Questions need answering

[Djem]

OK i have some of questions i have wonderered about for wuite a while now. I may be a totalnoob.

my specs are:
Windows Vista home premium 32-bit
Pentium D 830 3.2 GhZ (Dual-Core)
2GB RAM, 800MhZ (i think)
nVidia 7800GTX 512 MB's (415 mhz for the gpu and 1200 for the memory.)

First question: Why on earth is FSX so heavy anyways? I mean, it doesn't look THAT much better than FS2004. And i have seen much better sceneries for FS9 than FSX has default. E.g. Megascenery SoCal, max settings at everything, i NEVER go below 30 FPS.

Second Question: Why is setting the Scenery Complexity on a high setting such a massive FPS hit? Once again, i have seen much more detailed add-on airports in FS9, like cloud9 and FlyTampa. And they don't drag my FPS down.

Third Question: I have heard about people with ancient computers that get a better framerate than me on the med-low to med-high setting. why?

On fs9 i usually had around 50-70 fps, no tweaks and full settings, using GE pro and Activesky Graphics. I also overclocked the graphics card to 475 mhz and 1375 mhz ( I am dissapointed to see that i cant overclock in vista, or atleast i'm too noobish to know how)
On FSX i have set everything to what the game is capable of, except for the scenery complexity and Light Bloom.
I have set the scenery complexity to "dense", just because i want to see the detailed airports. but, at JFK and similar airports i only get around 15-18 FPS.

[mroseland]

Apply the tweaks found in the FAQ at the top of this forum.  There's quite a bit of good information in the thread titled "FSX&SLI" too.

Yes, this sim is quite a hog, but so was FS9 when that came out, as were all the other FS titles.  In the meantime the available tweaks should help ease the load and when released the patch should address some performance issues.

[JBaymore]

Third Question: I have heard about people with ancient computers that get a better framerate than me on the med-low to med-high setting. why?

So..... I've got this bridge in Manhatten that I'd like to sell you..............  

[Daube]

OK i have some of questions i have wonderered about for wuite a while now. I may be a totalnoob.

my specs are:
Windows Vista home premium 32-bit
Pentium D 830 3.2 GhZ (Dual-Core)
2GB RAM, 800MhZ (i think)
nVidia 7800GTX 512 MB's (415 mhz for the gpu and 1200 for the memory.)

First question: Why on earth is FSX so heavy anyways? I mean, it doesn't look THAT much better than FS2004. And i have seen much better sceneries for FS9 than FSX has default. E.g. Megascenery SoCal, max settings at everything, i NEVER go below 30 FPS.

Because:
- the autogen is much more detailled: instead of two or three different objects per zone (like 2 or 3 types of trees for a single forest), you get something like 10 different objects, so that's much more stuff to load in the memory. The results are forests and towns that look better than anything possible on FS9, especially on short distance.
- the autogen is much more dense, so you finally get towns that look like towns, and forests that look like forests. FS9 displays 600 objects per cell, FSX displays more than 3000 buildings and 3000 trees. Again, there's just no way of gettting that on FS9.
- the overall textures are much more precise and beautifull than in FS9. This has a big price in performance.
- the overall scenery is much more detailled than in FS9
- etc...

Second Question: Why is setting the Scenery Complexity on a high setting such a massive FPS hit? Once again, i have seen much more detailed add-on airports in FS9, like cloud9 and FlyTampa. And they don't drag my FPS down.

For the same reasons I listed above. the visual quality is greater than anything FS9 could ever offer, but the impact of displaying such detailled objects and textures is a great loos of FPS.

Third Question: I have heard about people with ancient computers that get a better framerate than me on the med-low to med-high setting. why?

Because very old video cards do not handle the latest shaders technology used by FSX. As a consequence, they have less work to do, but the visual quality is then no better than FS9, excepted for the density of the scenery of course. So it's like getting an ultra-detailled scenery on FS9...

On fs9 i usually had around 50-70 fps, no tweaks and full settings, using GE pro and Activesky Graphics. I also overclocked the graphics card to 475 mhz and 1375 mhz ( I am dissapointed to see that i cant overclock in vista, or atleast i'm too noobish to know how)
On FSX i have set everything to what the game is capable of, except for the scenery complexity and Light Bloom.
I have set the scenery complexity to "dense", just because i want to see the detailed airports. but, at JFK and similar airports i only get around 15-18 FPS.  
I'm not complaining though, because i get around 30 fps outide the large cities. but that's maybe because i have applied a lot of tweaks (except for the texture reduction ones).

Thanks alot for answers!

My advise: leave the scenery complexity to normal or sparse, put the autogen to maximum, and before that, read the FAQ and get to know all the possible tweaks, and your frames will increase.

When FS9 went out, everybody had to apply the reduced clouds textures (HiFPS packs ) to be able to run the meteo on 100% 3D, everybody had to apply the reduced autogen textures to be able to run the autogen at max, and fly over cities. With FSX, it's just the same.

[Daube]

To answer more specifically to the last part: the "special" objects of the scenery, those who are linked to this scenery slider, are:
- the airports specific buildings
- the specific buildings in cities (those skycrappers, hotels etc... that are not autogen)
- some other objects specific to a place

All those objects are using a high level of detail, and additionnaly they have very special textures, with shaders technology. For example, this is what ill give you the sun reflection on the windows of a skycrapper. This is for sure beautifull, but this is also VERY heavy for your video card, it fills its memory (because those textures are big) and it overload your GPU (because they are not easy to render). That's why increasing the scenery slider has so much impact.

[Djem]

Ok thanks dudes, now, i suddenly get 19-26 FPS flying over Chicago. well, i had to set the water settings to low 2x, and the scenery complexity to "very dense", but i'm happy. i still can have road vehicle traffic at max. Thanks for the detailed answers!