Steam FSX config vs "Classic" FSX

[gavinc]

Hi
Just got around to downloading and installing FSX.SE.

Comparing the default Steam fsx.cfg to the version on my classic install there are a couple of interesting differences

Steam TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD defaults to 4096 and the TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT defaults to 160 (where as I was running at 40 with my "classic" FSX)

I noticed that the HIMEMFIX "tweak" for FSX is missing from the FSX.SE config file. Does anyone know if it is still necessary with Steam?

Thanks
Gavin

[IanHenry]

Hi,
I've found that on my old system (i7 920, GTX 580) the Steam Edition works very well without any tweaking, I get roughly 50-100% better FPS. It's so good that I think it outperforms Prep3D v2.5. Try it I think you will be impressed.


Ian

[zswobbie1]

& it starts again, getting my popcorn ready!

[Dumonceau]

Hi,
I've found that on my old system (i7 920, GTX 580) the Steam Edition works very well without any tweaking, I get roughly 50-100% better FPS. It's so good that I think it outperforms Prep3D v2.5. Try it I think you will be impressed.


Ian

Outperforming P3D v2.5? Without DX11? I don't think so!

Johan

[IanHenry]

Outperforming P3D v2.5? Without DX11? I don't think so!

Johan

I don't tell lies contrary to what you might think.


Ian

[n4gix]

I noticed that the HIMEMFIX "tweak" for FSX is missing from the FSX.SE config file. Does anyone know if it is still necessary with Steam?

I cannot help noticing that no one has answered your actual question yet.

The HIMEMFIX "tweak" is no longer needed, as this flag has been permanently set in the .exe file.

[TeiscoDelRay]

Hi,
I've found that on my old system (i7 920, GTX 580) the Steam Edition works very well without any tweaking, I get roughly 50-100% better FPS. It's so good that I think it outperforms Prep3D v2.5. Try it I think you will be impressed.


Ian

I know it runs better than P3D 2.5 because I tried that first and could not get it to run well at all. I then tried Steam FSX version and it runs like a dream. Loads fast, plays fast and all my friends that have tried it say the same.

As far as horsepower to run P3D 2.5 I think my 5930k cpu and three 980 superclocked gpu's should have done it.

[Navy Chief]

& it starts again, getting my popcorn ready!

You crack me up, Zswobbie! NC

[odourboy]

This question has come up in another thread over at AVSIM (come to think of it, I may have asked it )

One noteworthy reply has to do with [bufferpools] usepools settings. Apparently Dovetail has made some buffer pool management improvements and setting them manually (usepools=0 in particular), undermines their improvements.

[gavinc]

I cannot help noticing that no one has answered your actual question yet.

The HIMEMFIX "tweak" is no longer needed, as this flag has been permanently set in the .exe file.

Thanks Bill,

Appreciate the info.

Gavin

[gavinc]

Can't possibly comment, trash or otherwise rubbish anyone else's commentary around performance but my personal experience is as follows

Clean install of FSX.SE on the same hard drive as my "classic" FSX.
Fired it up and flew from Heathrow over London in the default DC-3. Had AI set to about the same as what I have on my fully tweaked and over AI'd classic install.

Performance of SE was a bit better than classic but not jaw dropping. Probably roughly equivalent to a clean install of classic. I'll be curious to see whether it holds up better than classic when I start loading scenery and AI into it.

Plan on having 1 install dedicated to ORBX and the other for other areas (got great public domain scenery for Norway and Southern Africa)

Gavin

[Dumonceau]

I don't tell lies contrary to what you might think.


Ian

I never implied that you did. Sorry if you felt that way.

Johan

[Bjoern]

One noteworthy reply has to do with [bufferpools] usepools settings. Apparently Dovetail has made some buffer pool management improvements and setting them manually (usepools=0 in particular), undermines their improvements.

Can't confirm that. I still need the BP (custom pool size) and AffinityMask tweaks.

[odourboy]

Can't confirm that. I still need the BP (custom pool size) and AffinityMask tweaks.

I can't confirm it either - in my case because i haven't tested it. I would expect AffinityMask and Fiber_Frame_Time_Fraction tweaks would be carried through because they reflect your specific system, add-ons and preferences.

Setting usepools=0 never worked great for me anyway. As to custom settings (which I do use), here's the original question and response from DTG. You can form your own opinion regarding custom buffer pool settings:


Question: As you may know, a popular tweak in the FSX community is to alter the [BUFFERPOOLS] in the fsx.cfg to help some users with performance. On modern hardware the most popular setting is UsePools=0. My question is; as of 62608 there was a update that improved the vertex and index buffer handling for performance and I was wondering if manually changing the buffer pools overrides your default improvements and also what the new normal value is for your buffers, if you all are OK with revealing it.

