I honestly believe that the M$ flight sim series are mostly CPU driven with regard to frame rates.  Better video cards seem to give a prettier picture but the base frame rate does seem to stay the same.  This is based on the changes I saw in FS2k2 when upgrading from MX 200 64MB card to 5600 256MB card.  When I upgraded I started the sim in my old settings (75% ish) to view with awe the massive new FPS number.  I was disappointed to find that it was 2-3 FPS better.  I then maxed out the graphics at 1024*768 and it stayed the same....  I now run FS2k4 at 75% settings with AA at X8 and Anti wassit filtering at X4 and get 10-15 FPS on approach and 20-30 at all other times.  If the GPS is on it drops to 7-9 on approach.

The graphics look much better and the performance stays the same, it must be the CPU.

I ran 3d pro benchmarking on my system and tried various combinations of settings in an attempt to find the best settings for my system.  I scored between 200 and 2111 points, 2111 was with the card at factory settings with no tweaks applied.  I noted that throughout all of the tests I was getting the same scores from the CPU section, independant of any changes to the graphics card.

It would be beneficial to see what someone with a lower end cpu and higher end cpu gets in the same situation.

I will test my system at KBOS when I get home this morning and see what I get. 

Will

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4x?? as in AGP 4x? if so, that might be a problem... probably your mobo doesnt support 8x AGP which in that case, i would get a new mobo too, not to expensive..

I think that the CPU bottle neck is a programming fault and not a CPU fault.  I have other games which are as graphic intensive as FS, some even more so. 

Swanny - what do you mean by AGP?

As I understand it...  An 2x AGP slot is Twice as fast as a PCI slot - a 4x AGP slot is 4 times as fast and so on.

When I get my joystick later on today I shall see what this PC can do! Initial experiments look extremely promising!

Did an experiment with a "low and slow" aircraft and a standardized flight.......

Screen resolution at 1024x768x32bit, refresh at 75Hz. Set the AA on the 9800XT to 4X and the ansio to 8X.  Set both options off in the sim itself.  Everything else for sliders and checkboxes fully maxed out.... except for cloud density to 80%, sight distance to 60 miles, cloud distance to 50 miles and one other one that I can't remember now  .

Went to the "Select a flight" menu and took the "Scenic Wonders" flight titled "Along the rockies".  Loaded it as whatever defaults were set up by Microsoft for the flight.

Set the framerates to "unlimited".

When the Caravan first materializes, it is in a valley in the midst of some broken clouds flying through them with the mountains in the background and a river to the right and below.  At that point I am getting an average of about 28-30 FPS.  Flight is pretty smooth with an occasion minor "pause".  (very VERY slight)

As I get through the broken clouds and into a general "haze" with some light clouds hanging in the mountains........ and get up and into the mountains about 500-1000 feet above them, the framerates go up to about 55-60 FPS in the 2D cockpit and if I eliminate the cockpit at all and just look at the whole screen as a window.....it does not change more then 1-2 fps down.

The scenery quality is very, VERY nice and the plane flies very smoothly.

If I go and sdo the same flight and lock the framerates to 30.... it pretty much stays at 29-30.  The scenery looks a tad better...and the plane flies even smoother.

Great......... THAT is what I want out of the sim.

But if I go to the "Scenic Wonders" and select the "Sunset into Hong Kong" flight.......... the unlocked framerates with the same settings drops to about 20-25 flying up toward the city and then over the mountains toward the international airport.  As I get into final approach on the left active runway (right active too with "heavys"), the framerates drop into the 10 fps range.

I have added very few new AI flights into Hong Kong....... and the ones that I have are a few PAI planes.

To me, the sim is a LOT about takeoffs and landings.   Do I need a 4 Gig base machine to get that to work at about 20 FPS?  Geeze.  This is making the fs2004 sim look like a real "mistake" for Microsoft.

If any of you get a chance.... please max your sliders and select those "Scenic" flights and give me a readout of your fps and your CPU type + clock speed, RAM, AGP speed (2x,4x,8x), and graphics card.

