What kind of PC?

[Gnorfie]

Hello all,

Just a quick question: i have a AMD dualcore 3600 PC with 2 ghz memory and a good 1GB videocard. Fs2004 works ok, almost optimal settings. Today i bought a Dual Core 2 x 1,6 Ghz Intel, and a Nvidia i730 nForce kaart (256 MB) This pc is intended for other applications. What shall i do? Keep my AMD pc for FS2004 or shall i put the fast videocard in the Pentium Dualcore? I don't know the difference in speed between the two processors.

Thanx i.a.

Benno from Holland.

[ralmav]

Hi Benno ,
if FS runs fine on your AMD machine ,keep it as it is..never touch a running system ! :wink:

[knmi]

I am curious, how do you make FS 2004 benfit from a dual core?
I noticed when switching to my 2x2 AMD motherboard from single processor Intel 4, 3000, there were no significiant improvement. I could see that the AMD board used only one core for the FS. A FS limitation? What about FSX and multicore?

Framerate is king (shift Z Z), use your video card where you can benefit from it. Usually in a multi monitor fs setup. I use 5 of 'em with lousy videocards. I wish for a triplehead2go, digital!

Knut Michalsen

[Michael Carter]

FS9 cannot use a dual core processor, but it does allow a lighter load for background programs running, which for FS, should be at a minimum under any circumstances.

Mine is a dual core, but without building my own system, it is getting more difficult to fine an off-the-shelf system that doesn't have a dual-core processor.

It is also getting difficult to find an off-the-shelf system that has XP or XP-Pro loaded. I have read that some manufacturers have started offering a wider (though limited) selection of systems with XP or XP-Pro that are pretty much top of the line. Complains and derogatory comments are all over the Web about the quirks, compatibility, and reliability of MS's latest and greatest.

No thanks.

[Kennair]

Well I must say my new system is Quad core with Vista64 SP1 running FS9 & FSX. I was a bit nervous at first after reading similar "complaints and derogatory comments", but to no avail. All loaded, worked and continues without issue. However I haven't started running all the hardware interface cards for my system just the basic flight sim software.

Time will tell but often issues are caused by much more than operating system. And yes FSX can use multiple cores but FS9 can't.

My 2 cents.

Ken.

[Prof Bill]

Hi Ken,
I am glad you brought up the subject of running QUAD COREs with VISTA.
I was initially very wary of VISTA as a result of rather tortous experiences when I first began to migrate some of the scientific applications in the labs.

I am now delighted that with VISTAs performance (especially with QUAD CORES) and endless features that are a major improvement on XP. There is no way any of us here would consider going back to XP.

My personal experiences have been similar with FSX and there is no way I would abandon VISTAs feature rich facilities especially performance tweaking capabilities. The pain is a dim and distant memory!!

For those who are still thinking about VISTA and FSX they may well find that the May 2008 issue of Computer Pilot could provide some answers to questions they are concerned about.

www.pcaviator.com

There promises to be an article by Roy Hinds looking at the process of migrating to VISTA with a special focus on Flight Simulator software. He promises to tell what works, what does not work and what you need to do to get it all working properly.

I hope that this may persuade some more to use VISTA and FSX.

Bill.

[Georg Schneider]

Hi all !

The big problem with Vista is the amount of system memory you need to run only the entire system probably!
You need minimum 1GB Ram to run Vista without sitting whole day waiting:wink:
I have a Computer Business and involved many years with XP and now with Vista.

For a testsystem i have a New Siemens Notebook with Dualcore 2,4GHZ and 2GB system memory and Geforce 8600GS graphic card.

On it i run Vista Ultimate 32bit version and FSX
I must pull down all slider more than half way down to get 10-12frames
I`ve done all the twaekings you can find on the Net.
And for me this is not axceptible!

