Hello all you fellow pilots
I enjoy cfs3 very much,in fact it is in the top ten category where flightsims are concerned,on my part anyways.
Flightsims i have enjoyed in the past include:ace of aces,ancient art of war in the skies,wings,eaw,cfs2 amongst others.
Only thing that bugs me with this one is that i just can`t get it running right.And yes,i am very much into setting the game settings to full throttle.
The machine i am running it on has a asus a7v motherboard,amd xp3000 prossesor,512mb ram,winxp and a ati radeon 9200se graphics card.
It is not so bad in the terms of performance but stutters just enough to make me curse it once in a while.
Any hints or tips to make it run better would be greatly appreciated.
My settins are:aircraft detail4,terrain3,scenery3,effects,1,clouds1,shadows,reflections,lighting is on.
I have the latest  drivers and directx9b,patch3.1 and no-cdpatch.
By the way,i got killed in a intense scissors dogfight by a top anglo ace today,what a trip it was.
Keep the skies clean.
best regards
oswald_boelcke

Somebody with exactly the same graphics card as me  , and your processor is faster (mines is an AMD XP2700+) 1g ram, though whether it actually uses the 1g of ram is debatable. It goes without saying but the latest catalyst 3.10 drivers from the ATI site are a must, though you said you already have them up to date. I had a few little glitchy graphics problems with their earlier drivers until I got those latest ones. I'm using screen res 1024x768x16,  settings are aircraft 5, scenery/terrain 3, effects 5 and clouds 1. The other thing that most people say makes a big difference is to open the CFS3 config tool like Goose says...then click on File, Custom settings, click OK, then click on Window, then Overrides. In this menu, you want to click OFF Dual pass render and click ON High res Z-buffer. I'm getting good enough frame rates in the mid 30's or higher, but saying that, I still get those little stutters now and then, especially when turning high-g's at low level....looks like its part of life with CFS3...but on the whole, its running fairly well.

I'd say if you we're getting frame rates of 40 - 50 then your doing well, by CFS3 standards at least. Its doubtful whether your going to see that much of a difference in performance to justify paying for another Ram chip. This depends a lot on your motherboard, and whether it has the bus speeds to actually utilise the Ram thats available. Like I said earlier my 1gig of ram is probably more than I'm actually using. Opinions will vary on this however. Some people say you want at least 1024mb for CFS3.

That is the same story as me Scania.  All of my games look great with my GeForce 5600 card (I know you don't like it much lol!)  I am getting great FPS maxed out with all my games except M$ stuff.  CFS 3 wouldn't work at all, flashing autogen, and the FPS didn't change one bit.

I don't believe that CFS3 uses your graphics card at all, I think it is 99% processor and Ram driven...

Will

Quote:


You're not the only loser around here.

I also fell victim to M$'s CFS dump because I thought my kick-@55 computer was powerful enough to kick the living h377 out of CFS3.

However, it seems that CFS3 was kicking the living h377 out of MY computer.

All my other games and sims work well. IL-2: Forgotten Battles, FS9, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault.

I don't know what Bill Gates is losing. His managing skills or his marbles.

Hmm. Probably both.

Hi oswald_boelcke,

CFS3 runs fine on my old upgraded computer. I run it at 1280X1024X32 with the detail sliders at 4 except the clouds set to 2. If you think CFS3 is tough on your computer try LO:MAC. You can get the 125MB demo at:

http://www.lo-mac.com/

But LO:MAC won't run properly on those GF4 MX cards though. Something about them not really being DirectX_8.1 compliant although they are advertised to be such.

The Radeon 9200SE is DirectX_8.1 compliant but it doesn't benchmark much better than the MX series of nVidia cards.

If you possibly can upgrade to a better video card. I've had a 9700 Pro for over a year and I like it alot. You can buy one now for about $220.00.

Hi 4_Series_Scania,

How much RAM do you have on your new 800MHz FSB motherboard? And how fast of a P4 do you have and what video card did you get?


Alienware Intel D850GB 400MHz FSB with a PowerLeaped P4_2.6GHz
512MBs PC-800 RDRAM
Radeon 9700 Pro 337/348
Catalyst v.3.9
Seagate 120GB-8MB Cache HD
Audigy 2 Platinum
Klipsch Pro-Media 4.1
Sony 21" E540/B Monitor
HOTAS Cougar
WinXP_Pro w/SP-1
DirectX_9.0(b)
3DMark2003=5,198
3DMark2001 SE=14,233

Quote:


Did'nt you read my specs? (Under my post!)

Anyway, its a 2.6ghz with 512MB of PC400 3200 Dual Channel DDR RAM

One weird point, despite my new CPU,mobo & RAM, my 3D Mark 2001 score has gone down!
from 9000ish to approx 8500!

