FRAME RATES AGAIN

[cianpars]

Can anybody help? I thought I had a decent system:

XP2600
Geforce 5200
512 Meg memory
1024 X 768
FS9

But frame-rates are appalling. With no traffic, no weather, standard scenery flying at a fairly sparse airport like Bristol UK I’m getting 11 to 14 fps. Any sign of a cloud and frame-rates start to drop further. Even think about detailed clouds and we’re down to 2 or 3 fps.

Going down to 800 X 600 will give me 1 or 2 extra fps at best. What can be wrong?

Virus checker is off and a clean boot makes no difference.

How good is a XP2600 supposed to be (compared with a 2.6 pentium)?

[DemolitionMan]

I'd say that you graphic card is the weak point in your system,assuming that everything else is OK (Drivers etc)I'm assuming that your mobo is new enough to run at 333fsb?,the XP2600 T'Bred "B" is much slower at 266fsb.
Best,
Grahame (EDHL)

XP Pro
Albatron KX18D Pro2
XP 2700
1Gb Infinion PC2700
Asus FX5600 128mb
WD 60GB 7200
Samsung 80GB 7200
SB Audigy 2
Chieftech case
Antec True Power 480W PSU
Titan+Pabst cooling

[mariosunshine]

Although your graphic card is weak, I'm pretty sure it's not the cause for the low frame rates, I had a ATI Radeon 9200, which is still a weaker card than the 5200 and a Pentium 4 2.6 HT with an average framerate between 15-23 Fps ( now i have a 5700 Ultra and a average between 20-30 FPS with sliders at very dense, at Bristol i Get 41 FPS with ultimate Traffic installed and 80 % traffic) , your processor should be more than sufficient to handle fs 9 at decent rates, ( between 15-20 Fps minimum) check the following

1) Be sure not to run any programms in the background, you may use a little programm called Enditall which is free and helped me a lot ( even with Windows XP!!)( check you startup programs!

2) check the size of your pagefile with the system adminitrator, sometimes huge pagefiles slow down the sistem

3) are you using addon planes? or mesh scenerys?

4) try another Nvidia driver, if you have 45.23 try 52.16, or the other way round. deinstall and reinstall the video card driver.

5) check the advanced settings of the video card, maybe you have Anti Aliasing and AF enabled, which can cut the perfomance down to the 4th part of the normal.

6) if you had another video card before or an onboard card, check the previos driver have been removed

7) check if your video card is running for some reason in software rendering mode, be sure hardware accelaration is enabled.

8) unplug and deinstall the joystick, see if this helps, uninstall other hardware drivers and check one by one for conflicts

9) if all fails, reformat your harddisk from the bottom and reinstall FS9

Hope this helps

[cianpars]

Thanks for the info.....AA is clearly the problem (AF doesn't have too much affect on my rates). Only problem is that the graphics are so lousy without AA so I guess I'm going to have to live with it.

All add on scenery, planes etc have been disabled.

Downloading a graphics driver on a pay as you go modem is a bit of a bind too.

Sound card and joystick not a problem. have disabled these withot any affect.

Clouds seem to be the big problem. Traffic does not seem to have too bad an affect. I am told that there are some alternative cloud textures which may improve things but not sure which one to use.

[Boogie]

You can get around most of the effect of turning off AA by increasing your screen resolution to the highest you can, without much of a hit on frame rates.

The FPS-friendly clouds are in the file FpsAndFix.zip, which should be available at Avsim. Also, be sure to reduce your 3d clouds - I have mine at 30%.

Hope this helps,

Boogie.

[Boogie]

For the latest FPS-friendly clouds, see this thread:

http://www.flightsim.com/dcforum/DCForumID21/10023.html

Boogie.

[cianpars]

Thanks for that

Eventually downloaded the graphics driver and the frame rate friendly clouds. Big big improvements all round and now getting 20 f p s most of the time though it drops to under 10 inside 8/8 cumulus.

I think overclocking the 2600 to 2800 helped a bit.

have found that AA set at 2 and AF set at 2 seems to be a good compromise between performance and quality.

What benefits do you think an extra 1/2 gig of RAM might have?