Classic British Flight Sim

Hi Dave,

The current driver has a setting for Vertical Sync called "adaptive *(half refresh rate) which will lock it to 30

Roger that Ben.

I think my drivers are probably a couple of revisions out of date, but they're working great so I don't really want to upset things

I have had more than a little difficulty getting the latest P3D version to run as smoothly as its predecessor but with “adaptive, half refresh rate” enabled
I am finding things noticeably smoother.
Not really sure what it is though!

Its effectively a frame rate limiter mate that will lock things to either full or half the refresh rate of the monitor, but as I understand it, you must leave the application limiter set to unlimited for it to work.

This is what Kosta has to say on the subject of frame rate settings...

Kosta wrote:[DISPLAY]
UPPER_FRAMERATE_LIMIT=30

Many are using external limiters, many are using internal.

I found out (and got it recently confirmed) that external limiters cause blurries and more stutters.

The fact is that internal limiter is as smooth as FSX can get, if FSX achieves the limited FPS without a problem. If you combine this with the BP=0 tweak, you are going to get even better smoothness.

30 is not a magic bullet for everyone, although it’s probably the most used setting. Doesn’t mean it’s going to work for everyone though. If you have older hardware, you might be forced to go lower, 20-25 even. It’s all about what your machine can handle, considering both hardware and settings. The best though would be to aim for 30fps, due to the new VSYNC tweak.

Setting higher FPS is a bad idea and should not be done, much same like running unlimited.

The trouble with FSX is that it is quite sensitive to the settings and they need to be balanced. If you change one to solve a problem it often creates another problem elsewhere and you can end up spending more time tweaking than flying. A few of us have decided to use Kosta's advised settings as he has spent years doggedly trying out every possible combination and come up with a definitive group of settings and tweaks which work for most systems. He is very active on the Avsim forums and great many simmers follow his advice. I don't understand the different tweaks and what they do so I decided to reset everything back to basics and then tune my sim exactly as advised by Kosta to use it as a starting base. It works perfectly and has required no further adjustment from me. There are two or three of us here who are very pleased with his settings.

Although his list of tweaks looks complicated, they are mostly explanations of what they do. My philosophy was to not try to understand them, just to do what he advised. There are only three or four config tweaks plus advisory in-game settings which are pretty obvious and then the most effective ones are in Nvidia Inspector. NI is a freeware program which has a more advanced interface to the NV graphics card settings than the NV driver and, as Dave says, is the descendant of the old nHancer and works in the same way. There is a default setting for MS Flight Simulator X which you can select and then Kosta recommends a few changes to that default setting.

This is Kosta's tweaks page: http://kostasfsworld.wordpress.com/fsx- ... are-guide/ He has screenshots of his NI settings and in-game settings.

You can get NI from here: http://www.guru3d.com/files_details/nvi ... nload.html Latest version is 1.9.6.9 (31/01/13), scroll to the bottom for the download links!

Ian

Hi Ian,

The difference in the NVidia setting is that it does it at a card level, so its infinitely more efficient than the Kosta tweak (but obviously relies on an NVidia card and up to date driver). The NVidia setting restricts this at a hardware level and saves the CPU and GPU processing code from the application to implement the same thing.

I'm not quite sure what you're saying there, Ben, but I think you're saying that it's more efficient to set the video card directly through the NVidia driver rather than Nvidia Inspector. I've got the latest driver for my GTX675 so I decided to give it a try. I deleted the FS entry in NI and replicated the settings as best I could directly into the driver. Unfortunately there aren't nearly as many settings in the driver as in NI so I could only do the ones available. It cost me about 10fps and stuttered badly even when I turned down the display settings.

So then I reset the Nvidia driver back to default and re-entered Kosta's settings in NI and I was back to my smooth, fast performance with high display settings. I know that with your technical knowledge you know far more about this stuff than I do but I honestly doubt that I can better the results I'm getting via NI. I want you to be right, I really do - you're my top guru

But at the moment I'm sticking with Kosta

Ian

LOL, no Ian, Kosta is fine, but for the Frame rate limiter, when you have a suitable NVIDIA card and driver. Don't go changing everything, just the Vertical Sync as I mentioned above. Its just a more efficient way of doing the frame rate limiter part, nothing else mate

Aaah!

Still, it kept me amused for an hour redoing all my settings! It's all good practise!

BTW, speaking about fps drops as per this thread, for some reason my wave settings in REX seem to periodically default to 32 bit from DXT1 with a corresponding drop in fps. I know now to check that if I get an unexplained performance drop but I don't know how to stop it happening. The other settings seem to stay set. Do you get that?

Ian

I'm not sure Ian, I'll need to check. Just over Paris at the moment in Mike Foxtrot (DB's old friend) on my way back to Heathrow. Must say REX seems to behave much better since I put that public BETA on though, but I will keep an eye on those wave settings