On the other hand i put a new PC togehther for my 737NG pit

Intel Core Duo E8400 3GHZ @ 3,8GHZ stable ->watercoolded 18-20Celcius idle/24-28Celcius at 100%CPU usage
Mainboard: Gigabyte GA-X38-DQ6
RAM:Corsair Dominator DDR2-800 /4 GB->watercooled
2*Geforce 8800 GTX /768MB->watercooled
1*HD Raptor 10000U/min 40GB for system->watercooled
1*HD Raptor 10000U/min 160GB for FS2004->watercooled

For a test i installed Vista Ultimate and FSX and made the twakings:
Frames not over 20 with all slider half way:(

So i installed good old XP64bit to use 4gb RAM and FS2004 and guess what????!!!!

All sliders full up also AI at 100% for testing(normaly 48%)
Made the test with PMDG737Ng,Active sky6,skai package100%,ground
envirement pro,night envirement and FS Global 2008

Ground level at the Gate PMDG737 2D cockpit i got 80-100frames
Ground level at the Gate PMDG737 3D cockpit i got 50-75frames

Airborn at 25000 feet i got in 2D cockpit 140-170 frames
Same with 3D cockpit i got 100-120 frames

Outsideview at 25000feet i got between 350-480 frames sometimes frames went up till 580:roll:

Now for me the conclusion is i will stick with XP and FS2004
till some Hardware is out maybe in 5-6years you can run FSX same level;-)

BTW.:next view days is screenshottime and i put some up on my HP
so nobody tell me a liar !;)

Everybody who wants a good system for FS2004 should use
a Dualcore with at least 2GHZ and a good mainboard and a Geforce with at least 512MBRam(maybe Geforce8600),and for XP32bit 3GBram and for
XP64bit the full 4GBram

The bottleneck is the system Ram and the HD.
When you have fast Ram speed and a standart SATA2 HD with 7200U/min
the best ram is useless!
The only thing that brings more frames is the combination of fast ram/HD/graphics !
Use the Raptor HD`s with 10000U/min and 4,6m/sec access time
together with fast ram(low latency) and a good Geforce and you have
no problems with stutters and low frames!

And finally defragment your hard drive with a good tool like
"O&O defrag" !Because windows defrag wont do the job right!
All these and more you can read in the various tweeking guides;-)

Thats only my thought of the XP/VISTA argueing:roll:

Greetings and happy flying

Georg

[andarlite]

Hi all !


On the other hand i put a new PC togehther for my 737NG pit

Intel Core Duo E8400 3GHZ @ 3,8GHZ stable ->watercoolded 18-20Celcius idle/24-28Celcius at 100%CPU usage
Mainboard: Gigabyte GA-X38-DQ6
RAM:Corsair Dominator DDR2-800 /4 GB->watercooled
2*Geforce 8800 GTX /768MB->watercooled
1*HD Raptor 10000U/min 40GB for system->watercooled
1*HD Raptor 10000U/min 160GB for FS2004->watercooled

For a test i installed Vista Ultimate and FSX and made the twakings:
Frames not over 20 with all slider half way:(




Hi Georg

There should be absolutely no reason why you couldn't get better results with a system like that for FSX. There are people with lesser system that get better results that what you are getting. Do you have all updated drivers for everything? Are you on SP1 or SP2? Are you using Nhancer for your video card? What version of Nvidea are you using?.... people have been getting good results with version 174.74 beta.

Your correct in saying that no hardware is available to run FSX maxed out, but your system should run fine with sliders at 50% and still look good with acceptable frames rates at least 30 with no blurries or stutters.

Regards,
Henry

[Joe60]

Funny I was just messing with this stuff today as I have not been here in a while and see this post.
Well I have just bought myself a new machine with the tight budget that I have.

My previous and old faithfull 4 year old PC:
Intel P4 - 2.6 gig Northbrige
Intel D865GLC Motherboard and chipset
1 gig memory
nVidia 6600GTS256 graphics card
Windows Xp Pro SP2 + all updates.
80 gig IDE Hard drive.

