Are you having a bad fps hit with new FEX SHD?......This may help!

[Russ White]

Hey guys, I have read a load of posts on this forum about the new FEX SHD release being a real fps hog! well i have to say i downloaded the update and was really happy with the result, some of you have talked about not liking how defined the edges are, but if you play with the settings enough you can get a fantastic look. Take a look at my new vid which makes use of the new SHD FEX system with the clouds tweaked for best realism!

http://orbxsystems.com/forums/index.php?topic=3652.0

Anyway, i had not noticed any performance issues at all....BUT, then one day i was playing with my graphics card anti aliasing settings on the Nvidia desktop control panel, changed the AA to 8Q from "application preference".....Anyway, started FSX again, and when looking at the new FEX SHD clouds the frame rate dropped from around 45 down to 9!!!!

So, I quit out of FSX and went back into the Nvidia control panel and set the AA features back to "application preference" restarted FSX, loaded up a flight with lots of new puffy SHD clouds and fps was back to around 40-50!!!

So to conclude, if you are having performance issues with the new FEX clouds, i would ask you to look at your graphics card driver settings for AA and make sure you have "application preference" (or similar) selected. It would seem that by specifying a particular AA setting on your card driver settings panel, it is causing the system a lot of stress when trying to AA all those cloud edges.

Hope this helps guys,

Russ.

[Rainey]

Indeed, if the application supports AA then you should leave your card on Application-Controlled as the games graphics engine is designed to handle it much better.

[Nick]

I used to turn antialiasing completely off in my simulator due to the performance hit when application controlled was selected.

I compromised one day and turned down my autogen and turned on AA with it set to 4x or 8x in the Nvidia CP.

A true convert here ladies and gentelmen

the rule here is. Turn AA on in FSX and the turn it to whatever you want it on the control panel

same thing with FS9 i believe.

Take it from a guy who has had to put up with a 6600GT card and still does for a very long time

[Russ White]

I used to turn antialiasing completely off in my simulator due to the performance hit when application controlled was selected.

I compromised one day and turned down my autogen and turned on AA with it set to 4x or 8x in the Nvidia CP.

A true convert here ladies and gentelmen

the rule here is. Turn AA on in FSX and the turn it to whatever you want it on the control panel

same thing with FS9 i believe.

Nick, as a rule of thumb you are right...the control panel should be used to fine tune post processing settings such as AA, and when running flight sim (and games) this is the better option, i totally agree. However, i found that with a CP enabled specific setting, the new FEX SHD clouds were terribly slow to render. That is why i experimented and found that they run (for me) a LOT faster when set to application preference. Obviously every PC system is different, and some degree of experimentation is required to discover which settings best fit particular hardware configurations. But for me, the new FEX patch did not like to be rendered with locked AA settings on the card driver!....Strange, but true 

I hope this is of some help to others who have voiced a performace concern regarding the latest SHD update.

Russ.