Successful Upgrade for Running FSX

[Flight Ace]

I have been reading the many inputs to this forum over the past several weeks to learn as much as possible about what it will take to upgrade my PC in a way to effectively run FSX. After reviewing all the suggested tweaks for improving FPS on FSX and trying each to determine its effectiveness on my system, I would like to share how I finally arrived at a configuration that more than satisfies my operating requirements with FSX. I was looking for a solution to allow me to run FSX with the Autogen and Scenery Complexity sliders at their max and without getting involved with Vista, DX10, or a new dual core CP.  My PC configuration for FS9 was as follows.

ABIT IC7-G Socket 478 Mother Board
P4 3GB CPU
1 Gig RAM
TI-4200 64 Meg graphics card (AGP)
450Watt power supply
OS is XP Home

I was able to run FS9 at maximum settings with the above PC configuration. When I tried FSX with it, I was lucky to get 5 FPS. I learned from previous experience that FS9 was CPU orientated and that FSX was more in tune with a more powerful graphics card. With that in mind I researched all AGP type graphics cards and arrived at the BFG GeForce 7800 GS OC 256MB GDDR3 AGP Graphics Card as my best solution. The major differences comparing my old card with the new was an increase from 4 rendering pipelines to 16, going from AGP 4X to AGP 8X support, and an increase from 64 to 256 MB of SDRAM. I purchased the card as well as an additional Gig of RAM both on sale at Best Buy and updated my PC.

I

[Daube]

Good job  ;)
It's always nice to see the people that effectively read the forum, analyse the informations they get and then take the necessary decisions keeping a objective point of view.

Now let me give you some additionnal advises on your FSX configuration. With your hardware, I think you should be able to get some better visual quality:
- turn your mesh resolution to 38m. 76 is already OK, but 38 will give you better mesh on a lot of default sceneries.
- set your mesh complexity to 100.
- set your water to High 1x, there ill be no FPS impact until you reach the 2x setting.
- set your filtering to trilinear, much better visuals on ground textures, and eventually planes textures as well.
- you should be able to increase you detail radius to the max.
- set your ground textures resolution to 1m, go back to 2m if your system cannot handle it at high speed (you would get blurries, maybe, but if you fly low and slow, 1m is a must )
- let the autogen at max, but lower your scenery complexity to normal. You will loose some details over the major non-generic airports and cities, but your FPS will increase dramatically.
- set the cloud density to max if you have installed the reduced cloud textures

I just saw that you said you didn't apply any tweak excepted one. I think you can expect a major FPS increase once you apply all the autogen tweaks (FSX.cfg + reduced textures packs).

Enjoy your flights

[wealthysoup]

yeah even with sparse autogen (and reduced) the autogen resized textures saved me 4 or 5 fps and the difference isnt noticable untill your right beside it.