FSX Optimization

[hitchface]

Big topic, but much needed. There are a few threads out there regarding this, but the majority of posts refer to advanced tweaking documents or simply say "no modern computer can run it well". I will have a .cfg tweak or two in here, but a lot of the talk will be of what each slider actually does, and the performance impact each will have. I will include what setting my system currently utilizes, and you can scale up or down from there. My goal was to gain the most performance I could while retaining a high degree of aesthetics. You might want to bookmark this page...it will be a long read.

Reference System, no overclocking:

Motherboard - Asus M2N4-SLI
Processor - AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+
RAM - 2x1 GB Corsair XMS2 DDR2 800
Graphics Card - eVGA GeForce 7600 GS PCIe, 256 MB
Power Supply - Mushkin Enhanced 550W
Sound Card - Creative X-Fi Xtreme Audio PCI

So you start up FSX and you click on the "Settings" tab. You will see 5 categories to change. The sliders for them are global settings, and as you move them up or down, finer options will be automatically selected/deselected. Since there is so much room to wiggle in this game, those sliders don't help us very much. From the top down, mine are as follows:

Graphics: Custom
Aircraft: Ultra High
Scenery: Custom
Weather: Ultra High
Traffic: Custom

Now lets dive into each one individually and try and make sense of the whopping 53 (give or take) options that FSX gives us to toy with. To access the 'fine tuning' menus, click on the "Customize" button at the bottom right side of the Display Settings box. The tabs for each graphical component of FSX are located at the top. One by one, we'll move through them from left to right.

Graphics:

In the "Device-specific options" box, you'll see your video card listed, as well as a drop down menu for a target frame rate, and a scrollable menu to choose screen resolution. Choosing a resolution is fairly straight forward, though I have a word of warning. Those of you who use larger widescreen monitors might not have the option of running the game at native resolution and have graphical detail at the same time. Try it out, but if it doesn't work well, choose a lower res with the same aspect ratio. There are many options to choose from, so you shouldn't have trouble finding one to suit your needs.

The target frame rate slider is a little deceptive at first. You might be thinking "Oh, well I want 60 fps, lets just crank 'er up!" It doesn't quite work like that. This bar is actually a frame rate limiter, or cap. This is useful because in a high detail setting, you can get wildly varying frame rates depending on the view you have. You might be using the spot view of the airplane, flying along a populated coastline; while looking towards the city, you might have a frame rate of 12 per second, while looking out over the ocean it skyrockets all the way up to 60. This results in a disjointed gaming experience, and makes even simple flying overly difficult. Since this game is capable of bringing EVERY system to its knees with ultra high settings (just look at Tom's Hardware if you don't believe me), we need to be smart about where we place this limiter. I have mine comfortably at 30 fps. Anything much higher than that, and the game begins to feel unpredictable...which is a bad thing to have in an airplane! Play with it and see what gives you the most seamless experience, not necessarily the fastest.

Also in that box are the filtering and anti-aliasing options. Keep the filtering to trilinear or bilinear as opposed to anisotropic, and leave anti-aliasing deselected. We'll get around to those in a more efficient way later on.

Moving over to the right of that same tab, we see the global texture resolution slider. Pretty self explanatory. If you want your sim to look good, you need to get this as high as you can before your computer starts crying. When on minimum, the game responds very fast, but the detail downright sucks. Any realistic visual experience is lost unless you can work this setting to a high level. I decided to take the performance hit (which is substantial) and max out this slider.

Lens flare. Also self explanatory. The performance impact is negligible. I have opted to keep it turned off simply because you don't actually get lens flare looking through the window of a plane, or through your own eyes. It does look nice enough, and if you wanna sacrifice a single frame per second or less for that perfect photo opportunity, feel free to turn it on.

Light bloom shows the effects of the sun hitting reflective surfaces. Since the bloom is actually calculated, it really only becomes a performance concern if you are doing stunts or pretending to dogfight, since the reflective surfaces are constantly moving in and out of direct sunlight. This effect is one that doesn't make itself very well known, but you notice it when it isn't there. Feel free to turn it off if you want, but you'll only gain a frame or two. I have left it enabled.

Advanced animations allows things like people, animals and wing flex to be seen. Smaller planes don't really exhibit the wing flex effect, but larger wingspans show it proudly. I leave this feature enabled for the flex and for the animals. Nothing is cooler than seeing wildlife out of the corner of your eye while you gaze at the reflection of a DHC-2 Beaver on the lake surface. The performance downside is that when you get to the point where lots of people or animals are visible, your graphics card has to draw and maintain each model. That can become a real burden on your system at low altitudes, so do with it what you wish.

