OS of choice for tweaking

[ojdee]

So I've been running Win 7 64 bit with FSX for a while now and although I love Windows 7 for most other things, the constant issues with black screens, video corruption, stutters etc makes me question whether the best solution for smooth hassle free flight might be a dual boot setup with XP64.

I admit I'm running BP, TBM and a couple of other tweaks. My choice at the moment is:

No tweaks: Horrendous stutters, even flying over basci terrain with low sliders

Various combinations of tweaks: Smooth 30+ fps over the most demanding FTX scenery, but an inevitable crash, glitch or BSOD after 30 minutes or so. This is doubly irritation because it proves my machine is capable of handling the demands.

CPU temp never rises above 70 even after hours of use, so I'm pretty sure it's not the overclock. Numerous other games and 3d software run for hours at this OC without any issue.

So the question is, are you in a similar situation and / or, what OS are you using. If it turns out that these tweaks just don't play nicely with Windows 7, I may try the dual boot option.

[Arismac]

G'day Oli, from my point of view Windows 7 is one of the best things that has happened to FSX. But, an important but, I have a far superior machine with Win 7 installed to my previous hack running XP.

[ojdee]

Hi there,

I'm sure the tweaks are what brings Windows 7  to it's needs (coupeld with Nvidia drivers)

Are you perhaps not using any tweaks on your machine and therefore getting a decent W7 experience? I'd love to not have to use tweaks at all but that just doesn't seem an option for me.

[Owi]

G'day ojdee,

I have to admit to feeling more than a little relief on reading your post.  I'm having similar problems to you and I thought it was just me (or my machine).  Like you, I can have a perfectly good flight or two, then it will crash without warning.  I have managed to pinpoint a few missions that crash the machine at exactly the same moment in the mission - thus the blame fell on the mission design and it was deleted / removed.

Yet, with my games on XP, I have relatively few problems (I dual boot WinXP 32-bit and Win7 x64).  Perhaps FSX is still the only app guaranteed to bring even a current day powerful system to it's knees?

Anyways, after much prodding about, trying different components, research on the internet and chatting to some of my tech geek friends, my current thinking is that I have a faulty motherboard or it's a bad match for my CPU.  So I'm about to take the final plunge and change the only part left that I haven't done - my motherboard.  Going to try one with a more popular chipset.

After having said all that, I still think that FSX runs a lot better on Win7 compared to XP.

My quest for a great FSX experience on a stable machine continues.

Smooth skies

[Arismac]

Gentlemen, I honestly believe, having travelled the same road, that you should look to software problems and start your tweaking there first. I spent over A$7,000 on a new build and crashed all over the place. I initially blamed all sorts of hardware, but the truth was software (FSX, REX2 and more).

The wise men of this forum such as Maurice King and others diagnosed and offered corrections. Now, thanks to Orbx I think my flying experience is as good as it gets. No tweaks, no overclocking and no crashes that I can't explain.

[Maurice_King]

CPU temp never rises above 70 even after hours of use

FARK I've not seen mine higher than 55-60 running balls to the wall flat out with DiRT or FSX or similar.

30-45 is the norm, PC on 24/7 far more reliable that way.

Now an interesting thing. while I was away gathering images for a project, I had 2 clients PC's here one 32 and one 64 both running the same burn in program logging to a networked PC .

Cycle time for various HDD seek and save's were identical, Core temps were within 2Deg of each other at 55 & 57 C ,

Memory stress test was the same too even though both had 4 Gb DDR3 RAM their memory usage was the same given the stress test it was performing.

I have not been able to do a 3D Game test as yet but I am starting to beliweve that there is minimal value in running 64 Bit over 32 bit for the average user.

[ojdee]

The thing that is so frustrating is that there is no one fix for these problem, they are so hardware dependent and so specific to each build that no matter whose guide I look at, I always end up altering it so much to get something satisfactory for me that I may as well have started from scratch.

I'm not planning on changing hardware, I know that this machine is capable of great performance, it must be the software configuration that is breaking things.

If only it were as simple as reinstalling, running clean and taking a few routine steps like defragging - even on stock SP2/Acceleration flying over default terrain with no tweaks in place I get bad stutters. I'm very jealous of people who take the clean and simple route and get results - I simply don't.

[ojdee]

CPU temp never rises above 70 even after hours of use

FARK I've not seen mine higher than 55-60 running balls to the wall flat out with DiRT or FSX or similar.

