pfflyer Posted May 30 Share Posted May 30 First time posting here. Just bought Orbx sceneries (Base Pack, PNW, and a couple of airports) after trying lots of stuff to make FSX more real and enjoyable. I read LOTS of posts on LOTS of forums. (I'll be posting this on AVSIM as well). I bought Ultimate Terrain X. I bought Megacenery Arizona and California. I downloaded free airport addons. It just wasn't doing it for me. Megascenery added a little realism if I was flying a really high, otherwise it was just lifeless. I wanted better visuals, but something with buildings, trees, etc. A living world! I also tried AI Traffic addons. The only one that worked smoothly and reliably with FSX (Steam Version) was Traffic Global. It took a bit of following instructions in the manual (in other words not super intuitive but easily setup). THAT program really made the airports and sky come alive. But I still wanted a better visual environment. So I finally bit the bullet and spent the bucks on Orbx. That gave me everything I wanted. Great scenery, airports, life animation, etc. But when I flew in or out of any mildly busy airport, my FPS wer so low it was almost impossible to enjowy- and landing...forget it! I was really bummed. After all, FSX is decades old and I have a modern computer. FSX ran great before addons. Why couldn't it still run great? I searched forums and found some FSX.cfg tweaks and also recommendations for lowering FSX settings for AI Traffic, ground vehicles, etc. Between the cfg changes and the lowered settings, which lost so little in realism that it wasn't at all detracting, I ended up with such better FPS that I can't believe the difference. I was starting to think that Orbx just was going to kill my FPS in spite of how great it made the FSX world look. So, if anyone using FSX experiiences these performance issues, don't give up. With a few settings and easy text additions to the cfg file, you can have a very smooth running, incrediby improved visual world. What I did: FSX Settings- GRAPHICS Target Frame Rate- Unlimited Filtering- Trilinear Anti-Aliasing- unchecked Bloom and Lens effects- unchecked AIRCRAFT Aircraft Shadows- unchecked SCENERY Level of Detail Raius- Large Mesh Resolution- 38m Tecture Resolution- 60cm Scenery complexity and Autogen density- Dense TRAFFIC Airline density and General aviation density- 46% Airport vehicle density- Low Road Vehicles- 12% FSX.cfg file (located in Users/Your Name/AppData/Roaming/Microsoft/FSX (you may have to select Hidden Folders setting to see AppData...not sure..) Add this at the top of the file: [BUFFERPOOLS] PoolSize=0 Add this underneath "[GRAPHICS]" HIGHMEMFIX=1 Add this under "[Display]" SmallPartRejectRadius=4 I do not know WHY these things work but after trying LOTS of tweaks this one made a HUGE difference in my FPS. Orbx airports like LAX or SEA, which had me getting 10-12 FPS now give me 23-35 FPS ! IMPORTANT!!! Always ackup your cfg file just in case, on your system, this causes issues. Happy Flying Everyone! Pete 2 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wolfko Posted June 1 Share Posted June 1 (edited) On 5/30/2024 at 10:40 PM, pfflyer said: First time posting here. Just bought Orbx sceneries (Base Pack, PNW, and a couple of airports) after trying lots of stuff to make FSX more real and enjoyable. I read LOTS of posts on LOTS of forums. (I'll be posting this on AVSIM as well). I bought Ultimate Terrain X. I bought Megacenery Arizona and California. I downloaded free airport addons. It just wasn't doing it for me. Megascenery added a little realism if I was flying a really high, otherwise it was just lifeless. I wanted better visuals, but something with buildings, trees, etc. A living world! I also tried AI Traffic addons. The only one that worked smoothly and reliably with FSX (Steam Version) was Traffic Global. It took a bit of following instructions in the manual (in other words not super intuitive but easily setup). THAT program really made the airports and sky come alive. But I still wanted a better visual environment. So I finally bit the bullet and spent the bucks on Orbx. That gave me everything I wanted. Great scenery, airports, life animation, etc. But when I flew in or out of any mildly busy airport, my FPS wer so low it was almost impossible to enjowy- and landing...forget it! I was really bummed. After all, FSX is decades old and I have a modern computer. FSX ran great before addons. Why couldn't it still run great? I searched forums and found some FSX.cfg tweaks and also recommendations for lowering FSX settings for AI Traffic, ground vehicles, etc. Between the cfg changes and the lowered settings, which lost so little in realism that it wasn't at all detracting, I ended up with such better FPS that I can't believe the difference. I was starting to think that Orbx just was going to kill my FPS in spite of how great it made the FSX world