating weather to get it or not but I have vista so is it compadible with my computer and vista?

I might just end up buying it because of the poor graphics and settings and online that I have to deal with that is driving me CRAZY  ::)..
Whats diffrent from FSX and FS9 that I will notice though?

[ShaneG_old]

Number one difference for me is the water/land textures. FS9 water can't hold a candle to FSX water. Out of the box with no addons, FSX is a MUCH better looking sim by far. But with the right addons you can get FS9 CLOSE, but even this close is not as beautiful as FSX. It's kind of a trade off in what you want. Eye candy vs. Performance on a lower end system. Now if you had something like NickN's system, there would be no question, stick with FSX! But just look at the number of posts in here about FSX not running smooth, having stutters, and such. Granted with the proper tuning and settings this can be solved, but if you are after continuous good performance with minimum hassle and decent frames, FS9 is the way to go. You gotta remember, FS9 was designed in 2004 to run on 2008 technology much like FSX appears to be designed to run on 2010 technology. When it gets here, performance in FSX will be a non-issue.
But this is just my opinion, based on my experience and WILL be different for others. I built my system less than a year ago with fairly modern guts, I can barely run FSX the way I can run FS9 now. Much like my first system would turn and burn FS2000 but would choke and die on FS9 on med-high settings. This is how they keep the sim alive for so many years.
As far as the Vista thing goes, I really don't know. I refuse to run vista because I've invested years into learning the ins and outs of XP pro and I'm very happy and comfortable with it. Some day I may have no choice but to upgrade, but they will have to pry XP from me!  I got my copy of XPpro for $20 brand new from a college store for students, Might want to look into that. If Vista is the resource hog they claim it to be you might gain all kinds of performace by 'downgrading?!' to XP.
Just my thoughts.

[Paul Mohr]

Auto gen settings will really slow things down as well. Another thing to keep in mind is that the dual core processors don't really make your computer faster, unless you have software written to take advantage of it. I don't believe FSX is one of them. So you are really running a 2 gig processor. What it will help with is running multiple programs at the same time from what I understand.

Ram probably won't make a big difference either, doesn't hurt but I don't think it's the biggest factor. Your video card and hard drive are probably your two most important pieces of equipment from what I can gather. You can have a really nice processor and a ton of ram, but if you have a crappy video card and slow jumbled hard drive don't expect great things because those are your bottle necks.

Computers are a lot like cars, you can't change one thing and expect it to work right, everything works together.

If I get a chance later I will copy down my settings since I have similar specs. You really just have to mess with the settings and play the game to find out works best. If you do most of flying through the cockpit lower your global effects, these seem to effect how pretty the plane looks while your looking at it. If you aren't looking at it who cares right .

Vista as it comes stock uses a ton of resources, one of the bigger gripes about it. I am using vista basic though and I really like it.

Paul

[Paul Mohr]

Ok, here are my settings on my machine.

I have an AMD Sempron 2 gig processor
2 gigs of DDR2 ram
4 gigs of ready boost
160 gig high speed HDD
And a Radeon 2600 pro video card with 512 megs of DDR2
I also have Vista Basic with the services tweaked a bit to free up some memory.








I have a 22" wide screen monitor with a native resolution of 1680X1050 but you will notice this is not what my setting are. I picked the one I have because it was a lower resolution and a bit wider which I liked the look of.

On the first screen the Global texture setting seems to effect how the planes look from the outside views mostly. At least as far as I can tell. Like I said in my above post, if you mostly fly from inside the plane this doesn't need to be set really high. I like to watch the plane in flight so I set it to where I get the best looks and the best performance. I can actually go a bit higher on some of my settings like the filtering and global texture but I can't tell a huge difference in looks so I just left them where they were to be on the safe side.

On the Scenery screen the fourth bar down on the left "Texture Resolution" is the one that has the biggest effect on how things look. This will effect how photo realistic the ground looks as you fly over it. Set it to where you get the best looks but the plane still flies smooth. Try several planes as well, because some of them react differently.

The two top bars on the right effect how many 3d building and trees you will see. The higher you set these the slower things will run. What mine is set to is the lowest setting you can have and still have buildings and trees show up.

For the traffic and weather just shut everything off. You can play a bit with the weather if you want. The detailed clouds look really cool if you can run them well.

Hope that helps a little.

Paul