My new PC:
Intel P4 E6850 3gig 2 Core Duo CPU
Intel Dragontail Peak Motherboard
4 gigs Kingmax 800 mhz memory
nVidia 8800GT512oc Graphics card (V8803GT52)
Windows Xp Pro SP2 + all updates.
200 gig SATA Hard Drive

PS. I have all the latest drivers etc except for the new 8800 graphics card as that I'm using what has been adviced for FSX which is about 3 drivers ago.

Old PC
FS 2004
It gives me an average of 42 PFS with everything set to High and Very Dense.
Hardware set at 1024 x 768 + everything on.
Flying etc is good with the odd hicup when terrain updates.

FSX - Oh man this sucks and probably the reason I got a new PC
Average FPS 9.2
Even if I mess with the settings it does not change much and eitherway never reaches 10 FPS.
Flying is pitiful and the game got shelved in the bottom drawer.

New PC
FS2004 with same settings and extra's gives me 75 FPS.
Flying and soaring is an absolute pleasure, even with the most highest city and building updates.
This is at 1280 x 1024 btw.

FSX - I really expected better than this and must admit I am very dissapointed.
14.5 FPS :(
With everything set down a notch it still never sees more than 16 FPS.
And yes I did the proper recommended clean boot install with the Acceleration pack etc.

My Conclusion:
Unless you are a really hardened (and possibly wealthy) FSX simmer and have a seperate dedicated PC with Vista Premium that can see multi cores etc, I have decided to once again shelve FSX and go back to my beautifull FS2004 with its zillions of available updates and put FSX back in the bottom drawer possible until death do us part.

Some interesting points and tests I did tough.
For XP to use past 2 gigs of memory you must add the extra instruction in the Boot.ini file as recommended else you only use 2 gigs.
This alone stepped my FSX from 15 odd to 18.
Secondly although I have all the lastest updates etc in my Xp SP2, I went and installed SP3 from Microsoft and this pushed the FPS up to 20.5
Dissabling my LAN from the internet, disabling my antivirus, MS Office Package and all other stuff I have running gave me a further improvement to 22 FPS.
But at the end of the day I'm trying to suck blood out of a stone as anything under 40 FPS is not even worth having.

[Kennair]

Joe, looking at your specs FSX should also soar. Somethings wrong! I highly recommend AlacrityPC to stop all services before flight and a good payware defrag program to keep you clean.

BTW all the movies you've seen or ever will run at 25 or 26 frames per second depending on which part of the world you live in so there's really no point going over this rate in FS, all you're doing is taking away precious CPU cycles from doing other tasks like loading scenery and generating weather etc. The human eye can't tell the difference above this FPS.

Ken.

[andarlite]

Hi Joe

Ken is right, you should be having no problems running FSX on your new system. Also take a look at this link for getting your system tune properly for FSX:

http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=121&topic_id=440281&mode=full

Regards,
Henry

[Georg Schneider]

Hi Henry hi Joe !

I made my tests in FSX withe Forceware 174.74 whql running 1280x1024 settings AA2x.
And thats true i can run FSX with mor then 20fps but with some hours tweaking.And without tweaking i got 15-20 and sometimes dropdowns
to 5-10!

And for me i do not like tweaking FSX or FS2004 ! because it should run
good without tweaking !You pay a lot of money for the software or?

When you buy a new car it should run like the specs without tweaking underneath it:rolleyes:
Just my 2cents.

With system tweaking its another thing. I know the avsim link and the tips are good but not all is true and you can do horrible mistakes!
This tip from the avsim post is totaly wrong and costs system perfomance!"The page file ALWAYS goes on the boot drive with WindowsXP. Never move it"

The best perfomance gain is to have a extra partition with 3500-4000MB
and place the pagefile.sys there!
I gain about 2-7fps from that!