Informational text options don't make any impact other than they way text is displayed. If your computer slows down when generating text, I suggest you pack up FSX and save it until you upgrade your underclocked 386.

Aircraft:

This is key. A flight sim should have good looking aircraft. Here are your options:

3D virtual cockpit or 2D panel? Your choice really. The 3D cockpits are quite well done, and I like the freedom of looking around inside of them, so I use it the most. There is no performance hit to speak of when switching between the two. If you like the 2D panel, then go with the 2D panel.

The checkboxes underneath allow you to select the ToolTips and high-res 3D cockpit textures. ToolTips are handy if you are trying to find your way around an unfamiliar cockpit, and don't impact performance. The high-res texture option is also marginal in terms of performance reduction. The textures needed in the cockpit are quite small when compared to the mass amount of drawing the video card does outside of the airplane, so I've left it enabled.

Underneath those is a slider for 2D panel transparency. If you like the 2D panel but can't stand the fact that it takes up more than half of your forward view, adjust this slider and open up the cockpit a little.This is really handy on short final, because you can actually judge your flare much more precisely. Since I don't use the 2D panel, it is still defaulted to 0%.

To the right are three exterior options, and those are the aircraft casting shadows on the ground, itself, and the lights illuminating the ground. I have all three enabled, simply because not having them becomes a glaring problem. Since I like to use the spot view a lot, as well as fly low and fast, the ground shadow is a very important point of reference for me. Shadows not being cast on the airplane itself when there is a very clear light source (as in dawn or dusk) makes the sim look very incomplete. The same goes for aircraft lights on a ground surface. Once again, there is little to no detriment by adding these effects. Shadows typically cause performance problems in many games, especially first person shooters. Here, there is only one shadow to draw, and you are usually so high that it is small/unnoticeable.

Scenery:

This is the absolute killer settings tab if there ever was one. Properly setting these slides will make or break your sim experience. When you go flying, you see land...and a ton of it. Your GPU has to generate all of that land and everything in it, like trees, buildings, textures, roads, lakes...you get the idea. Adjusting these to your liking is a long task and is heavily dependent upon your tastes. Here we go...

In the Terrain and Water box, you have five sliders and a check box. The first setting is that of the level of detail radius, or LOD radius. This determines how far out from your camera view detail is rendered. In a flat desert, draw all the detail you want, and you probably won't see slowdowns. Trying to draw an entire city, like Vancouver, BC for instance, will cause some problems. I have set this slider to 'Small' or 'Medium' for my purposes. I really like bush flying, so my time flying around big urban settings is limited. In the default location of Friday Harbor, a 'Large' LOD radius drops a few frames per second, though the effect is much more pronounced in the city.

The next three sliders are very much intertwined. Each one will essentially dictate how accurate the image is on the ground. Keeping the sliders on the higher end will result in a less repetitive feel to the textures, and a more accurate representation of what is actually there in terms of land type. This includes elevation data as well (the smaller the number of the Mesh Resolution slider, the more accurate the elevation of mountains will become). The texture resolution slider will affect the blurriness or sharpness of the textures below you. If you fly around in flat areas, crank up that texture res, but don't bother with mesh sliders as much. Mountain fliers will have to balance the sliders a little more, as they are all important for good looking mountainous features.

Water effects are something that I find very important. Nothing ruins the illusion of realism more than poor water effects in a game like this. Your video card might not support these effects, so don't be entirely surprised if you see nothing happen when you crank the detail. The water itself will change if supported, though the coastlines and shoddy wave effects will all remain the same, unfortunately. This game does have some mighty fine water, and the performance cost isn't enough to justify toning it down.

Land detail textures isn't really anything major. It is really just a little bit of graphical trickery to give the appearance of more realism, even though the actual texture might not be entirely accurate. My sliders are as follows:

LOD Radius: Medium
Mesh Complexity: 90
Mesh resolution: 2 meters
Texture Resolution: 15 centimeters
Water Effects: Max 2.x
Land Detail Textures: checked.

