Low Frames at Airports

[Iroquois]

I've noticed something strange. I get really low frame rates (3-4fps) at regular airports. This particularly happens at Miami and Charlotte/Douglas. What strikes me the most is around detailed airports like Heathrow, I might get 4-10fps. What is causing this?

[loomex]

I think its the AI planes. As soon as they are out of view my fps jumps right up

[fisharno]

I've been experimenting with different scenario's, trying to figure that out.

I really think it's multiple AI aircraft at certain airports.
If you've added AI aircraft that aren't GMAX, that really does it. If you've added several GMAX aircraft, the decrease is a little less. But, multiple default AI aircraft takes a toll, also. Even if you haven't added any AI traffic, there's a lot of things that come together to drop the frame rates.
Higher scenery settings, along with 2 or more ground traffic work together with ATC and sound and your aircraft and panel, causing the drops. And, I would guess that it really depends on the PC, and the individual's settings and the use of addon aircraft, and scenery, or both in combination that are to blame. We all might see it, just some worse that others.

If you think about it, we're pushing our PC's to the edge with all the tweaking and stuff, just so it can try to do what we're asking of it.  ;)

[RollerBall]

Fraid I can't offer too much hope to guys who only have low end machines. And it's gonna get worse as newer fs versions come out as we've said before.

I've just increased my RAM to 1GB 2100 DDR. I've got an AMD 2100+ proc (1.75 GHz) and a GeForce 3 Ti 64MB g/card.

In the scenery I'm working on I've got quite a few AI planes on the apron plus a couple of detailed statics (Mandarin and Virgin 747s). And I've got a lot of custom buildings and objects and a lot of buildings surrounding the airport.

When I look towards the apron (AI, statics etc) my fr drops to UNDER 5 and sometimes under 4. Around the airport in general I can usually expect around 8 but NEVER as high as 10.

It looks as though if we want more realism - especially if we want to see animation in the future we're gonna have to pay for it in the form of new processors. Anything much less than a 2 GHz cpu won't hack it in my view.

[lib319]

Rollerball, your post has comforted me somewhat, I run an AMD 2000XP with Geforce 2 64mb card and I was thinking there was a problem somewhere as I too suffer from framerate drop at airports.

What does a guy have to upgrade too to get this sim to run fast?

Not a real complaint though because FS 2002 is still great without all the eye candy turned up.

[RollerBall]

Yeah, I think people have totally underestimated the load that AI puts on the system. M$ only put a few at selected default airfields. Now we've started slapping it everywhere because we've got AFCAD, TTools and stuff.

I've said before and I still think that pretty soon we're gonna need well over 2 GHz machines (and probably nearer to 3 GHz) to run all this stuff satisfactorily. By that I mean as designers intended ie everything visible ie sliders all up at max.

My own view as I've stated elsewhere is that sliders are in effect a marketing tool to expand the market for FS downwards to lower end PCs by allowing users to exclude prog features. Designers don't want that but if the market for FS was restricted to machines that could run the WHOLE system at fr's of 15 or over (ie no stuttering or flicker) they'd only sell a few thousand copies per year!

Roger

PS I don't include my setup in that category either yet as you can see from my post - but I recognise the reality!!

[codered]

I would have to agree.  On an average I will have the AI traffic set to around 50 percent, sometimes as low as 30.  This allows terrific frame rates at airports and enroute.  At airports I will get anywhere from 10-15 fps, then enroute I can find 20-30fps.  Not to mention that my scenery is turned down to normal or dense.  There are many sacrifices that can be made to better your performance.  

[fisharno]

I understand FS scenery, just enough to be dangerous, but....

AI traffic, static or otherwise is simply regular aircraft inserted into the scenery. They still have all their textures and flight dynamics intact. That's why framerates drop, especially when there's more than one in the scenery. The more AI traffic, the lower the framerates. My idea is to make static aircraft part of the scenery, like a building or a tree or something. They would still exist, but they would be part of the taxiway, or background. That way, there's no separate aircraft textures or .air or .cfg files for the PC to have to deal with, 'cause that all gets loaded with the scenery. In FS2000, the other aircraft that were shown in certain scenery is Dynamic Scenery, that caused the same framerate drops, (probably worse). FS2K2's static aircraft would be simply static scenery. But, the more moving traffic you want, the lower the framerates would go. Just the nature of the beast.

[foo_fighter]

Orenda,

I don't have an answer 4U sorry, but what's puzzling me is this very low framerate, what machine do U have?
cos I know my machine is very good and I usually lock the frame at 25fps and at Heathrow, Charles de Gaule O'Hare I have 20-24 fps at full charge o' ATC!
I thought about the mem and video card, can U specify 4 us yours?

[RollerBall]

My idea is to make static aircraft part of the scenery, like a building or a tree or something. They would still exist, but they would be part of the taxiway, or background. That way, there's no separate aircraft textures or .air or .cfg files for the PC to have to deal with, 'cause that all gets loaded with the scenery.

No, the fde files don't make any difference - it's the textures that matter. Your statics will need em (see below).

Lots of buildings also make FRs drop. But bear the following in mind.

Nearly all FS default building textures are 256x256 8 bit bmps and each building only has one texture (composite for all 4 sides + roof) which is why default buildings are v poor quality when you view em close up. But you can add a lot of buildings like that before the prog starts to get bogged down.

