FSX Tweaks How-To's Config Rewrites

[harleyman]

Thanks Wally Bob...



Stay safe protecting us .....

[txnetcop]

Hey Wally-Bob, I too was a little sick over losing all that stuff, but it's still in my head and one day I will sit down and do it all over. Harleyman and a bunch of others have taken up the slack in here and I'm grateful for that. After all that was gone I just didn't have the heart to start over at the time.

The i7Cores and Phenom IIs are really the most fun to deal with now. With the advent of some new Version 2 X58 motherboards for Intel and new 790X AM3 boards for AMD, we are going to see some really nice overclocks that will make a difference in FSX and other games. I just finished a whole week of testing at TechCorp and attended a hardware engineer seminar at Lake Travis in Austin. Some great stuff coming down the pike! One thing that I was astounded at seeing this week was the new HD4890 cards and high they overclock with a BIOS change on the GPU. The engineers at AMD-ATI have really been busy. We can expect some great competition from AMD in the very near future on all fronts. Wish I could say more. Anyway Amigo stay tuned, there will be more articles now that I have been re-energized.

Stay safe my friend and come home soon. Thank you for your service!
Ted

[Wally-Bob]

Thanks Texnetcop, Thanks Harleyman,

This one is for Major_Spittle,

I too wrestled with the Texture_Bandwidth_Multiplier concept. Here’s how I understand it. (Right or wrong? Don’t know)

Texture_Bandwidth_Multiplier represents the CPU’s task time sharing between simulating and rendering per display frame. Simulating means solving all those massive scary mathematical physics equations to determine where the aircraft is and how the terrain should be laid out on the monitor. Rendering means actually drawing it. (displaying textures)

FSX must have the simulation completed before it can render the next frame. FSX will simulate the next frame even if the current frame is not completely rendered. One has to take priority; you can’t have it both ways. FSX chooses simulate, because if we can’t display it all, oh well – on to the next frame, we’ve got places to get to. (We are flying after all.)

So, where to set it? Set it too low and you will come down with a case of the blurries, but smooth flying. Set it too high and you will have a beautifully rendered slide show. Remember we must complete the simulation first, so we will halt frame production until we’re finished, then render.

No calculator needed. Pretty easy right? Well, not so fast. Enter - Fiber_Frame_Time_Fraction. This one is important for autogen and the UTX stuff. NickN has some good articles on it. The complication is that Texture_Bandwidth_Multiplier and Fiber_Frame_Time_Fraction interact with each other. (Sort of) Set Fiber_Frame_Time_Fraction too low and you will get the blurries, too high, stutters.

What to do? Quad cores are easy, set Texture_Bandwidth_Multiplier at 10 or so and mess with Fiber_Frame_Time_Fraction. Single core, leave Fiber_Frame_Time_Fraction at default and mess with Texture_Bandwidth_Multiplier. Dual cores, have fun! What ever you do, don’t change everything all at once, one thing slowly at a time. Keep your test area conditions consistent and write things down.

Eventually you will have the perfect tweak for beautiful clear weather photo scenery flying in the Florida Keys. Now off to the Rockies with UTX and stormy winter weather and everything is all tweaked up wrong. Well that’s just how it is. Some guys have different FSX.cfg’s for every scenario. Gotta love this hobby!

wally-bob

[Pepere]

Where in FSX.cfg can you change the light intensity of approach and runway lights?

Is there "a" document showing "all" the adjustments possible using FSX.cfg?

Thanks

David

[harleyman]

Hey david...

All i know is this...You just need to adjust them to suit your needs.

I have not reset mine or I would post them for you..




RUNWAY_LIGHTS_SURFACE_SCALAR=1.2 //adjust values to suit your scale
RUNWAY_LIGHTS_VASI_SCALAR=1.2
RUNWAY_LIGHTS_APPROACH_SCALAR=1.2
RUNWAY_LIGHTS_STROBE_SCALAR=1.0

[Pepere]

Thanks for your help.

