Help and Advice needed please!

[Ian Drinkwater 1069808]

System:

xp home edition 2002 SP3

Intel® Pentium® 4 CPU 3.00ghz

RAM:1.5GB (DDR2)

Graphics card: NVIDIA Geforce 6500 256mb

2 hard Drives with 124GB free on the hard drive containing FS9 and FSX

C:74.5GB

F:149GB

 

I have spent time reading forum after forum about how to improve my flight sim experience however, what i am after is specific advice for my system.

 

Started off with fsx with mod settings, nothing to significant experienceing poor framerates -5-10fpm! I tweaked the cfg ie)texture bandwidth etc and followed a number of suggestions online which never really helped and i gained about 5 framerates if that. I understand that my system is most likely to blame however, i dont want to waste money on new hardware that might not be needed. After loosing all efforts with FSX, i switched back to fs2004, keeping fsx on the hard disk with still plenty of still space.

 

 

My frame rates are average, about 23 with mod settings however, it is stuttering alot in places and when I enable real world weather, the frame rates drops significantly! I have had a few connection problems (which is a different storey) flying online but when i get that working, I am dreading what the fps will be like!

 

I also like flying my add on captain 757 which i know will hit the frame rates and has done. Your proberly sick of stories like mine but all im after is a bit of advice of what parts of my system need updating as i have been through loads of tweak guides or what i can do to improve my performance

 

*I have been lately reading about driver updates for my NVIDIA 6500. Can anyone guide me as to if this is a wise idea and if it is worth doing before buying new as i have not updated my drivers for at least a year now!

 

All help appreciated!

[Joseph Jaster 932528]

Hi Ian;

 

First off, what year did you buy your computer in? [Mod - Happy Thoughts]uming the 2002-2005 range from the specs, it's a pretty old computer, probably uses a discontinued CPU socket and doesn't support newer video cards that use PCI-Express. I would recommend that you get a new computer if that is the case. Though FS9 may run okay on that computer FSX would see a major performance increase from a modern dual-core processor. A 1 year old Core 2 Duo at 2.66GHz is going to be faster than a 5 year old Pentium 4 at 3GHz.

 

Other than starting with a new one, you should get at least another gig of RAM for FSX, anything up to 3-4GB will be beneficial for both sims. Also, if you do have PCI-E ports a better video card may help somewhat, especially if you use Anti-aliasing which is heavily dependent on your video card. The rest of the sim however, is mainly CPU dependent so you will probably be best off getting a new system with a dual or quad-core CPU. (However, FS9 will not receive any benefit from having a dual or quad-core, only FSX is capable of utilizing more than one core.)

 

A driver update may help, but I've almost always had problem with new drivers. The saying 'Don't fix what ain't broke' kinda applies to drivers, sometimes new drivers will do more harm than good. You can always roll-back to the previous version though so give it a try. Here's the link to nVidia's driver download page:

http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

 

You could also, if you haven't already, do a defrag of your hard drives. If your FS drive is heavily fragmented it can cause a serious loss of performance.

 

Finally, welcome to VATSIM! Hopefully you can get your connection problem sorted out and get online soon; welcome to your new addiction

[Garry Morris 920567]

If your processor is hyperthreading (and I suspect it is), try disabling hyperthreading in the bios so that the entire 3.0ghz is applied to the game, which is very processor intensive, instead of only one core at 1.5ghz which isn't nearly enough.

 

When I used to run a P4 I always had HT turned off to get get FS performance.

 

Also, and sorry to state the obvious, make sure you've applied FSX Service Packs 1 and 2 to a clean install of FSX as well. They may make a big difference (they may not).

[Ian Drinkwater 1069808]

Firstly, thankyou for your detailed advice on my problem. may i ask what hyperthreading is? Also, my main concern is whether hardware upgrades ie video card, more Ram will suffice or to buy a new system however, doing this would seem a waste of money if i could spend less on upgrading and for that to do the job rather than getting a new system with components i dont need.

 

Another question i have is if i do upgrade to a core 2 duo processor, its not just as simple as adding more memory right? as i need to consider extra cooling and other various components i might need to run the dual processor. if i upgraded my video card and added more memory upto 3-4gb, could i then upgrade to a dual core processor or when you start upgrading processors does it really need a new system? Im just thinking cost benificial.

 

In answer to your question, i defragmented both hard drives the other day and i dont no if this helps but on the task manager, under processes, i always set the priority of the flight sim to high but this doesnt seem to benifit substantially. I also have installed service packs 1 and 2 but will try a complete reinstall.