With 'featured' airports like LHR, LAX, detail has to be increased so bigger textures are used. These hit fr and when we use AFCAD to put more AI in, that's why fr drops to a crawl at those places.

Default aircraft (inc the ones that are used for AI) are 1024x1024 ext bmps with MIPs but there's only the one texture plus a decal texture per aircraft. But you can see as soon as you add more default AIs you're adding some big texture files which is again why the prog slows down.

Because people want quality, most 3rd party aircraft use 512x512 ext bmps with MIPs for their detailed bits plus some smaller textures (eg 256x256) for the less detailed bits (eg gear etc) but as each plane will have prob at least 5 or 6 512x512 textures, you can see they will have a big impact on fr when they are in view (as AI or even in spot view). People like Aadvark have made their mark by dispensing with the MIPs which obviously reduces the texture size for their planes with a loss of detail at distance, which of course we don't care about for AI.

So you can see where this is all going. People WANT to see quality - they can ONLY get it at the cost of cpu processing power because quality means large texture files.

And I haven't even begun to talk about the impact of lots of animated bits on aircraft (doors, engine covers, holds, flaps, gear, flexing wings, rudders etc) which slow things down even more because with each cycle the machine has to check that as they are there, have they been activated (yes/no) and if so, what is their current status/position......

Hope this helps to explain things a bit.

Roger

[fisharno]

So, Roger;

Is it the mix of the bmp textures, (256x256, 512x512, 1024x1024), on the AI aircraft, along with everything else that causes the slowdowns?

Nuts and bolts! I like this stuff.

Al

[RollerBall]

No, it's the number of objects (going back to animations on aircraft - each animated bit is a separate object in the model) and the size of the texture file used to give each object its 'appearance'.

Bear in mind that compared to a 256x256 bmp, a 1024x1024 is 16 times the size (ie you go on area to count the pixels)

Going back to my previous post, in earlier sims eg FS98 each plane had only 12 or 13 textures each 256x256 max. Roughly each one was about 60 kbytes.

If you look at a POSKY 747, that baby has something like 10 or 12 textures, several of which being 512x512 doubled up for night (but only one set used at a time - I'm not sure if the prog loads day and night textures together, it probably does as they're all in the same file), 3 or 4 of which are over 1 meg in size. On a rule of thumb basis, a 512x512 bmp needs 4 x the processor power compared to a 256x256. I'd estimate that on the textures alone compared to the old plane the POSKY needs at least 3 x processor power on textures alone, poss more - and then you start adding all the moving parts - I'll bet it needs more than 5 x the processor power at least compared to a FS98 plane (much more if day and night textures are both loaded at the same time).

So when you get those folks saying my good ole Dell or Compaq was running FS98 great, why can't I run FS2002 - you can see why, especially when you factor in terrain textures, more detailed building textures and AI aircraft.

So how does FS2002 get away with what it does? Easy - as far as possible it uses small textures - for terrain, buildings and default objects - and it tries to use a loaded texture as often as possible on different objects (eg buildings) so even if the prog loads more objects in a view, it doesn't have to load more textures which would slow it down.

Obviously the fancier the graphic card you have (OK all we mean is it must have as much onboard processing power and RAM as possible) the more processing can be delegated to it away from the PCs cpu and the quicker the prog will run ie higher fr

But there's no doubt that there's some very clever programming behind FS2002 and given its complexity and the number of modules it contains I'm amazed that it holds together so well

[Iroquois]

Orenda,

I don't have an answer 4U sorry, but what's puzzling me is this very low framerate, what machine do U have?
cos I know my machine is very good and I usually lock the frame at 25fps and at Heathrow, Charles de Gaule O'Hare I have 20-24 fps at full charge o' ATC!
I thought about the mem and video card, can U specify 4 us yours?

AMD Duron 950
Geforce2 MX400 64mb
512MB PC-133 Ram
I'm thinking of upgrading to a Geforce4 MX440 64DDR. Funny thing is that I'm one of the few who has CFS3 running smoothly. I do have a lot of non-gmax AI airtraffic. I'm going to try removing some and see what that does.  

[fisharno]

Wow. Thanks, Roger.  :D

Ya gave me a lot better understanding of this.
I gotta do some reading, now.

[Charles Foster]

I just finished building my computer from scratch I have a Penium 4, 3.0GHz processor with a Ti4800 AGP video card, Creative Labs sound blaster live dolby digital 5.1 card 120GB hard drive with 2Gigs pc3200 DDR ram and I stayed away from integration as much as possible and went with plug and play every where i could, it's alot easier for upgrading. The operating system of choice naturally was Windows XP professional, very stable OS.
AT major airports with everything turned wide open with all AI trafic and full clouds my frame rates never fall under 45Fps and in the air they run between 60 & 75Fps.
I don't know if it matters but I locked my frame rate slider at 99Fps and it targets 86Fps.  I've seen it hit 85 a few time for only a split second then it goes back to 60 & 75Fps.
Anyway that being said, I would have to agree with RollerBall. If you want real life results you will have to spend the money on a good machine or do like i did and build your own either way it will cost some money and in the end result your reward will be 1. knowing whats in your system because you built it. 2. if you have never built a computer before and you don't know how to then you will when your done. and 3. you'll finally be happy with you FS2002 pro. at least until MS comes out with something your computer is outdated for.
One peice of advise when building a computer,
SPEED, SPEED, and more SPEED!
Happy flying!