David

[harleyman]

Thanks for your help.

David

OK..Not real sure it was much help...But

Hope you get it all sorted.....

[Wally-Bob]

David,

There are quite a "few" documents showing "all" the adjustments possible for FSX.cfg around on the various Flight Sim sites. They were very popular for FSX-RTM and somewhat popular during the FSX-SP1 time frames. For FSX-SP2, most of those documents were “replaced” by all the sliders and check boxes now so there is really not a lot left to play with, and they are covered in this thread. Also the better hardware today negates the need to reduce others.

There are some start-up load tweaks and other stuff left that have no bearing on flying performance like customizing your Shift-Z experience and disabling red text notifications like Stall … What is left are mostly personal preferences as Harleyman described.

There are still some that you can mess with. UTX has a configuration tool to change some of these that it is concerned with.

Mostly the ones I mess with now are to extend the range of sliders beyond “Allowable”. You could say “Performance Tweak”, but really are Eye-Candy enhancements at the expense of FPS.

Two that come to mind are:

Texture_Max_Load= which is important to Real Environment Extreme (REX) due to some of the new high resolution cloud textures provided. The manual covers this.

LODRadius= provides Level Of Detail further out towards the horizon, especially for mesh terrain. #.500000 are the only valid values, i.e. 5.499999 is really 4.500000 (max slider), thus 5.5, 6.5 …

The hassle with these two are they revert back to the maximum slider value every time you move any slider and you have to manually change them back and then restart FSX for the effect. Also be cautious as some addons modify your FSX.cfg, always have a back-up to revert to.

Sorry not to be more comprehensive, maybe some day. For me to have internet access and free time concurrently seems like the planets must be in alignment.

Wally-Bob

[harleyman]

Thanks for that Wally-Bob...

Good to see that from time to time you can drop in for a few...


I like to run my LOD at 7.5...But as you say you have to leave the sliders alone after that or else you get to reset the config again...I keep a shortcut to my config on the desktop for that reason...

[Wally-Bob]

Me too.

wb

[Major_Spittle]

Thanks for explaining the tweaks Wally-Bob. I got some bad info online, imagine that. Takes a ton of reading to try to get the whole picture, but your post made things very clear.

[Wally-Bob]

Thanks Major_Spittle,

I seem to understand Computer-Geek language (or maybe, I think?) but not being fully bi-lingual, I only speak layman or Redneck as you put it. One has to be careful, bad info online perhaps, however there is alot of old advice for FSX-RTM still out there that does not apply anymore. (FSX-Release To Market, i.e. before SP-1 & 2)

Now another tweak comes to mind, Max Frame Rate=

The frame rate tweak I use is one that NickN described. I didn’t believe him at first and I always evaluate things. It works for me. Max Frame Rate= unlimited in FSX and used in conjunction with your video card’s driver software Vsync=enabled or Vertical Sync=on. The words here vary by manufacturer. This combo will yield higher FPS in dense scenery than a FSX limited value. The idea is to have your hardware limit the sim frame rate as determined by your monitor’s refresh rate. The effect is not the same as setting Max Frame Rate= to your monitor’s refresh rate. (Because – read on …)

And yes, the Max Frame Rate= (A.K.A. Target Frame Rate) does interact with the Texture_Bandwidth_Mult= as The Major has quoted in detail earlier in this thread.

Many people tend to fixate on the FPS display meter (Shift-Z) to measure performance. That meter has a relatively slow update rate and I’m not convinced it is entirely accurate. As Texnetcop said many moons ago - Look for smooth flight without blurries and don’t worry what the meter says. Most people can’t see faster than 30 FPS anyway. (30 FPS is TV speed in the USA.)

So the bottom line with any tweak - If FSX seems smoother and looks better, it is. Forget about that Shift-Z FPS meter !!!

Wally-Bob