look. So, if anyone using FSX experiiences these performance issues, don't give up. With a few settings and easy text additions to the cfg file, you can have a very smooth running, incrediby improved visual world. What I did: FSX Settings- GRAPHICS Target Frame Rate- Unlimited Filtering- Trilinear Anti-Aliasing- unchecked Bloom and Lens effects- unchecked AIRCRAFT Aircraft Shadows- unchecked SCENERY Level of Detail Raius- Large Mesh Resolution- 38m Tecture Resolution- 60cm Scenery complexity and Autogen density- Dense TRAFFIC Airline density and General aviation density- 46% Airport vehicle density- Low Road Vehicles- 12% FSX.cfg file (located in Users/Your Name/AppData/Roaming/Microsoft/FSX (you may have to select Hidden Folders setting to see AppData...not sure..) Add this at the top of the file: [BUFFERPOOLS] PoolSize=0 Add this underneath "[GRAPHICS]" HIGHMEMFIX=1 Add this under "[Display]" SmallPartRejectRadius=4 I do not know WHY these things work but after trying LOTS of tweaks this one made a HUGE difference in my FPS. Orbx airports like LAX or SEA, which had me getting 10-12 FPS now give me 23-35 FPS ! IMPORTANT!!! Always ackup your cfg file just in case, on your system, this causes issues. Happy Flying Everyone! Pete Please forgive me my thoughts, but honestly, considering the costs of buying all these add ons snd the hassle of downloading and installing of hundreds of GBs I would have invested less money in MSFS to get a much better looking sim with much better performance, (even with a low spec system like I have). To a point I can understand folks who have invested lots into FSX add ons over the years not willing to switch sims, but buying FSX in 2024 I do not understand. Edited June 1 by wolfko 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Dow Posted June 1 Share Posted June 1 Not to mention that performance out of the box with MSFS is better than the equivalent FSX settings, and looks 100% better and the scenery is realistic the entire world. FOr me it's a no brainer! 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pfflyer Posted June 1 Author Share Posted June 1 I understand both of your comments. MSFS2020 is undoubtedly miles better, visually, than FSX. When MSFS2020 was released, I jumped on it and was blown away by the scenery, even though it was a bit glitchy at first (and I know it has gotten better through many updates). But enjoying a flight sim is, for me, 50% visuals and 50% enjoyment of the whole sim experience, or user-friendliness. So, for me, there were too many things preventing my enjoyment; things that were very usable and great features of FSX (even FS9 if we want to go back even further), and I was shocked that these features were not present in a more "advanced" sim. I'll list the main ones: ATC. This was a big one for me. I enjoy airline flying equally to small plane flights. I'm not a real world pilot and I'm aware that certain verbal terminolgies, and procedures such as SID and STAR, were not 100% accurate in FSX, but the ATC in FSX was simple and worked right out of the box, always vectoring me to the correct point to pick up an ILS, and never gave me an altitude that flew me into a mountain, etc. For getting from point A to point B, it worked perfectly with rare exceptions. Are there addons for MSFS that do this? I keep reading forums and I don't see one that is user friendly and really does it like that. VIEWS MSFS has very advanced and programmable camera views but 90% of them I just don't need. FSX had the basic, cockpit, minimized cockpit, spot, etc. and it was easy to use (and global, so I didn't have to set up a whole slew of custom commands for each individual plane). In addition there is a keyboard shortcut for "raising the seat" or lowering it, so that you can precisely, for any aircraft, look straight ahead and see as much ground as you need, not just sky. For landings, or just enjoying the scenery, I found this essential. FSX has the "W" key (assignable to a joystick of course) so you can immedietely hide the cockpit and just look at the scenery without changing perspective or setting up custom angles etc. MULTI MONITOR SUPPORT I know that recently MSFS has implimented some sort of multi-monitor function but can you completely hide the cockpit and just see the scenery on one monitor (from the exact same perspective in the cockpit seat)? Can you have the complete cockpit view/instrumentation on one monitor and the scenery/no cockpit one another? DEFAULT AIRLINES THAT ARE EASY TO FLY If I want to become a real world pilot, or just have that level of knowledge about flying the big birds, I can buy a study level plane for either sim, but the simpler airlines (all with auto start as well) are fun to fly and give me plenty of challenges without having to read a 100 page manual. I want that option. 