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FSX SP1:New tweaks

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In fsx.cfg

---

There is a tweak to control scheduling of threads on cores.

It is not recommended to change these settings unless you have a performance reduction and/or maxed out CPU loads in the PerfMonitor. The tweak is

Edit:Fixed a typo here
[JOBSCHEDULER]
AffinityMask=n
where
n num of cores scheduled
1 = 1 core 0001
3 = 2 cores 0011
7 = 3 cores 0111
15= 4 cores 1111

----

There is additional code to reduce blurries. If you get random texture tiles that appear in a solid color this may help.

In some cases, the textures generated from this code can get throttled and will be timed out. The time out config value is

[TERRAIN]

SWAP_WAIT_TIMEOUT=<number_of_frames>

The default is 30 frames.

--

There are new config items to control VSYNC for fullscreen and windowed separately

[DISPLAY]

ForceFullScreenVSync, default is TRUE

ForceVSync, default is FALSE

We have seen cases where when VSYNC is on in fullscreen causing major fluctuations in frame rate especially when setting the rate limiter above 45. If you run into widely fluctuating FPS in fullscreen when aiming for above 45, try turning VSYNC off or reducing below 40.

--

For the dusk/dawn textures some people feel, subjectively, the result is too dark or too light. There are 2 items that allow the transition time to be changed:

[GRAPHICS]

DAY_THRESHOLD

NIGHT_THRESHOLD

acceptible values are 0 to 65535.

Defaults:

DAY: 32768

NIGHT: 4096

These represent the amount of 'ambient' light at the ends of the day/night blend threshold. Zero is perfect dark, 65535 is full day sun at noon in the summer.

--

There is a tweak that helps with panel updates, especially the glass panel. If you use the glass panel and notice very slow updates. There is a 2 part tweak:

[GRAPHICS]

DirtyRegionUpdateLimit=<integer>

By default this UINT32_MAX (i.e. four billion or so) so it has no effect.

Setting it to zero effectively forces full texture updates instead.

Setting it to smaller numbers (1-1000) might improve performance if the card is slow at full texture updates and does not have a high overhead for incremental updates.

[GRAPHICS]

MergeDirtyRegionUpdates=<0/1>

By default this is 0 (i.e. disabled) so it has no effect.

Setting it to 1 (enabled) causes us to merge all of the dirty rects into a single large dirty rect. This means that we will only do a single partial texture update.

This may work well if the card is slow at full texture updates and does have high overhead for incremental updates.

---

There is a scenery tweak to eliminate very small objects, which can reduce render time.

[SCENERY]

SmallPartRejectRadius=<pixels>

Basically this culls out small model parts (e.g. air conditioners on roofs of buildings, aircraft doors) if their radius would occupy less than the specified number of screen pixels.

The default is 1.0 (i.e. 1 pixel). 2, and 4 are the next 2 settings we advise. Can significantly improve performance but may cause “popping” of small objects

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 15, 2007
    Congrats' Phil & Team, she's finally out ! Look forward to all the hard work you guys put into it. :) Best Regards' Garett

  • Anonymous
    May 15, 2007
    PingBack from http://switchfxdesign.wordpress.com/2007/05/15/fsx-sp1new-tweaks/

  • Anonymous
    May 15, 2007
    Great stuff Phil! Can't wait to try these out. :D

  • Anonymous
    May 15, 2007
    Congrats Phil, Very happy with this SP1 Almost all on the right, never below 30FPS with my E6600 good job :) CU Livai

  • Anonymous
    May 15, 2007
    this is great, i'm downloading it right now. Good Job

  • Anonymous
    May 15, 2007
    Hi Phil.  Sometimes, I get blurries at low altitude flying even though I am hitting my target FPS of 15 and there is no FPS reduction.  I am running a single core.  I have 3 questions:

  1. What effect is there if I were to increase or decrease SWAP_WAIT_TIMEOUT?
  2. For AffinityMask, I noticed there is no [JOBSCHEDULER] section in my fsx.cfg.  Do I need to add this section? Also, should I set AffinityMask to an integer value or the binary value?  In other words, what is the correct syntax for AffinityMask: AffinityMask=1 or AffinityMask=0001
  3. Any other suggestions for reducing blurries with SP1? Gadwin
  • Anonymous
    May 15, 2007
    Phil, Congrats on SP1 and your team's hard work. As someone who runs FSX on a system that just meets the min specs, I've noticed two fantastic improvements with SP1:
  1. gauges used to refresh every second or so. Now as smooth as silk.
  2. "Blurries" greatly reduced. If I could ask Phil, is there a setting I can change to make window reflections visible in VC mode? While they're visible on my system in helicopters and gliders, they're not visible in any aircraft. Again, thanks for the great work, solid effort, and open communication with FS enthusiasts. Charlie

  • Anonymous
    May 15, 2007
    Gad: 1)try it 2)we really try to do the right thing with the scheduler, so you dont need to add that. use the integer, I published the bitmasks so people understand the pattern and as cores increase can continue to use the tweak 3)reduce settings, use other tweaks.

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2007
    Phil, On a clean installation of FSX and SP1, is the Photo scenery patch on the download page still required? Thanks...

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2007
    I would just like to say well done to all the team. I did a mini-flight from Teteboro to JFK in an Ultralight with Extremely dense terrain and normal autogen, as this would've floored my machine previously. Now nice and smooth - so job well done!!! Only strange thing I've noticed is that if I set target frame rate as unlimited instead of locked at say 20fps, I notice a major (5-10fps) improvement on the unlimited setting.

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2007
    Hi , I tried ti chose Tower controller in a multiplayer game after installing SP1. This error popping up: "Unable to load model" (I try to translate that from german). Fact is: I cannot play tower controller anymore in multiplayer now, since it will always reset to Trike default model, showing the error above. Anyone else having this problem or is it working for you guys? Tx for reply, Soccy aka Testili.

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2007
    Hi, Thanks a lot. I am getting at all missions 20FPS! (IT IS LOCKED ALSO AT 20) With almost everything maxed out except traffic I am getting 15 FPS. You did a great job. Well done!

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2007
    I'm so confused now.  I'm looking forward to going home and downloading SP1, but what are all these code changes? This may sound like a stupid question, but why do these suggested changes come out a moment after SP1 release?  Shouldn't they have been included in the release? Sorry if this is a really dumb quesiton... Looking forward to getting out of work today....

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2007
    Phil and the team, thanks for the service pack. I see huge improvements,  but when i'm trying to tweak the SmallPartRejectRadius, i can't find it in the fsx.cfg file. any ideas? dirk

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2007
    Thank you Phil, I'm also pleased with the SP1. Will spend more time over the weekend experimenting. What i'd like to see here is more Tweaks.

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2007
    Phil, this serivce pack really boosted my performance, but there is a widespread issue. That issue would be blurries, tons of people including myself are experiencing them to a large extent. Even with the fiber frame tweak and the one in this blog post, the blurries are relentless. Turning down sliders isn't helping either. Please Phil, tell me there's a tweak we don't know about yet that will actually fix this problem.

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2007
    Hi Phil, Thanks for spending your time making this fantastic patch for all us flight simmers! I have noticed a huge performance  improvement on my machine,from around 15fps at WSSS without traffic, to now around 30-40fps. I also now have working jetways! I have picked up one problem however, if "Very Dense" is selected under Scenery Complexity and I am flying a dawn, night or dusk flight, I am getting around a max. of 6fps with every other setting lowest of off. When I pull the slider back to normal, I get a reasonable 15-30fps. This only affects me during the night though. Other than that, Thankyou Phil and Microsoft for such a wonderful product!

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2007
    I'm not able to find ForceFullScreenVSync and ForceVSync in my FSX.cfg (and I did install SP1) ...why could that be? Should I just add them manually?

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2007
    Phil, On your vsync tweak is this how you use it to turn VSYNC off in full screen under display settings?  I do have no cap on frame rates, works better for me, and I do get fps that jump all over. Gary [DISPLAY] ForceFullScreenVSync, default is TRUE ForceVSync, default is FALSE

[DISPLAY] ForceFullScreenVSync=false ForceVSync=false

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2007
    Soccy: thats a new one, we are investigating

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2007
    Michael, what part are you confused about? tweaks? historically there have been tweaks the user could apply that are not on by default. we cannot predict what users have and dont have. its up to you to understand them and when to apply them. The glass cockpit issue seems to be driver and config related, and doesnt happen everywhere. So until you see the need, why set it?

