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Sunday, December 30, 2012

Good grief Charlie Brown! FSX is killing me!

click the black box
Getting FSX to co-operate on my inferior system can be such a pain in my butt. My ATI 5800HD series struggles to keep up and my system is automatically overclocking my 2.8GHz to 3.3GHz in a serious effort to make this all happen. I can hear all 3 fans powering up so loud they might as well be turbofans. All in all though, it's really trying... the poor rig. Here is a test video I made using my iPhone. You can still see some stutters if you can differentiate them from the shaking camera. My pilots skills are greatly reduced when flying with a camera in my hand...



As I am a serious FS9 pilot, I was able to live without the car and boat traffic as that is not a default feature in FS9 anyway. If I add clouds, the rig will fall to it's knees. So wheras nothing is smooth as FS9, nothing looks better than FSX/P3D. It's my belief that FSX followed by P3D, followed by FS9, followed by X-plane (in that order) will be the platforms carrying us for at least the next 2 -3 years. So i'd better learn to settle in and get along with FSX a bit more as we enter 2013. Anyone have any advice for me?

The sound you hear is a combination of my headphones and the Buttkicker under my seat.


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14 comments:

Anonymous said...

FS, & I include fs9 too, is the most inefficient & sloppy pieces of software engineering EVER. Why do we love it so much, Nothing better I guess.

Anonymous said...

Agreed, sloppy, but X-Plane and P3D are no better, so we simmers are stuck with what's available, be it XP10, FSX, or P3D, whichever is the lesser of the evils in one's eyes.

Anonymous said...

If you can afford FS addons + the buttkicker you can afford a prefab water cooling system like the Corsair H100. Overclock a last-gen Sandy Bridge to 5GHz and your performance problems will go away. After all what's the point of getting complex addons if all you're going to get is a slide show?

Absolutely no excuse not to push your rig to at least 4.5GHz. It's easy and relatively cheap now as long as you invest on some great CPU cooling and ignore the graphics card.

DAndre Newman said...

I just haven't a clue where i can get all that done...

Unknown said...

bEST ADVICE i CAN GIVE YOU OR ANYONE CONVERTING TO fsx IS TO CUSTOMIZE YOUR FSX.CFG FILE TO SUITE YOUR RIG. GOOD STARTING POINT IS HERE: http://www.venetubo.com/fsx.html

ID SUGGEST TWEAKING YOUR CFG TO YOUR SYSTEM SPEC AND GO FROM THERE, THAT WAY IT WILL BE OPTOMIZED FOR YOUR GRAPHICS CARD / CPU AND MEMORY REQUIREMENTS TO NOW RUN FSX IN A WAY THAT COMPLEMENTS YOUR HARDWARE.

HAPPY FLYING. DS

Unknown said...

bEST ADVICE i CAN GIVE YOU OR ANYONE CONVERTING TO fsx IS TO CUSTOMIZE YOUR FSX.CFG FILE TO SUITE YOUR RIG. GOOD STARTING POINT IS HERE: http://www.venetubo.com/fsx.html

ID SUGGEST TWEAKING YOUR CFG TO YOUR SYSTEM SPEC AND GO FROM THERE, THAT WAY IT WILL BE OPTOMIZED FOR YOUR GRAPHICS CARD / CPU AND MEMORY REQUIREMENTS TO NOW RUN FSX IN A WAY THAT COMPLEMENTS YOUR HARDWARE.

HAPPY FLYING. DS

Unknown said...

Good starting point is here: http://www.venetubo.com/fsx.html

modify / customise your CFG file to suite your hardware and pc/spec requirements. that way your fsx will run smoothly and without stutters.

step two: try using an external FPS limiter and inside fsx setting UNLIMITED frames sto avoid microstuters and better / smoother frames p/sec.

step 3: Fly

Anonymous said...

I've had an H100 before, currently running a Water 2.0 Extreme, never have been able to get my 3930K above 4.2 GHz without unacceptable temps in a room that is usually about 65-70 degrees F. If you have any further tips on accomplishing this, I'm all ears.

