TweakFPS For FSX

By Andrew Herd (10 February 2007)

nce upon a time, the appearance of a new version of Flight Simulator meant it was time to for us all to upgrade our PCs, but FS2004 lulled us into a sense of false security by making more efficient use of silicon than its predecessor did. Between you and me, I found it so disturbing that FS2004 didn't reduce my PC to its knees that I had to go into therapy for weeks, so I am glad to be able to say that Microsoft traditions have reasserted themselves and that to use FSX is to be aware that a faster system is necessary.

And a new operating system.

And a new, DirectX 10 compatible video card.

And the suspicion that somewhere along the line, expensive though FSX appears to be at first sight, that it is a small part of the total investment that will be needed to enjoy it to the full. No doubt when Vista comes along, half our control systems will turn out to be incompatible with it, but that is the fun of flight simulation - you just get everything running to your satisfaction and then Microsoft spoil it all by releasing a new version of the sim.

Come to think of it, buying a copy of FSX is a bit like owning a real airplane - it hurts having to pay to fill up the tank after a flight, but fuel is only the tip of the iceberg, the remainder of which is made up of insurance, hangarage and maintenance. Those bills come later, which explains why so many GA pilots are prepared to fly a hundred miles for a free burger.

So maybe FSX really is as real as it gets, if only from the point of view of cost (-:

Amazing what can go on in a fevered imagination... anyway, let's talk about frame rates and the jitters. Just about everybody reading this who has ever loaded a copy of FSX will be all too aware of the downward pressure the new version of the sim exerts on frame rates and many readers will have spent hours fiddling about with the display settings in an attempt to make their copy of the sim run at something approaching a reasonable rate. I guess on the one hand we ought to be glad that Microsoft have coded FSX with a view to longevity, but on the other, it kind of makes you wonder why they didn't at the very least wait until Vista had released and DirectX 10 capable cards had fallen to price levels somewhere on this side of the tropopause, but then again, we will have forgotten all about it in eighteen months' time, at which point we will be eagerly waiting for the next version of Flight Simulator, at which point the cycle will begin all over again.

In the meantime, survival is on the menu. From the email I get, I know a lot of people are having trouble extracting any kind of performance out of FSX, a situation which is not helped by the fact that the learning center has a zillion words on absolutely anything bar how to make the game go faster. There is a small section on performance tuning, but it is hardly comprehensive and I gain the impression that whoever wrote it didn't want to draw attention to the fact that FSX is a performance hog on Windows XP. Quite why they didn't come up front and say so, I have no idea, because 100% of the user base discover the issue thirty seconds after loading the default flight - few words of encouragement would have been welcome, even if that encouragement was to wait for Vista and save up for a new video card.

On which note, I sincerely hope that Vista and DirectX 10 do solve the frame rate issues, or I am going to buy a Mac (-:

Which takes me back to what I am supposed to be doing, which is reviewing TweakFPS for FSX. TweakFPS is a tool for those who have to deal with FSX in the here and now on existing hardware and not in some soft-focus quad-core future where frame rates habitually run in the high fifties - what this neat little app does is to optimize the display settings for the sim so that it runs as fast as possible, or at least at the best possible compromise between speed and quality, without sentencing you to rolling up your sleeves and guddling around in the depths of the display settings dialogs. Sure, I know that it isn't that difficult to get the settings right if you know what you are doing, but when you bear in mind that it took me about a fortnight to figure out how to fine tune my system to run FSX at its best, a lot of folk are going take much longer and some will give up, because even if you can work out what needs to be done, testing it means spending many hours sat rabbit-faced in front of the FSX 'loading' dialog. TweakFPS takes all the pain out of display setup and gives you a menu of presets, labelled in good old plain English, using descriptions along the lines of 'IFR - best performance' which anyone who can put a DVD in a drive ought to be able to understand it.

TweakFPS is available on CD, but it is also there as a download amounting to only a few megabytes, so even if you have don't have broadband you shouldn't have any problems getting hold of it. The installation follows the usual convention of requiring a key to be entered to unlock the product and a quick check of the Start Menu showed a new entry with a link to the app, as well as a desktop shortcut; I did the review on XP, for what it is worth. The app itself boots almost instantaneously, to reveal a neat main screen with a row of buttons for scenery modes down the left and various other choices along the top.

