Free scenery tweaks for FSX

[DarrenL]

Not sure if it helps (might depend on your PC) but I've just turned up scenery details on my FSX and I'm now getting better FPS.

I have mine set like this now.



I originally had the level of detail radius, mesh complexity lower and the mesh resolution higher. I also had land detail textures un-ticked and I had water effects on Med x2 and special effect on medium (or normal).

I changed these due to recommendations from another website and I am now getting steady 25-40 fps (I have my FSX locked at 40fps) depending on aircraft flown. No idea why this might be apart from possibly running the scenery at their normal settings and not asking the processor to reduce the detail on the fly maybe?

Ps. This was tested running a proper add-on scenery package I have and the default FSX scenery. Not tested on an intensive City scape as I don't have one.

My PC specs
AMD Phenom II X4 865 Black Edition Quad Core
4GB DDR3 RAM
1GB ATi Radeon 5870 (DX11 card)

[DavidK]

Thanks for taking the trouble to make and upload the picture of your Scenery settings. They look stratospheric here -- 2.0 GHz Athlon CPU, 2 GB RAM, nVidia GeForce 7600 GT (has 256 MB) -- but I'll throw caution to the proverbial wind and give them a try a bit later. I finally found out how to display the frame rate while flying (Shift+Z) and perhaps the most telling difference between our systems' capabilities and setups is that FSX doesn't seem to top 15 fps here. However, that reading is the only one I've made so far.

What settings do you have in the other sections (i.e. Graphics, Aircraft, etc)..? I now have two sets of settings, but, right now, both share some identical ones:

GRAPHICS
....Target frame rate: 20;
....Filtering: Bilinear;
....Anti-aliasing: off;
....Global texture resolution: Low;
....Lens flare, Light bloom, Advanced animations: all off.

AIRCRAFT
....Global settings: "Very Low" (although I've found my way to that rather than set it);
........including Aircraft casts shadows on ground / on itself: both off; Aircraft landing-lights illuminate ground: on.

WEATHER
....Cloud draw distance: 70 mi / 112 km in my own "low" settings, or 80 mi / 128 km in my own "high" settings;
....Cloud detail: Detailed clouds with cloud coverage density: Low;
....Rate at which weather changes over time: Medium.

TRAFFIC
....In my own "low" settings:
........Airline traffic 10%, General aviation traffic 7%, Airport vehicles: Minimum;
........Road vehicles 7%, Ships and ferries / leisure boats 0%.
....In my own "high" settings:
........Airline traffic 50%, General aviation traffic 45%, Airport vehicles: Low;
........Road vehicles 15%, Ships and ferries 10%; Leisure boats 12%.

I use "World of AI" traffic packages, however, so those may override the TRAFFIC settings.

David K

[DarrenL]

Again it might just be my system running better at these levels, here are the other settings.

[Ben_Brook]

Hi

Last friday my FSX was chugging around at 15 fps average - today we are hitting the 35 - 40 bracket....

By disabling the High Resolution 3-D cockpit I managed to add between 5-10 fps. I only virtually fly using the VC so I was surprised to find that there is no appreciable difference to a lot of planes (some are really pants mind....) Mr Piper and Mr Maltbys' fare very well.
Another excellent install was Tile Proxy - for slow VFR virtual flying about it can't be beaten IMHO - it can only get better methinks.

Bye for now

[DavidK]

As I feared, Darren, your settings are too strong for my feeble PC (see below for a laugh) but they started me twiddling with mine again and I may have landed on something better than before. It also prompted me to look around the web again for tips and tricks and, though I was quickly reminded just how many suggestions are out there, I found a couple more that I hadn't tried.

Last friday my FSX was chugging around at 15 fps average - today we are hitting the 35 - 40 bracket....
By disabling the High Resolution 3-D cockpit I managed to add between 5-10 fps. I only virtually fly using the VC so I was surprised to find that there is no appreciable difference to a lot of planes (some are really pants mind....) Mr Piper and Mr Maltbys' fare very well.
Another excellent install was Tile Proxy - for slow VFR virtual flying about it can't be beaten IMHO - it can only get better methinks.

Don't laugh too hard now, but the best fps my computer seems able to produce is 11.5. Most of the time, it's around 8. I also use the virtual cockpit (almost) all the time and have tried it without high resolution but the dials are just too blurred, so maybe that's more evidence that my graphics card is a bit too old.
I found the webpage for TileProxy and it sounds fascinating. I wonder, though, whether it'd be too demanding on my PC. I'm going to download and try it, though. (Maybe it can be set not to load in scenery when your plane is above a certain altitude.) Thanks for your report.

David K

[DaveB]

Hi David..

There is a thread here somewhere which links to an article written by one of the big guns at Aerosoft (I think it was Aerosoft) which is a good basis to start from. He can produce like for like framerates across any number of different systems and he uses it as a basis for every system rebuild. It's not aimed at high-end mega-monster systems.. quite the opposite. I don't have time to search for it now but someone here might remember it in the meantime and post a link. Incidentally.. I use it as the basis for my setup too

EDIT.. This is the thread.. http://www.cbfsim.org/cb-bb/viewtopic.p ... ft#p230085 but.. there seems to be a database error at Aerosoft I'll see if I can find the psd on my HD for you

ATB

DaveB