 

Can anyone recommend a good decent average cost graphics card to upgrade to? the one i have my eyes on is the 8600GTS.

 

My connection to Vatsim was fine on FSX, no probs (apart from the fps) but cant connect on fs9 but not worrying to much on that because if i upgrade, i will be back onto fsx

 

Just incase any of you know, the Just flight captain sim update, does anyone know when it is due for release? sorry for going off the topic

 

Anyway, thankyou for your help and any more advice would be appreciated

[Erhan Atesoglu 1050499]

save your money and buy an i7. P5 and P4 chips are nearly identical except for the P5's 65/45nm architecture and the core duplication. It's called the i7 because it's the first improvement in 7 years

[Luke Kolin]

P5 and P4 chips are nearly identical except for the P5's 65/45nm architecture and the core duplication.

 

The Core architecture has far more in common with the P3 than it does with the P4 Netburst family. The i7 is far closer to a Core2 than it is to a P4. (And there is no such think as a Pentium 5).

 

Luke

[Garry Morris 920567]

Don't go spending money yet. If your system is not optimized at the moment, you'll want to see how good you can get it before blowing cash.

 

Hyperthreading, simplistically, was Intel's original attempt at allowing a processor to save portions of itself for multitasking (running more than one program at once). What it essentially does is cause the operating system to pretend that instead of one processor with 3.0ghz, you have two processors, each with half processing power. What this means is that games such as FS9, (and to some degree FSX) can only utilize half of the max power your processor, the other half is sitting nearly idle. When you have that situation happening, there is less processor time available for the single running program, resulting in reduced performance and in the case of a CPU intensive game such as FS, reduced frames as well.

 

You need to do some research on how to shut off hyperthreading on your particular machine to see if that will help. Most commonly there is a setting in the BIOS that allows you to turn it on and off, but exactly where and what else may be required is different on each model of machine/version of the BIOS.

[Luke Kolin]

What it essentially does is cause the operating system to pretend that instead of one processor with 3.0ghz, you have two processors, each with half processing power. What this means is that games such as FS9, (and to some degree FSX) can only utilize half of the max power your processor, the other half is sitting nearly idle. When you have that situation happening, there is less processor time available for the single running program, resulting in reduced performance and in the case of a CPU intensive game such as FS, reduced frames as well.

 

That's not what it did.

 

The issue that CPU makers face is that while core speeds have gone up by a factor of about 500 million, memory (and especially) disk speeds have not. Even under high load, a processor core can spend a great deal of time waiting for a memory fetch instruction to complete. The logic behind HyperThreading was to add extra transistors to store state data (which is comparatively cheap, relative to all the other stuff on the die) so that while an instruction blocked waiting for memory, another one could execute.

 

As a first attempt at SMT, it wasn't all that bad. However, it had several drawbacks, namely the Replay system in the P4, and insufficient L2 cache on the chip.

 

I have a dual-Xeon machine at the office that has HyperThreading, so it appears as having four processor cores. On a lot of my CPU-intensive workloads, performance goes up by between 10-20% when I scale up to use 4 cores instead of 2. On a single-threaded benchmark, you'll typically see no difference when HyperThreading is on or off (and certainly not a 50% drop).

 

Whether to turn on HT in a P4 is up to you. I'd certainly compare things with it on and off, but you'll find it does have benefits in day to day usage in terms of reducing latency and increasing responsiveness, so when I had a P4 I generally left it on.

 

Cheers!

 

Luke

[Garry Morris 920567]

I stand corrected. That said, it manifested in the taskman as one core at full, and the other at nearly 0. I found I always got much better framerates in FS9 with it off.

 

YMMV

[Ian Drinkwater 1069808]

Thanks guys! been and done some research today...i think its time to upgrade to a new system, at least a duo core and high graphics card but will experiment with the hyperthreading just one thing, where do i find the Bios menu/option? going to check first though if suitable to disable for my current system. Thanks for all advice on helping me choose the best method

[Luke Kolin]

will experiment with the hyperthreading just one thing, where do i find the Bios menu/option?

 

Hit either DEL or F1 as the system boots. Maybe F2 or F12 if it's a Dell - there should be a message on startup on what key to hit to get into the SETUP screen.

 

And yes, a P4 isn't enough to run FSX. On the bright side, you can get a Core 2, 8800GT and 4GB of RAM for a relative song these days.

 

Cheers!

 

Luke