Classic British Flight Sim

Ah well, here we go again................

Loaded up with no problem but, for me at least, it seems a retrograde step. FPS down, could hardly manage over 5fps on approach to heathrow - at one stage it was reading 2.2fps! Before Acceleration I was getting up to 40 fps with my nice new graphics card. Not only that but the whole of the UK seems to have become a brown lifeless desert. Even the roads look bad. Did a quick uninstall and everything is back tickety-boo.

Might try it again when I feel the urge to hit my head against a brick wall for fun - on the other hand I could give the whole FSX package to my grandson for Christmas - would I be that rotten? You betcha!

Now back to loverly FS9...................



Allan

I told myself I wouldn't do it but yesterday afternoon I buckled and ordered Acceleration from Amazon. I reinstalled FSX last night and left it all ready for Acceleration.

The DVD arrived in the post this morning, and I installed it into FSX, applied a few tweaks from other forums, and I also installed all the mesh from my FS Genesis DVD collection. Here's my very subjective opinion after a few hours of messing around with it:

First of all my system isn't a super duper earth shattering setup of Skynet proportions. It's a one month old laptop, Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 (2.2Ghz), 2 GB RAM, with an ATI HD2600XT 26MB DX10 graphics card (running the latest Catalyst 7.10 drivers which have been received with much praise by FS users with ATI cards)... I have both FS9 and FSX running on a 120GB external HDD connected via USB and using NTFS file compression (so I can squeeze as much stuff as I can onto the little HDD). I'm running FSX at 1680x1050 resolution on a 20" laptop display, with 2x FSAA and 8x AF. My laptop is no slouch, but it can't run the latest and greatest stuff at maximum detail (mainly due to the graphics card being a middle of the road one) and it's definitely not in the same league as some of the quad core monsters running top of the line graphics cards that some people have.

First up, the DX10 "Preview". I enabled the DX10 mode on my system and the framerate was atrocious. Not only was it low, around 10fps, but was also fluctuating wildly and the sim was totally unflyable for me. I disabled the DX10 mode and tried again in DX9...

...MUCH better!

I have the LOD radius set to high, mesh complexity at 100%, 10m resolution mesh, 1m ground textures, and scenery complexity and autogen set to maximum. Aircraft detail is set to "Ultra High" but self shadows, bloom and complex animations are disabled. I have my FPS lock set at 30FPS (see note below). In the cockpit the framerate counter seems to fluctuate between 15 and 31fps, but the sim itself seems to be very smooth. On external views the framerate stays at 31fps, but the movement seems to stutter a little. What I've noticed is if I stop looking at the framerate counter and turn the bloody thing off I'm actually pretty happy with the performance now!

As for the content side of things, I've tried a few of the missions with the Merlin and they are quite fun, but the displays in the Merlin cockpit are impossible to read unless you zoom the view in quite a bit. I tried the Reno Air Race in the Mustang and that was quite good fun as well. I haven't tried any of the other missions yet, but I will at some point... they may not be realistic for the anally retentive types, but they are fun... and that is the point of all this, innit?

Having a look around the various forums, it seems Acceleration/SP2 has broken compatibility with all aircraft models that were developed with the FS9 SDK. Unless an aircraft was developed 100% from the ground up for FSX it will have problems. People are reporting problems with opaque cockpit transparancies, translucent panels, aircraft parts, etc. A lot of people also report problems with addon aircraft in DX10 mode like missing textures. I think Aces have really dropped the ball here, as most addon aircraft for FSX are actually ports of earlier FS9 models, and now they won't work properly... So what we have is a patch that has now broken compatibility with most addon aircraft out there at the moment! :roll:

FS9 will still remain my main sim, as it runs beautifully with the plethora of aircraft and sceneries I have installed. I think I'll use FSX as a diversion when I want to try something different. I've found myself quite enjoying virtual bush flying in Alaska and Canada, so I'll install the Scenery Tech Landclass and Ultimate Terrain X to get some very nice landscapes, and I'll also reinstall the Aerosoft Beaver X and hopefully I'll have my sim of choice for bush flying :flying:

So, the conclusion is FS9 is still the top dog as far as I'm concerned, there is no chance of it being superceded on my system for a long time yet. For me at least Acceleration has improved FSX to the point where I actually enjoy enough to keep it on my HDD


NOTE:

I found an interesting post on another forum about the interaction between the framerate lock, vertical sync and LCD displays. Basically, if you have an LCD display that has a refresh rate of 60Hz (and I believe most if not all of them do) then you should set the "Vertical Sync" to "Application Controlled" in your driver settings, and once in FS set the framerate lock to either 30, 60 or unlimited. Apparently an LCD monitor can only display a steady framerate that is a multiple of the refresh rate... I tried all three and found 30FPS lock gave the best results for me. Might just be a placebo though, it was just a subjective impression after a couple of short flights. Give it a try, it can't hurt your PC...

so far it's looking like
acceleration is more like a double time step if FSX was a march
we still haven't made it to sprint yet, except a few who have
the captians daughter for a computer moving it along.
eh?

Well I think mine will remain as a 'used occasionally' type of programme, even with SP2 it will not be worth the hassle. :doho:

Gents.

I received Acceleration, installed same, fired up FSX and as the selected flight
commenced to load CTD.
I had previously installed, FSDiscover, A Scenery Design Program and Autothumbnail.
I then uninstalled the above programs and FSX worked like a dream.
I have now reinstalled all of the above. Checking FSX after each installation, and they
are all now operating correctly.

Brian.H

I installed Acceleration and entered CTD-land. If you have AFX and/or Instant Scenery you need to download the latest updates for them (v1.03 I think). Once I downloaded these FSX booted up fine but didn't really run smoothly etc etc.

So spent some considerable time re-applying tweaks etc to try and improve things. Funnily enough the single most effective tweak was resetting the max_texture_bandwith to default of 40 and resulted in a very smooth performance.

FSX still looks too 'gamey' for me so I shall stay with FS9 for proper flying, but at least FSX now useable. The carriers are an absolute hoot.

Best wishes

Nige

Well, my copy arrived today and I've just had it up for a quick bash about. To be honest I'm astonished at the difference it's made, I still need to make a new FSX.cfg and do some tweaking but it's running very well now wheras it was unplayable in SP2. The Merlin is great but it needs some new flight dynamics, the Mustang is poor and there are a million and one far better payware ones available and the F-18 has some nice features (the HUD will see a lot of use I think) but overall it's a wasted effort, the flight model is awful and more to the point why bother with it when the all-singing all dancing high fidelity hyper accurate VRS Super Hornet is out in the not too distant future?

SP3 gets major plus points, and the acceleration missions look like fun, but the aircraft are a disappointment to be completely honest, I don't even feel they come up to the standard of the default FSX ones.

Question
some are reporting the Game like look they experience
yet I read that FSX has a more real flying experience

can anyone explain what the difference is?

airboatr wrote:Question
some are reporting the Game like look they experience
yet I read that FSX has a more real flying experience

can anyone explain what the difference is?

In FSX (especially if you fly from the VC) the sensation of flight is far more "real" (in my opinion anyway). Objects seem to have more mass and momentum and "fly" slightly better, and VC's in general are just far tidier with a better refresh and some nice head movement. However the default ground textures especially are very bright and garish and don't seem to represent the real world very well, and if you add to that some of the excessive effects like bloom (which you can admittedly turn off) and on some occasions even the bump mapping and specular shine can look a tad excessive adding to the cartoony effect.

I'm personally quite happy with the performance of FSX now but it's a game I'll keep installed for testing purposes but I won't play for a good 12 months, and even then it'll be a slow migration from FS9. I've spent so much time getting FS9 perfect with AI and addon scenery and airports that it will take a long time before the addons to make FSX look that good are released.

Ahhh dear, I guess I spoke too soon. The microstutters are back, general fps is fine, in fact very high and in some cases higher than I get with FS9. However every half second or so there is a milisecond pause that is driving me insane. Back to the shelf you go FSX!