Anonymous said...

Yes, we got it the first 2 times you posted. Problem is, Venetubo's tool actually gives me worse performance than just modifying the TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT and applying the HIGHMEMFIX only. Using his 'hybrid' method of BUFFERPOOLS only creates microstutters and texture spikes rather than setting it to 0 which smooths things out. And an external frame limiter doesn't do a thing for performance over just setting the sim's own limiter to your screen's refresh rate. In fact, setting it to unlimited creates MORE microstutters on my system.

SD said...

I have most of the settings turned down low though as I'm more interested in flying the aircraft not looking at scenery. I put a new graphics card in my PC and FS2004 didn't work well. Using FSX though it was quite smooth.

Try turning down the resolution and you should see some improvement. Failing that update the video card drivers.

Anonymous said...

@ Anonymous

Perhaps you didn't seat the pump/heat exchanger correctly. I'm @ 4.7GHz with the 2500k, about 75C/167F @ 100% load, room temperature around 25C/77F. Currently hitting the voltage limits due to RAM issues. My own max safe temp is around 85C/185F and IIRC Intel's thermal cutout is at 92C/197F.

@D'Andre

Have a look (or ask) at the Tom's Hardware forums, and start learning how to build your own rig. Or get a pre-overclocked machine from Ebay or Craigslist.

BTW Also go to Kosta's FSX blog to optimise your FSX. Search Google.

DAndre Newman said...

I'll have a look at those.

But doing this myself is out of the question. One screw up, and my system could be out of commission. That's a risk I just can't take.

I am considering pushing the memory from 8 to 16Gb. Upgrading the GPU. (the GPU needs to be upgraded as I get Vsync issues,black boxes over lights sometimes, black squares over loading terrain as well. And I think over clocking to about 3.8 with a new power supply and cooling system should be enough to carry me another year.

By then, also with the economy, today's $3000 range hardware will be much cheaper by the beginning of 2014. And considering Microsoft has likely left the flight sim business for the time being, I don't have to work about them releasing FS11 designed to work on systems of 2020... LOL

Anonymous said...

With the pump seating, I've tried a thousand and one ways to seat it, apply TIM, etc still with no luck.

Anonymous said...

@Anonymous

IIRC the Corsair H100 has TIM pre-applied, but if your CPU already has some TIM residue it may not transfer the heat correctly. I used to have an air cooler (Tuniq Tower) and it drove me mad trying to spread the TIM correctly. With the H100 I thoroughly cleaned the CPU with Isopropyl alcohol and the pre-applied TIM on the H100 worked correctly on the first try.

@D'Andre
Upgrading the graphics card doesn't do much to FSX performance, perhaps you should consider getting an old 2nd hand graphics card to solve your graphical artifact issues. I used to have a GTS 250 and comparing it to my current GTX 660Ti (I use the PC to play Battlefield 3 as well) there isn't much of a difference.

As for the upgrade, You have to remember the current Intel Ivy Bridge CPUs have less overclocking potential and the downward trend will continue into the next generation due to Intel focusing on power saving features (Tablets are all the rage these days) and using cheap heat spreading material on the CPU itself. As a result the last-gen Sandy Bridge will remain as the overclocking king for the next few years, so if you don't buy one now they will become impossible to find in the future. Always remember FSX is almost entirely dependent on clock speed, and more overclock = more performance, irrespective of other CPU features like Hyperthreading or 6 Cores.

As for the RAM I seriously doubt you'll see any real performance gain going to 16GB due to the fact that FSX simply doesn't use that much RAM, and the only programs I know that benefit from 16GB RAM are things like Photoshop. (BTW I'm not talking about VAS here, which is the cause of the OOM errors) However if you do require new RAM I suggest some that works well when CPU is overclocked, as CPU overclock will raise memory frequencies as well and memory related instability is common at high overclock speeds. Lastly before you do anything consult with the hardware experts and read the AVSIM hardware forums as well.

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