The scenery objects in this sim are no picnic for your computer to generate. The options are all found on the other side of this page. Scenery complexity governs the amount of 'custom' buildings generated. That is, if there are buildings that are unique to a certain location, like the Space Needle in Seattle, WA, they will appear if the slider is high enough. Higher setting equals more unique buildings and landmarks. Mine is set to Very Dense, with Extremely Dense being the highest. Autogen Density is all about generic buildings to fill up the space. FSX doesn't duplicate every little house and store in a given area, so the less-than-famous structures are placed into this category. The higher the slider goes, the more generic stuff you'll see. This includes trees and vegetation as well. Mine is set to Dense. REMEMBER that this setting is forcing FSX to draw a LOT of models (hundreds, if not thousands in a given space). If you had to pick one setting that would kill your frame rate, this would be IT! Use wisely.

Ground scenery shadows is obvious. I don't have it turned on, because it seems that only certain objects will cast shadows. This inconsistency made me decide to save the frames per second for something else. The last slider is for special effects detail. I maxed this one out, because I like the look of good smoke (though I try to avoid it in an airplane...) and improved water interaction with the sea-faring aircraft. There is a noticeable difference in game performance with these effects active, but they are nice enough to warrant that sacrifice.

Weather:

The cloud draw distance can go quite high, but I keep it at the minimum, which is 60 miles. Especially if you keep detailed clouds, forcing the GPU to draw more of them than is needed will greatly affect playability. Thermal visualization has no impact other than to show you were the best spots for soaring in your glider are. Not exactly a shot at realism, but then again, neither is having a spot view. Downloading weather data periodically will cause occasional stutters on your machine if you don't have many spare CPU cycles left over, so I usually keep it off. You can also disable turbulence effects, which I have chosen not to do, since I like to get banged around a bit, and it doesn't help your soaring skills when there are no thermals. This will take up a few more cycles as it adds extra variables to the flight model, but is overall a nice, low-impact feature to have around. The rate at which the weather changes can greatly reduce performance if set too high. Developing weather systems (especially stormy ones) can really ruin your day if your settings are already maxed out. I keep mine on 'Low' to keep things interesting while assuring fair warning of a performance-killing snowstorm.

Choosing between detailed or simple clouds is a no-brainer for me. The detailed clouds are a big resource hog, but are vastly superior in looks to the simple ones. Cloud coverage density is pretty obvious. If you want the detailed clouds but are having really slow visuals, try fiddling with this setting to ease the tension. My slider is maxed, though it could stand to come down a notch to give me smoother gameplay.

Traffic:

Traffic settings are all about preference. If you just wanna buzz around and not really be a part of the airport environment, you'll probably want to tone it down and get a nice performance benefit. If you are all about being a virtual airline pilot on the other hand, nothing gets better than a busy airport.

Airline traffic, GA traffic and airport vehicle density are all scalable. You can also generate automobile traffic, ships/ferries and leisure boats as well. Let me tell you, putting all of the sliders to the top makes for on heck of a busy sim. However, you'd better have the horsepower to keep up with it. Remember what I said about the GPU having to draw a lot of models? This is the cream of the crop for model count. It would be nice to add all of the models and have the game still be playable because of the realism factor, but this poor system just cannot handle it. Adjust to your taste. The aircraft labels are inconsequential. Do what you like with them.


That is all for the in game settings. I told you we'd return to the topic of texture filtering and anti-aliasing. In your video card driver menu (nVidia uses the nVidia Control Panel as of this writing) you'll have an array of options that your card natively supports. ATi will have similar utilities. I am using the most current drivers, and the following applicable options are selected in the 3D settings:

Anisotropic filtering: 8x
Anti-aliasing - Setting: 4x
Anti-aliasing - Transparency: Multisampling
Force Mipmaps: Bilinear
Threaded Optimization: On

There are many more options available in that menu, but these are the important ones. While some things are disabled in the game, the video card is now applying these settings globally and much more efficiently than the game did. Not only can I achieve the desired texture filtering and anti-aliasing modes, but I can also select things like mipmaps to make texture loading a more forgiving process. Dive into those settings and tinker with them. Everything is reversible, so if you run into a problem, you can just go back and reset the defaults. I have not been affected by any instability in FSX with these settings.

The last one I'll mention is a tweak that can be found in guides across the internet. In order to utilize more of your video memory as a sort of prefetch utility, you need to open up the fsx.cfg file. Make a backup to store somewhere before you do any editing.

You are looking for this entry. If it isn't there already, type it in yourself at the very bottom of the page:

[BufferPools]
PoolSize=1000000

That number denotes the amount of video memory dedicated to remembering recent textures that were on screen. Increase that number to increase its allocation. I use 5000000, and it seems to smooth out panning views by a great deal. Play with different values and see what you get.

By implementing all of these, I get a reasonable 20-30 FPS with a high degree of graphical detail. I am running FSX SP1 with no add-on scenery or aircraft.