I'm wondering if I need to do a complete re-format & fresh install to fix this issue?

As things stand at the moment, my 3D Mark score has gone down whilst "real world" performance has gone through the roof!

With my old p4 (1.8 256k L2) and current card (FX 5600 which I really do like, although the 5700 is better....) I averaged 25fps with Nascar 2003 and about 35fps with CFS2, now with the new chip etc, the FPS rates are 45 and 55 respectavely - telling me my performance, as expected, has gone up.

3D Mark, it appears, thinks differently! 

Hi Katahu,

If you were referring to me when you wrote

"First off, I'm sick and tired of people telling me to ditch my video card."

you were misdirecting your anger. When I wrote

"If you possibly can upgrade to a better video card. I've had a 9700 Pro for over a year and I like it alot."

I was merely suggesting to oswald_boelcke that HE may want to consider upgrading his video card.

If you're satisfied with the performance of your GF4 MX card good for you. 

The main problem with the GF4 MX line of video cards is that they don't support pixel and vertex shading. I don't know how important this feature is with CFS3 but it's a game killer (BSOD and CTD) with LO:MAC. As an experiment you could try turning off the Vertex buffer in CFS3 msconfig/overrides and see what happens. Maybe the Index buffers too. Who knows, you may get a FPS increase.

The basis of the whole problem is that Microsoft let card manufacturers say they support DX8 if the card has hardware T&L and texture compression. At the same time MS has not created a standard where pixel and vertex shaders are needed. But all other GeForce4 cards have pixel and vertex shading programmable hardware on the die.

The following is excerpted from a review at Beyond 3D.

http://www.beyond3d.com/reviews/visiontek/nvidia_gf4mx/index2.php

"Glaringly missing from the GeForce4 MX features list compared to the GeForce4 Ti’s is what NVIDIA calls its “nFiniteFX II” engine. This, of course, refers to pixel and vertex programmability, two important DirectX8 features. Here is where a great deal of confusion may arise out of NVIDIA’s new product lineup naming convention. It would appear rather strange to have a past product with a name like “GeForce3” be superceded by a new product with a name like “GeForce4” that has less features than its predecessor. Yet there is one major difference between the GeForce4 MX and the GeForce3, and that is pixel and vertex shading capability. The apparent confusion is simply a result of NVIDIA having started the “MX” naming convention with the GeForce2. With the GeForce2s, “MX” meant “less speed, same features”… now it is “less speed, less features”. It is purely a NVIDIA marketing decision – they have determined that the GeForce2 will be its low end product, the GeForce3 its medium end product, and the new GeForce4, whether it be MX or Ti, its new high end lineup. TNTs will be phased out. It would be unfair to call a GeForce4 MX a “souped up GeForce2” due to faster clock speeds – there are now memory usage optimizations, new anti-aliasing solution, and new display technologies. It is also unfair to compare it directly to a GeForce3 - it is less advanced than a GeForce3 in some ways but it is more advanced in other ways."

When you get your Alienware maybe I'll see you at the Alienware forums.

Hi 4_Series_Scania,

Sorry, I missed the specs under your post. I was looking in the first paragraph and only saw part of your specs listed there. I was looking but I didn't see!

Since both your computers benchmarked in the same ballpark with the same video card it would seem that your video card is the bottleneck now. You're benchmarking higher than they did at Sharkey Extreme using a P4_3.0 but they used the 1280X1024X32 resolution and perhaps other differing settings.

http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/videocards/article.php/3211_3085191__4

Have you compared your scores at Futuremark to similar setups yet?

Since you have a DirectX_9 video card you may want to start using 3DMark2003 (340). It's a hefty 176MB download so hopefully you have broadband.

We have practically the same specs (you have double the FSB speed) other than our video cards and I'm in the low 14,000s. I don't know why your real world performance is much better than before and your 3DMark2001SE score is worse than before other than perhaps you have your video card setup a little differently in the nVidia Control Panel. Or the games and the sims that you're playing are more CPU reliant than the 3DMark2001 SE benchmarking test is. Flight and racing simulators are said to be more reliant on the CPU. And games such as Unreal Tournament and Splinter Cell etc rely more heavily on the GPU or video card.

Yesterday I upgraded my video card drivers and this time I followed some pretty intense instructions that I got from Tweaktown. The URL is

http://www.tweaktown.com/

but the server is down right now. Four pages worth of in depth instructions! The main gist of it is to make sure you have ALL remnants of your old drivers uninstalled first. And this can pretty involved and nerve racking because you need to delete bookoo driver files from Windows/System32 and  Windows/System32/Drivers etcetera so I had my fingers crossed when I first rebooted. Everything went well and I'm getting slightly better performance.

