New Hardware/Poor Performance

[shortspecialbus]

Hi guys, I asked this exact question on the Ultimate Terrain forums as well, but as I'm also getting extra-poor performance at any of the flytampa airports, I figured this would be as good a place as any to ask again. I'm not blaming any of the addons, including flytampa, but I thought it'd be OK if I ask here, as I'd really like to get it solved.

I just built a new system a few days ago, as my old one was on the fritz.

Specs:
MSI K8N Diamond Plus board
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+
Sapphire ATI X1900XTX 512MB
2GB Ram (4 512 sticks, so stuck running at 333)
2 Seagate 160GB SATA 3GB drives, nvidia RAID 0
Audigy 4 Sound Card

I'm not getting the performance in FS that I think I should. I am running a
ton of addons, which I know is hard on the machine, but I think I've got a
pretty decent machine. Addons:

Scenery:
All UT sceneries
FSGenesis meshes, 38m through the buffer meshes
Ground Environment
All Flytampa Airports
Misty Fjords
Simflyers KPHX

Aircraft:
All PMDG Planes
Flight 1 C172
Dreamfleet A36
Dreamfleet B58
Dreamfleet Archer

Other:
FSPassengers
FSNav
Active Sky 6 (512x512 cloud textures)
Active Camera

I think that's about it. I'm doing my best to singlehandedly support the
Flight Sim Addon community at the expense of my bank account.

I run all sliders maxed, terrain vertex whatever 20, 1280x960x32, AA in
FS off, Trilinear Filtering, no ground/aircraft shadows, and we'll say 70%
AI, although turning it off does nothing. I've tried both 200 and 400 for
the texture load mult or whatever it is in FS9 config, I forget exactly.

Video card settings are 8xAA, 16xAF, and a few other random settings.
I'm using the Catalyst 5.19 drivers, since the 6.4 drivers gave me crazy
texture flickering all over the place in FS9.

I'm getting relatively poor performance I believe. My FPS is locked at 20,
and it often is less than that. The flight I'm currently in is somewhere
near Palm Springs at 12000 feet, not much weather around, and I'm
getting around 15fps. I was getting better performance on my old
machine (Athlon 64 3400+, GeForce 6600 GT 128)

It doens't seem to matter too much what plane I'm in, although the PMDG
737 seems to hit harder, as to be expected, but I was really expecting
better performance.

I also get stutters when I look around in the VC (I fly VC exclusively), but
they clear up until I stop looking around for a while, and then try again
later.

I don't have any blurries, however. That's one definite improvement.

Other things I've noticed: FS takes a long time before it even starts to
load the flight - it sits at 0% for the longest time, over a minute, before it
starts loading. I defragged yesterday, and it didn't make a lick of a
difference. It also takes absolutely forever for the PMDG planes to load in
the SID/STARS and such, over a minute. In the old machine it took
several seconds.

I did a complete reinstall of the entire OS and every addon onto new hard
drives, so this isn't an artifact of copying stuff over incorrectly. I've also
tried changing the affinity for the FS9 process to use only 1 processor,
while sticking Active Sky on the other one. No difference.

I'm at a loss here - I can't see any reason why my older system should be
running better than the new system. Sure, I'm taxing it with a ridiculous
amount of addons, but I had just as many before, and performance was
comparable if not better in some cases.

I also noticed that I'm dropping to 10fps or less at any of the flytampa airports, which is even worse than Simflyers KPHX!! That was in the Dreamfleet Baron and no clouds.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks a lot,

-stefan

[paavo]

You expect me to read all of that ? Just kidding.
It could be active camera http://www.simforums.com/forums/forum_p ... 14334&PN=1

It could be UT, it conflicts with every thing, but you should get better performance, my advice get an Nvidia card. I get 25-40 fps at FlyTampa airports with less of a system and all my sliders maxed, AS set to 16x and AA set at 12x. I have a ton of add ons, and mostly use the DF A36 and Baron with all the Reality Xp gauges. Try the frame rates set to unlimited.

[skydvdan]

Maybe try removing 1gb of ram just to see what happens. Are these framerates low everywhere? Try going to an area with default scenery with a default aircraft and see what happens also.

[Dimon]

UT - disable residential roads and uncheck flattering. It hits FPS very badly.

ASV - don't use those clouds that come with AS Graphics. Go and buy FE and install DTX3 textures's set. They much better in quality that ASG and FPS is more efficient that even with default clouds.

FSNAV is very buggy for FS2004 even with update. If you use sophisticated planes like PMDG get rid of these amateur navigation programs like FSNAV or FSBUILD. Go to flightaware.com and you'll have all the routes you need in USA and Canada. If you fly in Europe - use routfinder.com

UT Europe - disable industrial landclass. There might be a problem with memory leak (according to UT designers) even with patch 1.01. I'd rather be waiting for SP1 to activate Ind. Landclass.

[mito72]

Stefan, I am by no means a specs guru. But I did notice this same situation happening on my newer system

HP a1250n
Athlon 64 X2 3800+ 2.0 GHz
Memory Installed 2 GB (4 x 512)
250 GB SATA 7200 rpm
Radeon X1600 PCIE 512Mb


I kept getting crappy framerates as well until a fellow uva pilot instructed me to do a simple change in my flight simulator settings.

Settings ---->Display---->Hardware (and make sure Transform and Lighting IS checked.

this increased my framerates back to where they should have been.

Hope it helps.


Miguel

[shortspecialbus]

Thanks for the suggestions, guys!! So far, no real luck.

As I feel bad for posting this all in multiple forums, I'm going to link this over to the original discussion which has some more info in it:

http://www.simforums.com/forums/forum_p ... 16628&PN=1

Thanks a lot for the help!!

-stefan