Simviation Forums

I have been looking at all the posts on this forum and noticed that a lot of the hardware used to play FSX is beyond what I am using, so I'm probably a moron for posting this. However, I will anyway :-D

Here are my sys specs.  

Windows Vista Home Premium
Intel Core 2 Duo 2 T6400 @ 2.0Ghz
4GB RAM
Radeon HD 3650 256MB PCI-E
Dell Studio 17 Laptop

My question is this:

I have both FS9 and FSX deluxe. With either program, no matter what level of detail I use, I still get the same amount of frames. On a clear, sunny day, I can get about 17FPS, which I know better than to complain about. Otherwise, I get about 5-8 FPS, and if the weather is really bad, I can make a pot of coffee and drink a beer in between frame changes. It doesn't matter if the settings are on max, medium, or minimum.  Because of this, I fly on MAX because it doesn't make any difference in frame rate. I know this probably defies logic, and I know that, too. I have used the FSX tweaks listed on various websites to maximize performance, and downloaded the updates, but nothing improves my frames at all. Does it make sense that both sims will have the same FPS on any setting?

Any tips on this would help, but I'm trying to stay away from overclocking my hardware because I need my laptop for school. Thanks in advance.

Well if you can do all that between frame rates, cut the beer you will get drunk.

Your processor is only a 2.0Ghz processor... For good perf on FSX you want at least 3.0

Another thing is you have an ATi card... They get eaten alive by FSX. ATi are great for newer games that are shader-intensive. FSX, however, has an engine from 2000 and is still a triangle-rendering engine. NVIDIA is what you want for FSX. That's the reason weather is putting your system to its knees.

I actually read that somewhere. Unfortunately, Dell didn't offer me a choice of ATI or Nvidia, only integrated graphics or ATI. I actually prefer Nvidia, anyway.

I've been checking things out, and it seems that I will have to just not fly in bad weather for quite a long time. The best system I could find on a budget was about $1500, that's with an i7 cpu which I've seen a lot of people boasting about, and probably upgrade-worthy hardware otherwise. Maybe one day I can afford a good system to run FSX, but of course, I'd probably spend less money on flying lessons, IMO.

I certainly wasn't complaining about 17fps in good weather; I just wanted to see if it was normal for the frame rate to stay the same no matter what settings I have.

Well, if you have 17 fps, with your system, KEEP THEM.
Its not bad believe me, at least you can play with it.
For FS9, well a bit of tweak it will be 80% as long you dont push it.
Keep us posted on anything we can help

I found another forum that had a tweak that I never thought of. Some French guy discovered that if he took the FS9.cfg file and replaced the FSX.cfg file with it, he could boost his performance of FSX. A lot of the members on that forum tried it and noted an increase of 5-10 fps on average. I figured I had nothing to lose from trying it, so I backed up my original fsx.cfg file and copied the fs9 file in its place. Placing all the fsx tweaks into that file as with the original fsx file, then restarted the sim. My benchmark was the default Friday Harbour Fair Weather flight in the Trike. FPS before with just fsx tweaks: 5-7. FPS after fs9.cfg and fsx tweaks: +/-20 steady. I was amazed that it did that. I then readjusted my settings for graphics, sound, etc. to where I balanced performance with eye candy and shockingly, only a 2-4 fps hit on my system. I'll have to experiment with this more, find out how far I can push the software, and maybe try to O/C my system slightly. Even if I can gain 1 or 2 Mhz for each processor I can bump up my settings a bit more without much more of a hit. Not too familiar with dual core -- my first PC that has one; my old PC was O/C'd to the max, from 2.0 Mhz to about 2.81 I think was my limit, with just stock fans. I'd be curious to see what this beast can do. I spent $1300 on it, maybe I should have put more into processing power and skipped on the Blu-ray, but with an HD screen and HD GPU, figured I had an excuse to go blu-ray.

I'll check this out further later tonight or tomorrow morning, but in the meantime, if anyone wants a copy of my revised fsx.cfg file to try this out yourself, please send me a PM and I'll send the text to you.

Cheers

Matt

I found another forum that had a tweak that I never thought of. Some French guy discovered that if he took the FS9.cfg file and replaced the FSX.cfg file with it, he could boost his performance of FSX. A lot of the members on that forum tried it and noted an increase of 5-10 fps on average. I figured I had nothing to lose from trying it, so I backed up my original fsx.cfg file and copied the fs9 file in its place. Placing all the fsx tweaks into that file as with the original fsx file, then restarted the sim. My benchmark was the default Friday Harbour Fair Weather flight in the Trike. FPS before with just fsx tweaks: 5-7. FPS after fs9.cfg and fsx tweaks: +/-20 steady. I was amazed that it did that. I then readjusted my settings for graphics, sound, etc. to where I balanced performance with eye candy and shockingly, only a 2-4 fps hit on my system. I'll have to experiment with this more, find out how far I can push the software, and maybe try to O/C my system slightly. Even if I can gain 1 or 2 Mhz for each processor I can bump up my settings a bit more without much more of a hit. Not too familiar with dual core -- my first PC that has one; my old PC was O/C'd to the max, from 2.0 Mhz to about 2.81 I think was my limit, with just stock fans. I'd be curious to see what this beast can do. I spent $1300 on it, maybe I should have put more into processing power and skipped on the Blu-ray, but with an HD screen and HD GPU, figured I had an excuse to go blu-ray.

I'll check this out further later tonight or tomorrow morning, but in the meantime, if anyone wants a copy of my revised fsx.cfg file to try this out yourself, please send me a PM and I'll send the text to you.

Cheers

Matt

That has trouble written all over it

its a load of hogwash

what he did was simply set up a scenerio where it deleted the FSX.cfg file entries and in the process FSX rewrote the DEFAULT FSX config to the FS9 LIST in that file

Useless BS and was debunked years ago