Terrain

[Bubblehead]

In the FSX Cfg, what's the maximum number of trees and buildings can I use without giving me any problems. I have two Diamond ATI Radeon HD3870 GDDR4 512M video cards connected crossfire.

[The3lf]

there is more info needed, mem, CPU, motherboard, resolution, xp or vista..........     give more info.

[SubZer0]

If you have SP2 installed, it's best to just leave those lines alone and play with the sliders.

[Anxyous]

Play around with it, no one can tell you what works best for you.

[Bubblehead]

Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe
2.2GHz AMD Phenom 9500 Quad Core
3072 Megs Installed Memory
700 GHz Usable SATA Hard Drives
Two Diamond ATI Radeon HD3870 GDDR4 512M video cards (CrossfireX)
WinXP Home SP2
Resolution 1280x1012x32

What slider can I adjust in order that trees and buildings show farther up in the horizon?

[Daube]

Your CPU is a quadcore, but the cores are slow (2,2GHz).
Your video cards will be of no help.
I suggest you start playing with 1000 buildings and 1000 trees, and the autogen slider set at one crank below the max.

I have SP2 installed (Acceleration) and letting the atogen tweaks out of the CFG (which means 3500 trees and 3500 buildings) is FAR TOO MUCH for my CPU (Intel quad 2,4 Ghz). Lowering the autogen density will just give me sparse autogen, which does not look as good as dense limited autogen.

[MightyGaz]

Your CPU is a quadcore, but the cores are slow (2,2GHz).
Your video cards will be of no help.
I suggest you start playing with 1000 buildings and 1000 trees, and the autogen slider set at one crank below the max.

I have SP2 installed (Acceleration) and letting the atogen tweaks out of the CFG (which means 3500 trees and 3500 buildings) is FAR TOO MUCH for my CPU (Intel quad 2,4 Ghz). Lowering the autogen density will just give me sparse autogen, which does not look as good as dense limited autogen.

its not the cpu limiting you then.  i have a q6600, quad core running at 2.4ghz.  my autogen and scenery complexity are both at very dense with everything else at ultra high, some things pushed even higher in custom.

[Daube]

I have also a lot of other stuff set to high settings, and still I can get pretty stable FPS. But the very dense + non-tweaked autogen wold result in terrain blurries when flying too fast, stutters etc...

[packercolinl]

Can I make a suggestion?

Find an area in FSX that corresponds to an area you know in real life and try adjusting the sliders in various ways to get a best fit for the FS terrain and what you see in real life.

Keep in mind that what you see from ground level looks somewhat different at altitude(helps if you can overfly the area in real life ).

You don't need to max. everything for the best result,in fact if you do a bit of fine tuning with all the sliders you should be able to run a reasonable sim.

You must be prepared to do a few flights and note the differences for any changes you make.

I would suggest also that you leave any .cfg changes as a last resort.

I still would like to see an improvement in my FSX and I am running:

[MightyGaz]

i get fairly decent performance with everything like i said above, on the main graphics scene everything at ultra high then stuff pushed beyond in the customise screen.

but then i just upgraded some bits.  got the 2.4ghz quad core, had that as high as 3.2ghz with overclocking but my pc case is old and rickety and bereft of decent fans, so dont like to push it too hard, often just leave as stock.  

4gb of DDR2 ram, overclocked to 950mhz from 800, and a 512mb GDDR5 radeon 4870 graphics card.  so its fairly top of the line right now.  but then fsx is mainly processor bound.  

As for your virtual memory, how high do you have it?  its a menace!  turn it down!  you should have no more than 2 gig or it'll actually start to hurt performance, have it low as you can without serious performance issues.  my page file is only 512mb.  

[packercolinl]

Hi,MightyGaz.

Virtual Memory:I have found that the default setting seems to be about half of the recommended setting for the systems and changes I've done. In the past I've selected the max recommended setting.

This time around the recommended is 3G and for a change I selected the system allocation choice and it went to 4G. I would not with my system have doubled the 3G as I might have in the past.

Also nothing is o/c'd and I wonder if that may have some effect as well--interesting thought.

Col.

[packercolinl]

Just a note,that VM setting covers 2 x 240Gb internal HDD's.

Col.

[MightyGaz]

Hi,MightyGaz.

Virtual Memory:I have found that the default setting seems to be about half of the recommended setting for the systems and changes I've done. In the past I've selected the max recommended setting.

This time around the recommended is 3G and for a change I selected the system allocation choice and it went to 4G. I would not with my system have doubled the 3G as I might have in the past.

Also nothing is o/c'd and I wonder if that may have some effect as well--interesting thought.

Col.

anything over 2gig of ram, and you can normally turn it off entirely with no issues.

the formula used to be 1.5 times your ram, back in the win98 and early XP days, but with increasing ram amounts, its no where near as important as it used to be, if you are just running a single app, for servers and the like its a great deal more important.

now with vista and the increasing use of 64bit, for a desktop machine the page file is starting to be a bit like an appendix.  i'm on vista 64 and will be adding another 4 gig at some point to go to 8gig, and while the Pc will use the page file still with that much ram, there is no reason for it to do so for what i'd be using the PC to do, so it will be turned off, and if i have the need for a page file for something that wont run without it, i'll give it the minimum thats needed for the job.

why slowly page something to and from disk when you have the capacity to hold it all in fast RAM?

[MightyGaz]

Just a note,that VM setting covers 2 x 240Gb internal HDD's.

Col.

from what you have said here, i'm not sure you actually understand what the page file, or virtual memory, is.  one thing that has no bearing on it, except if the disc is full of course, is the hard drive.  changes to hardrives of any kind have no real bearing, except a faster drive will access it faster of course, but not enough to make any kind of difference in real terms.