4 replies to this topic

[Zippo2glide]

Hi Everyone,

i am an FSX "virgin" but have dabbled with some very low quality freeware FS and got a yearning for a more realistic experience. Having never got off the ground with FlightGear (looks very similar to MFS) on my HP Inspiron laptop - stuttering & crashing - I decided to jump in and purchase MSFX. Furthermore, a birthday and bonus (monetory) led me to purchase a dedicated PC setup, onto which I loaded MSFX Gold Edition.
Herein lies the rub: having researched forums here, I now realise FSX isn't plug & play and will need some PC/software setup work to optimise performance/appearance but I am not sure if my hardware is entirely up to the job or whether my expectations are too high.

Expectations:

using the default flight (???Creations Trike, Friday Harbour etc) and minimising high demand FSX settings (forum advice), I find I get annoying -

• shimmering effects in mid-ground scenery
  
• very high frequency jittering when panning/turning aircraft to the side
  
• scenery - especially forested areas and leisure boats - seemingly to jump into focus in random areas rather than a gradual transition from distance to near distance detail, to near detail.....

Am I expecting too much to resolve these effects - especially item 3 ?

Reassurance:

my hardware etc is as follows - advice from gaming retailers and limited to a budget (no mods or tweaks as yet).

Apologies if this info already appears in the post from my profile details.

Win 7 Home Prem. (64bit), FSX (Gold) Delux + Accelerator
Core i5 3570K (std clocked), M/B = Gigabyte H77N WiFi
Kingstone 8GB (1600MHz) x 2 (not both fitted at same time)
Gainward Nvid. GTX670 (2GB), 650W PSU
HDDs x 2: Seagate Barracuda 1TB SATA3 (7200rpm), Kingston 120GB HyperX 3K SSD
Acer 24" s240hlbd 5ms 1920x1080 LED/LCD monitor
CH Flightstick Pro, Saitek rudder & throttle quad x 2

Will I realise most of my expectations if my gear is optimally setup and FSX tuned ? (forum research)

Any replies welcome.

Zippo2glide

[mjrhealth]

Start here,

http://www.simforums..._topic36586.htm

Some more

http://forums.simvia...hp?f=21&t=68004

The one thing that will help the most is CPU overclocking, anything over 4 gig helps the higher the better. But if you insist on perfection than go buy a real plane and get a pilots licence.. FSX can look really good, but you need to start enjoying instead of trying to find all the faults in it.

[mjrhealth]

Knew there was another one

http://www.simforums...topic29041.html

[Buziel-411_RED]

To deal with the shimmering, try downloading Nvidia Inspector. http://www.guru3d.co...r_download.html Unfortunately the AVSIM forums appear to be down at the moment so I can't link you to a guide there, but Nvidia Inpsector will allow you to enable anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering (AA and AF, respectively) which will help with shimmering and blurry ground textures.

As for the detail popping in, unfortunately FSX isn't very good at handling this so there will always be some kind of suddenly appearing objects or blocky ground textures which sudden become clear at a certain distance. However, you can minimize the effect by zooming out your view. I use around 0.40 zoom in the cockpit, and 0.60 zoom in external view. In external, you can adjust the eyepoint with either CTRL and -/+, or SHIFT -/+, I can't recall which, sorry.

Try and locate the FSX.cfg file (there are numerous forum posts which can be found on Google explaining how), and you can use some settings which are normally hidden from view inside of FSX. Find the LOD_radius value, and try increasing it to 6.5 to see if it increases the radius of detail around you. Also, try putting WideViewAspect=True under the [Display] section.

Hope this helps!

[Zippo2glide]

mjrhealth, on 16 March 2013 - 03:58 PM, said:

Start here,

http://www.simforums..._topic36586.htm

Some more

http://forums.simvia...hp?f=21&t=68004

The one thing that will help the most is CPU overclocking, anything over 4 gig helps the higher the better. But if you insist on perfection than go buy a real plane and get a pilots licence.. FSX can look really good, but you need to start enjoying instead of trying to find all the faults in it.

Thanks for links and I'm not looking for perfection - just trying to guage my setup's capabilities. Really? I 'd buy a plane and learn to fly it, if I could afford to.

Buziel-411_RED, on 17 March 2013 - 11:31 AM, said:

To deal with the shimmering, try downloading Nvidia Inspector. http://www.guru3d.co...r_download.html Unfortunately the AVSIM forums appear to be down at the moment so I can't link you to a guide there, but Nvidia Inpsector will allow you to enable anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering (AA and AF, respectively) which will help with shimmering and blurry ground textures.

As for the detail popping in, unfortunately FSX isn't very good at handling this so there will always be some kind of suddenly appearing objects or blocky ground textures which sudden become clear at a certain distance. However, you can minimize the effect by zooming out your view. I use around 0.40 zoom in the cockpit, and 0.60 zoom in external view. In external, you can adjust the eyepoint with either CTRL and -/+, or SHIFT -/+, I can't recall which, sorry.

Try and locate the FSX.cfg file (there are numerous forum posts which can be found on Google explaining how), and you can use some settings which are normally hidden from view inside of FSX. Find the LOD_radius value, and try increasing it to 6.5 to see if it increases the radius of detail around you. Also, try putting WideViewAspect=True under the [Display] section.

Hope this helps!

Hi and thanks for the help. Sounds like I should be able to get some improvements with optimising hardware & FSX setup, especially since we seem to have similar PC components. Thanks again.