And this is for Joe:D

When you have problems loading scenery and in this case stutters
look in my prev. post.
I advice everybody when the old HD is out of order sometime
to get :

1x 36GB 3,5" WD Raptor ADFD SATA 10000rpm 16MB (http://www.bugcomputer.de/bugccag/product.asp?PageNo=PRODUCTCARD&Catalog=HARDWARE&ProductId=110031833&ShowOnlyAvailable=&SortOrder=&selFilterManufacturer=&Category=1120000,SATA) for system
1x 160GB 3,5" WD Raptor ADFD SATA 10000rpm 16MB (http://www.bugcomputer.de/bugccag/product.asp?PageNo=PRODUCTCARD&Catalog=HARDWARE&ProductId=110031833&ShowOnlyAvailable=&SortOrder=&selFilterManufacturer=&Category=1120000,SATA) for FS

With these ultrafast HD`s and pagefile.sys on extra
partition(4GB partition on the 40GBHD) you have almost no stutters anymore! These HD`s have everage access time from 4,6m/sec !
and 16mb cache.

I do only have a very little stutter on 100%ai traffic at a very big airport.
But never flying on 100%ai! Thats useless!:roll:

Greetings Georg

[andarlite]

With system tweaking its another thing. I know the avsim link and the tips are good but not all is true and you can do horrible mistakes!
This tip from the avsim post is totaly wrong and costs system perfomance!"The page file ALWAYS goes on the boot drive with WindowsXP. Never move it"



Hi Georg
Other people have also mentioned that. Here's Nick's response:


Bottom line, What use is it to put the page on another drive?

On a network server whereby the page will most likely be used it is important to TUNE and position it for best results

If you do as I specified above the page will ALWAYS end up at the END of the data on the platter. Since the user makes sure their PM is in line with their use, the ONLY thing the page is used for is for program allocation. In example.. some programs such as Adobe Acrobat Professional, when booted, look for an allocated and specified space on the page file. It only makes sure that space is available. If its not there because the user specified a "constant" page size that is too small, or, the system is not set up to use "SYSTEM MANAGED, which increases and decreases the file as needed, you can get an OOM error with that program at boot and it will exit.

So the two major things that file is there for on a properly defined and built system that is not a network server, or other of that nature, is for crashes and a log file write, and, to ensure programs have the space they may wish to have allocated for its use. Otherwise the file is not used unless you run out of PM

Now, if you are telling me you are running FSX on a system with 1GB of memory, then it is possible optimizing the file and its location MAY help but I would never fly or use a system that required the page file in ANY operation. I would increase PM before I would bother moving the page around.

Moving it therefore becomes an operation that nets you absolutely nothing, other than to believe the internet story about moving it will make your system run better, which is TRUE if -and only if- certain network or lack of memory criteria are met... If it won't, why do it.




And for me i do not like tweaking FSX or FS2004 ! because it should run
good without tweaking !You pay a lot of money for the software or?

When you buy a new car it should run like the specs without tweaking underneath it:rolleyes:
Just my 2cents.

When it comes to tweaks for FS, everybody has an opinion about what works or doesn't. NickN has been around for many years helping thousands of flight simmers get the best out of their system. I have a lot of respect for Nick and I would rather listen and apply his advice than anyone else on the internet. And do you really believe that any computer you buy is going to come completely optimize for whatever your needs could be? The way I see it there are 2 things you can do here: 1) Tweak your computer to get the best performance for your application and needs or 2) Spend money to buy a faster computer.

Me, I rather save money and tweak my lowly dual core e6700 with only a Nvidea 7900GS video card (following Nick's advice) and I am now enjoying flying FSX.

Regards,
Henry

[BHawthorne]

Just to throw my 2 cents into the mix... ;)

If your machine is dedicated to a simpit or even a simulator app without a simpit Vista has it's downsides. All those new extras within Vista are totally worthless to the function of the flight simulator itself. You don't need the Aero theme, the sidebar or other new Vista only things. Those only become impediments to the smooth processor and memory prioritization for the sim.

Another big issue that downright kills all interest in Vista for me is that horizontal span modes are permanently removed from Vista. That option only exists in XP and older OS.

