FE1 Frame Rate gone downhill

[Mike Dora 171]

I just came back to FE1 after three years away, I was overseas without access to my desktop. One of the things I did on return, was to replace the old GTX 640 with a GTX 950.

 

Trouble is, now I'm getting very choppy frame rates in FE1 which makes it much less playable than it used to be. For example the SE5a gives me in-cockpit rates of 13-14 down to below 10. (yes I know the SE traditionally had the worst frame rates, but it was fully playable for me before).

 

For the record, I'm running Win7, and my FE1 graphics settings are now (been experimenting, with no joy so far) as follows:

 

[GraphicsOptions]
DisplayDeviceID=0
DisplayWidth=1024
DisplayHeight=768
DisplayDepth=32
AspectRatio=1.600000
LensFlare=2
DetailLevel=4
ObjectDetail=2
ObjectTexture=2
CockpitTexture=2
CockpitMirrors=1
CockpitReflection=1
EffectsDetail=2
TerrainDetail=2
TerrainTexture=2
HorizonDistance=2
GroundObjectDensity=2
WaterDetail=2
CloudsDetail=0
Shadow=2
rem AntiAliasing=0
AntiAliasing=3
UseAdvancedShaders=1

 

 

 

Any ideas anyone?

 

Thanks

 

Mike

[33LIMA 972]

Have you tried setting antialiasing=3 to =0 and letting your card's drivers handle the AA? Also maybe set the screen res to your monitor's native resolution - 1024x768 seems very low so maybe there's some resource-grabbing conversion going on.

 

TBH I always found FPS in FE2 were better, setting for setting, than in FE1, even with the latter fully patched and Useadvancedshaders set to 1.

[Mike Dora 171]

Thanks for the tips 33L, I'll try those tomorrow. The resolution mismatch thing sounds promising, I have some other old sims that have also gone all choppy on me since installing the new graphics card.

 

Also I realize FE2 may be smoother, but I had invested so much time and effort customizing different versions of FE1 for different Fronts, and tweaking all the ac models to my liking, that I just couldn't face the effort of porting everything over to FE2. I guess it's called Transactional Cost!

 

Thanks

 

Mike

[+Stephen1918 1,473]

Try setting your aspect ratio to 4:3   (1.33333 in the options.ini) 

 

I am also running FE1 on Windows 7 and my screen resolution is also 1024 x 768. Changing the aspect ratio increases my frame rate about 50% without changing what I see in the game.

[MigBuster 2,876]

FE2 has some changes to work better on modern hardware...........I would try offloading most of the word using an NVIDIA profile as said above........also some driver versions will work better than others.............but no idea which.

[Mike Dora 171]

Thanks everybody,

 

I've tried all the suggestions, but to little avail. Oddly enough, running SFP1 with the same Graphics Options gives me frame rates in the region of 20+. Isn't this essentially the same engine? I'm confused now.

 

Mike

[Wrench 9,655]

it's not exactly the same engine ... it's (FE2 & SF2) more optimized for Vista/7, using the dx10 shaders (but not all of them)

 

check for a post by Fubar512 somewhere in the SF2 forums on vid card settings. I can't remember the exact title name, but something along those lines

[Mike Dora 171]

Problem solved!

 

Following Wrench's advice I went browsing in the SF fora and rediscovered the ENB graphics fix. Not only has it more than doubled my frame rates, the game actually looks nicer, especially the clouds! Now I have my sim back.

 

Thanks Everybody

 

Mike