Jack's guide to the BufferPools Tweak

[Boeing 747 Flyer]

Hello everyone,

This is my guide to the FSX bufferpools tweak, first discovered by Jesus Bojote of Avsim.

I welcome you to my very own guide of the infamous BufferPools Tweak for FSX. Before we start, I just need to make one thing clear:

I would suggest that you only read on if you have a 1GB Graphics Card or higher. Less than this will most likely cause the tweak to WORSEN performance! Also, please note that this Tweak isn't for everyone, and it isn't guarenteed to work 100%. Thanks.

So then! First things first. What is the BufferPools Tweak? Basically the BP Tweak is an adjustment that a user manually makes to the FSX.cfg file, allowing FSX to make much better use of available video memory. It works so, so much better with 1GB+ Cards. The result is incredible FPS performance... If it is done correctly that is.

BEFORE YOU START ANY TWEAKING AT ALL, MAKE AN ORIGINAL, UNTOUCHED BACKUP FS.CFG FILE!!! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

Step One:

- Download nHancer (this is a neat little utility for nVidia Cards that allows great control over things such as AA, AF, HDR, etc). If you have an ATI Card downloading nHancer probably won't do you much good at all.

- Set up nHancer as per NickN's great guide here: http://www.simforums.com/forums/forum_posts.asp?TID=29041 (you'll have to scroll down to about halfway on the page to see the nHancer setup guide, ignore everything else for now.

Step Two:

- Download the UIAutomationcore.dll file. This helps stop manu bar crashing in Windows 7, and also helps reduce annoying random crashes too. Download here: http://www.search-dll.com/dll-files/download/uiautomationcore.dll.html

- Pop the UIAutomationcore.dll file into your main FSX Root Directory folder. Before each FSX flight, navigate to this folder, hold down SHIFT and right click the UIAutomationcore.dll file. Then click open command prompt in this windows, and type EXACTLY this (without the speechmarks):

"regsvr32 UIAutomationCore.dll"

Then press ENTER

Step Three:

- Download a free utility called "GPU-Z". This neat little application allows you to see how much Video Memory is being used, GPU Load, Card temperature, and much more. Download Here: http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/

Step Four:

- Navigate to your main FSX.cfg file. This is found in C -> Users -> Your user name -> AppData -> roaming -> Microsoft -> FSX

- Open the .cfg file in notepad. Make sure it is the file called "FSX", which is a .cfg file... NOT the file called "FSX.cfg" which is a text file.

- At the very top of the FSX.cfg file, type in this exactly:


PoolSize=0

- Finally, save the notepad file and close it. Close all other windows so you are left with your desktop.

Step Five:

- Boot up FSX how you normally would. Then, start a flight of your choice. I would recommend that for testing you use a pretty intensive add-on in an intensive FSX location if possible (eg 757 Captain at FTX YSSY Kingsford Smith International Sydney).

- Change views, move around the airport. Check your FPS against your old FPS (the FPS coutner can be opened by pressing SHIFT+Z, then SHIFT+Z again).

- If all looks okay and stable, and you don't see any strange scenery anomolies. Then congratulations! You have sucessfully utilised the BufferPools=0 Tweak!

- Open up GPU-Z whilst FSX is in windowed mode. Arrange the windows so you can see both the GPU-Z and SX information at the same time. make sure that your GPU temperature is acceptable, your GPU load is below 75%, and that your memory usage isn't above 70% of your card's memory.

[u]POSSIBLE PROBLEMS AND HOW TO OVERCOME THEM:

[b][u]FSX is very unstable! It crashes now and again!

This is probably due to the fact that you are running out of Video memory. At the time of the crash, what is your Video Memory usage on GPU-Z? If, for example, you have a 1GB (1024MB) Graphics Card, and your Memory Usage is around 950MB, then I'd suggest maybe lowering AA, AF (in nHancer). OR - Another thing I noticed which greatly impacts GPU Memory Usage is the AIRCRAFT'S LIVERY. Take a look at this:

Memory Usage with McPhat's UHDT American Livery:
http://i822.photobucket.com/albums/zz146/Stratuspheric/FSXBufferPoolswithMcPhatHD.jpg
as you can see, Video Memory Usage is very high with such a GPU intensive livery.

Compare to the supplied Air Transat livery (remember, all settings the same, just changed the livery!):
http://i822.photobucket.com/albums/zz146/Stratuspheric/BufferPoolsFSXwithStandardAirTransa.jpg
The GPU Video Memory Usage is practically halved.

