Frame Rate Test: It's For Real!

[ThePlainsman]

Just to clarify, and I admit that I haven't read every post in the thread, but when others state that some aircraft (FS9 ports) turn white, they don't mean the screen goes white, they mean the aircraft textures show up as white when running DX10 Preview. I've actually had a few airplanes where only some of the aircraft was white while other areas looked fine. I've read earlier explanations for why some ports turn white in DX10 and it wasn't related to bloom which a lot of folks don't use anyway because of the fps hit.

Has nothing to do with light bloom. The absence of skin textures means the person who made the aircraft didn't create to be DX10 compatible. I don't know the techie terms for it but that's what it comes down to. I have freeware and payware add-on planes and all are DX10 preview compatible. I just installed a Fokker DR. I off the disc in the latest issue of PC Pilot. It is DX10 preview compatible. No "white skin/blank texture" problem.

 

[falcon409]

Has nothing to do with light bloom. The absence of skin textures means the person who made the aircraft didn't create to be DX10 compatible. I don't know the techie terms for it but that's what it comes down to. I have freeware and payware add-on planes and all are DX10 preview compatible. I just installed a Fokker DR. I off the disc in the latest issue of PC Pilot. It is DX10 preview compatible. No "white skin/blank texture" problem.

Yep, exactly. :salute:

 

[N2056]

If a given plane was properly built using the FSX SDK tools it will work in DX-10. If you have installed either SP-2 or Acceleration and it's a plane that was built using the FS9 SDK it might work in DX-10, although based on the huge numbers of threads out there regarding how to fix prop and glass textures if you have a working plane without modifying something you are a lucky person. Think about it. FS9 planes can't be built to be DX-10 compatible. The tools don't exist!

For any FS9 model that works perfectly in FSX under DX-10 I can find you 10 that don't.

It would be a huge contribution to the discussion if you would post what you are running in terms of system specs, and what flavor of FSX you are using. Without those most of this means nothing.

 

[Daube]

Just to clarify, and I admit that I haven't read every post in the thread, but when others state that some aircraft (FS9 ports) turn white, they don't mean the screen goes white, they mean the aircraft textures show up as white when running DX10 Preview. I've actually had a few airplanes where only some of the aircraft was white while other areas looked fine. I've read earlier explanations for why some ports turn white in DX10 and it wasn't related to bloom which a lot of folks don't use anyway because of the fps hit.

Absolutely Falcon, we were talking here about the AIRCRAFT being white, not the full screen
And also, the full white screen when using the bloom on FS9 planes did happen to me in the past, but it does not happen anymore, so I suspect the bug might me linked to the video card settings or something like that. Nowadays, in DirectX9 mode, I can activate the bloom when I fly FS9 planes without any issue.

 

[Daube]

If a given plane was properly built using the FSX SDK tools it will work in DX-10. If you have installed either SP-2 or Acceleration and it's a plane that was built using the FS9 SDK it might work in DX-10, although based on the huge numbers of threads out there regarding how to fix prop and glass textures if you have a working plane without modifying something you are a lucky person. Think about it. FS9 planes can't be built to be DX-10 compatible. The tools don't exist!

For any FS9 model that works perfectly in FSX under DX-10 I can find you 10 that don't.

Indeed. And I would really like to know the precise criteria that would make a FS9 plane work in DirectX10, but so far that's stil unknown.

It would be a huge contribution to the discussion if you would post what you are running in terms of system specs, and what flavor of FSX you are using. Without those most of this means nothing.

I7 960 @ 3,2 GHz
GTX480
Windows 7 64b.
FSX Acceleration, with Gizmo's water textures and FSWC shader tweaking.

 

[Phantom88]

Quad4 @4GHz
8gigs Ram
GTX580

 

[Dangerous Beans]

Interesting discussion guys.
I've never had any luck with DX10, no change in framerate and all the usual bugs.

Could you include what video drivers your using, could be an important factor.

 

[DarrenL]

I'd like him to press "shift Z" a couple of times to get the FPS up on the top left of the screen and take 2 screen shots (pressing V key) of the same aircraft and same scenery, one using DX9 and one using DX10. Using the same FSX display settings so if maxxed out in DX10 then maxxed out in DX9. If bloom off, then bloom off in both etc...

To see the difference in FPS but also the difference in screen quality.

 

[Thoe6969]

I'd like him to press "shift Z" a couple of times to get the FPS up on the top left of the screen and take 2 screen shots (pressing V key) of the same aircraft and same scenery, one using DX9 and one using DX10. Using the same FSX display settings so if maxxed out in DX10 then maxxed out in DX9. If bloom off, then bloom off in both etc...

To see the difference in FPS but also the difference in screen quality.

Me too ,and I would see his specs on his pc,cause I've never seen a puter that would get 150 FPS with the settings he says he's using.Ya know that old saying(I was born in the dark,but it wasn't last nite).

