I also tried the settings from nvidia and found the sim looked pretty baron of visuals and although the frame rate was higher, the quality of the image was still not very good.
Santa Clause came early this year for me. Old St. NickN gave me the following settings and changes to work with and I must say, my sim not only looks great but the stutters around large city areas are no where near as bad. It still stumbles when flying around very large airports and cities a bit but no where near as bad and the enjoyment of having the visuals along with the flight dynamics having resources more than makes up for the stutter here and there.
He had me download an autogen tree fix from here:
http://www.fox-fam.com/FSX/AutogenDescriptions.zip He said to rename the original so I don’t loose it and simply unzip and place that file in the Microsoft Flight Simulator X\Autogen folder.
And then reduce the textures for only the autogen buildings to 50% using the tool in this package:
http://www.fox-fam.com/FSX/BatchFiles2.zip and the instructions on this page:
http://www.fox-fam.com/wordpress/?page_id=41 He said converting the ground and other textures and turning off shaders were having an opposite effect people think and not to reduce anything other than the autogen building textures for now until hardware catches up to the simulator. He also said there is reduced tree texture set here:
http://www.savefile.com/files/146254 but that if I use it the trees may appear too dark and not blend in as well but that it will give a bit more to the system for rendering. I tried the trees and he was right, I did not like the look (too dark) so I reverted back to the original textures.
He had me download and install the Net Framework 2.0 from here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0856eacb-4362-4b0d-8edd... and then BETA NvTray from here:
http://nvtweak.laptopvideo2go.com/beta/NVTray_BETA4-x86.exe He gave me these settings for the sim based on my AMD 4000+ and 7800gs 256mb video card which are all slightly overclocked now thanks to him. The following changes were made in the NvTray settings:
AA=4x (he said 4xS make the image a bit smoother and I could run 2xSS but I like 4x)
AF=16x (he also said 12x would work)
DIRECT 3D:
Level of Detail= HIGH [ -6 ]
Mipmaps= Application
Optimizations= Trillenar, Aniso Mip Filter, Aniso Sample, Neg LOD Clamp = All Enabled
Vertical Sync = Application
IMAGE SETTING:
HIGH QUALITY
He had me edit the following in the Flight Sim configuration file:
[Display]
TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=80 (I originally had this at 400 and it stuttered like mad)
UPPER_FRAMERATE_LIMIT=18 (he said to raise this to 22 outside city areas)
[Main]
DisablePreload=1 (added to the file to stop the default flight from loading)
FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION=0.25 (he said any less and it robs the visuals too much)
[Weather]
DynamicWeather=1
DownloadWindsAloft=1
DisableTurbulence=0
CLOUD_DRAW_DISTANCE=3
DETAILED_CLOUDS=1
CLOUD_COVERAGE_DENSITY=8
THERMAL_VISUALS=1 (he said zero was also an option but that the thermals help the scenery look more realistic in the distance)
[GRAPHICS]
SHADER_CACHE_PRIMED=1
TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD=1024
NUM_LIGHTS=8
AIRCRAFT_SHADOWS=1
AIRCRAFT_REFLECTIONS=1
COCKPIT_HIGH_LOD=1
LANDING_LIGHTS=1
AC_SELF_SHADOW=1
EFFECTS_QUALITY=2
GROUND_SHADOWS=0 (he said to leave ground shadows disabled for now)
TEXTURE_QUALITY=3
IMAGE_QUALITY=0
[SCENERY]
LENSFLARE=1
DAWN_DUSK_SMOOTHING=1
IMAGE_COMPLEXITY=4 (3 only after reducing other areas)
[TrafficManager]
AirlineDensity=21 (He mentioned traffic needs to be kept low or off until the patch and/unless a good AI replacement in installed)
GADensity=20
FreewayDensity=10
ShipsAndFerriesDensity=25
LeisureBoatsDensity=25
IFROnly=0
AIRPORT_SCENERY_DENSITY=2 (can be reduced to 1 but 2 works for me)
[TERRAIN]
LOD_RADIUS=4.500000 (he said to drop this to 3.5 in a really big area like NYC or if it stutters too much)
MESH_COMPLEXITY=100 (also try 90%)
MESH_RESOLUTION=22 (he said this can be reduced to 21)
TEXTURE_RESOLUTION=25
AUTOGEN_DENSITY=2
DETAIL_TEXTURE=1
WATER_EFFECTS=4
TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_TREES_PER_CELL=3500 (added to the file)
TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_BUILDINGS_PER_CELL=700 (added to the file)
[BufferPools] (added to the file)
PoolSize=2500000
He mentioned that the registered version of FSUIPC4 for FSX may have the ability to control cloud layers so under overcast conditions the clouds would not be a problem. I have not purchased it yet but intend to next week.
He said the items I should reduce by 1 notch in THIS EXACT order to get it tuned were:
Level of Detail from High to Medium
Mesh Complexity to 90%
Mesh Resolution to 19
Texture resolution to 2m
Traffic to 10% or less
Airport Vehicle to Low
Ships/Ferries/Leisure boats to 15%
Road cars to 5% or zero
Scenery complexity to DENSE
Autogen to SPARSE
All of the above were based on my hardware. I must say after a bit of tweaking and trimming the sliders here and there my sim looks AWESOME and fly’s like I never thought it would.
Nick mentioned that I have to get use to the sim being a tad stumbly here and there until the patch is released and I get better hardware. (more memory, better video card and processor) and at first I did not know what to expect but this runs great on my system and I can now enjoy FSX with visuals like FS9 .
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