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2007
    Dirkie: add it, most of these tweaks do not exist by default, that is precisely why I am telling you about them :-).

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2007
    Daniell: see my previous reply.

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2007
    Moon: besides the tweak, you may have to play with the graphics card control panel, many of them have a vsync override that trumps the app. try it both ways, with and without a frame rate limit, to see what generates the best results for you.

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2007
    Phil: many columns have posts about 'fatal errors' and the like.  How essential is a total uninstall of all add-ons? And is the VS update also critical?  Would this limit the number of crashes and unhappiness.

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2007
    Ian: yes, I would remove all add-ons. it removes them as a variable in the equation right away. thats why I blogged about it. if that fixes the fatal errors, then you know. usually the VS update is only needed when add-on installs fail, not crash. but its hard to debug these things even with a machine at hand, much less from email.

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2007
    Hi Phil, Playing around with my single core HT machine 8300 I discovered something which you probably already know about and have blogged about.  I turned the detail radius from max to small and almost immediately everything improved including blurries without adjusting any other sliders.  I have a LCD 21 inch opt at 1600x1200 at 65mhz and the graphics were breaking up completely after awhile into a flight streaking and boxing into solid colors.  That stopped completely when I lowered the radius to small.  I don't see any real noticeable difference in the scenery quality by doing this and it really is worth considering as a tip for those that will listen.  This one slider adjustment made more difference that all the others I have tried Gary

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2007
    Maui: did you see what Adam had to say about this tweak, that I quoted before SP1 released?

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2007
    Phil, I am experiencing FPS increases, but the aircraft (and cars on the road) are stuttering quite badly, especially in external view mode.  I have low settings (except for water 2x low) and bilinear, no antialiasing etc  I have also got unlimited fps assigned. What do you write into fsx.cfg for JOBSCHEDULER tweak if my system is a duo centrino?  Is it just n=3 and that's it?

  • Anonymous
    May 17, 2007
    Great job Phil. SP1 totaly changed experience on Pentium D machines. It's really great now and amazing to play. I would like to see some of the settings, especially JOBSCHEDULER setting somewhere in the Settings/Advanced menu in the game.

  • Anonymous
    May 17, 2007
    There seems to be a bug with this build...could you please confirm or deny? I use 2-D cockpits and when flying I often press the W key to hide all the instrument panels, then use the numeric keypad arrow buttons with Numlock turned on to look around (ex: behind me) when I am flying (ex: taking off, to get a nice view of the runway). This used to work but now I just see the 2-D plane cockpit itself, even when no instrument panels are showing (hidden with the W key). Is there a workaround for this? I uninstalled the patch and it started working again. I reinstalled the patch and it stopped working again. So, please advise.

  • Anonymous
    May 17, 2007
    So let me get this straight... It's better to set the FPS to 30...40...50.. or whatever rather than setting it to unlimitted? Why now with SP1?

  • Anonymous
    May 17, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 17, 2007
    Hi Phil, Im getting a definite framerate increase in Vista (Ultimate) which is good news. If only Nvidia would sort out a major issue with their drivers i could play it properly (on ASRock mobo's when the visual style changes to basic horizontal lines appear on the screen.) My major issue right now is a CTD (crash to desktop) about 2 mins into a flight. In the event log this is what it had to say...

Faulting application fsx.exe, version 10.0.61355.0, time stamp 0x4643ee0a, faulting module visualfx.dll, version 10.0.61355.0, time stamp 0x4643f2ad, exception code 0xc0000005, fault offset 0x00029ca8, process id 0x13d4, application start time 0x01c798af9f15d9a0.

And this one...

Faulting application fsx.exe, version 10.0.61355.0, time stamp 0x4643ee0a, faulting module xuipc.dll, version 10.0.61260.0, time stamp 0x45df9d57, exception code 0xc0000005, fault offset 0x0001b877, process id 0x1328, application start time 0x01c798aafbb49d5a.

