Delta Virtual Airlines Water Cooler | PC Support |
Speaking of frame rates |
DVA1440
Captain, B737-800
Joined on December 21 2003
Northeastern United States
55 legs, 86.1 hours
53 legs,
83.4 hours online 1 legs,
2.1 hours event
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Posted onPost created on
January 07 2004 07:14 ET by Adam Plourde
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My current system: Celeron 2.4GHz, 512MB RAM, ATI 9000 AGP (64MB), Windows XP Professional, FS9
Since there has been some discussion of Framerates, I thought I'd check mine. 12-15fps is what I normally get. Simple clouds are set. This FPS is adequate, and frankly I never really thought about it; but 20 or 25 or better would be nice. I thought my system had sufficient horsepower; but something isn't producing. Could my graphics card be the bottleneck? Or is a 2.4Ghz Celeron not enough (I would find that almost obscene)? Or maybe XP is just doing too much stuff behind the scenes. But I usually shut down all the performance hogs, including the virus checker, when flying.
Ideas?
I haven't looked too deeply into this, yet. Just looking for a push in the right direction in the hope that It'll save me some time.
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DVA1213
Captain, MD-88
Joined on May 11 2003
Southeastern United States
16 legs, 25.7 hours
13 legs,
20.8 hours online
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Posted onPost created on
January 07 2004 07:25 ET by Albert Gardiner
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Dell Dimension 4400 (1.7G P4); 1GB PC2100 RAM; Asylum NVidia Geforce FX5600 w/256M Ram... I have all the graphics set to one notch below the top setting. I get consistently in the mid-20s with 30s and 40s when flying high. In and around some of the more detailed airports, it drops to mid to low teens.
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DVA1440
Captain, B737-800
Joined on December 21 2003
Northeastern United States
55 legs, 86.1 hours
53 legs,
83.4 hours online 1 legs,
2.1 hours event
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Posted onPost created on
January 07 2004 07:30 ET by Adam Plourde
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Do you think I'd benefit from more RAM (I thought 512MB would be plenty) on the system board, or a better graphics card?
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DVA1272
Captain, B757-200
Joined on July 19 2003
Midwestern United States
86 legs, 174.9 hours
55 legs,
105.9 hours online
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Posted onPost created on
January 07 2004 07:34 ET by William Morris
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I feel that 1g of ram, when running XP, and at least 128mg on the video card is needed for optimum performance - regardless of processor. IMHO
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DVA1440
Captain, B737-800
Joined on December 21 2003
Northeastern United States
55 legs, 86.1 hours
53 legs,
83.4 hours online 1 legs,
2.1 hours event
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Posted onPost created on
January 07 2004 07:51 ET by Adam Plourde
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1GB and 128MB? Hmmm. Will have to start pricing options and consulting with the money gods.
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DVA1296
First Officer, B737-800
Joined on July 05 2003
Southeastern United States
14 legs, 21.9 hours
14 legs,
21.9 hours online
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Posted onPost created on
January 07 2004 11:10 ET by Chanse Watson
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I recommend you upgrade your graphics card. I have now, an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128mb. The 256mb cards are overpriced and the performance on the Radeon 9800 Pro and the 256mb cards were tested to be the same.
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DVA1419
Senior Captain, B737-800
Joined on December 07 2003
Century Club
Southeastern United States
175 legs, 303.7 hours
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Posted onPost created on
January 07 2004 13:54 ET by Randy King
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Sigh...Chanse...I just posted above asking about graphics cards, then saw your post. It is my understanding that the human eye sees fluid motion around 30 frames per second (video etc). Here, we always speak in terms of what we find we will accept...i.e. 8 to 24 FPS (which to the eye is preceived and is, flicker/pausing, refresh delay, etc). Our graphics also flucuate greatly depending on how intense the scenery is your in at a given moment. Of course, it never fails, acceptable frame rates in route only to come in on finals to heavy traffic and a graphics enhanced airport and the FPS goes out the window. It is conversations like these that led to my posted question(s) above. Ultimately, the CPU can only move as fast as the slowest attachment. To me, content with the Pent chip, then it comes down to a mix of the video card (with as much memory availability on it) and on board memory. I used to think in a Windows environment I would only ever use but so much memory and the rest would make a good dust catcher, but have come to realize in that Windows environment, there's a lot more going on than just MSFS and memory is quicky confiscated by programs running in the background (which can be a time consuming pain in the butt to close all the time). If I can arrive at a constant 30 FPS in most all graphical settings I may fly in to...that would be true happiness here. More frame rates? Not sure my eye would discern the even more improved performance, but wouldn't be upset with that either.