I would definitely recommend a format and clean installation of your OS. I do mine every 6 months to a year to keep it in good shape and this would guarantee that you have all those driver file remnants removed.

Hi HawkerTempest5,

You wrote:

"Hey pal, I run a GF4 MX440 8X with 128 meg with CFS3 settings at 4 and 5 and just check out my screen shots to see how well I have it running."

I don't think it runs very well when you have a few wingmen and a bunch of AI flying around with busy scenes and lots of flames and smoke etcetera. Especially in the rain or in a thunderstorm. It's not possible unless you don't mind simming a slide show.

I only have 512MBs of RAM too and CFS3 seems to run fine with it. I'd rather have 768MBs or a gig but I have all 4 of my RAM slots filled with RD-RAM (needs to be installed in pairs) and it's just too expensive to throw out 2 or 4 of them in order to upgrade.

If your motherboard supports it you can install more RAM using WinME. You may need to update your BIOS. Just don't put in more than 1.5GBs. Use the MS workaround found at:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q304943

WORKAROUND
To work around this issue, add the following line to the [386enh] section of the System.ini file:
MaxPhysPage=40000

This limits the amount of physical RAM that Windows can access to 1 GB. To add this line, use the following steps:

Use any text editor (such as Notepad) to open the System.ini file in the Windows folder.
Add the following line in the [386Enh] section of the file:
MaxPhysPage=40000

Save the file, and then restart your computer.

Specifying Amount of RAM Available to Windows Using MaxPhysPage go here:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;181862

In short it tells you what numbers to edit in System.ini file.

The following table list some common RAM amounts and the corresponding MaxPhysPage entry:
   Amount of RAM
   available to Windows (MB)  (Bytes)           MaxPhysPage entry
   --------------------------------------------------------------
   960                        1,006,632,960     MaxPhysPage=3C000
   896                          939,524,096     MaxPhysPage=38000
   832                          872,415,323     MaxPhysPage=34000
   768                          805,306,368     MaxPhysPage=30000
   704                          738,197,504     MaxPhysPage=2C000
   640                          671,088,640     MaxPhysPage=28000
   576                          603,979,776     MaxPhysPage=24000
   512                          536,870,912     MaxPhysPage=20000
   448                          469,762,048     MaxPhysPage=1C000
   384                          402,653,184     MaxPhysPage=18000
   320                          335,544,320     MaxPhysPage=14000
   256                          268,435,456     MaxPhysPage=10000
   224                          234,881,024     MaxPhysPage=0E000
   192                          201,326,592     MaxPhysPage=0C000
   160                          167,772,160     MaxPhysPage=0A000
   128                          134,217,728     MaxPhysPage=08000

This is getting kind of long and I'm anxious to do some LO:MAC simming now. Take it easy.

I for one think that this CFS3 is well below par as far as CFS in general.
I have owned and enjoyed 1 and 2 for many years, but this one is really beyond a joke!
Yes my machine may be old..but IL2 and ILFB both run great without a 26 million, out of this world latest hot rod machine.
Of course I can here you all now shouting "get a new machine'  but what for as my old gives me everything I want..and lets face it your machine is outdated as soon as you get it home. So it's a never ending battle...If other makers can sell 'sims' that work on an old machine, (3 years old!!) why can't Microsoft?
I have the latest drivers, DX, and all the ram you would ever need...but the dam thing just stutters when your in dog fights, or any attacking moments just when you think you have him for the kill...I for one will stick with IL2 and ILFB as they are really both fab sims..this one sucks big time..Mr Gates hang your head in shame.. 8)

CFS3 is very odd.  I have P4 1.7Ghz with 512MB and a GeForce FX 5600 with 256MB, I get 2111 points on 3D 03 and about 9FPS on CFS3 with flashing scenery and all the settings on 1 or 2.

I managed better with a GeForce 2 MX400 that scored less on 3D 03.

Interestingly FS9 runs like a dream.

Will

6 Hours of swaping cards and benchmarking between my old p4 1.8 and my new one, 3D Mark 2001 is more or less the same, regardless of CPU, RAM etc!!!

It seems both CPU's drive my FX5600 to its max. - Max but not enough for CFS3..... 

What little faith I had in such benchmark programs is well and truly out of the window! (or Windows!  )

Sure, the benchmarks test your 3D cards capabilities, however, its now more than apparent, the relative "game playing" experience, isn't measured accurately at all!

Anybody know of a more accurate benchmark program? Not by Futuremark, if at all possible. 

Paul.

Mine used to stutter if I didn't turn the virus checker off.  Upgraded RAM from 512 to 1024 and now it doesn't stutter even with the virus checker running.  Set at max realism also.  2.53 GHZ P4, 64 M video.  Sick