I just want to see if I should be looking at something else in the machine setup OUTSIDE fs2004  (or even fs2002) for the issues.

Particularly interested in your AGP speed.  Is THAT the key to this whole thing?

best,

..................john

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...a 400/800 Front Side Bus...and fit it out with at least 512 Mb of DDR ram, (expensive but fast).... 8)...!

Cheers... ...!
Paul.

JBaymore,

I'm gonna try your flight and see what fps I get.

I'm a bit under your spec.

But, from What I've read, I think there is a prob somewhere.

Not many apps use the 8x AGP speed to advantage, 4x providing more than enough transfer bandwidth. But, still, it's possible the card or it's drivers are optimised for that. So I guess that cant be discounted.

Yuor 2.4 gig cpu on a 533mhz fsb seem quite adequate.

your RAM is slowish but 1 gig, so it seems ok.

I definitely smell a rat. There is a big diff in the performance of the two cards you specify.

Out of curiosity you could try my unofficial FS9 benchmark in these posts and do it at 1024x768x32

Also, my fs2002 runs 30-40% faster than fs9

GL, congo



ok, just did your flight a close as I could, 8x anisotrpic wouldnt display correctly so i did it at 4x, also i had antialiasing fully enabled.

on entry of first flight 10 fps, mountains around 20+
antialiasing off - double that.

second flight about 10- 15 fps the whole way. 10 0n approach.

Now, my card rates half of what your new one does, TI4200 8x AGP :  55    , ->    9800xt :  114

and you are supporting 8x aniso..... so maybe you are pretty spot on...... despite the 4 x   agp speed.

Weird thing was my final approach. about the same as yours, but I have a massive addon there, so..........

Note: I can turn down a few things and get nice graphics, but what really kills the TI4200 performance is the clouds, particularly with antialiasing them.

THG tests have shown that AGP 4x to 8x is a small improvement.
Your problems are certainly not in the system, RAM or card.
It is in the settings.
Same old frame rate issue.

Try modest 1152X864X16 settings.
4X FSAA and AAF.
One click down on mip etc from High Quality.
Bilinear.

App settings modest.  Don't max sliders.
24 Frame rate setting (COF).

Adjust from there.

No seriously JBaymore, there is definately something wrong here and I would NOT blame that card or your decision...something is obviously fishy.  You should be getting much better out of that system and card.  I am stumped man, I'm sorry.

All I can think of is if at all possible could you list the exact items that your rig constists of?  I mean, what kind of motherboard, hardrives, RAM (brand/model of each),  etc.?  There is a lot to pay attention to when it comes to your system ACTUALLY handling the hardware at the correct speeds they should be running at.  For example, a processor's FSB is very dependent on the speed of your RAM and so on.  It seems this could all add up and be causing less than desireable results and much of your hardware may be running well below full performance capacity.

Hey Fido,

Your system is not right at all. You should be getting at least 4 times the frame rates of your old system, and probably more. Check your Bios configuration and make sure you installed the AGP driver for the mainboard.

It certainly is baffling.

I've owned 6 graphic cards in 3-4 years and always experienced a direct correlation between the relative power of the video engine and it's display performance, (ie. Frame Rates.).

This has been the case while using FS95, FS2000, FS2002, and FS2004. (as well as numerous other display dependent programs.)

There have been a couple times when performance was lousy, but the usual methods sorted it.

Unfortunately, I haven't the resources to run out and buy a $600 dollar video card, because that's what the good ones (like R 9800's and FX5900's) cost here in Australia, so, I haven't been able to test those.  

Back to basics:

I'll include the following, just fob it off if you think I'm mad. But I like to test the graphics on a system at the very first opportunity, this is easier said than done, and it's impossible to do if you don't install your own operating system.  Any Pre-Installed system could have any number of errors beyond your control.


When I install an operating system from scratch, I like to repartition the drive. This rids the drive of just about everything - wipes it cleaner than a format!

I use a Win'98 startup disc and the old "fdisk" command to partition the drive to FAT32, enabling large disc support. It's not fancy, but it works.

