ACTIVE Most Taxing Performace in PNW--Settings Sliders

[ALF]

With the advent of KSEA from Taxi2Gate, the performance settings that I had previously for PNW Urban are not cutting it. I know that the Autogen Density is first and foremost in hitting performance, but in this thread I wanted to ask for support in identifying the various performance hitters in order of importance. I have reviewed the PNW manual pages 15-20, and will do several tests but maybe Holger and the other Orbx wizards can point out performance hitters which can be adjusted down. Right off the bat, the flickering issue that Taxi2Gate put out in their .exe file removed big chunks of beautiful autogen in the west and east sides of the airport, which they had managed to blend rather nicely. Uninstalling the flicker does not get your beautiful airport back, as the uninstaller removes airport textures as well. So if you want a good KSEA without the flicker you must for now install the .exe from Taxi2Gate. OK, here it goes:

 

Computer I7 4790K Quad core OC´d to 4.8 GHZ, NVidia 780I graphics. Top notch computer, but I am guessing performance hitters take the sane toll on any computer.

 

1) Do you support the [JOBSCHEDULER] lines in the FSX.CFG as a contributor to better performance in a quad core Yes or No ?

                                    AffinityMask=15

 

2) What is the second and third slider performance hitter after the autogen density ?

 

3) If I reduce level of detailed radius to Low, I have blurring textures but is that less taxing on performance ?

 

4) Weather, lights tweaker, traffic what is hitting performance the most ?

 

Any suggestions would be most welcome.

[John Dow]

Can't speak for other people's computers but on my tired old mid-range rig, i7-920 @3.8 Ghz, GTX660 card, I get acceptable framerates just about everywhere, if I set the autogen slider to suit.  None of the other sliders other than the water settings seems to affect frame rates, just loading times.

 

Seattle and Canberra Cityscape, and similar sceneries get Dense.  Very Dense around the margins of cities etc.  Extremely Dense anywhere else.  While checking fps for the new Pago Pago scenery, around the island and even over Pago Pago I was getting 60-100+ fps.

 

Tweaks?  HighMemFix.  That's it.

 

Other settings... Water Low 2.x.  Clouds distance draw set to low.  I've noticed simple clouds can help sometimes but success varies.  Traffic etc as per the ORBX recommendations... about 16%.

 

Tried every tweak ever devised over the years... none has ever improved FSX overall, every single one has resulted in a drawback somewhere else.

 

Occasionally when I want the purest VFR experience in dense scenery I pretend it's a perfect clear day and set the weather to Clear All Weather, choose a known simple plane, and just enjoy smooth scenery for what it is... 

 

Oh yeah and check your BIOS for hyperthreading, Disable it if it's Enabled, that gives me an immediate 5 fps across the board.  Some reckon they see no difference, the only way to know is to save a known flight and compare the two settings.

[ALF]

Thanks John! I took out the lines regarding the affinitymask=15 in the display section of the config file. It did not add to performance.

 

What do you think the effects are with the sliders of the mesh complexity and texture all the way forward ? is it just a loading time problem or memory ?

 

Because, in the PNW region FS runs very smooth but all of a sudden I start hearing a bing from the computer and then it freezes on the spot and I get a message that it has run out of memory ! And yet FS runs very smooth.

 

I ordered this computer with only 8 Gigs of Memory as per advice in other forum but I am regreting it. The word was then that FS only needed that amount but I am thinking that I may have a ram memory limiter problem here.

[Rob Newman]

One setting that always claws back a lot of performance for me is the "airport vehicle density"... for some reason, if it's on, even on the lowest setting I get a big hit. Turning it off completely (full left on the slider) really helps.

 

I don't really miss the default airport vehicle traffic... and if you use AES or GSX, these have less impact (plus look better and are interactive) than the default anyway.

[John Dow]

I can't see how 8GB of memory isn't enough, I have 6GB.  FSX can only use up to 3.8?  4?  Somewhere round there.

 

I used to get the dinging in PNW, don't any more.  All I can tell you is that I have a dedicated SSD for FSX, I have set the permissions and sharing to be as wide as possible across the entirety of my drives, particularly mu User folder, I don't run any anti-virus or similar except the Windows Defender, generally I like to start FSX from a reboot, I have Windows 7 Ultimate, and I only run FSX, ORBX, FSUIPC and EzyDok.  If I run Active Sky in PNW I increase my chances of getting memory or performance issues, but even then a quick save and reboot to the same flight often allows me to complete the flight.

 

Fact is we are pushing a 32 bit game to its extreme ends and compromises will show up.  If you want to see how far we have come load up FSX with original scenery and default aircraft and be amazd at the loading time and performance...