fsx graphics issue ?

[Peter Lürkens 30]

Hello,

found fsx under the Christmas tree! Of course the first thing I tried out was the DG808. Sadly, it doesn't show the famous flex wing thing rather than flying always lop-eared. Left flaps is pointing fully down, right flap fully up.

Has somebody a similar behaviour? My graphic card has only Directx 8.1 capability.

merry Christams, everybody

Peter

[B21 19]

to get wing flex in FSX you have to have 'advanced animations' (or similar) checked in display settings. If you don't see the checkbox then maybe it's not a 8.1 capability. Let us know.

The wing flex is a *total* waste of time though - life would be easier if the DG808S simply had upswept wings by default. The droopy wings with no flex look fairly dopey in the air which is where you are most of the time. I also had the asymmetric flaperon display bug - doesn't affect the flight model and I think I haven't seen it since setting the animations.

[Peter Lürkens 30]

If you don't see the checkbox then maybe it's not a 8.1 capability. Let us know.

I see the checkbox but I doesn't help anyway. In some other groups I found I remark, that DirectX 9 graphics card is needed. Maybe it's a Shader Model 2.something thing, since my card only supports upt to 1.x (Geforce 4 MX 440, Athlon XP 2400+, 768MB)

In the meantime I found settings which makes the program quite flyable.

Radius detail : Low

Complexity: 75

Resolution: 76 m (very important, when I set this higher I got nasty washed out ground textures)

Structure(?) resolution: 5 m

water effects: high 1.x

land details: on

scenery complexity: very dense (!)

Autogen density: low (scarce?, in addition, I edited the FSX.CFG to reduce the maximum numbers of objects per tile to 1000 tres, 800 buildings, helped a lot)

Ground shadows: no

Scenery effects: high

Graphic: 1280x1024x32, no antialiasing (set in graphics card control panel,instead), bilinear filtering, everything else: on or on maximum,

Airplane: ultra-high

Weather: ultra-high (!)

Traffic: high

In the end, the FSX runs with pretty reliable 10-15 FPS, which makes a pretty smooth behaviour. Different from FS9, the planes are reliably maneuverable still at 10FPS (maybe except from heli).

Terrain and weather is a charme, in most cases DEM extension are probably no necessary anymore. What will be certainly needed are fixes for the too obvious errors in the DEM data bases. An example is shown in the picture below, highway bridge on highway A61 east of Koblenz, Germany. Funny, isn't it? It is likely, that in htis case the error of SRTM data is actually a consequence of the presence of the obstacle (bridge), so many of these can be expected.

[attachmentid=304]

Another joke are the holes and hills in rivers, e.g. follow the Mosel from Koblenz to Trier, or look at the Rhine between Bonn and Cologne. There is a lot to be repaired.

In the end I'm confident, that with somemore main memory, and a new graphics card, Iwill get a reasonable performance again.

Cheers,

Peter

[B21 19]

well done getting your config sorted. Re the 'washed out textures' you might find they sort themselves out if you give them a little time to load, and after that you're ok. Or maybe not...

I suspect your cpu is the real constraint on your box - with a new graphics card you can increase the screen resolution but not much else, as everything else ends up dependent upon the cpu. AI traffic is cpu-demanding - I can't remember if you said you turned that off or not. If you don't like the droopy wings on the DG808S the cheaper option would be to install the W.Piper LS8-18...

The Athlon 2400 is out-performed by maybe a factor of five by the current top-end cpu's, and the bottom-end core duo 6300 is capable of a high overclock so you don't need that much money to increase performance from your athlon by a factor of maybe four. Well, not much money is relative I guess - the easy answer is upgrade EVERYTHING ! for cpu you also need motherboard and memory so it adds up...

[Peter Lürkens 30]

Re the 'washed out textures' you might find they sort themselves out if you give them a little time to load, and after that you're ok. Or maybe not...

Actually, it was not. I could even saw, that after switching to full screen, in a first moment, textures were nearly ok, than it went haywire as they textures switched back to uselessly low resolution.

