Atomic Systems

Here’s the Salt Lake area –

Beat me to it with your Salt Lake City scenes, which look as real as can be expected !

What are your computer specs to get these frame rates ?

djt01 wrote:“Screens go blank in between loading scenery or choosing another in Alt-World.”

Starting MSFS-X the loading screen seems to take ages before the first menu screen appears.

Having selected my saved Salt Lake City - Cessna flight and "FLY NOW", it then loads scenery, terrain, etc, again taking ages:



Now I want to Alt - World change the season and time like so:



and after getting a completely blank screen for what seems to be 5 minutes get this:



Here we at last, the front wheel sinking into the runway !



What do you get ?

Also find that I can no longer re-size the control panels by dragging their edges so that I can insert a GPS display, etc, like I used to in this Cessna at my local Staverton, Glos, airport I occasionally fly a real Piper Tomahawk from, my favorite !

O t t o

Yay!

Glad you got the better of the installer, Otto!


Doug.

“Cessna flight and "FLY NOW", it then loads scenery, terrain, etc, again taking ages:”

Yes it does hit system resources hard; I’ve got 2GB of ram so my load times are not that bad.


“Here we at last, the front wheel sinking into the runway !”

That is a problem with the 172 (figures, it’s my favorite aircraft in the sim). I have not noticed it with any of the other aircraft.

Rebooting after a period of use tends to imply a heat problem, easiest way to prove or disprove this quickly is to take the lid off the computer (or side) so that you have full access to the motherboard and cards, then put a big desk fan on it on full speed. Give it a few minutes, then start flight sim and see how it goes - if it lasts longer, or doesn't crash at all then it's a heat problem.

I had a heat problem a while ago, turned out the bloomin fan on my graphics card had jammed, let alone it and the pc being hot, it was cooking the unit NEXT to my PC! (an X360)

Matt.

Hi Matt !

This computer is barely one year old and has a 128Mb Radeon X300 PCI-express card and the air being expelled by the rear fans is as cool as a cucumber !

I am using it extensively for working with the payware GOOGLE EARTH to learn to create terrain textures images for use with DEMEX MOSAIC and also for testing MSTS on this WIN-XP SP-2 computer so that I can check out reports by others that they are having problems with the latest Catalyst drivers, SP-2 and being connected to the Internet at the same time as running MSTS.

It is also used for up to one hour long Video/Audio session with my son and grandchildren in the States, not causing any problems

It is running my Loop-the-Loops 3 hours WUPPER EXPRESS-10 activity while I am writing this on my WIN-98SE Internet computer, this route being very graphics demanding and up to now almost one hour into it, no problems !

It's only MSFS-X which does it, using all the standard settings as installed and it not having a hands-free Demo to run can not test it's continued demand on graphics without setting up a Boeing 747 flight and let it fly on Auto Pilot at 20000 feet without having to set up the CH-Yoke !

This WIN-XP SP-2 computer with it's 512 Mb DDR2-RAM is I think not good enough for MSTS-X, frame rates in MSTS not being the best either !

I wonder what hardware djt01 is using to get these exceptionally high frame rates ?

This boring intro music sounds like something I heard before, was it in the MS Combat Flight Simulator-2, I also had to bin after it was first released !

Take care, O t t o.

OTTODAD wrote:
I wonder what hardware djt01 is using to get these exceptionally high frame rates ?

Yes I would also like to know this, and what settings and tweaks, if any, he has done to get those really high frame rates on FSX!

Cheers,
-Alex.

“This boring intro music sounds like something I heard before, was it in the MS Combat Flight Simulator-2, I also had to bin after it was first released !”

The music can be turned off in the audio settings.

The specs of the two systems I have been running FSX on are listed below. My Nvidia setup has a slight edge over the ATI setup so I have been running FSX on that machine only. If you take a look over at the flight sim forums you will see a lot of people with similar spec machines getting the same results. Intel’s Core 2 CPU along with Nvidia’s 8800GTX has proven to be a good combination.

The sim is pretty much running at the default settings. I’m running FSX at 1600x1200 resolution, 8xQAA and 16xAF.

FS9 performance with this same hardware is even more impressive. Triple digit frame rates are the norm with every slider turned all the way up.