For me, I pretty much require my OS to be stripped bare, have graphic span modes and be used specifically for the simpit. The removal of critical features and the addition of useless features make Vista a "no go" for me with a simpit. However, if the machine is not dedicated to the simpit, that's another matter altogether.

[Joe60]

Hi Guys,

Firstly I must sincerely apologise to Benno from Holand for stealing his thread but I must strike while there are good people willing to help :)

Yes I agree with you Ken and Henry that it should be better but its not.
Let me just put my case and hopefully we can solve the problem once and for a all as I see many posts around the sim forums relating to the absolute rotten performance in FSX.

First a little about myself, I was in the engineering side of the broadcasting world for over 30 years, hence I understand what Ken is talking about regarding FPS although with interlacing its actually double, so 25 FPS is actually seen as 50 FPS by the naked eye.
Also scanning a digital LCD monitor's pixels is a far cry from the movie machines but we can talk all day on that subject alone, so back to FSX :)
About 3 months ago I was approached by a company thats involved in flight/vehicle motion simulators and was given all the flight simulators plus a pile of other stuff and told to learn them inside out.
The flight section of this package consists of MSFS 98, MSFS 2000, MSFS 2002, MSFS 2004 and MSFX + Accelerator pack, also the whole of the Janes (non public version) aircraft design package.
Not to mention all the books, maps and drawings which will take me years to get through.

So back to this topic:
This is where I have to agree with Georg, and we must also take into account FSX is not a modern 2008 game designed for today's hi-end PC's such as I now have, but FSX was released way back in 2006 when a Celeron 2.8 or a Prescott 2.4 and a nVidia 6600GTS256 was the order of the day, also no gaming company in their right mind will release a sofware package if you can only play or use in X years time.
Now can you emagine if I had to spend my time running around to heaven knows how many clients all around the country tweaking and adjusting their PC'S and operating systems just so the things can work properly as you must remember most people that work with this stuff have never even heard of Microsoft or even the internet.
No, this should be all plug and play like FS2004 and previous versions are.
My wife's PC has a 2.4 gig Celeron with a FX2590 card and I installed FS2004 on her machine just to test and it works great with no 'tweaking' required, and boy oh boy is that PC full of junk (nuff said).
On the side I have always, and still am an Unreal Tournament fan, and this latest UT3 which I couldn't play on my older machine, now rocks big time on my new machine with everything set to max and that is a 2008 game designed especially for a 2008 hi-end machine.
I dont normally play much as I'm coding and testing stuff most the time but my partner was complaining bitterly about the lack of FPS on his FSX machine he bought in October last year which is similar to my new PC but has a 2.33 gig CPU and a 8600GTS256 card.
I watched him play a while ago to see what he's complaining about and sure enough as soon as he goes in low (approx 1500 feet) over any well populated area everything shudders and shakes so bad it becomes unplayable.
Except for a maybe bit of extra detail, FSX is no greater than FS2004 regarding terrain, and the aircraft detail (in my book) has actually gone backwards.
I realise these forums have very experience and very dedicated people on them and I have to be very carefull what I say as not to offend anyone but I'm just being practical from both a private and business point of view.
The biggest problem we're facing is FS2004 is no longer available, accept the odd copy at the odd online shop here and there, so a need to switch to FSX is very necessary but looks like I have a nightmare of a job ahead and maybe should just stick to broadcasting :)
Yesterday I bought a copy of Windows Vista Business and am going to soon install that on a new hard drive with only FSX, which will simulate a typical clients machine, and see if that improves anything.
It's also said the next version of MSFS is only due mid 2011, and we cannot sit around that long waiting for something that may not even improve anything.

Thanks so much for listening as I'm in a real dilemma here.
Joe

[SSO]

Hi Joe,

Gotten any further over the past month?