I suspect your cpu is the real constraint on your box

True, absolutely. Meanwhile I have a GF7600GT card in + 1 gig of Mem. Disappointingly, the framerate was even worse. As it turned out, that was a consequence of features, that were simply skipped with the old card. At least it brings now a superb image quality with high resolution ground and relief, nice water, and vey nice wing flexing with G-load as one could expect. At the end the 7600GT is wasted money in this set which one could even see by the GPU temperature, that never increases by more than 5°C. A 7200 or X1300 would have done easily, I guess.

After some testing however, I could identify the main frame rate killers in my setup. It is the water effects, if higher than 2.x/low, lighting effects, and, surprise, the natural thermal indication. Any of these kills 40% of the intial framerate, and in combination 50-60%, which means a drop from 22 fps downto 10 and below. Everything else is pretty insensitive. Current settings now are:

Scenery:

Detail Radius: medium

Mesh complexity: 75

Mesh resolution: 19 m (!)

Texture resolution: 1m

Water effects: 2.x low

terrain details: on

Scenery complexity: very dense

Autogen scenery: dense at 1000 trees/800 buildings

Ground shadows: off

Graphics:

1280x1024x32, unlimited (for testing)

Filtering: Anisotropic

Antialiasing: off (set in graphics card menu to 4x)

Global texure resolution: very high

Light reflections: ON

lighting effects: off

advanced animations: on

Airplane and weather : Ultra high

Traffic: high

Well, not much money is relative I guess - the easy answer is upgrade EVERYTHING ! for cpu you also need motherboard and memory so it adds up...

You're right, but what prevents me most is the hazzle of setting up and migrating to the whole new system. It seems now, that I can live for while in the FPS-range of 10-20, which was more or less what I had with FS9 before. Perhaps there are even some patches from MS, or the community to ease, the problem. Btw, FS9 runs now at 35-60 at a much better image quality.

The next step after that could be complete new machine in the mid-class, within one or one-and-a-half year from now.

Cheers,

Peter

[B21 19]

did you try turning AI traffic (all of it - planes, cars, boats) completely off? That stuff is entirely cpu-based.

Anyway... Now you're up and running, do the Austrian Soaring mission and post your time to 'clock stop'. There's a bug that sometimes stops you recording a successful mission completion after landing but don't worry about that.

Check out fsxhome.com and fsxmission.com

[Peter Lürkens 30]

AI has some influence, too, but I like th cars driving on the roads. Nevertheless, the impact was not so high as the illumination flag or the higher level water effects, what the heck that might be. I'm gradually approaching a good compromise bow.

I come back to the soaring mission, soon. Did you do it with or without thermal indicators ?

[B21 19]

In FSX soaring the 'norm' is to fly with thermal indicators on, because the thermals don't link to Cu's (yet). It is possible to use clear weather and plant a BGL cloud above each thermal, but this isn't done in the stock mission.

The Austrian Soaring mission has ridge lift on North slopes (wind's from the South) and you don't need a visual indicator for that. In common with much soaring development by non-gliding-pilots, the lift in the mission goes astronomically high (24,000 feet in some places) and is very strong but that doesn't detract from the fun too much. If you beat one hour 30 on your first attempt you're doing well. After a few attempts you get to learn where the strong thermals are and then it's an exercise in shaving off seconds for the fasted possible circuit - no-one's posted a time below the hour though (this means you average 125 knots!)

You *can* climb before the start but it's better to fly right through the start gate at around 4000 feet and start straight away for comparison with other pilots.

[Peter Lürkens 30]

Well, seems that I sorted out the graphics issues mostly. I'm running now with pretty reliable 13-20 fps, which is surely enough, at striking image quality. What puzzles me a bit are the large fluctuations of the fps.

Made the Austrian course it tonight with 2:04 :embaressed: , but I had a few unnecessary detours, because I was stuck a bit in floor exercises.

Picked one thermal that brought me to 20.000 ft. The slope behaviour was somewhat confusing, I experienced it much better in CCS.

What could be interesting if the slope list is by weather engine design, or just "placed" by hand, as formerly done with Thermiek and other tools. Then it may be there or not.

How is the reporting ? I only saw the stop watch counter on the screen and nothing else when I finished.

BTW: Could be better to continue in the General Section with this thread.

Cheers,

Peter