The "Flight Simulator X puts my PC at its knees" thread.

[TteFAboB]

I have a Pentium 4 3.2ghz with that fake 2-core trick, 2GB of good RAM and a Radeon 9800 256mb.

I'm still trying to tweak it, but with special effects at max and the best Aircraft quality, I have to lower everything else except for Airline and General Aviation traffic to the lowest setting or bare minimum to stay above 20FPS. And the FPS will go down to 10 or 15 if I look at crumped AI traffic. What the hell Microsoft, how about adding low polygon, low texture models for the damned AI? It's not low enough, make them a flat paper 2D texture.

What did MS do wrong? I don't understand anything about programming, but since that never stopped me from commenting before: it seems the road, airport and naval traffic completely crushes my CPU, innefficient coding? Or is it meant to run on quadruple-CPU PCs? What's the point of adding all this glitter if your average CPU can't handle it? Can that new Intel chip handle it? Or should I save to buy four of them?

When you put everything at the best settings, the world is beautiful, truly stunning, despite the 3 to 5 FPS. Merit where merit is due, congratulations to Microsoft for creating a world worthwile to do long flights in, appreciating the scenery. But with the settings down to a minimum, it's the same world from FS2000 or whatever: dull, boring, repetitive, empty.

Any performance tips are welcome. I can only suggest removing all traffic. And start saving for CPUs and Graphic cards that are so advanced you won't be able to play your older games anymore.

FSX is truly fantastic if you can run it. I can't.

[Linton]

If you are going to spend all that money on hardware and be disappointed why don't you spend it on some real flying lessons instead?

[Bort]

Yikes! This is not good. I've been waiting for FSX for a while now, being rather heavily addicted to FS9 and now I'm a bit worried. I have a 3.2 Ghz P4 that I haven't done anything fancy to and I just got a new graphics card, an ATI Radeon X1800 that is by all means spectacular. Whereas the old graphics card I had, an ATI X750, was always fussy and melted down after 6 months of use, this one is thus far bulletproof. I have played the demo for FSX and while it was slower than FS9, it isn't awful. Regardless, I will almost certainly end up buying FSX sooner rather than later, although the latter seems more likely after hearing this.

[TteFAboB]

If you are going to spend all that money on hardware and be disappointed why don't you spend it on some real flying lessons instead?

Show some mercy will you?

I've found a compromise. Reduced all traffic to 0%. Airliner, General, road/airport and naval. Now my world has better scenario but I'm the last human on Earth. Bleh. Will suffice untill I have enough money to buy 4 processors.

It seems the problem is mostly with traffic. It's a CPU hog. Reduce traffic and you can run a, hmm, decent scenario.

[Bort]

I just remembered this, a while back I read on the message boards at AVSIM in a post from a Microsoft developer that they had tinkered with the graphics, drawing power away from keeping up frame rates to improve texture and distance draw qualities. Maybe that's whats bogging down the game?

Is the game even out yet?!? I see it for sale at EBgames.com on the 17th of October!

If you are refering to the Demo I wouldn't put a lot of stock into that. Sometimes the Demo's aren't quite up to par with where the actual game is! Also, Microsoft may release a few patches to help configure the game to run better on different types of hardware a little later on.

Same thing happened with Lock-On Modern air combat when it first came out. Lots of people were highly dissappointed that UBISoft released a game that only played (barely) on high end systems of the time. I had to shelve it for years before I had a system capable of playing it with lots of detail and good FPS.

[TteFAboB]

I just remembered this, a while back I read on the message boards at AVSIM in a post from a Microsoft developer that they had tinkered with the graphics, drawing power away from keeping up frame rates to improve texture and distance draw qualities. Maybe that's whats bogging down the game?

Sounds like a plan. Reducing detail draw distance to minimum and other settings to as low as my eyes can take it, as seen in this screenshot:



Will generate these, a bit sparse and far from the bext quality but FPS become acceptable: 11-15 in heavy areas and 20-24 in light areas.







Now to tell you what I'm missing, compare this water:


And this forest:


And the density of the scenario:





Only the water was at the highest setting, the rest was just a notch or two above the first three pictures. And that's without the sailboats, ferries, ships and cars, trucks and busses moving around.

Is the game even out yet?!? I see it for sale at EBgames.com on the 17th of October!

Hehe, I pre-ordered it at a local store, it surprised me too, I wasn't expecting to receive it so soon. Anyway, rest assured, it's not the demo, it's the real thing, and it's impressive, if only my PC could run it at the level it deserves to be run at.

EDIT: Small mistake, I was running at the default resolution, increasing it to my desktop resolution added 1-2FPS.

[Seeadler]

I can play the latest demo (not the pre-demo from last month) with all settings to "ultra" in 1280x1024x32 and get 35-38 FPS.

System:
- AMD64 X2 4400+
- Geforce 7800 GTX + Forceware 91.47driver
- 2 GB Ram
- DirectX 9c August update

[Dowly]

Aww.... oh well, I´ve ordered it already, no turning back. My PC can do wonders, but I really doubt that it will give up now on this one.

[snowsub]

I've got the latest demo installed & the Deluxe version on order (26th here in Oz )
And I'm getting anywhere from 15-30 FPS depending on the area (15 @ St Maartin) and averaging 20 odd.
I've got the texture & water settings to average, cars & boats to low and AC to full.

At least the verkiness of the FPS is not really noticable.

But I'd like to see what that setting will do at a city like NY. Though atm since this'll be my first serious FS I'll be doing short runs around the east coast of Australia, mainly on GA aircraft then progressing up to the big boys .

Personally I can't wait

My system Specs:
AMD Athlon 65 3000+
2 gb DDR-400 Ram
Nvidia GeForce 6600 GT
and the game will be running on a SATA drive.

But mid to late next year I'll be upgrading my system and hopefully be getting all the good stuff and really see how it fly's.

I was debating whether to buy FSX or FS9 but chose FSX so I can get on at the ground floor with the mods for it, there's such a plethera of them for FS9 it's very intimidating

[timetraveller]

This has also been a common problem with train simulators I've fooled with over the last few years, which attempt to recreate all scenery, much of it in 3D, out to several miles distant. When you start to get many objects on the ground that are 3D objects and each must be rendered as a seperate object (and not simply a ground skin), your polygon count goes sky high.

Our solution was always to turn down the drawing distance too. All that detail has a cost to it.

TT

[TteFAboB]

Originally Posted by Seeadler

I can play the latest demo (not the pre-demo from last month) with all settings to "ultra" in 1280x1024x32 and get 35-38 FPS.

System:
- AMD64 X2 4400+
- Geforce 7800 GTX + Forceware 91.47driver
- 2 GB Ram
- DirectX 9c August update

Is that processor and video card better than mine?

EDIT: Damn my vid card is so outdated. Nevermind...

[The Noob]

Well, it seems like this secret Video from the Microsoft Conference room was fully correct.



:rotfl::rotfl:

[SUBMAN1]

I've flown aircraft since I was a child, but have to say, if you are after real flying lessons, there is something to be said for gliders. I've got most of my time in powered aircraft, but I still miss the feeling of making it or breaking it based on thermals.

-S

[Seeadler]

Originally Posted by TteFAboB

Is that processor and video card better than mine?
EDIT: Damn my vid card is so outdated. Nevermind...

yes your bottleneck is the Radeon 9800, see several tests on www.tomshardware.com. The Radeon 9800 was a good video card in 2003-2004 but in the comparison with today's video cards such GeForce7800/7900 or Radeon X1800/X19000, it went powerfully into the background with actual games.