Problem with XP gauges in A36

[KBR]

Dear Dreamfleet,

I have your Beech A36 and I like the plane a lot, it is a very well done plane. I am also looking forward to the model of Lou Betti's Dakota. I saw the picture of the interior of the real one in the interview with him in PC Pilot and it looks like a very nice plane.

Anyways, my problem is in regards to the XP Reality 420 and the weather radar. For some reason these more than cut in half my fps rate. I have isolated this problem to these gauges by creating an optional panel that displays just the regular avionics gauges and a freeware garmin 430 and now I am getting the full frame rate that I get with other Dreamfleet planes. I would really like to find a way to fix this as I really like the Reality XP gauges. I suspect the problem is caused by the Reality XP gauges making use of a 16bit app but am not fully sure.

Any help you might be able to provide to get around this problem would be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely

Kevin Roberts

[RealityXP]

Hi Kevin,

thank you for your valuable feedback! Can you further try putting back the Wx500 radar and compare again? Also, is this happening in the 2D panel only, in the VC only, or both?

Let me also add that an issue has been spotted and corrected in an upcoming v5.2 udpate affecting FPS when having the GNS in the VC. it is affecting only a very small fraction of the customer base (less than 1%). Nevertheless, we do care and we are trying to improve whatever we can improve!

I've also just posted a message in the Reality XP Product Support forum about NTVDM.exe:

http://www.simforums.com/forums/forum_posts.asp?TID=12864&PN=1

Hope this helps!

Jean-Luc

[KBR]

I’ll do some testing some testing tomorrow. I’ll try it with the weather radar and also determine if the problem is isolated to the vc or not. I’ll get back and let you know what I find. Thanks for your help. I'm also checking out the link to that post. I have had a feeling that NTVDM maybe the problem. Thanks again.

[RealityXP]

You may consider reading this thread, and following the directions posted:

http://www.simforums.com/forums/forum_posts.asp?TID=12864&PN=1

Hope this helps!

Jean-Luc

[KBR]

Sorry about not getting back to this when I said I would. Got a bit tied up. Here are my results. Each flight started from Emma Field. I chose this area because it is the toughest on frame rates that I know of. I waited until I was in the air and the FPS had time to stabilize before jotting down the fps.

With both the 430 and WX500;
2D- 11 fps VC- 10 fps

With only the WX500;
2D- 18 fps VC- 16 fps

With only 430;
2D- 14 fps VC- 13 fps

Without both the 430 and Wx500;
2D- 22 fps VC- 19 fps

Looking at these I come to the conclusion that the 430 is eating more frames than the wx500. Any help would be nice. I’ll also check out that site listed.

-Kevin

[KBR]

I checked out the post. Checking NTVDM's cpu usage, I noticed that it averaged only around 2%. I already have windows xp setup to launch folders in a separate process as this as eliminated most CTD which I rarely have now. I do use an AMD cpu like psionmark, but it is not 64bit. Mine is a Athlon XP2000+. Though the Athlon XP 2000+ has a clock speed of 1.7ghz, it has more processing power to the clock speed than the pentium 4 and it benchmarks in 3d software such as fs just below a Pentium 4 running at 2.4ghz. My graphic card is an ATI Radeon 9500 pro, which is similar to the Radeon 9700. I have one gigabyte of system ram. With most planes, I can achieve about 30 fps where autogen doesn't go overboard. Just thought it might help to put my system stats here.

Kevin Roberts

[RealityXP]

Hi Kevin,

Many factors can be adjusted about frame rates! first, there is a now known issue with the GNS in v5.1 affecting frame rates in the VC with some systems. v5.2 included in the Baron (and supposed to be available as an update to the A36) is supposed to help soved this.

Please note that the A36 is one of the most complex 3D model released as compared to any other available FS add-on. Combined this with high resolution textures for the best visual experience, and then, a system may just reach its limit with the A36 as compared to any other aircraft. Tuning down a couple FS parameters in the visual department or the AI traffic density may sometimes just put your system back to the other side of the performance fence, and restore a great experience. In turn, FS performance is not linear to the combination of your CPU/GFX card and complexity of the add-ons: past a threshold, it simply stalls. Finding what settings helps you stay below the threshold for a given add-on can do magic!

Hope this helps!

Jean-Luc

[jboweruk]

I too have notice an occasional issue with the Garmin GNS430, whereby it appears to crash and cannot be switched off, even when the whole avionics and battery are turned off. Then when I looked at the system resources meter the program in the background NTV>>? is using 100% of the CPU. This happened last time halfway through a 2 hour flight, so when I used Alt+Tab to check resources (I was looking at a slideshow at this point) that's what I saw, so I lowered the GNS430's native program to a lower priority which gave back the resources to FS, so increasing my FPS to a normal level.

The problem started when I attempted to activate the approach procedure after loading it, although this has happened once before while programming the GNS initially. On that occasion I exited FS and re-loaded.

Problem is not often, and have flown well over 20 hours in the A36 since without issue, so must be intermittent, just posting here in case it may help.

John