Randy KingSenior Captain, B737-800
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DVA1677
Captain, MD-88
Joined on May 16 2004
Online Nine Century
Millennium Club
Kansas City, MO USA
1,036 legs, 2,006.7 hours
964 legs,
1,869.5 hours online 797 legs,
1,632.7 hours ACARS
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Posted onPost created on
May 24 2004 09:34 ET by Rob Wadley
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I just purchased a new computer about a week ago with a celeron 2.7 processor. I was astounded by how horrible the frame rates were, even at the fs9's lowest settings. I talked to the experts that I purchased the computer from and they said that celeron isn't the way to go for applications like flight sims. Now I'm running an atlon 2000+ rated at 1.67 and everything is much smoother. My ram, graphics card etc is almost exacltly the same as it was in the celleron.
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DVA1675
Captain, B757-200
Joined on May 13 2004
Southeastern United States
18 legs, 30.4 hours
7 legs,
12.8 hours online
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Posted onPost created on
May 26 2004 09:18 ET by Dale Owens
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Something else you might want to check if you're running XP is spyware. These little buggers seem to multiply like rabbits and each runs one or more processes in the background. They take precious cycles from your CPU and degrade performance. Try this... Hit Ctrl+Alt+Del to bring up the task manager. Then click on the Processes tab. What you're looking for are strangely named processes such as XMjrx9.exe. They almost look like randomly contrived file names. They will more than likely be listed as being in your Windows/System32 directory. If you find them, try downloading a free spyware removal program to get rid of them.
A word of warning. These things are extremely difficult to get rid of, even with the latest versions of spyware removal software. You may have to use Google to search for 'Spyware Removal' to find instructions on removing the stuff manually. I did.
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DVA1427
Senior Captain, MD-11
OLP
Joined on December 14 2003
Online Double Century Club
50 State Club
Tri-Jet Triumph
Globetrotter
Moose Club
US Capital Club
Everett 250 Club
Quincentenary Club
DVA Twenty-Year Anniversary
"Livin' in the Dog Pound!" Kannapolis, NC
558 legs, 1,984.3 hours
250 legs,
611.8 hours online 384 legs,
1,530.5 hours ACARS 38 legs,
82.7 hours event
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Posted onPost created on
May 26 2004 09:40 ET by Lewis Gregory
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For spyware removal, go to www.lavasoft.de and download Ad-Aware; then google on "Spybot S&D" and download that too. I use them both and between the two they are very effective at cleaning spyware and tracking cookies.
I run an Athlon XP 2500 with a GeForce 4 Ti 4200 128 MB (4x AGP) video card and my FS9 frame rates are acceptable, but not great. The video card is the bottleneck, but I can't really afford to replace it right now...maybe soon.
What did make a huge difference, as others have suggested, is going to 1 GB of RAM. FS is an incredible memory hog, it routinely seems to eat 275+ MB of physical memory when running (per Windows task manager). Consider that for online flight I have open three IE6 sessions (usually one for the Water Cooler/Pilot Center, one for the approach chart menu, and whatever approach chart i need), FS2004, ActiveSky2004, FSScreen, SBRelay, Squawkbox, Servinfo, Roger Wilco, Saitek control software, anti-virus, firewall, PLUS whatever other crap XP's thrown in there...512 MB of memory just doesn't cut it. For that matter, if FS2004 is running, 1 GB isn't even enough to do some things. I can't open a PDF, for example, with all that other stuff going...Acrobat will lock up. Same thing with surfing to a Java website like www.vatsim.net, it'll hang. Opening Outlook while flying? Forget it, it'll take 3-4 minutes of solid disk access to run. I really think I need *another* 512 MB to smooth out those problems, and how crazy is that?
Lewis GregorySenior Captain, MD-11
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DVA1008
Senior Captain, B757-200
Joined on December 14 2002
B757 100 Club
Everett 250 Club
50 State Club
Six Century Club
Online Six Century Club
DVA Fifteen-Year Anniversary
"Fly 'till the map turns blue" Kokomo, IN
633 legs, 1,731.3 hours
613 legs,
1,689.9 hours online 212 legs,
792.3 hours ACARS 35 legs,
77.7 hours event
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Posted onPost created on
May 26 2004 09:50 ET by Matt Young
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Try increasing the size of your virtual memory as well. I only have 512MB of RAM, but my virtual memory is set at 2GB. In theory, this gives me 2.5GB of memory.
Matt YoungSenior Captain, B757-200
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DVA1329
First Officer, L-1011-100
Joined on September 22 2003
Western Europe
66 legs, 155.0 hours
53 legs,
132.3 hours online 5 legs,
20.7 hours event
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Posted onPost created on
May 26 2004 15:17 ET by Tim Slater
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Guys, I wouldn't bother buying anything in the way of video cards at this time. The new PCI express will be released soon making PCI and AGP redundant. Your motherboards will be worth less than your speakers. Any PCI or AGP cards you have will be worth basically nothing. And the only places you will be able to get old PCI cards will be second hand dealers like eBay. PCI will be like ISA, and as for ISA, what ISA? If you buy anything now you will be participating in a dying trend. The time has come when PCI, and PCI equipped motherboards must fade away and make way for the new technology. If I were looking for a new vid card, I'd wait a few months, then buy a PCI express card. Just pick up a PC magazine and read the reviews, they are awesome!
Regards,
Tim
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