Thanks

  • Anonymous
    May 17, 2007
    My biggest question is resolution.  I can and have had it set for 1440:900, but should I set it lower?  Will it improve the performance of the game? Phil: What should the resolution be set too?

  • Anonymous
    May 17, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 19, 2007
    When I use slew mode, in free flight,in missions and in multiplayer,my engines stop and I have to start them again!

  • Anonymous
    May 19, 2007
    Out of Memory:   Phil I have posted on this one before, but I note in the forums (see Sim Forums in Flightsim #22622), there is a fix that allows for 3 gigs of VRAM using a MS editbin.exe tool.  However it is not for the faint-hearted and I am one of those with small computer skills.  Is there any way this fix, which would help a large number of FSX users could come out as a small fix for those who neeed it - and within a self-executable setup.  After SP1 this seems selfish, but it clearly affects many and is a source of dissatisfaction.

  • Anonymous
    May 21, 2007
    Then Phil do you mind explaining why do I have a better performance without the SP1 than when I intall .  I reintalled the FSX clean no tweak and when I apply the patch the FSX is worst can you explained that. my sytem is the following EVGA 680i with 2gb 88sieris nvidial card with 640mb, not overcloked enough space in HD E6400 intel processor.

  • Anonymous
    May 21, 2007
    S0436: try setting a frame rate to 30 instead of unlimited. if you want to disable the 2nd core, try 1. 3 means use both cores.

  • Anonymous
    May 21, 2007
    Mimarsinan: this blog is not product support, please log bugs with the link on fsinsider.com

  • Anonymous
    May 21, 2007
    Michaelvg1: its always been true that limited is better than unlimited for the rest of the sim.

  • Anonymous
    May 21, 2007
    Bobby: this blog is not product support, please log bugs with the link on fsinsider.com

  • Anonymous
    May 21, 2007
    Michaelvg1: FSX is not typically fill-rate limited until above 19x12 so resolution below that isnt typically an issue.

  • Anonymous
    May 21, 2007
    Dan: there is always a risk that any change can cause an install failure. I am glad it worked for you but being conservative is always best.

  • Anonymous
    May 21, 2007
    Panos: This blog is not product support.

  • Anonymous
    May 21, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 21, 2007
    Capt: This blog is not product support.

  • Anonymous
    May 21, 2007
    Phil:  I am now running SP1 and I must say the performance improvement has been extraordinary.  It is astonishing to consider a framelock at 40 or 50, where before such numbers could only be got over the sea.  My only problem, and it is a much reported problem is the blurries - very severe.  I will try some of the settings suggested by you to see if they can be reduced.  And I would be interested in any further developments that you come up with in regard to settings.  Once again, thanks indeed for the greatly improved experience.

  • Anonymous
    May 21, 2007
    Ian: have you tried reducing your settings to see if that helps with the blurries?

  • Anonymous
    May 22, 2007
    Phil, The program is greatly improved, thank you. Personally with Vista Ultimate and 4 mb of Ram the only way it will run smoothly without the blurries and crashes is to remap memory in the boot.ini and then attach the largeaddress fix to fsx.exe.  Then it runs fine, for the most part, only the odd crash here and there; more on that latter. I realise this is DirectX problem but MS needs to get on the stick or hire Steve Jobs to get things done in a complete manner. The other persons with blurries might be caused by addon programs either incorrectly installed or written.  This happened to me with a recent addon scenery downloaded from a well known sim site; once removed FSX with SP1 worked great.  The program scenery was poorly written using landclasses with texture file attached!  So now a check is run each time an addon is installed to make sure the sceneries are not blurred. Now to the occasional crash problem.  It seems using Michael Heise's MH's FS Library Scan V1.0 available from flightsim.com there are 1768 instances of missing textures referred to by your bgls (clean SP1 install).  The instances and actual number are different; the actual number missing textures is about 101, mostly FS9 textures.  I am told that missing texture files can, if compounded by calls, cause "out of memory" problems and occasional crashes. Is this correct can your company supply a simple patch to address these missing textures or are these missing textures not an issue?  If you wish the excel files please email me and I will send them to you. Once again great job this was a definite improvement.

