Fs9 disk partition improves FPS

[kmentt]

Hi,
I am throwing this one to see if anyone tried it.
One friend of mine met a Micrsosft employee who also is a fan player of Fs9. He says fps improves a lot if you partition your HD to a size just over your pagefile.

What its still not clear to me if this partition should be the total size of your Fs9 (mine is over 1.5G) or if its just need to be the pagefile size and run the fs9.exe from there?

Has anyone tried anykind of dedicated partition?
Does it make sense?

thanks
Luis

[zoynyne]

This is a win95 era tactic that had a bit of validity back then, but is pretty much useless today. It does nothing for fps, but it could affect stutter, and therefore AVERAGE fps.

If you had a primary partition that was all fragged up and you didn't defrag it, and then tried installing FS on another partition that was clean you'd possibly see a difference, but you'd see more of a difference by merely defragging the primary partition because you'd not only clean up the FS installation, but the operating system files as well.

Putting the PAGEFILE on another partition on ANOTHER DRIVE ON ANOTHER IDE CHANNEL can smooth things out a very tiny bit, but again does nothing to increase fps. It COULD reduce stutter a bit, and therefore increase AVERAGE fps.

But basically I'll tell you right now; you're better off simply buying more RAM than playing around with multiple partitions, multiple drives, and alternate pagefile locations.

You can play around with that stuff for days on end, and you're not going to see any improvements beyond 1 or 2 percent overall.

In the old days tricks like this might have been good for improvements in the 5 to 10 percent range. Maybe...

Not on newer hardware and newer operating systems though.

If you're really hell bent on increasing fps without spending a penny there's basically only two ways it can happen.

Either by correcting improperly set BIOS parameters, or via device driver experimentation.

There ARE times that you find drivers for your mobo/videcard/soundcard/etc. that result in some pretty unexpected performance increases.

Of course I'll leave out the third and obvious way - not running background stuff, keeping the system generally healthy, etc...

And the fourth and really obvious way - not dragging sliders too far to the right...

[TheFlightMan]

I've read several articles about this and the performace increase you will see is about 1 go 3 percent, not worth the extra headache. FS9 is a tricky game if you really look at it, you will find postings in this forum of users with high end systems that are encountering performance problems.

It all comes down to how your system is setup as far as what is installed and running while FS9 is being used. Another thing people mention is to disable services or modify BIOS settings, again, the performance difference here is minimal to nothing. Start with a low setting and adjust them accordingly until you find a spot where it is decent for you. Along the way, you might have to sacrifice a thing or two if you have a lower end system but you can accomplish satisfactory results.

For me, the big difference came when I upgraded my video card a second time around. I started with a 5600 Ultra thinking it was a good card, however, that quickly changed after I sold it and purchased a 5900XT from MSI. I now have way better image quality and double the performance. So to sum it all up, its a balancing act between your hardware and the game settings.

TheFlightMan

[kmentt]

Thanks guys for both explanations.
I will stick to my one drive/one partition.
In the end I dont find fps so bad, I consider myself a lucky one, because I have a middle tech pc and still get very good fps even with max textute clouds and 60% 3d clouds, everything else maxed except dynamic scenery. Anti-aliasing in 2xQ in video card. I get anywhere from 12 to 21 fps even on 76m landclass scenery.

Since I see people here with better video cards and processors, I guess my setting are already well adjusted

Luis Kmentt
AMD Athlon 1G
768mb ram 64 mb nvidiaGeforce4
FF2 joystick

[kc10]

Partitioning is so highly over-rated. The only real benefit these days is maybe salvaging some of your data in the event of a hd crash. I think you would see some gains with multiple drives with the right data stored in the right locations (ie. the OS, pagefile, FS, etc).And even then we're not talking much higher FPS, but rather other types of performance gains.

[heyer]

>Partitioning is so highly over-rated. The only real benefit
>these days is maybe salvaging some of your data in the event
>of a hd crash.

:-hmmm If a harddisk crashes it crashes regardless how many partitions have been on it. After a real harddisk hardware crash the data's gone no matter if there have been a hundred logical drives or just one.

[kc10]

Yeah I shouldn't have said crash, but here's one example of what I mean,very similar to what I went thru once on my last pc:

It started with strange noises, then random locks ups (rebooting sorted the problem out).
I turned on the machine and tried to run a program from within windows. Now the Icon for the program was there but when windows tried to run the program it froze completely. Another reboot and Win98 got to the splash screen and it froze. Repeated attempts at rebooting resulted in the same.
I removed my IDE lead from my Hard Disk (Suspecting a problem) and low and behold, Windows booted fine (with blank icons representing those that were associated with programs on my E and F drives (my faulty drive fragmentations). Now E: had all my music, mixes, 10 gb of wavs and samples and 70 odd music programs.