Response: The short answer is yes. We have improved the handling of vertex and index buffer pooling (actually, this is dynamic vertex/index buffer management) within FSX:SE.

By setting UsePools=0, you are effectively disable dynamic buffer use. This forces all buffers to be created in a static fashion which may affect performance in either a positive or negative way, depending upon your hardware.

Buffer pool management in FSX:SE is now much more sensible by default in that we only use dynamic buffers when the buffers are quite small. Larger buffers still end up as static buffers so the idea is that the overhead of creating small buffers is made much less by pooling them.

[Ian Warren]

I brought "FSX STEAM" as a backup , the great thing is the FSX may turn into FSE (11) I tricked a few with that , was great to see 'Captain Sim' adjusted their Boeing 737-200 Classic to suit .

[Cees Donker]

The best five euro's I've spent... Great value, great FRS!


Cees

[Naismith]

Initially I was not impressed, I bought it t'other day for $5 and it claimed to be installed properly even with its error checking, but it failed to get past the opening graphic and just disappeared. In frustration I uninstalled it and Steam from my new install of Win 8.1 64. I reinstalled on another HD and woah! It runs smooth. Out the box maxed out in settings I was getting fps in the 130's never had that with my I7 2600K. Now I have a I5 4690K running on an Asus Maximus VII Hero MB.


Interesting point to me is that FSX Accel gets fps in the 80's with exactly the same in game settings and no addons as FSX Steam.

I will be I think strangling both back to 30 fps for stability in the future... lot of installing to do ahead of me....

[cortomalteseit]

Well, it seems that a clean FSX-SE installation is definitively super-smooth, in almost every situation and pc... but... I'd like to know from the people that have installed a lot of addons (sceneries, airplanes, AI, meshes, etc.), if the sensations, at the end, are the same.

[Bjoern]

I've done a bit of testing in FSXSE last night (well, I've tested all night long...). BP=0 does indeed give a mild performance boost, but I get occasional, flashing white artifacts on the terrain. Bumping up water from 2.x low to 2.x high, as generally recommended when locking out bufferpools, does help, but comes with a performance hit that negates any frame rate improvement.

And surprisingly enough, I do get better results without any custom poolsize numbers at all! DTG apparently really made some improvements to the handling.

One thing left over from FSXMS that can be worked with surprisingly well, however, is the "RejectThreshold=" line in the [BufferPools] section. This (AFAIK) sets a size limit for what models go into the buffer and what models go directly from the CPU to the GPU. Sane values that can be worked with are anything from 128 KB to 1 MB.
For me, the best compromise between framerate and smoothness is a value of 524288 (i.e. 512 KB - 512*1024). I assume that due to this treshhold, higher poly AI models (model file size >512 KB) and the user aircraft (model file size definitely >512 KB) take the shortcut to the GPU, while lower poly models (clouds, buildings, cars, the remaining AI aircraft) are buffered before they're further processed. This should ease input/output stress on the buffer while avoiding chocking the GPU bus with a lot of simulatneous, instant rendering requests.
In any case, I was surprised how much the 512 KB value improved my "performance nightmare" (NYC) scenario.

A job well done from DTG. Save for AffinityMask, the RejectTreshhold tweak is the only (performance-related) thing left over from my old FSXMS config.


The rest of my tests revolved around anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering and its performance cost. My compromise solution for my system and settings is AF enabled in FSXSE and 16x AF set in NvidiaInspector. AA is off in FSXSE and is also set in NI via "Override Application Setting". The mode is Nvidia's "8S", which applies a base "1x2" supersampling to the rendered image. This softens up edges on parts with alpha channels (fences, etc...). The mode then adds 4x multisampling to further refine parts without alpha channels. This overall produces a better image than 8x multisampling, because any transparency anti-aliasing mode won't work when FSX(SE) is running in DX9 mode.


Well, thanks for making me investigate. I otherwise would have used my old tweaks till St. Neverwhen's Day.

[gavinc]

Hi,
Don't know what I have done (don't think I have done anything except disable the default AI and put back in all the custom airline and military AI) but the performance of FSX.SE is quite a bit better than I saw with FSX classic (of course I haven't "improved" FSX.SE with things like custom textures and stuff). I have just installed all the Southern Africa mesh, landclass and scenery from Aeroworx (http://aeroworxsa.blogspot.co.uk/p/f.html) and am getting significantly better frame rates than I did with the same scenery in my FSX classic install.