  • Anonymous
    May 22, 2007
    Surfsup: We have moved on to DX10, so we are not looking at any more work on SP1. Using the /3G option is very risky, as there is a D3DX issue that is more than likely causing the crashes you are seeing. We do guard against missing textures so I suspect that is not what is causing the crashes.

  • Anonymous
    May 22, 2007
    Phil:  a serious comment.  I was in a retail computer store, and saw a couple looking at FSX with about an 11yr old boy.  I spoke to them, and it was clear that they had an old and slow computer. I told them the first thing they would need to do was find the SP1 -of course they knew nothing about it, so of course they wouldn't apply it.  I had to tell them they would be better off buying FS9.  FSX even with SP1 is filling the forums with posts on fixes - frankly it is no longer an amateurs game, and you have many upset loyalists as well.  If MS wants to maintain the Flightsim market that it has built up then you must bypass this version quickly.  Forget Adrenaline and Trainsim, and get FSXI underway.  I believe that it is business critical for MS to do this or lose a powerful market base.  I have it running adequately now, but with a $3000 upgrade and endless tweaking and fiddling.  It is no place for the average punter, and they will discard the game and not return.

  • Anonymous
    May 22, 2007
    "We have moved on to DX10, so we are not looking at any more work on SP1." Thanks again for all the hard work on SP1.  If you didn't see my avsim post, we did rename our 8-month-old daughter to Phil in your honor after my fps doubled.  (of course, that was before I noticed the blurries, but I'm still happy enough that I didn't recall the paperwork) I am anxious for DX10, so I'm not sure I'd want work on it to be held up anyway, but I'm curious if it is known to you guys how one of the changes might have caused the blurries to crop up for some of us?  While we were given some warning about somewhat of an increase in autogen popping as a tradeoff for the efficiency of batching, I never saw anything mentioned that the new multi-tile work could have the trade-off of slower texture loading in some cases.  Did the reports of blurries surprise you, or were you aware that some of us might see a setback in that arena? (or no comment?) Also: any chance you could experiment with autogen that fades in with DX10... or have you tried and found it corny?  Will you continue to batch autogen with DX10, or will you drop that with the DX10 patch?

  • Anonymous
    May 22, 2007
    Qusetion: Does Sp1 automatically ''understands'' how many cores I have or I should apply that tweak?

  • Anonymous
    May 23, 2007
    Ian: sorry you feel that way, we see that many low-end machines are showing good gains from SP1 and that FSX when approached with the proper expectations is a lot of fun.

  • Anonymous
    May 23, 2007
    Maui: I will talk details about DX10 later, just not now. Does turning settings down help with the blurries?

  • Anonymous
    May 23, 2007
    Panos: we do try to detect the number of cores and do the right thing.

  • Anonymous
    May 23, 2007
    That's not the question I was asking... I'll take that as a "no comment".

  • Anonymous
    May 23, 2007
    Phil:  my comment was not a matter of me 'feeling' that way.  It was about the impact of the game on new users with low to medium hardware.  It was a commercial observation.  For me, the game is running well, but required significant investment and a great deal of time.   I now look forward to DX10.   You warn about the /3GB fix, although many report great success (this is the adaptation available through the 3G enabler download).  Is it possible for a small patch to be prepared to enable this, as many users now have 4 gigs of quality RAM installed.  I note that you say there is a D3D bug in FSX, but I also see that was your specialty.  Surely that can be repaired or a large number of users will be permanently hobbled.

  • Anonymous
    May 23, 2007
    Ian: If and when the DX team fixes the problem in the D3DX dll, we will take a look again.

  • Anonymous
    May 23, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    May 23, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 24, 2007
    Surfsup: DX01 may let us buy back some efficiency. We'll just have to see. The 1st gen DX10 cards are full-featured, thats the way the API definition works. I just meant to say that each succeeding generation of cards for a particular API just gets better. Look at the difference from 5900 to 7900, or 9700 to X1900.

  • Anonymous
    May 24, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    May 24, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    June 13, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    June 14, 2007
    Camel: we are still investigating the blurries, its complicated by the fact there seem to be at least 4 types of blurries.