[Joe60]

Hi SSO,

In a way yes.
I re-formated and re-installed form scratch following all NickN's advice together with installing nHancer etc and stuck with Xp SP3 as Vista I did not like, maybe because I dont know it well enough.
Although FSX is pretty much working well now as I managed to get my FPS right up to average around 35+ with everything set on High as can be seen in the pic of Seatle, but its still not nowhere good enough for my requirements.
http://www.proasm.com/images/pics/seatfsx.jpg
Basically I like to fly at low altitudes, under bridges, in canyons etc and for that you need a good FPS.
FS2004 most certainly does that for me as my LCD can only handle 75 so its basically 75 wherever I go with everything on Ultra High++ except the odd really high density stuff where it may drop somewhat.
A similar pic for Seatle in FS2004
http://www.proasm.com/images/pics/seatfs9.jpg
Sooo... I have basically shelved FSX for a while longer and switched back to FS2004 where everything just plain rocks :)
Regarding the business side of things we have decided to go with X-Plane.


Joe.

[SSO]

Thanks for the update. Too bad, as there seems to be alot of nice visual improvements in FSX.

Interesting comment on the Aircraft modelling being degraded in FSX by the way. Any details on this?

Im still with FS2004 XP Pro SP2, and quite happy with this.
Is it worth installing SP3?

[Paul G]

While I would generally agree that users of software shouldn't need to have to tweak it to get it to work right, there is no way that producers such as Microsoft can know how well or badly their software is going to run on your system. And unless you have someone to regularly check and optimize your system, you're left to do it yourself.

The way I look at it is that to run FSX on today's computers, you're effectively driving a sports car where you expect at least 95% optimal performance out of it. Optimizing it and then doing nothing will see a degradation of performance over time, even if you don't do anything else on the computer other than run a flight simulator.

I would like to subscribe to the notion that you should never change a working system. That's fine if you are using 20% of your system's potential, using Internet Explorer and Outlook. But when you are running FSX you're red lining all the time. To keep it running you need to optimize and regularly fine tune it.

I don't understand people who build computers just to improve their 3D benchmark, which I consider to be a fanatical obsession. But tweaking my system and occasionally getting a 10% increase in FPS is reward in itself for me.

[fweinrebe]

This has been a fun thread to read so I thought I can just as well participate.

I was wondering what sort of antivirus program you guys are running on these PC's? I read this very interesting Blog entry about the fact that nothing cripples your PC's performance quite like anti-virus software. If using a antivirus program on your FS PC, I think this is sometimes overlooked as a reason for better/worst performance.

The url is: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000803.html.

There are also some XP vs Vista links.

[Joe60]

SSO, regarding SP3, personally I think it beefs things up a bit especially if you are not a great 'Auto Updater' like me.
I dont allow anything on my PC to auto update, I rather go to the site and do it manualy, like often I goto M$ and dont understand something so I leave it.
Its for these reasons I added SP3 and my performance definently improved.

Paul, I agree, the majority of us here are pretty technical I reckon, and enjoy tweaking here and there, but there is a limit to how far do you go :)

fweinrebe, regarding antivirus, well I run AVG and will be switch to something else on the 25th when 7.5 comes to an end.
Basically when and if I play FSX, I disable the internet as you'll be surprised just how many apps poll their websites and these polls cause interuptions however slight, like ICQ6 is a disaster for polling etc.
Antivirus should be disabled before playing FSX especially on slower machines.

There is also a lot of stuff you can disable on bootup that causes minor disruptions in any game.
Start - Run - type msconfig and click Ok, then click on Selective Startup, click the Startup tab and go disable all the stuff you dont want to start with windows next time you boot, makes quite a difference :)
I spent a lot of time tweaking things for FSX, like I discovered that although I have 4 gigs of memory (3.25) on FSX, my Virtual Memory increased from 1.5 gig to 2.0 gig, so I told windows to use my E drive for that.
I suppose you could also use a 4 gig USB Pen Disk for that, anything as long as it does not use your C drive.

LOL, ever since I got FSX about 4 months ago, I have learnt more about tweaking windows Xp since I got it in 2002 :D