Hello,

after the coming of my new computer, i was away from it for a while, and only yesterday and today i've been able to actually try FSX in it... so, i thought i'd drop a line here to tell how it performed thus far, and maybe get some tips to make it even better... so here it goes:

yesterday i installed FSX and SP1+SP2... had a problem with the activation, which was solved shortly after... ok... so i fired up FSX for the first time on the new rig, and was surprised by how much better and faster this new computer is compared to my old one... i have a lot more room to play with the sliders now... full autogen is actually a possibility now

so i tinker with the graphics settings for about an hour... great fun ... being able to max out autogen and scenery is something that's happening to me for the first time in my life... but there are stutters... and although the frame rate is up in the 20-30s, there are stuttering spikes that make the sim anything but smooth... but i've read about this here before, and i was kind of expecting it would happen to me too...

so today i decided to install my addons (i missed them) and do some tweaks to improve the stuttering... so i dug through the mess that is my old hard drive, and finding my addons, happily installed them onto the new installation of FSX... no problems there
and then i applied some tweaks to the FSX.cfg file to remedy the stuttering... namely, the TEXTURE BANDWIDTH MULT = 80, [BUFFERPOOLS] PoolSize = 1000000000 and the [JOB SCHEDULER] AffinityMask = 255

so i fire up FSX againto see how this affected performance... i loaded my Nemeth Designs CH53, and went to Dutch Harbor, Alaska, for a test flight.... the stuttering was still there... although lessened, and the frame rate was locked at 30 (frame locked) and oscillating somewhat along with the sutters... i thought then that the tweaks didn't make much difference... then i loaded my AlphaSim Rutan LongEZ, and took off again in the same airport... perfection... is all i can say... it nearly brought tears to my eyes... never before have i seen any version of FS run so flawlessly while set to such a high setting level... the frame rate was absolutely glued to the 30 FPS lock... and although my flight was short, since at this point i was already late for college... i couldn't help myself not to try out the Alphasim SR71, at edwards AFB... i realized then, that performance now greatly depends on the aircraft i'm flying, and that the weight of a particular aircraft can now be compensated simply by lowering autogen a bit... the SR71 was far heavier on hardware than the LongEZ... and it brought the frames down considerably... one notch down on autogen and sceery didn't quite cut it to relief the burden this craft imposes on the sim... but i've become spoiled now by the beauties of flying on full autogen... and i found it hard to dial the sliders back some more...

well, at this point i was almost 20 minutes late for college... and i hadn't even packed up to leave yet ... so i decided to 'buzz' a nearby city at 500kts and make a grand exit by blasting away with full afterburner, hopefully breaking some windows ...and now it was time to say goodbye to FSX for now, and get my ass to school before i got into trouble...

So, this is where i am right now... FSX is behaving much better than expected, and i haven't even OC'd this beast yet... default planes, and light addons now behave flawlessly at full scenery settings   while heavier payware stuff still need some work...

also, i must account for the fact that i'm running a triple head setup here, with only a single video card... while my trusty 8800GTX has been doing a heroic job of pushing that many pixels, i can't expect in a right mind that it'll perform nearly as well as a single screen setup... so i have to resign myself to getting somewhat diminished performance, in exchange for the bigger display area... but that's a trade i'm willing to make any day

Just thought i'd share my experience  

Cheers

HarvesteR wrote on Mar 20^th, 2009 at 1:25am:


Welcome to the i7 club! The stutters are most likely from the Autogen being too high. I can run very dense almost everywhere with the exception of a few areas that have HUGE amounts of trees which from what I understand is a flaw in the way MS wrote the code for tree placements. So if you are maxing out AG turning it down a notch will help with the stutters but dont go any lower than dense. Probably OK to run Scenery complexity at max but that too may need to come down a notch (I am able to run max on that). Try no bufferpool and see what happens, if you see no difference dont use it. I would also nix the Affinity Mask as after several hours found no AM was better. Try out the now famous FPS limiter. That will allow you to run unlimited FPS giving you better perf. Using that also takes the load off the 1st core and throws alot at the other 3 cores. I then manually set my addons to run on core 0. Using that cpu load on core 0 doesnt go over 50% (at least for me)

That should keep you busy for awhile and hopefully help with the stutters you are seeing. I would OC your CPU and then tune FSX.

Harvester,

Read this thread on the FTX forums and see if this high of a BUFFERPOOLS entry helps your card in any way. With your card, I would try 200mb and then 300mb, but from what they're saying 300mb is a bit high for the card and will create texture problems. See if that works after you've done everything we've said here and it doesn't work.

HarvesteR wrote on Mar 22^nd, 2009 at 5:12pm:

Sorry, Harvester.... I've been having memory problems the last couple of years... It really worries me, actually

http://orbxsystems.com/forums/index.php?topic=9908.0