30-45 is the norm, PC on 24/7 far more reliable that way.

Now an interesting thing. while I was away gathering images for a project, I had 2 clients PC's here one 32 and one 64 both running the same burn in program logging to a networked PC .

Cycle time for various HDD seek and save's were identical, Core temps were within 2Deg of each other at 55 & 57 C ,

Memory stress test was the same too even though both had 4 Gb DDR3 RAM their memory usage was the same given the stress test it was performing.

I have not been able to do a 3D Game test as yet but I am starting to beliweve that there is minimal value in running 64 Bit over 32 bit for the average user.

I take on board that the CPU is running hotter than yours but mine is being overclocked to a greater degree so I would expect higher temps. It isn't unusual for 930s to be stable at 80c according to a variety of OC boards.

Thing is other software that hits the CPU and obtains these temps for extended periods of time don't cause any issues so I'm assuming that CPU temp isn't a factor in this.

I don't think I would consider a downgrade to 32bit, I'm only considering XP64 or Vista 64 at the moment.

[Milamber]

I have not been able to do a 3D Game test as yet but I am starting to beliweve that there is minimal value in running 64 Bit over 32 bit for the average user.

Other than the amount of directly addressable RAM, I suspect that's probably true, but with 8GB RAM here, I'll stick to 64 bit W7.

Maurice.

[Nyxx]

Oli I feel for you, but you should be more than fine with your PC and W7

I got 2 Rap-tores and Got them RAID 0 installed W7 on them and then FSX, after every and I mean every install(aircraft/airport/etc) I defrag, a defrag takes me 5 min's tops.

Now the point is, i do use tweaks and i find the BirdDog/A2A Cub the best GA for loading in the best textures PNW have. I lock my FPS@ 20 and can say hand on heart fsx is as smooth as can be.

Look at my PC, I would LOVE to OC my E8500 as i know it would be easy if someone who know what there doing.

I dream about running @4.

I think keeping things VERY clean and defrag to max really helps. W7 64 is great. With just a few tweaks, the less the better, but it does need some imo.(e.g. LOD 6.5 or 7.5)

I wish you all the best and hope you find the solution to your fsx problems.

[ojdee]

Cheers Dave,

Appreciate the encouragement - it hasn't beaten me yet!

I think the next step for me is to be a bit more methodical (even though I feel like I've tried most things already).

Will Reinstall FSX, add SP2/Acc, add PNW, add Birddog (agree about a good choice for textures, use it all the time), leave all the settings on default, apart from resolution to native 1920x1080, and remove nHancer. Also a defrag at the end for good measure.

If this doesn't run smoothly, (remember all the sliders will probably be less than they could be), I will surely be in the position where tweaking is unavoidable. If Not, I'll increase one factor at a time and try again.

[Wolter van der Spoel]

Hi Oli,

before tossing the towel, would you like to try something odd 

looking at your system specs it's a wee bit better as my 2 year old contraption here

OK, here we go:

delete the fsX.cfg file

set fsX to Default

fire up fsX

disable the parts of the world you don't fly to, just untick the boxes, DO NOT delete them

do a little checkflight

defrag fsX

now here it comes

toss in the W7 DVD and when it comes up you should get two options either "upgrade/repair" or "install" hit the repair option !!!

let windows do it's thing and finish the repair ( could take some  time, even if it looks dead in the water DO NOT touch it, leave it doeing it's thing)

use the Guru 3D driver sweeper to clean out all nVidia Vidcard related stuff watch out to not delete other nVidia stuff like networkcard and SLI drivers

get the latest W7x64_nVidia Beta 197.25

install them

defrag

my settings with my gtx285ssc 1 Gb are as follows:

in the nVidia panel under3D settings programs select the fsX.exe

Ambient Occlusion  = not supported for this application

Anisotropic filtering = 16x

Antialiasing - Gamma correction = on

Antialiasing - Mode = Enhance the application setting

Antialiasing - Setting = 8xQ

Antialiasing - Transparancy = Supersampling

Maximum pre-rendered frames = 6

Multi-display/mixed-GPU acceleration = Single display performance mode

Power management mode = Prefer maximum performance

Texture filtering - Anisotropic sample optimisation = Off

Texture filtering - Negative LOD bias = Clamp

Texture filtering - Quality = High qaulity

Texture filtering - Trilinear optimisation = Off

Threaded optimisation = Off

Triple buffering = On

Vertical sync = Force off

Apply the same Settings to the "global settings" as this is the setting when using "windowed" mode in fsX

