Classic British Flight Sim

Yes. I tried it. As I'm only running a basic FSX with few add-ons I had nothing to lose. There was a slight improvement in frame rates but it was because it had downgraded a couple of my display settings. I think Garry has hit the nail on the head - I think my config is already optimised for my laptop and it's as good as it's going to get without buying a new PC. I'm sure it would show improvements on a config that wasn't running at it's best.

There are another couple of tweaks getting a lot of downloads on Avsim if you're in the mood! I haven't the faintest idea what they do but between them they've improved the scenery and the frame rates by a little bit - say 10-15%.

If you go to Avsim/Library/This Month's Hot Files, look for these two files (and back up your originals - obviously ):

Shader Model 3.0 for FSX v1.5 (Performance Edition)
FPS Enhancement Package V2

Ian

It's a bit like playing with driver updates to get that extra percent and upsetting all that has gone before

I think here that if you are reasonably happy with your setup and it runs stuff much as it should even if you feel it's a bit on the slowish side, then perhaps best leave alone

But if you are like me and it seems AD, where the World and his dog has an inferior machine but gets a better result then this might well be the answer and perhaps a good grounding to see what has been changed. If the results are better then one could look at what has been turned up, by how much and more importantly, what hasn't and perhaps was before draining the FPS for no advantage.

A good stepping stone and maybe the basis for an even better build but it can't really be seen as the answer to everything no matter how much it appears to be. That is simply because it will generalise your specs where as in reality driver variations and other software interaction would make you machine one of thousands of similar general specs that will in fact behave differently in some slight, but maybe in this case, significant ways.

So my suggestion to AD is give it a go.....it can't make it worse as you are ready to accept defeat and see what it does do. I for one would love to hear the results and more importantly to see if gives you a setup that perhaps you are happy to use even if it's only occasionally

There are some cracking FS.X models like those of Rick and DG and of course the Nimrod from Brian and team that even if it was only used for these it would be more than well worth keeping FS.X.

Just quickly run FSX to check FPS.

At Manchester running REX2 and realtime weather (snowing), outside view of aircraft. Cropped image though without resizing so you can see the FPS counter.

110fps, that's better than what I was getting.



That's an improvement. When I have some time tomorrow I'll try some more tests.

Text is blurred though.......I used to have it sharper than that. Must be new gfx card drivers doing it.

Cheers Darren

What if you lock you FPS and let the spare memory go for quality.......would that sharpen it significantly???

I guess that balance is the next thing then, they say unlimited is best but if it's that high I can bring it down. That's my work for the weekend

There is a limit to what your eye can cope with....so it's worth bringing it down

I've always locked at 20 and it's seemed OK, although I've nothing to compare it with ...something worth experimenting with I suppose

What's the general consensus on this ????

Setting the frames to "unlimited" in FSX & use an external frame-rate limiter is generally considered the "best" method (YMMV)

DaveG wrote:Setting the frames to "unlimited" in FSX & use an external frame-rate limiter is generally considered the "best" method (YMMV)

Yep, that's what I've always been told. And it seems dropping it made no difference to the red overlay text, so I think that must be down to ATI driver updates. No big thing though.

I just tested with an intensive aircraft (CLS 747) and an intensive airport ORBX Melbourne. I had 25fps with unlimited but if I dropped it to 50, or 40 fps I got no better than 13fps.

Bearing in mind I have my settings quite high now.



Only difference there to before the CFG analysis is lens flare, light bloom off and aircraft ground shadows off. (DX10 is usually off but I turn it on for some things).

I have found the external frame rate limiter "FPS_Limiter_0.2" but it says it's not compatible with DX10, which is a shame. As DX10 runs better on my PC and I love the water effects it gives me.
Anyone else running it, can you turn it off and on or is it once it's on, it's on?

I use it

I have 2 shortcuts to FSX, one via the limiter (set at 30fps) & one direct to FSX (unlimited, or as set in-game)

Don't think you can turn it on or off in-game

One point, there is a bug in the external limiter if you run multi-monitors in full-screen mode. It will limit the frame rate to set value divided by the number of monitors. i.e. if it's set at 30fps it will only give 15 if you have 2 monitors in full screen.

Angus Prune wrote:Have you tried this?

http://www.venetubo.com/fsx.html

It's been discussed at some length on Sim-Outhouse.

Input some basic details of your hardware setup & upload your fsx.cfg file, it will analyse it and produce a supposedly optimised fsx.cfg for your system.

Might be worth a try?

Never trust a site that writes this:

"We'll analize your configuration"