Frame Rates becoming a real issue, but using an 8800GTX

[Chris Nineham 992809]

Hi all,

 

Looking for some advice. Im running FS2004 on a Pentium D 3.0 with 3GB's of RAM and a Geforce 8800GTX card. I'm really starting to get fustrated as at some airports such as Just Flight's Orlando, i'm getting only 7-10 FPS. At LHR with Heathrow Pro, my FPS are about 10-13. Surely there is something wrong here as im using such a high end graphics card?????????????????????????

 

Im using a Matrox triple head2go unit running three 19 inch monitors at a resolution of 3840x1024x32. Could this be where the problem lies ????

 

Any pointers or guidance would be much appreciated as i'm soon gonna go nuts!

 

All the best .... Chris

[Alexander Jespersen 921770]

Yeah the monitors can be a huge reason why your FPS are so low. With only 1 card, those three monitors are sucking all they can out of that one card. If you can afford it, get another card. Its should help. Or, do what I do, and turn the other monitors off when flying. 3 monitiors at such a high resolution all running on the same card is not good for your card. It can eventually hurt your card.

[Paul Byrne]

Hi,

 

Another option would be to reduce the resolution and depth that the monitors use. 32bit on 3 monitors with such a high res takes a lot out of your card.

 

Try the same res with 16bit on all 3 monitors or try a lower res with 32bit. See if that helps your frame rates at all.

 

For reference, I run my 2 17" monitors at 1280x1024x32 and FS9 looks great and runs locked at 30fps (with a few blips here and there) including Payware aircraft, addon scenery and VATSIM going on. Here are my specs :

 

AMD64 3700+

2Gb of Matched DDR PC3200

PCI-e ATI 256Mb X1600XT

 

Hope this helps.

 

Cheers!

Paul.

[Ross Carlson]

How do you have the displays configured? Do you have multiple out-the-window views, one on each monitor? Or do you have one view stretched across them? Or one view in the center, and pop-up panels on the sides?

[Michael Bevington 814931]

I bet he is running only one view stretched across all three monitors. I have seen those Matrox triple head2go units at the AVSIM convention running three 19 inch monitors at 3840x1024x32. It's a slide show but wow what a view with the side monitors angled in toward your head. I guess the 8800 can't even make up for the cpu speed needed to generate a 3840 pixel wide view.

[Ben Dale 956302]

Michael,

 

It's strange that you say slideshow. Maybe it's the processor not pushing enough information to the GPU fast enough. We already know that FS is very processor bound.

 

I am running a TH2Go on an Intel Core 2 Duo E6700, 2GB of fast Corsair Ram and an NVidia 8800GTX with no overclocking. I have 3 19" flat panels for my stretched outside view at 3840x1024x32 with AA and Aniso Filtering (note, can't spell that word very well, LOL). I then have a 17" flat panel for my panels at 1280x1024x32 as well. All settings are enabled within FSX and not in the Graphics driver. NVidia control panel is set to "Application Decides", so that no settings are applied directly by the driver at all.

 

With FSX and the settings that were deafult on installation, i only changed a couple of things and i am getting a very fluid 17FPS, which is good considering how many pixels my card is pushing. It's completely flyable, so flyable in fact that i have stopped worrying about FPS completely. Even installing FSInn and FSCopilot hasn't brought my FPS down.

 

The only settings i changed were to turn off Autogen, turn up the ground details so that i can still see the terminal buildings, turn off AI traffic and also all ground traffic. I haven't made any other tweaks at all. The only other thing i did was to redo my panels with FS Panel Studio so that the main panel sit's directly under the outside view screens without the window post showing, and fix the error in the XML file for the landing lights switch being in the wrong position. I also fixed the XML so that my Altimeter displays in HPa and not inches as well. It's not perfect, as i need to work out how to have the HPa display 2 decimal digits as well as the 1013 that it displays now. I guess FSX is still adjusting in inches, even though it displays in HPa.

 

I did need to create the runway scalar settings in my FSX config and use a different Halo.bmp for my taxiway lights, otherwise they are really big and blurry. I lose a little bit of visibilty on the lights when further out from the runway on approach, but i can live with this for now.

 

The only major problem with FSX on VatSim is that any FS2004 aircraft display as if they are in the ground when taxiing, as the elevation data in FSX is more accurate using the new GPS data, like Google Earth uses. I can live with this, as i am not on the ground for a long time anyway.

 

A friend of mine has a Pentium D 2.8 GHz, and his results in FSX are terrible. Mind you, he has a 256MB graphics card only and is running a single screen (which should help, as he is not pushing as many pixels as me), so maybe that's part of the problem.

 

Anyway, just my 2 cents worth.

 

Regards

Edited April 29, 2007 at 10:23 AM by Guest

[Man Hang Wong 974212]

the resolution is the reason

 

the more pixels you have, the more calculations are required.

[Ben Dale 956302]

Tony,

 

I see your point, but don't agree, as the 8800GTX on my system has no problem pumping out all those pixels. My FS is smooth and fluid.

 

I think his card is not even breaking a sweat yet. The Pentuim D processors were not renowned for their dual core abilities, as they are not truly optimized dual cores. Just a stop gap measure Intel introduced when they realized that AMD was stealing the market.

 

The Core 2 Duo, however is a pure beast. It is a true dual core and has a combined 4 MB cache. Either of the cores can use as much of the cache as they can get. Plus it runs 1 more instruction per cycle than a Pentium. All this at 2.66 GHz, and it beats even the most expensive Pentuim D and AMD dual core hands down.

 

Just my 5 cents.