FSX performance improvements

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Postby happytraveller » Sat Dec 27, 2008 12:31 am

Read the following on another flight sim site, and wonder if anybody else has tried deleting the page file (or at least turning it off), on Vista32. I tried it this morning, and the first thing was that Photoshop refused to work, so I have had to turn it back on. I will experiment again later and try FSX to see if it does give any frame rate improvements, but if anybody else has already tried, then any advice on the benefits of deleting the page file would be appreciated.

I have Vista32 and 4GB of RAM, so I am interested to see what the page file does and how it works without it. Sadly I have not been able to uninstall Vista yet, but it is on the list of things to do.

quote from the other flight sim site:-
QUOTE
"I’ve been working with Rob P. at VRS, trying to figure out why my frame rates are so low when flying the new VRS FA-18E Super Bug in FS9. We haven’t got to the source of the problem there, but one thing he suggested has had a HUGE impact on frame rates in FSX.

Deleting the page file.

** WARNING ** Only do this if you have enough RAM such that you don’t need a page file.

This makes logical sense, but it never occurred to me that I could simply delete the page file. I have 4 GB of RAM (Windows XP x64), and evidently this is enough that I don’t need a page file. So, as suggested by Rob, I deleted it. It had no effect on FS9’s performance, but DAY-UM, frame rates went through the roof in FSX!

This corroborates something else I read (here) about FSX, compared to FS9. Some smart person here said that FSX is much more CPU and RAM intensive than FS9, which has more of the work being done by the graphics card. I remembered this because when I first bought FSX it was a slide show, so I bought a new graphics card, and FSX was still a slide show. Then I bought some RAM. Went from 2 BG to 4 GB and the difference was astonishing. FSX went from a slide show to fun.

But even after increasing the RAM to 4 GB, I could not fly around big cities of huge complex airports, because it was back to a slide show. However, after deleting the page file, I can now fly around cities!! I still see a drop in frame rates, but I can still fly and land!

I guess if you have a page file, Windows will use it, but if you delete it, Windows will be “forcedâ€￾ to use RAM, where it would otherwise use the page file. And if you have enough RAM, this results in much faster processing!

Happy times! Thanks Rob P. from VRS![/quote]


smooth landings.
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Postby Adamski » Sat Dec 27, 2008 12:35 pm

happytraveller wrote:
QUOTE (happytraveller @ Dec 27 2008, 01:31 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
Read the following on another flight sim site, and wonder if anybody else has tried deleting the page file (or at least turning it off), on Vista32. I tried it this morning, and the first thing was that Photoshop refused to work, so I have had to turn it back on. I will experiment again later and try FSX to see if it does give any frame rate improvements, but if anybody else has already tried, then any advice on the benefits of deleting the page file would be appreciated.

I have Vista32 and 4GB of RAM, so I am interested to see what the page file does and how it works without it. Sadly I have not been able to uninstall Vista yet, but it is on the list of things to do.

I also have Vista/4Gb ... and have tried every single "tweak" I could find. Not one that offered any *massive* improvement. Some even made the system worse - or unstable.

I got the new PC with Vista pre-installed, but have often been tempted to upgrade to XP winkyy.gif

I may try the pagefile thing ... but it'd be a PITA to have to reset it every time you want to do anything other than FSX.

EDIT: Well ... I tried the pagefile thing ... absolutely NO DIFFERENCE!
Last edited by Adamski on Sat Dec 27, 2008 5:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Postby Alfashark » Sat Dec 27, 2008 9:28 pm

I tried the pagefile tweak as suggested, and gained maybe 5FPS - only over Switzerland Pro scenery with the autogen set to very dense though... no noticeable improvements anywhere else sleep.gif

I'm running Vista32/4Gb as well with a Q6600@2.4Ghz, so as far as logical conclusions from all of the tweaks suggested so far for FSX go... 3.0Ghz clock speeds are the only way forward
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Postby dbcunnz » Sat Dec 27, 2008 10:37 pm

I run two OS on two different hard drives one HDD I have Win XP Home and run my everyday PC on that and for the other HDD a sata 2 160GB I have Win XP Pro x64 and just my FSX Matrox TripleHead2Go and TrackIR 4.
I have a dual core AMD 2.61 GHz and 4GB ram.
I have the paging files disabled for both HDDs.
When going to Flight Sim I reboot to the Win XP 64 this is not connected to the Internet and so I do not need to have the Anti virus, firewall or anti spyware running programs that all help to slow things down.
I find that this does give me far better frame rate that I get if I run FSX in the WinXP Home with everything else running.
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