I found that I got rpetty frequent crashes if I used such an intensive livery with such high settings. So my advice is to slow down! Treat your Graphics Card nciely and it will reward you!

my Textures are all blurred!

This is, unfortunately a problem with the BufferPools Tweak which effects some people. I didn't really experience this, but when I did, I adjusted the TextureBandwidthMult value (found in the FSX.cfg) to either 80 or 120. crank this up to 400 if you're using HD Photoreal Scenery!

I keep getting crashes when I hit Escape and look at my flight progress!

Are you sure you've run UIAutomationcore.dll properly? Follow the instructions on Step number Two again, remember this must be done before EVERY flight. Also, check your graphics card temepratures in GPU-Z. High temperatures cause graphics card to bail out for safety reasons.

Further Tips

- Either set your FPS to Unlimited, or to 40. Do not set to anything higher than 40, as the human eye cannot detect any FPS above 35. So setting to 40 guarentees super smooth performance, and also leaves system resources free for other things.

- As far as I know, if you have 512MB Graphics Cards in SLI/XFire... It does't matter. This is because this Tweak relies on the OVERALL Graphics card memory.

I really hope this guide helped you guys! Feedback is always appreciated!

Kind regards & good luck,

Jack :winka:

[Matt Olieman]

I'm so impressed with this information, I made the post a sticky. So everyone coming to this forum will see it first.

Thanks Jack!!!! :) :) :)

[Boeing 747 Flyer]

I'm so impressed with this information, I made the post a sticky. So everyone coming to this forum will see it first.

Thanks Jack!!!! :) :) :)

Wow thanks very much Matt, it is no problem, always glad to help the community (I feel I owe you as much for those dodgy posts I made i nthe General forum:oops:).

Anyway, it is no problem and thanks for making this a sticky, hopefully others can enjoy the experience I'm getting with the Bufferpools tweak!:D

Thanks alot,

Jack;)

[Boeing 747 Flyer]

Also Matt, not sure if this was you or just the MyCockpit.org censor, but the preceding word before "Bojote" on the second line down is censored. I know it could be classed as a profanity, but that word is actually the person's name.

Anyway, just thought I'd let you know incase you thought I was "censoring up" the forum!:p

[Walther]

Hi,

Be aware that after Nvidia driver 25x.xx Nhancer doesnt work and you need to install Nvidia Inspector.. I have installed it and it's only a couple of mb's. My graphics jumped in quality as the AA wasnt working too well with my Matrox. Which made me jump as well.. :-))

Below is the link from NickN on the settings And the download!
http://www.simforums.com/forums/fsx-and-nhancer-settings-for-new-drivers-updated_topic36586.html
*** be aware that this will also effect how your tweaks in the .cfg will handle fsx. I had to retweak some of them to remove black spots and stutter even though my fps were in their 30's when banking.. Just as a warning..***

But I have a different experience with the multiplier. My best setting is more like 30 or 40 to get the best fps with most scenery. And the blurryness with photoscenery mostly happened with me when my fps dropped to about 15fps and I had to change scenery settings plus increase my bufferpool or leave it out to better preload the textures.

Source is a Microsoft dev:

"The TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT option in the GHraphics section is the target frame rate use for calculating texture bandwidth. The higher you set this value the more textures we will allocate and copy per frame to the graphics card. The lower you set this value, the less we will allocate and copy up to a minimum limit. As an example, the default rate in the “high” perf bucket setting is 40. The lowest perf bucket setting is 10.
Higher settings on this flag can cause stutters on frames where the terrain system has finished compositing lots of textures. Lower settings can reduce stutters on busy frames and spread out the load across multiple frames"
So thinking this thru, if the value you set is 40, and your frame rate limit is 30, then we will send 40/30 or 4/3 as much textures per frame."
Moving this value to 400, like I have seen some users post in the forums, is probably *not* what you want to do since that increases the texture load on the graphics
card by 10x, eg 400/40 = 10x. And after talking about
this to Raf, setting it to 0 is ignored and can be validated by setting it to 10 which should give no different results.

*** EDIT*** For the photoscenery the above stated has not been taken into account!!! So what Jack below suggests can definitely help, only with the photoscenery for NL, which is quite heavy, I just have a different setup!
- these are very easy tweaks to put in your .cfg file and compare in Fsx and see if it is running better.. Remember that it will change per scenery! So basically if I am wrong with the above you can just easily see it and compare it..

Regards,

Walther