Simviation Forums

My system specs are: AMD Athlon XP220+1.80GHz
                                   512MB of RAM
                                   Windows XP Home Edition
                                    Nvidia GeForce4 MX440
                                     w/64 mb RAM
                      MS Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro
                                 CFS3.1a

I defragged the hard drive, set up a permanent swap file,  turned off dual pass rendering, turned down the graphics, downloaded new drivers,  started using wheresjames startup program, and I still cant get fps above 30!!!!!!  Any advice??  

30fps is excellent.  But, your bottleneck seems to be that MX video card - performs like a GF3.  

What framerates do you get when you are at 800X600 with no FSAA?  That is usually your CPU's bottleneck.  Any lowering from there is typically your video card.

Scott.

30fps! I only get half that. My bottleneck must by my older processor.

30 is generally tops with no clouds and clear weather.  If there are any clouds it drops to between 15-20. and what is FSAA?

Not trying to boast, but I get 60fps in the clear blue.  Got this with a Geforce 4 Ti4200 (Omega drivers)with 128MB  onboard and (most importantly) RAAF_Shep's tweaks (available here).

My specs:
Pentium4   2 GIG
512 MB RAM

A good video card and the tweaks make the difference...most people including me (and those with much better specs) get stutters...its a resource greedy program, but uou can't help liking it for its great realism.

I hate bragging as well, honest, but recently I bought myself a better pc with an AMD 2700+ (2.17ghz) Radeon 9200 graphics card and 1gig of RAM. I tested it out in a thunderstorm with 12 other aircraft in the sky and it gave me good consistent framerates above  the mid 30's at 1024 res (32 bit) and all the image quality ratings set at 5. Obviously clear skies are even better. Screen res does make a big difference, I can get away with higher resolutions for free flight but I tend to keep it at 1024 for combat. Also, reducing the colour depth to 16 bit gives me an extra 3 or 4 frames per second, and you hardly notice the difference in the visuals. So i guess I cant really complain. Saying that...even with those specs I do get the occassional jerks, usually during high G maneouvers If i'm close to the ground, but it isnt that bad, I can live with it. For two years I got by playing CFS2 on a Celeron 700 and Geforce 2, so the difference is phenomenal. I always use the 25 fps rule of thumb for frame rates. Since most TV's in the world today put out at around 25 fps, I reckon that if you can at least get that, then your not doing too badly.

You indeed were doing very well with 30fps from cfs3 with an MX440!!!

I used to have an MX440 and with my current cpu etc (which is no way as good as yours wwatkins) I was rarely seeing 20+ fps. :(
Now, despite the Celeron etc, with my FX 5600, 30 > 40 fps is an average! I'm quite sure you'd see a marked improvement.

One other thing, the FX5600 seems much happier with CFS3 at high res, so playing @ 1280x1024 seems to have become the norm for me.

Its just so damn annoying that over the past year or so, I've spent so much time and money upgrading enough to get CFS3 running right.

The main benefactor of my CFS3 upgradeing quest has been CFS2...... I can now frequently top 120fps with this sim despite sliders and quality effects being set to absolute max!

And so the merry go round of upgrades will start again once CFS4 appears!  ::)

Paul.

i just got Sheps tweaks.  Made some improvement, but if  i start shooting a bandit at close range the framerate drops to below 10.  CFS3 has always done this when I was getting shot at,  but has never done this before.

now to the next in a long list .... are you by chance on dial up ?  it has some unusual things (packet loss ) as issues.
if on BBcable or DSL  it seems much improved. on my Ti4200 it gives me 60  with clouds , but drops in thick of combat with  6 or more aircraft buzzing about , but rarely below 25 .
perhaps a BIOS tweak  could help out... are you using the  45.23's ? from NVidia ?  
that new 5900 w/128  is  next on my list ,  but the stutters ... just deal with them.... they wont go away, but do improve the more you run the game.

thanks Tony .... good to see that kind of praise.