Flying around Cape Town with the default DC-3 I am getting about twice the frame rates that I used to get with FSX classic. And that is with airline AI at 80% and autogen at very dense.

I am sure it will go back down to "normal" as I start to "improve" things and bloat out my install with 3rd party aircraft, texture upgrades & scenery.

One other little thing I noticed is that FSX.SE still has the bug in all the texture.cfg files so that they look similar to this
fallback.1=..\..\..\..\Scenery\Global\Texture
fallback.2=..\..\..\..\..\..\Scenery\Global\Textur e

Where fallback.2 is wrong.
the texture.cfg should look like
fallback.1=..\..\..\..\Scenery\Global\Texture
fallback.2=..\..\..\..\Texture

I don't know if this makes any difference to the performance (and it is a real PITA to fix as every texture.cfg inside AIRCRAFT, ROTORCRAFT, ANIMALS, MISC, BOATS and GROUNDVECHICLES is wrong and needs to be edited) but it does annoy my flightsim obsessed personality.

Gavin

P.S. Bjoern - thanks for taking the time to do all that testing I will give Rejected Threshold a try.
Gavin

[odourboy]

I've done a bit of testing in FSXSE last night (well, I've tested all night long...). BP=0 does indeed give a mild performance boost, but I get occasional, flashing white artifacts on the terrain. Bumping up water from 2.x low to 2.x high, as generally recommended when locking out bufferpools, does help, but comes with a performance hit that negates any frame rate improvement.

And surprisingly enough, I do get better results without any custom poolsize numbers at all! DTG apparently really made some improvements to the handling.

One thing left over from FSXMS that can be worked with surprisingly well, however, is the "RejectThreshold=" line in the [BufferPools] section. This (AFAIK) sets a size limit for what models go into the buffer and what models go directly from the CPU to the GPU. Sane values that can be worked with are anything from 128 KB to 1 MB.
For me, the best compromise between framerate and smoothness is a value of 524288 (i.e. 512 KB - 512*1024). I assume that due to this treshhold, higher poly AI models (model file size >512 KB) and the user aircraft (model file size definitely >512 KB) take the shortcut to the GPU, while lower poly models (clouds, buildings, cars, the remaining AI aircraft) are buffered before they're further processed. This should ease input/output stress on the buffer while avoiding chocking the GPU bus with a lot of simulatneous, instant rendering requests.
In any case, I was surprised how much the 512 KB value improved my "performance nightmare" (NYC) scenario.

A job well done from DTG. Save for AffinityMask, the RejectTreshhold tweak is the only (performance-related) thing left over from my old FSXMS config.


The rest of my tests revolved around anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering and its performance cost. My compromise solution for my system and settings is AF enabled in FSXSE and 16x AF set in NvidiaInspector. AA is off in FSXSE and is also set in NI via "Override Application Setting". The mode is Nvidia's "8S", which applies a base "1x2" supersampling to the rendered image. This softens up edges on parts with alpha channels (fences, etc...). The mode then adds 4x multisampling to further refine parts without alpha channels. This overall produces a better image than 8x multisampling, because any transparency anti-aliasing mode won't work when FSX(SE) is running in DX9 mode.


Well, thanks for making me investigate. I otherwise would have used my old tweaks till St. Neverwhen's Day.

Good info - thanks!

[Bjoern]

Another tweak that's discussed at Avsim is "SmallPartRejectRadius", which can be added to the FSX.cfg's [Scenery] section. It affects airport vehicles and AI models and the default value is something like "4". Setting this to "0" will make FSX start rendering said models at a far distance from the user aircraft at the cost of a few FPS, while values larger than 4 will make them disappear much earlier, thus improving visual performance. Setting it to 6 or so (as I did) definitely helps over very busy areas like NYC-

[Bjoern]

Just started a flight over a rural area. Not smooth, not smooth at all. Which is odd, because there's not much AI around. Quit FSX, threw the "RejectThreshold" line out of the fsx.cfg, restarted the sim. Rural airport - smooth. "Frame rate hell" scenario - smooth flying a circle (objects need to be loaded).

Wow, you really don't need to tweak FSXSE anymore*!



*Save for AffinityMask and SmallPartblahblah.

[Daube]

That's really good news.
If I ever have to reinstall FSX one day, it will be the Steam edition and not the disk one.