Whats the deal with the scenery??

[Werd]

Hi everyone!

First, sorry for my english.

So.. My FSX runs pretty well with decent graphics settings except in some cities. I wondered why and finally found it. Take a look at these screens.

in both we have autogen turned OFF

First one with no scenery at all:



This one with some scenery (dont remember the exact setting, I guess i put "dense")






Looks very wierd to me! We lose 20 fps to render few boxes! Wtf?!

This scene is running 15-20 fps with no scenery and maximum autogen (maximum settings in game + cfg tweak) on my computer.

So, can I still get some city specific scenery and not lose half of fps?

[Ashton Lawson]

Yeah, I know how you feel.  In FS9, Scenery almost made no hit whatsoever, and autogen did the most killing.

Now, it's the other way around.  Scenery hates us, and autogen is actually quite reasonable.

Why ACES?  WHY!

[Camel_Moe]

Hehe, add a little autogen and you'll get a blazing 9 fps...
Some AI traffic, you'll get an incredible 5 fps.....
A handfull of boats in the harbor, and it turns to a blurry mess, and crashes to desktop.
Pretty much standard Microsoft quality software in other words.....


For PTaylor:  If your reading this, sorry. I know I have seen you here once or twice, and I am actually fairly satisfied with my performance vs my machine, even if the sim isn't what I was expecting at one time.  Sp1 and DX10 has helped my FPS quite a bit to tell the truth, but I don't have much faith in M$ in general, so please excuse my bitterness....

[Werd]

max autogen




max autogen PLUS 20 BOXES




Cant be true.

Ok, I'll try to resize the scenery dds textures now.

[Camel_Moe]

ROFL, I was only off by 5 fps, and I was just putting out numbers at random.
I bet if you were inside the cockpit, I would have called it right within 1 or 2 fps.
Sheesh....

[Brett_Henderson]

I'd rather hear complaints that the software is too much for a person's computer, than have software that's behind the hardware curve.. 'cause that's what it boils down to. Aside from growing-pain bugs that have to be part of cutting edge software.. the problems are that most peoples computers just aren't up to the task

[Solid]

I agree to a certain point with the slowness of FSX.......it still junky but you can remedy it to a fair degree....I am getting about 25-45 fps for about 30 minutes then the horse slows down to 18-26 fps for about 1 hour then I simply shut it down and re-start again-----no big deal considering its a MS product...

Here is my recepy:.... Defrag the disk as often as everytime you are going to fly.

[Daube]

Hi everyone!

First, sorry for my english.

So.. My FSX runs pretty well with decent graphics settings except in some cities. I wondered why and finally found it. Take a look at these screens.

in both we have autogen turned OFF

First one with no scenery at all:



This one with some scenery (dont remember the exact setting, I guess i put "dense")






Looks very wierd to me! We lose 20 fps to render few boxes! Wtf?!

This scene is running 15-20 fps with no scenery and maximum autogen (maximum settings in game + cfg tweak) on my computer.

So, can I still get some city specific scenery and not lose half of fps?

The problem is very simple: it because of the textures that are used for those buildings. They are heavy and hard to render for the video card (because of the reflections and other special effects, which are NOT used for the autogen buildings). And still, with SP1 it's a bit better, but before SP1, the impact was even greater !

Best solution is to limit the scenery detail as much as possible (sparse) and increase the autogen instead. The cities will still look like cities, and the impact on the frames will not be that high anymore.

If you find the corresponding textures of those scenery buildings, you could replace them by generic, light and non-special-effect bundled ones, and you'll have no FPS hit anymore. I didn't try deactivating the special effects either...

PS: en resume, les textures des batiments specifiques des scenes (donc non-autogen) sont beaucoup trop lourdes. Belles, mais lourdes, et elle foutent les vieilles cartes graphiques a genoux. J'ai pas essaye de desactiver les effet speciaux, ca a peut-etre un impact ?

[Werd]

[quote]I agree to a certain point with the slowness of FSX.......it still junky but you can remedy it to a fair degree....I am getting about 25-45 fps for about 30 minutes then the horse slows down to 18-26 fps for about 1 hour then I simply shut it down and re-start again-----no big deal considering its a MS product...