Using TweakFPS is about as simple as can be - all you have to do is launch the app, choose a scenery mode, hit apply and then press the FSX button to launch the sim. If you always do the same type of flying in FSX, then there once you have used it to set things up that first time, there is no need to use TweakFPS ever again, as the settings are permanently written to the fsx.cfg file, but if you wanted to do some IFR practice today after a VFR session yesterday, then you would launch TweakFPS again and select one of the IFR modes; it really is that simple.

At this point, experienced simmers will point to FSX's ability to save named sets of user-defined display settings and reload them on demand, which is an entirely new feature of the sim - possibly inspired by the popularity of TweakFPS for FS2004. It is true that if you know what you are doing, you don't need TweakFPS, because a little bit of experimentation should allow you to build and save your own display settings sets; the advantage of using FSX's native display settings stash being that you can reload them while FSX is running, whereas changing them with TweakFPS involves exiting and restarting Flight Simulator. This would be the death knell of TweakFPS were it not for the fact that it takes a hell of a long time to work out what the best FSX settings for different types of flight might be - TweakFPS does all the hard work for you and, as I remarked earlier, it saves inexperienced users from having to thrash through the less than self-explanatory FSX display settings dialogs, which, it is rumored, were coded by the Chief Inquisitor. In my experience, TweakFPS works.

There isn't much more to say about the app, beyond a brief run through its various features. The version I reviewed had seven display settings presets in addition to one which allows you to restore the original fsx.cfg file and go back to the way things were, although I would expect you will not. The choices of display preset on the main screen are:

1. IFR - Best Performance (autogen and AI traffic turned off, scenery and weather settings at lowest values, optimised for smooth instrument function and a responsive flight model.

2. IFR - AI traffic (as above, but with AI traffic maxed)

3. VFR - Screenshot (everything maxed for best quality, but worst frame rates)

4. VFR - Normal (average values for most display settings)

5. Aerobatic - Inside view (autogen and AI traffic off, weather, scenery and aircraft textures set to low)

6. Aerobatic - Outside view (as above, but scenery and aircraft textures maxed, because you will be looking at them)

7. MegaScenery (optimised for flying over and viewing MegaScenery products)

Useful though these presets are, they are only example and TweakFPS' real use is to allow users to fine-tune their FSX visual environment in a safe sand-box, while leaving the door open for deeper manipulation. In the final analysis, it doesn't matter what outrages you commit on the fsx.cfg file, because TweakFPS always provides access to a pristine backup of the original, leaving you free to experiment to your heart's content.

The config screen lets you fine tune and save altered settings for each of the TweakFPS display presets without having to start up FSX, which even experienced users will find quite useful. This is where TweakFPS gets into experienced user territory, because to quote an example at random, you are presented with stuff like 'LOD_RADIUS' and a value of 4.5 and lots of zeros attached to it. This is the point at which it is very easy to get tired and emotional while doing config file edits, but if you double click the line and hover the cursor over the data entry box that appears, a help balloon pops up and tells you what the range information on the value is - at the very least you aren't left completely in the dark, but it would enhance the product greatly if there was even a minimal explanation of what each value does. This might be one for the help file, because I gather that ballon help has a 129 character limit.

The settings screen lets you choose a default flight to launch FSX with, or to launch the game without a flight loaded, so you can set one up yourself. There are a wealth of other options on this screen, mostly related to TweakFPS housekeeping and many of them will prove useful to experienced simmers. Notable among these are the ability to load the FPS counter in FSX (the way to see the ordinary frame rate counter is to hit shift-z a few times, but on the whole, the average frame rate counter is more useful, since it shows highs and lows as well as the average) and to launch the fsx.cfg file so that you can manually edit it. You might ask why this last option is provided, but when I read through the help file I was interested to find some stuff even I was unaware of, so the developer has clearly done his homework.

Verdict? Worth serious consideration if you are new to Flight Simulator and are having trouble getting FSX to run smoothly - even moderately experienced simmers will benefit and the price isn't likely to break the bank. The basic screens have been designed to help newbies get acceptable frame rates in the easiest possible way, while the deeper levels let experts make alerations quickly, without having to fight their way though complex folder structures.