Now i managed to retreive SOME of my important data... and heres how....

1). Booted into Windows and pressed F8
2). Choose command prompt only
3). Ran Scandisk on E: drive (which can still be accessed from a DOS PROMPT) and no problems. Ran scandisk on F: drive and....
LOCKUP. Yep, Both the scandisk and format commands caused lock-ups.My F: drive was shagged and Windows needed to access the partition as some of my desktop icons were located there.
4) Now, if my disk was NOT partitioned, i'd have been ruined, as it is i've only lost my sound samples (i can replace those).
5). Now - a theres no helpfile on Windows98 for DOS Commands - this is how you copy directories should the same thing happen to you..
6) MD D:\TRACKS (makes a directory called TRACKS, replace this with whatevers relevent)
7). XCOPY /s E:\CUBASE\TRACKS D:\TRACKS (copies the directorys and ALL their subdirectories in my okay E: drive, to the newly created directory on my other hard drive.

Data Saved, but only if you have at least two partitions, so bear this in mind.

Anyway there you go, another lock-up solution explained.

Remeber the hard disk will still need replacing as FDISK will lock up as soon as it access that bad sector/cluster or whatever caused the problem.

Remember, if you have 2 Hard Disks and boot-up problems, remove the second (not the first as this will contain your system!) drive (well, the IDE lead) and see if it boots, if so, its your hard disk.

[jasho]

Yes...I think what you are trying to get at is that if you need to re-format your HD and re-install Windows, you won't lose all your data and applications. You may need to re-install them to get certain files into the Windows or Windows\System32 folder, but for the most part, the system gets left alone while only that partition with the OS needs to be formatted. Of course, this applies to all partitions regardless if it is an OS that needs to be fixed, meaning you only have to format that partition and leave everything else alone.

~Jason

[JimmiG]

My thoughts on partitions:

Paging file:
No real advantage to having it on a separate partition.

However - It's a good idea to set a FIXED paging file size. Set Max and Min size to the same. This prevents the file from constantly growing and shrinking and reduces fragmentation. What you should set it to depends on how much RAM you have, and what you use the the computer for. I have mine set to 1.5 GB, because I play X-Plane a lot and with detailed addon sceneries, it needs lots of memory (paged or physical RAM). For most people, 512-768MB should be fine.

Also, use a disk defragmenter that support optimization of the paging file. I use and recommend PerfectDisk by Raxco.

Downloaded files:
It's a good idea to download your files to a separate partition, especially if you download many files at once or download very big files. When downloading, it writes a few KB every second which causes fragmentation, and if you use a program with Resume to download some every now and then, it gets even wrose. Place this download partition last on the disk. Performance is worse at the end of the disk (inner tracks of the spinning discs inside the harddrive unit), so use it for storage (downloaded file, music, videos etc.).

FS:
Here's how I keep my FS files organized. I have two harddrives:
Primary: 160GB Maxtor DiamondMax9 7200 RPM/8MB cache
Secondary: 120GB Western Digital 7200RPM/8MB cache
=280GB total (or 264 GB if you don't use the bogus 1KB = 1000 bytes that harddrive manufacturers use).

The primary, 160GB drive is divided into three partitions:
One "primary" partition. This is quite big and contains the WinXP OS, paging file, as well as the games and programs I use, including FS9.
The second partition contains downloaded files, music, videos, pictures, documents etc.
The third is my "experimental" partition which currently houses Slackware Linux 9.1.

The secondary, 120GB drive has two partitions:
A partition for bigger FS2004 scenery addons such as Megascenery, England+Wales VFR, France VFR etc.
The second partition is a mirror of the second partition of the primary drive and contains the exact same files. This is done so that in case I have a harddrive failure, I won't loose my important personal files or have to re-download a ton of stuff (unless BOTH drives crash at the same time which would be BAD luck).

By keeping the hundreds of thousands of small files that make up the photographic sceneries outside the main file system, file searches and defraggging of the other partitions is faster, and I can more quickly defrag my "scenery" partition when adding new sceneries.

By placing the scenery partition at the beginning of the drive, performance is much greater and loading time is reduced significantly. Harddrive are up to twice as fast as the beginning of the disk, compared to the performance at the end. That is because data on a harddrive is stored on circular discs that spin at a constant speed. It then becomes obvious that performance is better near the outer edge of the disc. Data is stored from the outer edge and inwards so the first files you placed on the drive will be read faster. On a CD, data is stored in the reverse direction. This is why in your audio CD player, the disc spins slower when you listen to the last few tracks. It slows down because the laser must pick up the audio data at a constant rate.

By keeping FS and the big sceneries on separate harddrives, performance is increased, because FS can read scenery data from one drive, and at the same time, read all the other data (sounds, aircraft models etc.) from the other.

There you have it. "Partitions Made Dificult" by JimmiG :)