Another view on FSX settings

Katy Pluta (www.projectmagenta.com) has kindly allowed me to post her views here. Here’s what she said on a private forum.

OK, after running the RTM today with following hardware and settings below I could set the fps at 28 and not go below them for 1920*1600*32 resolution and a smooth flight now that the disk has been defragmented(!):

• Core2Duo @ 2.4Ghz, 2Gb of RAM and X1900XT, XP SP2
• no AA needed for this resolution (and it would cut the performance…)
• filtering: trilinear (anisotropic gives same performance but shimmers, NVIDIA filtering is so much better than ATI IMHO)
• global texture very high
• advanced animation on
• aircraft ultra-high
• radius large
• mesh 80 and 19m
• texture 1m
• water effect low 2.x
• land detail texture on
• scenery extremely dense
• autogen sparse
• special effects detail: high
• cloud draw distance 60m
• detailed clouds, low density
• airline traffic 50
• GA traffic 25
• airport vehicle max
• road 10, ferries and boats 5

I have also set that fiber setting at 0.50 and lost performance but not so happy with the blurries so I will boost it at 75% and see, the mesh and mountains in the distance and textures surrounding the aircraft are crisp but in between it’s a yucky blur 😦 Anisotropic filtering sure would help if it was not shimmering so much with that ATI card, I’ll have to check how to tweak with the ATI control panel if possible and report.

I am sorry to say that if you do not have an AMD FX or an Intel Core2Duo your hardware is obsolete today, if you want to upgrade now take at least one of these two for your CPU, preferably the latter which is faster.

I ran the beta on a P4 3.4 and an AGP 7800 and was able to squeeze 16 to 20fps for 1600*1200*32 resolution, it is going to be a matter of settings. Autogen is a complete killer no matter what, not sure if it is due to textures (don’t think so) or the sheer number of objects.

We are in again for compromising until the hardware catches up and we find optimizations…

Oh by the way, I tired to run FS9 after forgetting I already had FSX running, both cannot be launched at the same time… 😉