 

[almccoyjr]

I mostly "lurk" but this thread has caught my interest.

Are frames-per-second being equated to rendering speed and better performance? If so, fps is not a great way to measure performance because it's not linear.

Just a question to clear up some confusion on my part.

plug_nickel

 

[warchild]

it's a brute force measure of performance and the ability of the machine to handle whats being thrown at it. although not as good at determining performance as other methods, mostly we all go by what we see with our eyes, and the more frames per second we can generate, the smoother the over all performance of the sim appears..
The downside is that in order to get the frame rates in fsx to rise much higher than 15 fps, you gotta really throw some heavy metal types of machines at it. Ergo, the requests for system specs. For example, i'm personally currently running an NVBidiua 780I mobo, with 8 gigs of ram and a Q6600 core two quad clocked at 2.4 gigaherz. my current GPU is a single GTX-260 with 878 megs of ram on board. With this set up, I'm getting about 15 frames per sec on on average with a DX9 capable plane. In order to get a higher FPS, i need to overclock it to about 3 ghz, and add in the second GTX-260 which will give me approximately 40 fps..

 

[almccoyjr]

Thanks warchild.

Perhaps a better use for fps would be it's relationship to frames-per-rendered-scene or just drop fps completely.

My system specs are:

EVGA 680i-sli_1066 fsb
X6800 @ 3.72ghz
8gb PC6400 locked @ 800 w/ 4-3-4-3-2-9T timings
EVGA GTX 260/216 w/core @ 576_mem @ 2106_shader @ 1242
Primary HD is 600gb WD raptor
On-board audio
Sony GDM-FW900 @ 1920x1200x75hz or 2304x1440x80hz

I strive for consistent (not average) 30-40 fps in a dedicated flight scene and it takes a lot of mostly enjoyable work getting there when I do. To that end, I've found that "fps for fps sake" is pretty much a dead end. The only real use I've found for fps is when checking monitor resolution/frequency and the shear number of pixels a card can produce. As a matter of fact, I don't monitor in-game fps at all. When I hit a micro-stutter, I fly back around again to that area and see if it was a "simple" cache delay between mem/card/hd.

Some where, a long time ago, I remember reading an Intel white sheet that a consistent 45 fps (fprs) @ 1600x1200x75hz would be just about ideal. In today's hardware terms that 45 would mean at very high resolutions above 2304.

On a side note, I'd be curious to know how many "FSX'ers" use the same fsx.config for every flight. I've had as many as 19 back when I was "anal" but since I now primarily fly ORBX or Horizon Sim. scenery, I've pared it down to 7.

Hardware is important, but tuning what you have is even more so. And as you so rightly put it "mostly we all go by what we see with our eyes, and the more frames per
second we can generate, the smoother the over all performance of the sim appears.. ". FSX is code that is reproduced digitally where our eyes are analog devices that continuously process light information, hence we don't see in fps. The only change I'd make to your quote would be to add consistently before generate.

plug_nickel

 

[DarrenL]

I'd like him to press "shift Z" a couple of times to get the FPS up on the top left of the screen and take 2 screen shots (pressing V key) of the same aircraft and same scenery, one using DX9 and one using DX10. Using the same FSX display settings so if maxxed out in DX10 then maxxed out in DX9. If bloom off, then bloom off in both etc...

To see the difference in FPS but also the difference in screen quality.

Me too ,and I would see his specs on his pc,cause I've never seen a puter that would get 150 FPS with the settings he says he's using.Ya know that old saying(I was born in the dark,but it wasn't last nite).

He's gone very quiet hasn't he.

 

[Thoe6969]

He's gone very quiet hasn't he.

You noticed that also.?

 

[wombat666]

Indeed he may have but best to play nice people.
FWIW, I've never been fussed about the whole FPS swagger, as long as users are happy with what they can run it is totally irrelevant.

 

[lazarus]

I sort of look at these claims with some scepticisim. For my fairly modest system, using the jesus tweak guide, DXT9 cause I have a number of ports I cannot go with out, middle sliders, detail clouds, 2x high water, large draw radius, mostly default scenery mesh except for stuff like OzX death valley, Grand canyon, FSmainiacs Isuszu islands, frames locked at 25, 15-24.5 average rates, it can be as low as 3.5-4.5 with 7-8 Victorious clones in a 5nm box, but its smooth, no stutters, autogen bangs in with out delay, no waiting for textures to load when changing veiws. Smooth and snapy refresh rates win for me over the obsessing about frame rates. Heck, the eye and brain can't process anything more than 60fps. My eye just isn't fast enough to notice stuff moving at blink and shake rates.