Evga nForce 680i SLI (BIOS P24)
Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800
CORSAIR XMS2 2GB (PC2 6400C4)
2x Evga GeForce 8800GTX KO ACS3
Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty FPS
2x WD 74Gb Raptor (RAID 0)
2x WD 36Gb Raptor (RAID 0)
Plextor PX-716A
Plextor PX-755SA (SATA)
PC Power and Cooling Turbo-Cool 1KW-SR
Silver Stone TJ09 (Black)
Windows XP Pro/SP2

Intel D975XBX2 (BIOS 2431)
Intel Core 2 E6700
CORSAIR XMS2 2GB (PC2 6400C4)
ATI X1900XTX / X1900 Cross Fire Edition
Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty FPS
2x Seagate 80GB (RAID 0)
Plextor PX-755SA (SATA)
Plextor PX-760A
Silver Stone OP1000 (1000Watt)
Silver Stone TJ09 (Silver)
Windows XP Pro/SP2

djt01 wrote: Intel’s Core 2 CPU along with Nvidia’s 8800GTX has proven to be a good combination.

This is also what I keep reading about in the UK computing magazines, the Intel core 2 CPU Extreme X6800 with the nVIDIA 8800GTX performing best in benchmark tests.

But I think I shall wait for VISTA and DirectX-10 to mature before investing in another computer which will need a DirectX-10 graphics card, the 8800GTX's performance using it not yet established !

O t t o

Otto,

The activities you describe will barely tickle a PC to make it even remotely warm. Also, if after using FSX for a couple of minutes that air is still very cool then that's definitely your problem, the air coming out the back should be hot as heck implying it's actually moving the hot air out. After a couple of hours with my PC the air coming out the back is red hot but the CPU gauges etc are all still showing nice cool temperatures - when the fans weren't working before the air out the back was reasonably cool but internally the cpu was severely overheating.

It might not be CPU either, it could be graphics card getting hot (which does NOT imply a fault and can happen on a brand new PC). The fact is that fans are either unreliable, or put in a bizarre combination - too many ill informed people think that you can just chuck loads of fans in to a PC and it's good - without proper thought to the airflow inside the machine (where does it get in to the machine, where does it flow through it, and what expels it, what path does it take and is that natural etc) - i've seen combinations where every fan was set to expel air, meaning it was struggling to get new air in, or every fan was set to take air in and nothing could escape. You need a good amount of cool air going in and a good amount of it going out, keeping the whole system bathed in cool air and removing the hot air quickly.

It's a cert that FSX will push your machine a LOT harder than MSTS does - while it is graphics intensive in the route you mention, it's only using a fraction of the power of your graphics card so really it's just making it do a simple job lots of times. FSX makes it do difficult jobs lots of times, crudely speaking. It was the same when MSTS came out, it could bring the cooling system of any PC to its knees if it hadn't been thought out.

The music at startup bothered me also btw in that I loved it and couldn't remember where i'd heard it... it dawned on me a couple of weeks ago - it's the theme music from an old microsoft flight arcade game called Crimson Skies, damn good fun it was too, finished the PC and XBOX versions

Matt.

“This is also what I keep reading about in the UK computing magazines,”

Here’s an example of performance in an application that is not totally CPU bound.


r-Factor in Single GPU mode


r-Factor with SLI enabled






Evga nForce 680i SLI (BIOS P24)
Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800
CORSAIR XMS2 2GB (PC2 6400C4)
2x Evga GeForce 8800GTX KO ACS3
Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty FPS
2x WD 74Gb Raptor (RAID 0)
2x WD 36Gb Raptor (RAID 0)
Plextor PX-716A
Plextor PX-755SA (SATA)
PC Power and Cooling Turbo-Cool 1KW-SR
Silver Stone TJ09 (Black)
Windows XP Pro/SP2

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Then please accept my apologies Otto, I bow to your greater experience. In my own somewhat lesser 15 years experience, the symptoms you describe have, 100% of the time and without fail, been related to either faulty equipment or a heat related issue. Since you are keen to remind how new the machine is, I therefore assumed a heat related issue.

I shall step out of this discussion as there is apparently nothing of value I can offer.

Matt.

“You seem to have forgotten that for most part of the past 30 years I was involved in building and maintaining computers and being an Accountant also supported all popular commercial Accounting Software from PEGASUS to SAGE. After creating and supplying my own bespoke LAN and WAN networked multi-user Accounting Software for clients I had to design specific NOVELL NETWARE servers and workstations computers which were up to the job of running it and the networking software and were built by my computers OEM and hardware maintenance partner according to my specifications.”

I’m wondering with all this experience that you claim you have how you could have so much trouble just installing FSX?

The possibility of heat being an issue, like Matt has suggested is completely possible. Did you not mention not to long ago that your video card had died –

http://forums.flightsim.com/ts/dcboard. ... 50&page=18

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