Locked Frames. . .a Myth?

[AndyE1976]

As has been previously stated, it's a target frame rate, not a locked frame rate. Setting a target means that you free up CPU cycles for other things and generally get a more consistent frame rate.

Personally I run with a target of 18, which seems to work well with a good balance of autogen, AI traffic and scenery density. It all falls to pieces though if I get near London X with the Horizon Photoscenery and a complex aircraft though. Which is why I'm evaluating building a new rig next year.

Addons do cause the sim to run slower, but mainly due to the poor way that FSX indexes - it routinely takes me 10-15mins to load the sim, select a plane and airport and load onto the runway. A good chunk of that time is simply waiting for the aircraft select window to open or the airport select window to open/close. Both operations that should be instant, except FSX doesn't maintain proper indexes and is loading things it doesn't need prior to me selecting 'Fly Now'.

There is a huge amount of room for improvement in the UI and game engine, which hopefully a new version of FS will address whilst retaining compatibility with FSX addons.

 

[heywooood]

correct Andy
FSX is poorly optimized (if it was optimized at all) by m/s....which is in keeping with the general appraisal of the populace wrt m/s optimizing ANY program they put out.


it could run so much better if certain things were prioritized or indexed better - but I doubt m/s will revisit flight simulator anytime soon...and since they don't like to give stuff away I'm afraid the only thing third party dev's can do is try to get their products as streamlined as possible so as to utilize the things FSX offers as best they can without using too much resources or CPU cycles to render within FSX's nasty framework.

 

[Bjoern]

There's an entire forum for FS9 folks that will tell you what they thought of FSX "out of the box".

FSX RTM was a POS in terms of efficiency.

SP1 was an absolute necessity to make the sim enjoyable.

FSX is poorly optimized (if it was optimized at all) by m/s...

...because the FS9 users spoilt with hundreds of $ worth of add-ons needed backwards compatibility at all costs.

If it hadn't been for the ability to use stuff from FS9, FSX would have run *way* better from the start.

 

[n4gix]

Mike is absolutely spot on with the technical details. I would point out however that SP1 and especially SP2/Acceleration has somewhat diminished the actual purpose of the "target frame-rate lock," since many of the fibers that were previously auto-throttled by it have been spun off onto separate threads which are shifted to other cores (if available).

 

[AndyE1976]

...because the FS9 users spoilt with hundreds of $ worth of add-ons needed backwards compatibility at all costs.

If it hadn't been for the ability to use stuff from FS9, FSX would have run *way* better from the start.

I think that is always going to be a problem. I've got too much invested in FSX now to just abandon ship because they bring out something slightly shinier. However, backward compatibility is not necessarily a reason for inefficiency.

MS could have not supported FS9 aircraft in FSX and made more money by selling some features of FSX as addons or FS9, or provided an object convertor or added conditional logic to the code to branch to less optimized code for FS9 aircraft that couldn't take advantage of all of the FSX bells and whistles.

It's all wishful thinking though, it is what it is and it's not going to change any time soon.

 

[Bjoern]

However, backward compatibility is not necessarily a reason for inefficiency.

Depends on the extensiveness of the modifications. As of SP2/Acc, the gap between FS9 and FSX (native) is huge.

As you've said, what *could* have been done was offering a *real* model converter converting FS9 code to FSX code with the SDK but I guess that would have been too much for the FSX team to handle in time.

It's all wishful thinking though, it is what it is and it's not going to change any time soon.

Well, with Model Converter X, we're off on a good start. Conversion of scenery objects is possible with it and I really, really hope it'll get animation compatibility one day and the ability to read FS9 aircraft .mdls.

Granted, those aircraft wouldn't have stuff like bump or specular maps, but FSX's model format will totally do the trick.

AI with mimimal frame rate hit...*Dreams away*