Posted: Tue May 22, 2007 9:56 amJust prior to SP1 release, one of my 1GB RAM modules died. Because they were a matched pair, I had to send both back for replacement under warranty. Luckily, I had purchased them off a guy here in Nelson, and he was able to lend me a 1GB stick to get me by.
The loan stick could not cope with my FSB settings, so I returned the frequency to the default, meaning the E6600 CPU ran at its rated 2.4GHz (rather than my usual 3.2 GHz).
Now I can't remember if I ran FSX after that, but soon after I downloaded and installed SP1. When I ran it, I was horrified to find that the performance had turned to custard, with slow texture loading and jerky pauses, especially in complex scenery areas. In the end I uninstalled FSX, and waited for the new RAM.
Yesterday it arrived, and I was able to get my machine back up to speed (I ran 3DMark06 just to reassure myself, and was amazed to get my record score to date of 11430 marks! - presumably a result of a recent NVidia video driver update to 158.19). I reinstalled the base FSX and performed some test flights. Performance was as smooth as it used to be (I'm lucky enough to have a fairly grunty system).
I then installed SP1, and re-ran the same flight. Still good, although a couple of brief jerky bits when flying between some mountains in the F18 - they didn't occur pre-SP1. The big difference is the effect of pushing up some of the sliders. I can now push the water quality slider to max with no effect on the frame rate.
Anyway, I guess the take-home message is: the drop from 2GB to 1GB RAM, combined with a CPU frequency drop, had a huge effect on my FSX performance under SP1.
The loan stick could not cope with my FSB settings, so I returned the frequency to the default, meaning the E6600 CPU ran at its rated 2.4GHz (rather than my usual 3.2 GHz).
Now I can't remember if I ran FSX after that, but soon after I downloaded and installed SP1. When I ran it, I was horrified to find that the performance had turned to custard, with slow texture loading and jerky pauses, especially in complex scenery areas. In the end I uninstalled FSX, and waited for the new RAM.
Yesterday it arrived, and I was able to get my machine back up to speed (I ran 3DMark06 just to reassure myself, and was amazed to get my record score to date of 11430 marks! - presumably a result of a recent NVidia video driver update to 158.19). I reinstalled the base FSX and performed some test flights. Performance was as smooth as it used to be (I'm lucky enough to have a fairly grunty system).
I then installed SP1, and re-ran the same flight. Still good, although a couple of brief jerky bits when flying between some mountains in the F18 - they didn't occur pre-SP1. The big difference is the effect of pushing up some of the sliders. I can now push the water quality slider to max with no effect on the frame rate.
Anyway, I guess the take-home message is: the drop from 2GB to 1GB RAM, combined with a CPU frequency drop, had a huge effect on my FSX performance under SP1.