That is all I have for now. I won't add many tweaks to this guide, simply because they are already out there. If, however, I do notice a new trick with the sliders or a nice performance shortcut, I'll add it as necessary. Enjoy your flight!

[perkster]

amazing post hitchface, many thanks for posting all that info, great to see other FSX players settings and such, Its key as you say to know which setting really make the impact on the game play and which ones to tone down, as I tried it on max and it was choppy to say the least, then I took most stuff down to medium and it was fine but not looking very good, so getting the balance is what i really want. Will try your settings and nvidia trick and changing configuration file tonight and let you know how it goes. Might be able to slightly push more out of some settings than your rig, but will try with your exact settings first.

[blue60007]

Excellent post HF! I don't have FSX installed on this computer, but I'll have to give these tweaks a try some time.

[hitchface]

I'm really glad you both enjoyed it. A couple of notes:

You might wanna keep this page open as you do your tweaks/settings. Just Alt-Tab between the two...it'll save some headache if you can have a reference along side you, since there are so many options.

Also, this guide is simply showing what I have discovered about each setting/slider/tab. It is by no means complete, and if you have conflicting ideas or results, bring them up. That way we can encourage testing among multiple configurations and enhance the usefulness of this guide.

I have found that the biggest problem is that people tend to just try and set global settings for the 5 major categories in this game, and often get disappointed. With the complexity of this sim, you HAVE to take the time to work through all of the settings and discover what you can do without and what you need. I am a pilot, so I do have a great deal of personal taste going into this guide.

Anyways, this is long enough without me adding stuff. Glad you guys liked it.

[perkster]

having used it (printed it and followed it).

the only things id mention is:

you don't state what you think good traffic settings are, so i left them at game default.

The FSX.cfg file is hidden and in application data user folder, i had to view hidden files and search computer for it as had no idea where it was, thought it might be in program files game directory.

but did it all and will test the results over next few days.

[hitchface]

Right you are on all accounts.

I keep my traffic settings completely off for the most part. I don't want the sim to worry about drawing additional models because I want to free up resources for the rest. All your choice though.

And yes, the fsx.cfg file is hidden quite well. A simple search for it will bring it up.

[fink]

I followed your suggestions and noted better performance. But I might still have a bottleneck since it does not run smoothly at all - seems to me that loading ground textures takes too long and the plan seems to stop in the air every 30s or so :-(
What I would like an advice for is the fact that it does not work on my system to apply anti-aliasing and texture filtering settings in the nvidia control panel. It simply does not do anything until I enable e.g. anti-aliasing in the FSX settings.
My system should run better:
AMD x64 X2 6000+ EE
4GB RAM (3070MB usable)
nvidia 8800GT graphics
SATA system disk, FSX on a RAID-0 stripeset of SATA disks

thx for any help!

Fink

[hitchface]

Hey fink, and welcome to PCMech. The only thing I can think of is this: In your video card settings, you need to be in the "Adjust Settings with Image Preview" window. There, you'll have 3 options. They are to let the 3d application decide, use advanced 3d image settings, or use my preference emphasizing (quality or performance). You need to have the second one selected, so that the video card actually enforces the settings you chose.

Do that and see what happens!

[fink]

Hi, and thank you for that hint. I folllowed this, no change so far.
The real issue seems to sit somewhere else. I have a pattern now.
With all graphics and scenery set to highest settings I can fly smoothly at 30 frames/s - for 15s. Then the stuttering comes for 5-10s and then again I have 15-20s of smooth flying.

It gets better when I reduce settings but I have to go down to "minimal" in Scenery to make it go away. And even then, there is a stuttering from time to time...This does not meet my expectations so far, to say the least (and I mean my graphics card, not your posting )

I tweaked it a little bit more with FlusiFix, a great tool from a German programmer. Overall I can fly very smoothly with a nice plane in a desert landscape

Q: When I change settings in NV control panel and switch back to FSX, should the settings be effective immediately or do I have to restart FSX?

thx again, Fink

[hitchface]

They should take effect immediately. Try restarting FSX anyways to see what happens, but it won't likely fix anything.

It is starting to sound like the problem is elsewhere, like in resource management. What OS do you run, and how many processes are going? Has something similar to this happened in other games, even if barely noticeable?

[fink]

I am running Vista Ultimate 32 Bit with SP1. Latest nvidia drivers.
FSX SP2, no add-ons
everything else is shut down (antivir, messenger etc.)

I can't change it: When I disable AA in FSX, there is no AA at all, even if I choose 16x or whatever in NV control panel (tried "extend app settings" as well as "overwrite"). The same holds true for filtering.

You wrote that you are running FSX SP1, maybe that's the difference.

regards, Fink

[perkster]

i had to downgrade scenery options a bit from your settings to run smooth on my rig, but i guess that confirms the 8600 isnt good for gaming, may upgrade to 8800GT

[hitchface]

I'm still a little stumped for fink's situation. My wifes Vista lappy has some serious resource management problems, which might explain the stutters, but the fact that he can't change the settings on his card almost completely defeats the purpose of having settings there at all.

Don't worry fink, I'm workin' on it

[fink]

hey, thank you for taking care of this

Last night I worked on it until 3 in the morning. Here's what I got:
I can now fly at 25 fps, stuttering sets in after more than a minute and disappears for another minute. I can fly and land and the experience is quite good.
I have the scenery settings on "high" now. That is enough for me.
Everything else on far right.
AA still in FSX, still can't make my NV card to overwrite it.
May it have something to do with my DataColor Spyder calibration software running (it writes to the cards LUT)?

My tweaks:

[Display]
TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=400 -> this seemed to have the best effect
UPPER_FRAMERATE_LIMIT=25
WideViewAspect=True
ForceFullScreenVSync=False -> not sure if required
ForceVSync=False -> not sure if required

[Main]
FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION=0.35 -> this one helped to make smooth phases longer

[BufferPools]
PoolSize=10000000 -> good for curve flying

[JOBSCHEDULER]
AffinityMask=0011 -> not sure, did not see a difference in performance meter (1 core sleeps and then jumps to 100%, the same moment my frame rate goes down)

regards, Fink

[hitchface]

Is there a performance improvement when AA and AF are off in FSX?

[fink]

yes, there is. but only a bit, since the hardware does AA quite seemless.

But the downsides are squares instead of a smooth textures and lines like in FS1
And the regular stutter doesn't stop neither.

[fink]

Hi Hitchface et al,
great news: I solved all issues.
bad news: it is worse than expected...

After tweaking around half of my hard-earned Sunday, I decided to use some spare space on my drive to install a fresh Vista. As an additional challenge, I chose the x64 version.

After installing FSX RTM, I was stunned by the performance. I could fly at 20fps in all areas at high settings, and the best: no stutter at all. Framerate was amazingly constant. I never had that much fun with FS before (and I've been using it since version 1.0).

OK, so I thougth that my "old" Vista installation was somehow broken and began to make plans for a reinstall.
But the best was yet to come.

I installed FSX SP1, startet at Boeing Field in Seattle and before I even saw the downtown skyline, I had my first drop to 3 fps. And then it was the old game: 30s smooth flying, then 10s of stutter.
Guess what, it did not get better with SP2. I gained 1 frame or two in top fps but the stutter did not go away.

OK, logical next step: uninstall the service packs. And voila: smooth flying is here again.
Don't know yet what they messed up but I will live with the RTM version from now on. And I will save the money for the Acceleration Pack, too (since this would bring SP2 back to my hard disk).

I am so happy that I just started RTM before installing the service packs (what I usually do right after the DVD install).

Needless to say that I uninstalled the SPs on my x86 installation and had the same effect: constant frame rate. Now I can go on the hunt for additional fps

And I also solved the other issue with the NV settings.

This simply does not work if you have Vista, FSX SP2 and you enable "preview DirectX 10". If you disable this, you only have to enable some filtering (e.g. bilinear) and then NV takes over.

Besides that, FSX did not run faster on Vista x64. I did not really expect that, though.

best regards, I hope to help others to enjoy this great game!

Fink

[fink]

And now for the real solution:
Guess how you get rid of all the stutter and fly smooth at Ultra-high:
DISABLE MULTICORE.

I read a lot about SP1 and the support for multicore and the breakdowns in fps always were coincident with a fully loaded 2nd core. So I made the math and tested it.
I installed SP1 and disabled multicore with:
[JOBSCHEDULER]
AffinityMask=0001

(If you prefer to put the load on the other core, use the 0010 mask :-)

And that was it! I had the performance improvements of SP1 and 2 and the same smooth experience as on RTM.

I am in contact with some aces to find out what's behind that, but for now I am a very happy pilot!

best regards,
Fink

[hitchface]

Excellent to hear fink! I know I have multicore still enabled on this machine...I'll have to see what happens if I disable it. More to come.