A little bias here:  Partitioning a drive this way installs a FAT32 file system, not NTFS. If you require an NTFS file system, installing windows will give you that option.

NTFS file systems are tricky and not for the novice in my humble opinion. So, go FAT32 unless you're sure.

Next, after a reboot, I send the "fdisk /mbr" command to write the master boot record. Reboot.

Then, I format using "format c: /u/c". This does an unconditional format with error checking. Next, "format c: /q" a quick format of the same drive. I repeat the format procedure for each drive.

At this stage, if there have been no errors, I'm satisfied the drive is ready for an operating system to be installed.

Next, it's a good idea to go back to the BIOS and double check that all the settings are correct; the front side bus speed, CPU multiplier, RAM speed and latency, AGP settings, graphics aperature, and all hardware devices and ports are enabled.

Hook up any peripherals you have drivers for.

Now, the operating system should install with minimal if any errors. If you get a lot of errors on installing windows, it's usually a sign of trouble to come in my experience, and it may be wise to start again at the format stage.

Install Windows.

Some versions of Windows like XP will ask if you wish to reformat the drive to an NTFS partition, unless you want that, skip it and go with what you have.

It's recommended that the mainboard drivers are installed before anything else.

With XP at least, you'll be inundated with devices trying to install. If you know how to do it later, cancel those installations. If you don't know how, then let windows install the drivers.

The mainboard drivers cover IDE, sound, AGP acceleration, LAN, hardware bridges and heaven knows what.

It's a good thing to get them on the system first so the rest of the hardware is at least installing to a correctly installed mainboard.

These drivers are the ones on the setup disc that came with your motherboard. There is usually a pretty straight forward front end program to do this, with either a selection of items to choose from or a mass install program.

BEFORE getting on the internet:

Install a known working video driver for your video card.

Install the latest DirectX. Tweak the video settings using the driver settings.

Test the system's graphics  first, using a known benchmark utility that is familiar to you. If not, Install Flight Simulator and ONLY adjust the screen resolution to suit. If you make other adjustments, LEAVE THEM ALONE until you get your system fully installed. This will Provide you with a benchmark utility.

If you use the default settings, you can always return to defaults for a useful comparison.

If you change ANY settings in FS, and do a comparison, the results will be useless.

Press FLY, or go to the default flight, Shift + Z for Frame rates. DON'T MOVE! Don't fly! Don't change Views! Write down the average of what you see, and use this as a comparison for later.

Install the rest of your Software/ Hardware, checking Flight Sim's FPS periodically as before (same view, everything), or use your favorite benchmark tool.

This will help you see when or if something has caused a problem hopefully.

If you're Frame Rates are less than acceptable from the start, you haven't got to go back very far to trace the culprit, It may be a conflicting driver with some other hardware, anything is possible. I've even had to remove a PCI card out of slot 5 to solve a problem, even though slot 5 was perfectly ok. It just conflicted.

One of my worst cases was where my Soundcard Drivers were at odds with my system, causing a massive degradation in FPS, this took me ages to figure out, but upon reinstalling the sound card, everything went back to normal.

I hope this helps someone.

good luck

John,

What kind of hard drives do you have, and how do you have them configured?  I recomend if you havent done so already, take your fastest hard drive, and create a 10 gig partition and install windows on that partition and leave it alone and use it for nothing else.  Unfortunately, you would have to be willing to lose all the data on that disk as you'd have to format in order to create partitions.  Anyway, having the operating system running on it's own partition allows for a much smoother and somewhat faster OS as it is recognized as being on its own drive.  Often with such large hard drives, especially when full, they will run very slow because of the clutter of data it has to sort through.  It's all a matter of efficiency.  Just a thought.

That's great man.  Unfortunately this is a topic about an ATI card issue.  Nvidia "fixes" don't really apply.

I don't know if you resolved anything yet JBaymore, but have you still got your old card?

I was thinking, maybe pop it back in and see if it still performs the same as it used to. In case something mucked up in the change over of the cards, maybe that will help sus the prob.

A stab in the dark lol.