 

[Overshoe]

 

[ThePlainsman]

Yes, I've been gone awhile. I got a "downsized" notice from my former employer end of September. Got another gig fiarly quickly, though, so I feel lucky, especially at my advanced age (58). Anyway, I use FRAPS for my frame rate counter and it doesn't show up in screenshots (also FRAPS). I've never tried the FSX fps counter or the screen shot key. FRAPS has so many more uses.

Since I was on this thread last, I replaced my GTX 285, 1GB VRAM card with a GTX 580, 3GB VRAM card. I also doubled my CPU RAM from 6 GB of 1600MHz to 12 GB of 1600 MHz. The difference is amazing! Everything is turned on max with REX, GEX and ORBX installed. In DX10 preview, NO STUTTERING! THe additional RAM in both the vid card and the CPU has made a significant difference, and it was already pretty good.

 

[Daube]

Since this topic has been bumped, I'll take the opportunity to share here my most recent exeperiences with the FSX.cfg and general FSX performance tuning.

First a bit of context:
I have a i7 runnning a 3,2GHz with 6 Gb of RAM and a GTX480.
With Jesus website, I could achieve in the past some satisfactory results for the balance between quality and smoothness. However I was still getting some small problems:
- when reaching a big city or airport, the FPS would crawl down to barely flyable levels.
- when flying away from big cities, the FPS were fine (around 30 locked), but some micro stutters would somehow prevent the sim from being "really" smooth.
- when playing with the values of the Texture_bandwith_mult and the bufferpools, I could never get rid of the occasionnal black artifacts and flashes when panning around
- deactivating the bufferpools completely (usepools=0) lead me to a very smoooooooooth sim, but an unbearable amount of artifacts and flashes

After many months of "not so serious" testing (like, once in a while, when I was thinking about it), I have finally found some "explanations" and a way to finally get rid (almost totally) of the artifacts. Here is what I did:

1- in NVidia Inspector, I have DISABLED TOTALLY the "transparency AntiAliasing". I killed it, killed it dead, with fire. The boost on the FPS has been incredible. Suddenly, I was able to fly aver Seattle or any major airport, including in OrbX sceneries, even with overcast skies.

2- as I saw in quite a lot of topics all over the forums recently, I went to a very high Texture_bandwith_mult value. I set it to 800, then run my FSX.cfg through Jesus website once again to get modified values for the other tweaks.

3- in the FSX.cfg, I forced myself to disable the bufferpools (usepools=0), I wanted to seriously try to get rid of the artifacts, because the sim smoothness was a goal that was getting more and more important to me.

4- in the FSX graphic settings, I FINALLY decided to lower the "mesh complexity" slider down to 50 percent. My other settings are as follows:
- mesh resolution 5 meters
- ground texture resolution 60 cm.
- autogen density set to maximum
- scenery density set to one crank below the max

5- after all the modifications, I modified my shader_cache_version value in the FSX.cfg, to force FSX recompile its shaders on next start.

CONCLUSION: The sim is smooth now. So smooth that I decided to crank back the water to High 2x, and I removed the autogen TREES limitation in the FSX.cfg !! (was set to 2000 before). I could also push my cloud draw distance the the middle ! FPS are stable at 30 unless I fly in some extreme condition with an extreme plane.

The most important elements to keep focus on are the transparency AA and the mesh complexity. I wonder how I didn't think about the terrain complexity before.... for information, this feature is the smoothing of the terrain shape. Set it to zero, and you'll end up with mountains looking like XPlane9. Set it to 100 and your mountain shapes will be very smooth (no visible polygon lines). Set it somewhere in the middle and you'll find a perfect balance, and your CPU will be happy. This really had an influence on the micro stutters in flight.

All my tests were done above FTX PNW, next to Concrete, Seattle and Bowermann. I have not tested in the "default" world yet.

 

[falcon409]

Hmmm, wish I knew more about this but I simply use Nicks well documented settings for Inspector to get me through.

Several things I noticed while comparing mine to yours Daube:
In Nick's settings for Inspector he doesn't suggest any change to the "disabled" setting already in place for the AA Transparency setting, so according to him it should never be used.
My Texture_bandwidth_multi setting was 80 so I hesitate pumping it to 800 (although I may just to test the results).
I don't have a Buffer_pools setting in my cfg file
I don't have a shader_cache_version setting either. . . .what I do have are these:
SHADER_CACHE_PRIMED_10=1693500672
SHADER_CACHE_PRIMED=1693500672

The only problem I've had constantly since "day 1" are stutters. Nothing I do and nothing I've read and tried have changed them one iota, so I have to assume that it's related largely to the age and make up of my system. I will give your settings a shot though just as a test to see what I get. Also, just to reitterate what I said basically a year or so ago, I don't use DX10 because I fly a lot of FS9 aircraft that are not compatible with DX10. I also do it because IMHO DX10 is overrated.:salute: