Six Five's anyone?

[UK_Widowmaker 571]

Just wondered if anyone is running with all sliders at five?...... I suspect not many!...and when i tried it, I noticed no major improvement in quality of Graphics over sliders at four...just a massive framerate hit.

[theseeker 0]

Just wondered if anyone is running with all sliders at five?...... I suspect not many!...and when i tried it, I noticed no major improvement in quality of Graphics over sliders at four...just a massive framerate hit.

 

If I run at all 5 I get 42FPS. What are you getting?

[cptroyce 0]

Same here..tried running all 5's and saw no real difference at all from my current set up of 54453.

 

As for FPS rate I am getting between 45-50-75 currently. I have pointed out before that at least for me, changing the resolution from 1024x768 which I normally always have it set on, to 1440x1920(?) as recommended by someone weeks ago on the forum, increased frame rates by like

15-20fps. More then anything I had ever seen before..works in other sims/games as well.

 

Regards,

Royce

[RAF_Louvert 101]

Tried it too, but I've settled on 5-3-4-5-3 as I can see no difference, (as also noted by Royce). With these settings I have no jaggies at all and a solid 50 to 70 fps all the time. Very nice.

 

Cheers!

 

Lou

[Schnitzel von Krumm 0]

I'm running all fives at the moment, for no particular reason other than turning things down doesn't make much difference. I have all the sliders up, AA set to 16Q and AF set to 16 at 1600x1200. I'm loving this videocard (BFG GTX285 OCX). The only thing I found that made any difference was setting "Maximum pre-rendered frames" to 2. That eliminated a little "catch" I would get every second or so, where there'd be a stutter when turning tight.

 

Currently, I get a steady 40 fps, which is what I set as a maximum. Occasionally, it drops into the mid to high 30s, but usually only for an instant, then it's back bouncing off the limit of 40.

 

At the moment, I'm mainly playing in QC mode (trying to get the hang of WWI air combat), so there are typically only two planes in the sky. I'm not sure if a big air battle would slow things down. I would think that would stress the CPU more than the GPU, but I won't claim to understand all the intricate technical interactions in a flight sim.

 

OFF really is an extraordinarily detailed game when the graphics settings are maxed out. Now, if only I was a better pilot. At least I leave a good-looking corpse.

[catch 81]

The only thing I found that made any difference was setting "Maximum pre-rendered frames" to 2. That eliminated a little "catch" I would get every second or so, where there'd be a stutter when turning tight.

 

My sliders are 54455 with FPS between 30 and 60 (capped with vsync on). My default "maximum pre-rendered frames" is set at 3 and I haven't messed with it. Is there a recommended setting ? I presume the lower the setting the less likelihood of stutters but at the cost of visual quality ? Or is it the other way around lol ?

[Schnitzel von Krumm 0]

My sliders are 54455 with FPS between 30 and 60 (capped with vsync on). My default "maximum pre-rendered frames" is set at 3 and I haven't messed with it. Is there a recommended setting ? I presume the lower the setting the less likelihood of stutters but at the cost of visual quality ? Or is it the other way around lol ?

 

As background, this controls the number of frames rendered before they're needed for the display. From what I read, a lower number (never use zero, though) reduces latency (i.e. the time from when you make a control movement until it shows up on screen) for faster games. A higher number is supposed to give you a smoother but lower frame rate. With DirectX 9, three is the maximum, so setting to eight won't help anyway. Also the effects of this setting can change depending on whether or not you're CPU bound. With OFF, that is fairly probably, unless you have an older videocard.

 

So, results can vary, or so I'm told. I tried different settings, and 2 worked best for me. At least that's what I've convinced myself of, anyway.

 

You'll have to try it yourself to see what works best on your machine. Default is three (i.e. triple buffering). If I have been correctly informed, higher than that won't help with a DirectX 9 game. Setting zero is apparently not a good idea, and can lead to crashes and other oddities. So, that leaves one and two as settings to play with. For me, two helped, but for any other machine . . . who knows?

[catch 81]

Interesting. Thanks for the info Schnitzel. So if you have triple buffering on then pre-rendering should also be 3 to avoid a mismatch or something ? Or doesn't it matter ?

[Schnitzel von Krumm 0]

Interesting. Thanks for the info Schnitzel. So if you have triple buffering on then pre-rendering should also be 3 to avoid a mismatch or something ? Or doesn't it matter ?

 

I honestly have no idea.

 

Going by what I've read, though, the consensus seems to be leave triple buffering off (I don't think it works with DirectX anyway) and don't move the pre-rendering more than one notch. In other words, at two or three, with the exception being if you're in Vista and are playing a DirectX 10 game. Some people say they get less mouse lag with this set to one, but those are people playing first person shooters. In OFF, the movements tend to be a bit more subtle, plus I would imagine there would have been some inherent lag in the response of these old planes, depending on speed and the control surfaces of the individual plane. Personally, I'd accept a little lag to get rid of the stutter.

 

At this time, I'd like to back away slowly from my first post, because I'm not sure I can honestly say this setting got rid of the stutter. It was gone, but now it's back. Sigh. On a happy note, it seems to disappear after a minute or less. Maybe it's the textures loading? Oddly it seems to make no difference what the other detail settings are. If turn off AA and AF and pull the sliders back, it's still there. Maybe I'll try turning all the background stuff off in Vista. You'd think with a quad core I'd be fine for those things, but this is Vista we're talking about. The OS is probably trying to cram all the processes on one core.

 

I'll keep playing around and post my experiences. If other people could do likewise, that would be great.

 

In the meantime, if you Google for "maximum pre-rendered frames" you'll get plenty of arguments on every side of this issue. I'm really not sure what to think any more. I'm used to that feeling though.

 

I will stand by the part of my earlier post where I said I was a crappy pilot. That will never change. There are no upgrades coming for my brain and hands any time soon.

[catch 81]

LOL Schnitzel. Just beware, Tweakitis is a dangerous malaise. Been there done that. It sends you crazy. I think I'll leave well enough alone (although just quietly I may turn triple buffering off).

 

Are you patched to 1.28a ? Unless I'm imagining things, I get more stutters than previous patches where I rarely got them at all. But I really don't want to go through all the painful tweak tests again ! I'm mad enough as it is .... MUAHA MUHAHAHAHHAHAHA !!!!

[UK_Widowmaker 571]

I honestly have no idea.

 

Going by what I've read, though, the consensus seems to be leave triple buffering off (I don't think it works with DirectX anyway) and don't move the pre-rendering more than one notch. In other words, at two or three, with the exception being if you're in Vista and are playing a DirectX 10 game. Some people say they get less mouse lag with this set to one, but those are people playing first person shooters. In OFF, the movements tend to be a bit more subtle, plus I would imagine there would have been some inherent lag in the response of these old planes, depending on speed and the control surfaces of the individual plane. Personally, I'd accept a little lag to get rid of the stutter.

 

At this time, I'd like to back away slowly from my first post, because I'm not sure I can honestly say this setting got rid of the stutter. It was gone, but now it's back. Sigh. On a happy note, it seems to disappear after a minute or less. Maybe it's the textures loading? Oddly it seems to make no difference what the other detail settings are. If turn off AA and AF and pull the sliders back, it's still there. Maybe I'll try turning all the background stuff off in Vista. You'd think with a quad core I'd be fine for those things, but this is Vista we're talking about. The OS is probably trying to cram all the processes on one core.

 

I'll keep playing around and post my experiences. If other people could do likewise, that would be great.

 

In the meantime, if you Google for "maximum pre-rendered frames" you'll get plenty of arguments on every side of this issue. I'm really not sure what to think any more. I'm used to that feeling though.

 

I will stand by the part of my earlier post where I said I was a crappy pilot. That will never change. There are no upgrades coming for my brain and hands any time soon.

 

 

Very interesting post guys..I 'believe' that CFS3 (and therefore OFF) is only ever using single core, and therefore Duo / Quad has no effect on the sim?

(feel free to correct me on this, as it's just what I have heard)

 

Also..how do you 'clamp' the FPS? (there's a setting in FS2004 etc, but I cant find it in OFF.....but then i am pretty dumb!

Edited April 1, 2009 by UK_Widowmaker

[ONETINSOLDIER 2]

Correct, unless the program utilises multi threading technology, it meens it wont run faster, but you could run two at the same time at same speed, or 4 with a quad core,,

[Schnitzel von Krumm 0]

Correct, unless the program utilises multi threading technology, it meens it wont run faster, but you could run two at the same time at same speed, or 4 with a quad core,,

 

Yeah, about the only benefit you'd see in CFS3 from a dual or quad core is that any unrelated background processes, like anti-virus, other utilities, or the operating system itself, could be handled by the other cores, theoretically leaving one core to handle nothing but the game. In practice, it gets a bit confused, though, because things are constantly being switched around between the cores. This is by design within the sphere of "symetric multi-processing" and "pre-emptive multi-tasking" on a multi-core machine. The load is supposed to be spread out among cores or individual processors. Spreading the load, though, is the job of the operating system, and that's where things can fall apart.

 

You can set affinity for a program to stay on one core or processor, but I don't know of a way to prevent other processes from also being loaded onto that core as well. So setting a process (like cfs3.exe) to run exclusively on a given core still doesn't guarantee that other processes won't also be run on the same core. If the operating system is doing things right, it should send things to less heavily loaded cores, but having spent a little time watching the action in Vista,that isn't always the case.

 

I started out as a defender of Vista, but after a year and a half I'm pretty sick of it. It really does have a lot of deficiencies in some very basic areas. But I digress.

 

As for multi-threading in games in general, I believe that Microsoft Flight Simulator X has multi-threading. Multi-threading is starting to show up in a few games, what with all the multi-core processors out there these days. Games are not inherently parallel, though, so I understand it's very difficult to find ways to split jobs between cores. In other words, there aren't many things that can be done at the same time because there are a lot of things that depend on something else being done first, if that makes sense.

 

I got the quad core because I do a lot of Photoshop work. Photoshop has a lot of multi-threaded functions. The more I get back into games, though, the more I think a faster dual core would be better. With a Q6600 running at 3.0 Ghz, I'm not doing too badly though.

[sitting_duck 3]

At this time, I'd like to back away slowly from my first post, because I'm not sure I can honestly say this setting got rid of the stutter. It was gone, but now it's back. Sigh. On a happy note, it seems to disappear after a minute or less. Maybe it's the textures loading? Oddly it seems to make no difference what the other detail settings are. If turn off AA and AF and pull the sliders back, it's still there. Maybe I'll try turning all the background stuff off in Vista. You'd think with a quad core I'd be fine for those things, but this is Vista we're talking about. The OS is probably trying to cram all the processes on one core.

 

 

You may want to google "nvidia 285 micro stutters" Not saying its a huge problem, but seem to be alot of posts about it. I almost got the 4870x2 (dual gpu), thank god parky steered me away from it. 295 has the same problem. Major micro stutter problems with the dual gpu cards.

[Schnitzel von Krumm 0]

I'd heard that about the dual GPU cards, but not about the 285, which is a single chip card. Thanks, I'll have a look. Maybe there's a workaround.

[pied 0]

Hola Widowmaker!

 

 

 

In response to 'clamping' max fps:

 

 

 

got to wherever your off bhah files reside,

 

look for the folder labeled 'default',

 

inside find 'cfs3.xml',

 

open with notepad or any xml editor,

 

find the line that contains 'maxFPS=0'

 

change to whatever you'd like.

 

save and off you go!

 

 

 

I'm using vsync on, so mine is set at 60....

 

 

 

PIED

[UK_Widowmaker 571]

Hola Widowmaker!

 

 

 

In response to 'clamping' max fps:

 

 

 

got to wherever your off bhah files reside,

 

look for the folder labeled 'default',

 

inside find 'cfs3.xml',

 

open with notepad or any xml editor,

 

find the line that contains 'maxFPS=0'

 

change to whatever you'd like.

 

save and off you go!

 

 

 

I'm using vsync on, so mine is set at 60....

 

 

 

PIED

 

 

Pied?..You're a star!...many thanks Bud!

[Schnitzel von Krumm 0]

Pied?..You're a star!...many thanks Bud!

 

Just a quick addendum for those coming to this thread in the future. If you're using Vista, you'll need to give yourself permission to be able to edit that file. Nothing is simple in Vista.

[sitting_duck 3]

I'd heard that about the dual GPU cards, but not about the 285, which is a single chip card. Thanks, I'll have a look. Maybe there's a workaround.

 

 

My bad,,,read the post wrong. 285 is a really nice card.