Flight Simulator - running slowly

MisterNick

My son has FSX deluxe edition.
The programme is running very slowly, almost to the point that it is unplayable.
When he first installed the programme it asked for the pixels to be set at 1024 x 768 which he set.
He has tried uninstalling and reinstalling but to no effect. It did start out OKish, but got slower and slower.

If you need to know the technical details about the computer it is installed on could you let me know how to find the information please.

Many thanks

Zahc

Flight sims are notoriously heavy on system usage. The computer should have a good graphics card installed along with at least 1 gig of RAM and a fairly powerful processor.

If you go to 'my computer' then 'view system information' you'll find the PCs basic set up on the 'general' tab.

Zahc

thomas01155

Firstly scan for spyware.then go to run and type msconfig go to startup, if you look at start up item until things like real player, quick time and stuff you don't think you will need just don't untick things like firewalls and anti virus.
What is the game you are trying to run have a look here and it will be able to tell you if you can run it http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/referrer/srtest it might not have you game but you can try

Spyware scan: http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=133269

Defrag: http://www.auslogics.com/disk-defrag/

Zahc

It seems you're not alone. The FS community are not best pleased with FSX. Anyway, you can play with the program settings to get it to go a little better.

Found the following here.

Graphics

* Target frame rate: seemingly even more so than FS9, FSX will effectively use cycles not absorbed by refreshing the display. So set this as low as you can tolerate it to reduce blurries and have scenery elements display properly. Some folks are claiming better performance with frame rate set to unlimited though, so experiment for yourself.
* Filtering: if your video card has anisotropic filtering, select this and check anti-aliasing.
* Global texture resolution: I didn’t find this made a huge difference to performance. Set to Very High
* Lens flate: minor impact but every bit helps so I turn it off
* Light bloom: high impact, it’s off
* Advanced animations: unsure of the effect

Aircraft

* Aircraft shadows on the ground: off
* Aircraft cast shadows on itself: off
* Aircraft landing lights illuminate ground: on

Scenery

* Level of detail radius: I have this set to Large as it seems to make very little difference. But experiment on your system
* Mesh complexity: 92
* Mesh resolution: for most purposes 38m is plenty, 19m only if you have addons that need it.
* Texture resolution: surprisingly this doesn’t have as much effect on frame rates as I would have thought. If you want to experience higher-res textures, go to 2m. 5m is equivalent to FS9. Likely the impact is mostly on the blurries, as the sim has to load more data.
* Water effects: this setting does affect my performance much until I hit Mid 2.x, which is where water reflections kick in. Then frame rates drop dramatically. So generally I have mine at Low 2.x.
* Land detail textures: on
* Scenery complexity: I have mine set between Normal and Extremely Dense. It is indeed a sparse world in some areas at Normal! The effect this has will vary drastically with how many custom buildings are placed in the area, and what complexity they’ve been assigned by the designer. Near CYVR, I get a 30% increase in frame rates dropping to Normal.
* Autogen density: certainly anything above Normal is asking for trouble. I’ve been trying autogen off in an attempt to get flyable performance. With the higher resolution ground textures, this looks much better than in FS9 with autogen off, but is not much good at very low altitudes.
* Ground scenery cast shadows: no
* Special Effects Detail: high, doesn’t have a large effect. I imagine this would vary with the number of effects active

Weather

A pleasing aspect of FSX is that the weather doesn’t have as much of an effect on performance as it did in FS9.

* Cloud draw distance: 96 km
* Thermal visulization: none
* Detailed clouds

Traffic

* Airline traffic density: varies drastically with the amount of traffic you have in your area. You’ll have to play with this one.
* GA traffic: ditto
* Airport vehicle density: minimum
* Road vehicles: this has a very high impact if you have a lot of freeways, so I set it to 4%, just to get a taste of activity, or turn it off
* Ships and ferries: there are few of these, and it doesn’t seem to have a high impact so I have set this to 100%
* Leisure boats: again, I give myself a taste at 4%, the impact is quite high if you push this slider up, assuming there’s lots of water around!


Zahc

MisterNick

Thanks for the very prompt replies and the help you have provided.

We have been out this afternoon, but when we came back we had a go at your suggestions.

FSX is a lot better, but it does jump every 10 or so seconds. Is this normal?

We downloaded the trial Boost speed and optimised all of their suggested changes. There are some changes that can be made, but without buying the package it will not do it. Do you think I should buy the package?

We did a Spyware and Malware scan a couple of weeks ago when we had a problem with the computer, so have not done this again.

We checked the PC basic setup which stated "system Microsoft XP. Premium (R) 4CPU 3.20GHz, 3.19GHz. 1GB RAM". Is this OK?

Changed the settings per Zahc suggestions which seems to have boosted the performance. I think the only thing that he will change back is the aircraft shadows as he likes helicopters and it is difficult to land without them.

FSX was in systemrequirementslab, and we checked against this. It ranked about a third of the way between "minimum" and "recommended". Looking at the answers there didn't seem to be much that we could do to improve what we had to get to nearer the recommended level.

It did suggest Logitech 3d joysticks. My sons is a Logitech Freedom 2.4 cordless joystick. Is this OK?

Once again many thanks for your replies.

Zahc

I'm glad it's speeded up a bit for you. Another thing you can try is to make sure you have up to date drivers for your graphics card. Your system specs appear to be more than enough, though you don't say what graphics card you have. Go to control panel, system, device manager and check out what you have there. If you have ccleaner, just start that and have a look at the top.
As for the jerkyness every 10 secs, just play with the settings; especially the target frame rate setting if it's anything like FS9.

Zahc

Joysticks are a personal preference, but I can recommend saitek for the serious FS fan, especially if you're trying to keep a helo in the air

MisterNick

Thanks for the info Zahc. I now know what is on his wish list as far as a joystick is concerned.

We can't get the info about the graphics card up.

We can't find it on ccleaner.

On Control Panel, the nearest we could get was "System">"Hardware">"Device Manager". But then we don.t know which is the graphics card.

Do you have any thoughts on where to go next?

Zahc

MisterNick wrote: »

Thanks for the info Zahc. I now know what is on his wish list as far as a joystick is concerned.

We can't get the info about the graphics card up.

We can't find it on ccleaner.

On Control Panel, the nearest we could get was "System">"Hardware">"Device Manager". But then we don.t know which is the graphics card.

Do you have any thoughts on where to go next?

Display adaptor in device manager

Zahc

MisterNick

Thanks Zahc

Radeon X600 series
Radeon X600 series secondary.

Does that make sense?

Zahc

Yep. Here you can get the latest drivers. I'm assuming we're talking about a desktop PC. You should have catalyst on your machine which can (sometimes) help you get the best out of your card. I've just had a thought (despite the red wine!). Make sure you have the latest direct x too........... http://www.microsoft.com/windows/directx/default.mspx


Zahc

MisterNick

Thanks for that.

We have downloaded the latest drivers and made sure that we have the latest Direct X.

Had a go on FS and it is running the better than when it was installed

Hope the red wine is a good one because there is one happy son here. I think he is off to look at these joysticks now

Once again, thanks