Here is my recepy:.... Defrag the disk as often as everytime you are going to fly.
                                Hope you have a lot of space in your disk---a full up disk is venom!!!
                                Boost up your memory with a Memory booster freeware program, test
                                a few------this works pretty good for me ( I have never seen this from anyone
                                and it is oviuos in a ram hungry program like this horse)
                                Use a decent Video card....I have Envidia 8000GTS 360 MG and please make
                                sure you have the latest driver in -----this is a Must!!!!
                                You should also have your latest motherboard driver.....do an online test
                                to check it out and if you need to--download and install..
                                My rig is a regular bummer that you can get off any shelf....
                                Acer-Double 2.4GHZ Pentium, 2 -160GIG disks, 2G Ram-19" Flat screen....
                                FSX- Config: All sliders up high, except: Water 1xmax, airport Traffic 46% on
                                both sliders, 25% on airport traffic....about 25% highway traffic and boats about
                                40%................
                                I do not get bad drops over large cities--fps

[NickN]

Defragging using the right defrag software and the right defrag method is all that is needed. Defragging before every flight is not necessary if you use the right defrag software and use it right. If a defrag before every flight really does make a difference it would be because the disk is not defragmented correctly to begin with. That is why you need to use the right software for defragging and the right approach.

The Windows defrag is garbage for real optimizing. It is not designed to optimize the MFT or for game performance. You need professional payware defrag software to accomplish that goal and set up/used correctly.

http://www.simviation.com/cgi-bin/yabb2 ... ;start=0#5

The routine in the 2 posts can not be done in VISTA except you CAN use O&O Defrag 10, just omit/skip the SPACE defrag after it has been run the FIRST time and ONLY use the COMPLETE/NAME defrag thereafter in VISTA/XP. With O&O defrag version 8.5 and Windows XP you can follow that O&O Defrag instruction list TO THE LETTER.

Also, if a hard drive is greater than 70% full you can expect very nasty disk stutters and slowdowns


As for reducing texture and AG sizes... I have said this before and I will say it again... DONT MESS WITH IT

Those original resize hacks for RTM had purpose for VERY slow cards/systems but the trade off was you LOST quality and created other problems. To do so with SP1 or SP2 is WRONG. Leve them alone and upgrade the system, and, learn how to tune FSX/drivers for you hardware.

Drivers: http://www.simviation.com/cgi-bin/yabb2 ... 53/165#171


Tuning FSX: http://www.simviation.com/cgi-bin/yabb2 ... 3998514/60



adding in the FSX.cfg autogen lines

TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_TREES_PER_CELL=xxx
TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_BUILDINGS_PER_CELL=xxx

are required for slower systems. I would start with values of 600/300 and a slider setting of 50-75% then increase the values in the lines if possible on very slow systems. Most modern cards (79xx-8xxx) do not need those lines in the config after SP1 and with SP2 autogen batching further increases performance.



FSX needs a minimum of 2 gigs of memory for decent performance in XP, 3 in Vista but it will work with 2. It also needs a 512MB+ video card although 256 will work, 128 is suicide and try to get any scenery

[Werd]

ok, buying a 256 mb card was maybe a mistake  :-/


Anyway... I resized and recompressed textures for north america, so now i get 3-4 fps more in NY. The difference isnt noticable unless you get really close to the buildings.. The sickest thing, they've put a reflection shader on each scenery building wich you can actually see only if you're like 20 meters to it.. Sick..

[NickN]

Just an FYI

You guys are right, just a few 'blocks' does create a hit but its not because of the blocks.. its because of the airports and the scenery complex slider being increased. You introduce CPU calculations for airport gates when that slider is increased. That is multiplied by the traffic slider which is why FSX (default) traffic is such a wild drain on a system and always will be. Older replacement AI does not have the gate and jetway data so replacement AI traffic can run higher sliders, however, as traffic is designed for FSX and the gates, even the FSX replacements will hog a system down,

its not the aircraft/buildings as much as it is the airport calcs.

As you increase the scenery complex slider you introduce a scan of all airports in a 50-120NM radius around your location in which FSX starts calculating jetways and gates even with traffic set to ZERO. Add a bit of AI and that is multiplied greatly. That is one of the 'over the top' parts about FSX and CPU use. As soon as you boot the sim it scans everything in the sim objects folder and will make airport calculations based on the config files/scenery slider.

It is not the city boxes that hit you, its the airports 50-120NM around your aircraft in which the same slider triggers the calc calls.

[NickN]

Resizing did nothing but allowed the frame buffer to have some room which will increase performance but the install is now trashed unless you backed up all the original textures. Do not try to apply any SP patches with those hacks. Also, with SP2 certain coompression/formats and alphas are trashed which is why older aircraft and scenery have texture issues with the SP

I would have upgraded the hardware and left the textures alone. Too many people, including myself, have seen the long term affects of screwing around with the texture sizes. You think its all peachy-keen and one day you find out flying another area/ time/ envionment, its trashed and screws things up. Proper mip-mapping is a must when messing around with textures along with preserving the correct alpha and other factors.

Not worth it and also not necessary. If it dont run, reduce the slider and learn how to set up Windows and FSX correctly.

[Solid]

Oh well......Everyone seems to have his own medicine no?.....This program should have been worked and tested much much more and we all would be seeing

[NickN]

You know the silly thing about people complaining about what MS put on the box for min specs?