[GRAPHICS]

TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD=4096

[Display]

TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=80

[TERRAIN]

LOD_RADIUS=6.500000

MESH_COMPLEXITY=100

MESH_RESOLUTION=22

TEXTURE_RESOLUTION=29

AUTOGEN_DENSITY=4

DETAIL_TEXTURE=1

WATER_EFFECTS=5

[DISPLAY.Device.NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285.0]

Mode=1680x1050x32

Anisotropic=1

AntiAlias=1

in the game I have AA ticked and Anisotropic and set framerates to unlimited on my 22"monitor with 1680x1050x32 res

my sliders are set at

AG = Very Dense

Water= 2x med

AI-GA= 50%

AI= 50%

AP traf= min

road traff= 12%

boats= 35%

ships= 35%

mesh = 2m

tex res= 7cm

Hope it helps to get things a bit better for you

[ojdee]

No problem Wolter, I've got nothing to lose at this point!

That's some checklist, with a few items such as driver sweeper that I hadn't considered before. I'll try and run through it later and see what happens - thanks.

[Valcor]

I have a new own-built Windows 7, i7 930 going at 3.8Ghz for now.  Testing shows it can go higher without changing vcore anymore but I want to test "real-world" stability the next couple weeks first.  This is my second mobo/cpu combination for Windows 7 and I've actually been amazed how much I can abuse/tweak/Mod many different games and this OS stays stable  (FSX, older Silent Hunters, IL2, Black Shark). 

Is this your own build?

To me, it sounds like a RAM issue.  Have you ran memtest and Prime95 for at least a few hours?  If you can run Prime for 6 hours+ and not crash or get errors in the string, then it's definitely not your system or OS.

Some other questions when you installed Windows 7.  Did you do a format of HD's in bios or at the least the "delete" option in advanced Windows 7 install to clear your partitions?  I clear and re-create my RAID array every time I reinstall Windows.

[ojdee]

Can try a MemTest and Prime95 test to at least try and rule that out. Like I said though, I have hammered the system with Maya rendering, Black Shark, ME2, World in Conflict, COH and Crysis without any issues. It's just FSX that trips it up.

W7 was installed on a clean partition on its own - FSX on completely different dedicated HDD.

Looks like I have a busy evening ahead

[ojdee]

UPDATE

First things first - I am smiling Something has worked - not sure entirely what though.

First of all I thought it best to eliminate temp/mem issues from equation so I ran memtest and Prime95 torture tests. No issues after three hours of Prime - one of my cores CPU peaked at 72 but no side effects.

I was about to embark on Wolter's list when I thought I'd perform a couple of the less time consuming steps first

1. Ran guru3d driver sweeper. This cleaned out some old soundblaster drivers in addition to my current 196.21 nividia display drivers. Rebooted

2. Installed the latest nvidia display drivers 197.13

3. Uninstalled nhancer

4. Modified Nvidia CP settings to force some settings equivalent to nhancer

5. Defragged (although this was a marginal change since I've been doing this a few times anyway)

6. Deleted fsx.cfg

On running fsx, once I'd changed to native resolution and put all sliders to right, I got stutters.

Added BP=0 - no stutters but conscious that this has caused issues in past I have now settled on BP=13000 (no typo). I've also locked framerate in fsx to 30, AND I'M GETTING IT!!

So far I've flown over Starks and Darrington, Portland and back of beyond and only get the odd stutter when spinning around in spot view, although it quickly subsides. Over some of the heavier ares the framerate drops to high teens but its consistent, and without stutters, so much more acceptable. Most importantly I haven't haven't had any glitching trees or screen static and it just seems more robust when alt-tabbing, opening and closing.

So while I'm much happier with performance and general improvement in flakiness, I can't honestly say what fixed it! I have had one nv related bsod after running a few other games then straight fsx with EMB mod in place, hopefully that will be a rare occurence.

The only negative impact is the image quality is a bit less than when I was using nhancer, even though I have aa and af set to comparable values in nv cp now. I can happily live with that though.

Thanks for all suggestions and advice - I'm turning off FPS counter, taking Chris Palmer's advice..

http://www.flyaoamedia.com/blog/aviator90/aviator90-episode-25/

..and enjoying the view!