Some information on tweaking

[ramsa329]

In light of some the excellent suggestions made here in this forum I would like to add a couple bits of information regarding tweaking.

As has already been pointed out FSAA (also called AA) or full screen anti-aliasing is better done through programs outside of the sim itself.

What has not been covered is the fact that each set of Nvidia Drivers responds totally differently to the application of anti-aliasing as does each video card.

Nvidia has struggled with this issue since the beginning. To make a faster driver which can handle difficult AA issues in a variety of games knowing that AA causes frame rate drops.

So for instance the 29.42 drivers are recognized as amongst the fastest but their AA is very weak(which makes them fast) so simply applying anti-aliasing of say 2x or even 4x will not have the same effect as say on the 40.xx series drivers which have

[ATI_7500]

and what about ATI??  ::)

[Fozzer]

Excellent subject matter Ramsa... ...!
...Made a good read, (I've saved the text).... ....!

Cheers mate... ...!
Paul.
(England).

(Ge-Force 4 Ti 4200).
Current Drivers: 4.13.01  4072

[RIC_BARKER]

Hi Ramsa,

I also agree with you on the issue of Ansiotropy, it is a complete can of worms, the very reason I didn't touch on it im my posts. I have also noticed that ansiotropy becomes unavailable (or at least more difficult to impliment) with the use of some drivers, even if the card itslef is capeable, for example, nVidia's 40.72 drivers.

I think the probelm with gaining a good all round FS2002 performance benchmark is made almost impossible by the huge variety of machines it is run on, there really is no one setting that will work for everyone.

I think people consentrate too much on framerates. I personally think that anything above 50fps is wasted, it's more about the look for me, as long as it "looks" smooth, that's fine by me, I usually disregard the fps counter altogether.

Ric B.

[Fozzer]

Hi Ramsa,

.....I think people consentrate too much on framerates. I personally think that anything above 50fps is wasted, it's more about the look for me, as long as it "looks" smooth, that's fine by me, I usually disregard the fps counter altogether.

Ric B.

Hi Ric, Ramsa.... ...!
My card and drivers work fine on programs such as Quake, Unreal, etc.....fantastic effects.... ...!
...when moving left-right-up-and down...
...It's just the peculiarity of flight sims which force the screen to re-calculate X-Y-Z co-ordinates when banked over at an angle.... ...!
(The same problem was apparent in the Sinclair Spectrum computer and caused serious screen shuffling problems).... ...LOL...!
Straight and level flight is fine, (X-Z, Y-Z), and frame rates dropping to 8 FPS when banked over, (X-Y-Z), are acceptable for a short time..
...no problem... ...smooth is fine... ...!
LOL...!

Cheers all... ...!
Paul.
(England).

[RIC_BARKER]

Hmm,

Interesting that Fozzer. I do know that some guages can eat up alot of power when they are forced to rotate, I remember FS2000 being patched to fix exactly what you have just described. Is this on any particular aircraft/panel?

Ric B.

[Fozzer]

Hmm,

Interesting that Fozzer. I do know that some guages can eat up alot of power when they are forced to rotate, I remember FS2000 being patched to fix exactly what you have just described. Is this on any particular aircraft/panel?

Ric B.

Hi Ric... ...!

It's the problem that all computers have in displaying information on the screen.
If you are stationary all the computer has to do is to refresh the horizontal and vertical scan quickly.
If you move to the left the pixels all have to be shuffled to the right, a simple, quick, machine code calculation.
The same applies if you move to the right, or up or down. It's a simple machine code "rotate" instruction.
Now...
As soon as you move to the left AND down, (as in banking), the instruction has to be calculated TWICE, once for left and once for down, alternately.
This DOUBLES the time it takes for each pixel movement, and therefore the screen refresh takes twice as long... ...!
It was particularly noticeable in the Spectrum as the colour screen was made up of 8X8 pixel squares and without some very clever coding these 8X8 squares shuffling sideways AND down, produced some alarming effects... ...!
LOL...!
...and all of this is just to display the outside scenery...
..thats without all the rotating hands on all the gauges...
...phew... ...
LOL...!
The modern processors and graphics cards do a particularly fine job of all these complicated calculations.. ....
(I still love my trusty old Spectrum and it's machine code tho')..... ... ... ..!

Cheers all...
Paul.
(England).

P.S.  With a screen resolution of 1024 X 768, (multiply those two numbers together, (my little calculator exploded trying to display it), that's the number of pixels on the screen. Now imagine having to shuffle EACH one, starting from the top left of the screen to the bottom right of the screen, and that's just ONE screen refresh...
...it's mind boggling.... ...!
LOL..LOL..LOL..!

[ramsa329]

Fozzer Ric et al

Fozzer your problem is exactly why I wrote this post. It would be close to impossible to "fix " this without actually running a series of tests on your machine to see why this is happening.

One general area often overlooked is the issue of screen refresh which may not be as much of a visible factor in other games as it is in Fs2k2.

Without getting into too much technical lingo you have to patch the refresh rate to change it as the default of 60 HZ will

[RIC_BARKER]

Yep, sounds about right to me mate!

Ahhh, the days of the Spectrum huh? I had a 16k, a 48k and 2 128k's. I remember tyring to program that thing in Basic back then, I wrote a program to teach myself times table.

My calculator says that for each 1280x1024x32 RGBA frame, the data output is 41943040 bytes, or 419.4MB per frame, and that's just raw image data. At 25fps, that's over 10Gig's a second........no wonder they have mega bandwidth RAM on these modern cards.  :o

I wonder how long it would take a Spectrum to render that?  ;D

Ric B

[Fozzer]

[quote]
My calculator says that for each 1280x1024x32 RGBA frame, the data output is 41943040 bytes, or 419.4MB per frame, and that's just raw image data. At 25fps, that's over 10Gig's a second........no wonder they have mega bandwidth RAM on these modern cards.