Break through in FSX tweaks

[Guest Pheebster]

A very good morning to you all! By chance I stumbeled on this break through in fsx tweaking and would like you to benefit from it also.Yesterday evening I tried 'the magic tweak' after thinking "what the hell...what do I have to lose" and was very pleased with the outcome. ;D My system specs are:Intel E8600 @ stock4GB memory 2x Ati 3870 in CrossFire Seagate Baracude 500GB 7000.11 32MB SATA2 drive (Main drive; some other drives installed too)Creative X-fi PlatinumVista Ultimate x64FSX including AccelerationATI Drivers 9.3After setting the bufferpools to 300MB (...bufferspools=300000000) I tried various sliders settings in the Scenery configuration tab and flew at FL060 directly above KJFK. With all sliders maxed out I got a frame rate of approx 14 - 18 fps. When I changed the autogen sliders one notch back the frame rate increased to 22 - 29 fps. I could not believe my eyes! In addtion to this eye-candy the flight model 'felt' very smooth, certainly after notching up the texture_max_bandwith to 90.It appears that by applying this tweak finally my CF set up is utilized by FSX :D . This evening I will do some more testing with DX10 (yesterday evening I only tried DX9) and see how the frame rates are when flying with my PMDG 747X with ASA enabled. Hopefully this will result in big smiles too.More details regarding the discovery of this tweak can be found here: http://orbxsystems.com/forums/index.php?topic=9908.60

[Guest BadWhippet]

Hello Pheebster Thanks so much for this - it might just be what I'm looking for (I've just posted about ASA with FSX dying on me and I'm trying to find a solution). I want to try these tweaks to see whether I gain improvement (I have nothing to lose here) and my specs are similar to yours except that I have the lesser E8500 and I'm running a single nVidia GTX260 - otherwise everything else is the same...I'm a total newbie to FSX so I need to check what I'm doing...Firstly, are these edits made in the config file "FSX.cfg" that can be found in Vista's 'Appdata/Roaming/Microsoft/FSX' folder? This is the only config file I can find with any similar settings.Secondly, none of the settings listed as tweaks actually exist in this config. Do I just add these to their relevant sections? (e.g. add the TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH... line under my [DISPLAY] section)Many thanks indeed,Sue :( EDIT: Doh! Was looking at the wrong config file. I've found one with the settings listed - shall now try the tweks.

[Guest ashwath]

hi guys,just to add something more to this; a setting of 300000000 in the buffer pools section is not going to work for everyone because it depends on the amount of video ram ur graphics card has. mine is an ATI 4870 512 MB and even 200MB of buffer pools just messed up my textures big time. however, i changed the setting from 10 MB to 100MB and everything seems to be pretty smooth so far, but i have to do some more testing. so the value differs for each system configuration. as far as texture_bandwidth_mult is concerned, i would say 30 or 40 is the best value to use as of now, for most systems. i dont think there is much relation to ASA because it is more CPU oriented than GPU oriented.regards,

[Guest BadWhippet]

Thank you both!I've now found ideal settings for my rig. At first, they seemed to make things worse rather than better for me but ashwath's post made me experiment with some settings. It transpired that the bufferpool setting was too much for me too (my system specs are a bit lower than Pheebers'). I set the bufferpool from 400Mb to 300Mb and instead increased the TextureBandwidth Mult figure from 40 to 80, but all my other settings are the same as Pheebers suggested. My framerates are AT LAST excellent for my system. with all scenery sliders up, and with nVidia drivers upping the anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. I've now added turbulent weather from ASA and FS Passengers is running in the background. With these, my framerates are now:

• at 3000ft over densely populated London are 23 - 27fps
• at 3000ft over average scenery they're 30fps (the limit I have set for FSX)
• at 10000ft over any terrain, they're 27-30fps
• on the ground at airports, they're 15-20fps (they used to be 6-8fps!)
• in ASA heavy cloud weather with turbulence and rain, they're 20-23fps

This is all on the default scenery right now. I haven't yet added my scenery packs or VFR airports (and with these framerates, I'm tempted not to add anything further)! In case anyone wants to compare a similar system, my PC specs are:E8500 Core 2 Duo (3.13MHz)4GB DDR2 RAMnVidia GTX260 OC (896Mb RAM)1000w PSUVista Ultimate 64-bitCreative X-Fi GamerVelociraptor (primary HDD) with other HDDs in additionI'm totally thrilled with the result and glad I saw this thread.Sue :(

[Guest ashwath]

hi,well i did some more testing at more busy airports with lots of scenery and it seems tht even 100MB of buffer pools is messing up my textures. according to microsoft aces FSX tweak guide, we r not supposed to set the buffer pools any higher than 10MB unless we have a mammoth system. and 10 MB seems to be the limit for a 512 MB card. anyway my FSX is smooth even with 10MB buffer pools, so i'll just stick with tht. anything more and its messing up my graphics.regards,

[vgbaron 3,512]

hi,well i did some more testing at more busy airports with lots of scenery and it seems tht even 100MB of buffer pools is messing up my textures. according to microsoft aces FSX tweak guide, we r not supposed to set the buffer pools any higher than 10MB unless we have a mammoth system. and 10 MB seems to be the limit for a 512 MB card. anyway my FSX is smooth even with 10MB buffer pools, so i'll just stick with tht. anything more and its messing up my graphics.regards,

With a 512 card - 30M is about your limit. WIth a 728M card - about 70M BP - only with the 1M cards can you get into the 100's without esxperiencing some sort of corruption or stutters.

[Guest BadWhippet]

My 896Mb card is fine with 300Mb, but my framerates were crippled at 400Mb, so 300Mb seems to be my best point. However, it's only a GTX260 (lowest of the GTX range) so I'm wondering whether it's possible that the clock speed of the card might make a difference too?I've just tried out the "FPS Limiter" utility which has given me another surprising 6fps or so - especially at points where I was losing fps. I won't even pretend to know what that does, but my airports are now 23fps average, and flights 33-37fps. It apparently helps players with mid-range systems the most, whilst high end and low end users see no real impact.The only issue I have now is a small degree (yet noticeable) stutter whilst ASA is running in the background. It only seems to happen if ASA is operating in 'download' mode (if I download historic weather, it's fine). I don't think it's the weather effects either because, if I start ASA, let the weather be received by FSX then shut down ASA, FSX is fine again. It's only happening whilst ASA is actually running alongside FSX. Perhaps I have a net bottleneck or something!