2D PANELS This is a hot topic on any forum. I am not blind- I can see that in many cases, 3D cockpits give a more realistic view to the real thing, but it seems MUCH harder to turn a dial, flip a switch, etc. in a 3D cockpit, which is a "smaller" area than the 2D view. Also, whenever I flew is MSFS, the cockpit would move, like with real world turbulence, and even slight movements would make it harder, with a mouse, to grab that knob or switch. After all, unless I invest in a whole bunch of harware, a mouse is how I am selecting autopilot headings, altitudes, etc. I really enjoy having the (stable/non moving) 2D option for adjusting things and some of the better, freeware, ones are actually extremely accurate. I don't need a million custom views to use them. By th way, now that I've added Traffic Global to FSX, the airpots have really come alive and I like the AI traffic better than what I had in MSFS. But I haven't thoroughly investigated that aspect for MSFS2020 so I'll reserve judgement there. So...give me a sim with those features plus the scenery/realism of MSFS and I'll gladly pay big bucks with no complaints. I'm waiting for MSFS2024, hoping that some of these features will be incorporated. After all, why fix something that ain'y broke? Just improve upon it. 2 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rodger Pettichord Posted June 1 Share Posted June 1 On 5/30/2024 at 1:40 PM, pfflyer said: First time posting here. Just bought Orbx sceneries (Base Pack, PNW, and a couple of airports) after trying lots of stuff to make FSX more real and enjoyable. I read LOTS of posts on LOTS of forums. (I'll be posting this on AVSIM as well). I bought Ultimate Terrain X. I bought Megacenery Arizona and California. I downloaded free airport addons. It just wasn't doing it for me. Megascenery added a little realism if I was flying a really high, otherwise it was just lifeless. I wanted better visuals, but something with buildings, trees, etc. A living world! I also tried AI Traffic addons. The only one that worked smoothly and reliably with FSX (Steam Version) was Traffic Global. It took a bit of following instructions in the manual (in other words not super intuitive but easily setup). THAT program really made the airports and sky come alive. But I still wanted a better visual environment. So I finally bit the bullet and spent the bucks on Orbx. That gave me everything I wanted. Great scenery, airports, life animation, etc. But when I flew in or out of any mildly busy airport, my FPS wer so low it was almost impossible to enjowy- and landing...forget it! I was really bummed. After all, FSX is decades old and I have a modern computer. FSX ran great before addons. Why couldn't it still run great? I searched forums and found some FSX.cfg tweaks and also recommendations for lowering FSX settings for AI Traffic, ground vehicles, etc. Between the cfg changes and the lowered settings, which lost so little in realism that it wasn't at all detracting, I ended up with such better FPS that I can't believe the difference. I was starting to think that Orbx just was going to kill my FPS in spite of how great it made the FSX world look. So, if anyone using FSX experiiences these performance issues, don't give up. With a few settings and easy text additions to the cfg file, you can have a very smooth running, incrediby improved visual world. What I did: FSX Settings- GRAPHICS Target Frame Rate- Unlimited Filtering- Trilinear Anti-Aliasing- unchecked Bloom and Lens effects- unchecked AIRCRAFT Aircraft Shadows- unchecked SCENERY Level of Detail Raius- Large Mesh Resolution- 38m Tecture Resolution- 60cm Scenery complexity and Autogen density- Dense TRAFFIC Airline density and General aviation density- 46% Airport vehicle density- Low Road Vehicles- 12% FSX.cfg file (located in Users/Your Name/AppData/Roaming/Microsoft/FSX (you may have to select Hidden Folders setting to see AppData...not sure..) Add this at the top of the file: [BUFFERPOOLS] PoolSize=0 Add this underneath "[GRAPHICS]" HIGHMEMFIX=1 Add this under "[Display]" SmallPartRejectRadius=4 I do not know WHY these things work but after trying LOTS of tweaks this one made a HUGE difference in my FPS. Orbx airports like LAX or SEA, which had me getting 10-12 FPS now give me 23-35 FPS ! IMPORTANT!!! Always ackup your cfg file just in case, on your system, this causes issues. Happy Flying Everyone! Pete First of all, welcome to the Forum, Pete. Keep coming back -- and join us on the Neil Hill Memorial Lounge/This Week's Meaningless Topic thread for some good company. The posts above note the better scenery in MSFS, but it's also true that FSX has a lot more plane options and is simpler to work with. If I could get MSFS scenery with FSX ease of use, I'd be a happy camper indeed. In any case, congratulations on your new setup. Hope you really enjoy the world of Orbx! 2 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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