Frame rates any airport bad!

[Tristar35]

The piece was written in 2005 by a chap called Steve Lacey, whom I took to be one of Microsoft's developers. You can see immediately that his suggestions are a bit dated now but here it is for curiosity and who knows, maybe it will help.

 

From the defunct http://www.steve-lacey.com/category/flightsim/

 

***

 

 

Ok gather around … I have a little treat for you tweakers.

 

Before I get into this I want you to understand that if you believe 40+ frames are necessary for smooth flight and great scenery – or- you believe running ‘unlimited’ on the frame lock and nothing else… this tweak is not for you and there is probably nothing I can do to convince you that your 7900GTX does not need to be locked @ or above 38-45FPS. (Note: the unlimited frame trick does work but NOT for most systems)

 

 

Understand that blurry textures and stutters come from both the same source and difference sources all at once. Assuming you have a good CLEAN system which you have tweaked and optimized so you're not running all sorts of programs in startup and you have a good base to work from… try this:

 

The TEXTURE BANDWIDTH MULTIPLIER is just that. It multiplies, just like it says.

 

The mystery is, what does it multiply? Well, it multiplies loading a specified number of 256x256 ground textures (in file kb size depending on what ground textures you use) AND it calculates a load for the rendering engine to analyse based on the frame lock.

 

So the question is… where is that specified number?

 

Here it is:

 

TextureMaxLoad=X

 

Never seen that one? If you haven’t don’t be surprised because it is a Microsoft developers' edit which is undocumented. The DEFAULT value when the line is not present in the FS9.cfg file is 3.

 

And the formula the system produces is:

 

TextureMaxLoad -MULTIPLED BY - TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT – DIVIDED BY – FRAME LOCK = X

 

Now that you know this, how does that help?

 

Immensely!

 

Knowing that, I will go on to say the TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT does NOT require a set number or to be a factor of anything. Although it is best this number remain a divisible by 20 the number used for the TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT is not set in stone and it is completely based on the system being tweaked.

 

Assuming you have a x800 (or fairly close) or greater performance type card, -and- a DECENT supporting motherboard/memory/CPU... AND your Flight Sim works good but it is not as smooth or does not display the scenery as well as you would like… or you just want to play and have some fun, try the following.

 

First, save a copy of your FS9.cfg file for safe keeping.

 

Next, open your FS9.cfg and edit the following

 

TextureMaxLoad =X

 

 

……directly under the TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT= entry in you cfg file.

 

 

I will make this easy and without going into a lot of chatter about testing and tweaking because I cannot possibly tweak these numbers without sitting in front of the system.

 

 

Start with these values:

 

 

TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=100

TextureMaxLoad =10

 

 

YOUR FRAME LOCK MUST BE REDUCED OR THIS WON’T WORK.

 

For x800 – x1600 and comparable Nvidia cards, lock your frame @ 22

 

You read right… 22 (you might be able to nudge it up to 24 after its tweaked)

 

 

For x850xt and comparable Nvidia, lock it @ 25

 

For x1800 and comparable Nvidia cards, lock it @ 28

For x1900 and 7900GT – GTX, lock it @ 30

 

Set your PAN_RATE= to either 600 or 700 for any card (your choice)

 

For x800 – x850 x1600 and comparable Nvidia cards, disable SHADOWS in the sim. Others can test it to see how it does. The cards I mentioned can also test it but if you are not using a GOOD set of properly designed DX3 clouds such as found in FLIGHT Environment, I would leave shadows disabled. Test using "Building Storms" so you can judge the full load properly.

 

THIS TWEAK assumes you know how to correctly set up your video drivers and have all the FS9 SCENERY sliders maxed and all boxes checked (except shadows for those I mentioned above) and correctly set up your cloud sliders (60 -40 – 100 with Detailed Clouds and 100% maximum density) AA disabled in the sim and the rest of the display settings correct.

 

When you first boot … DON’T judge the tweak until you fly around for a bit. It will most likely need to be adjusted.

 

If you have blurry scenery most likely the frame lock is too high. ONLY drop it by 1 to test.

 

Also, I would NOT exceed 10 as the value for TextureMaxLoad =X Good values are (3 default) 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10… but it WILL go higher. If you experience stutters, DROP the

TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT= from 100 to 80.

 

Assuming the TextureMaxLoad = 5 or GREATER, I would not go any higher than 120 on the TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT no matter WHAT you have learned in the past about that setting… most of which was the max value being 400.

 

You guys with the right video cards but slower systems may want to work with LOWER TextureMaxLoad values and HIGHER TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT values.

 

 

The idea is to find the spot where your ground textures load in a flash with no stutters when changing views over an area your flying in for the first time during a flight. With the extra time after that flash load the sim can start using the correct calculations to start sharpening and displaying them further away.

 

 

You will need to work with this setting.. It’s REALLY a gem once you learn how to CORRECTLY set up the FS9.cfg by understanding how the sim works.

 

***

 

My gripe about the maths is that he states:

 

TextureMaxLoad -MULTIPLED BY - TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT – DIVIDED BY – FRAME LOCK = X

 

and:

 

TextureMaxLoad =X

 

which means that:

 

X multiplied by TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT divided by FRAME LOCK = X

 

which means that...

 

TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT divided by FRAME LOCK = 1

 

which means that:

 

TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT = FRAME LOCK

 

***

 

On my old Win XP machine I saw some improvement in landclass and photoscenery load times by altering these values but last night I experimented on my Win 10 machine and saw no difference with values of...

 

TextureMaxLoad from 1 to 132

 

TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT from 64 to 25600

 

but then over the ocean I've had framerates up to "D25" in the Shift+Z info top left of the FS window so perhaps I'm simply not seeing what may have become a relatively tiny improvement. I don't know...

 

D

 

 

I recently tried out some of the tricks which were posted in there, reinstalled Bill's Honolulu V5 to see what would happen, and only ended up getting a very minor improvement to my fps. Appears though that if anything, it is the lack of LOD/spawn control in Bill's trees within HonoluluV5 that cause the biggest loss of fps for me. Though without access to the editable files which Bill worked in before compiling to .bgl, there's not much anyone can do on that front.

 

On the subject of LOD control, while I cannot speak for the OP of this thread, I do know that certain scenery for fs2004, specifically the very recent Seattle airport addons on the flightsim library, have lowered my fps slightly on my system as they lack any LOD control. Thus, I could be flying around Seattle Tacoma and well beyond the max distance for said scenery to spawn in. However, the moment I get the sim to register that I am just within range of when the scenery could be barely visible in the distance, poof!, the entire thing spawns in. Even though it is only visible to me at that moment as a couple of pixels on my screen. Resulting in a somewhat noticeable fps decrease as I fly around.

 

Perhaps this is a sign of the flightsim community finally starting to discover what the actual limitations of fs2004 are.

[defaid]

Perhaps this is a sign of the flightsim community finally starting to discover what the actual limitations of fs2004 are.

 

... nearly twenty years of beta-testing and we're almost there :D