Remerciez-le!

Remerciez @Admin pour avoir partagé cet document gratuitement, de la manière la plus simple, en partageant sur les réseaux sociaux.

Microsoft Flight Simulator X Tips, Tweaks, and Config Guide October 27, 2006 Re

Microsoft Flight Simulator X Tips, Tweaks, and Config Guide October 27, 2006 Recent Changes: 2006-10-27 – A few cfg file notes added, switched to dates for versioning. 2006-10-24 – Power line easement aesthetic tweak documented. 2006-10-23 – Retracted the FPS counter bug for now, SHIFT-Z config file entries mentioned. 2006-10-20 – Added shader hardware hack, minor cfg file additions, some document layout and organization improvements 2006-10-19 – Added Rhumbafloppy’s custom default.xml file, minor layout items fixed 2006-10-18 – Initial release! FSX Tips, Tricks, and Tweaks Guide Table of Contents Introduction................................................................................................... 1 What to Expect from Tweaking ........................................................................... 1 FSX In-Game Settings ....................................................................................... 2 Graphics Tab ............................................................................................................................. 2 Aircraft Tab............................................................................................................................... 4 Scenery Tab .............................................................................................................................. 5 Weather Tab ............................................................................................................................. 7 Traffic Tab ................................................................................................................................ 8 FSX Community Tips and Tricks........................................................................... 9 Autogen Performance – Disabling/Editing the Default.xml File............................................................... 9 Autogen Performance - Autogen Tree/Forest Tweak.............................................................................. 10 Autogen Performance - Customizing Autogen Densities ......................................................................... 11 Autogen Performance - Autogen Texture Conversion ............................................................................ 11 Texture Performance - Autogen Texture Reduction ............................................................................... 12 Texture Performance - Cloud Texture Reduction .................................................................................. 12 Texture Performance - Pops and Stutters During Panning........................................................................ 13 Blurries – How to Balance Blurries with Framerates................................................................................ 14 Blurries - Texture Bandwidth Tweak ................................................................................................. 15 Aesthetics – Narrower Power Line Easements ...................................................................................... 16 Hardware Performance – AGP Aperture Size ....................................................................................... 17 Hardware Performance – Disabling Shaders ........................................................................................ 18 Inside the FSX.CFG File.....................................................................................19 -Important Disclaimer- Everyone attributed as an original idea author and the author of this document take no responsibility if you royally mess up your FSX or computer installation by using the tweaks in this document. Changes to your FSX install or computer system should only be undertaken if you are aware of both the consequences and how to recover. Please, for the love of Pete, backup any and all files before you change, delete, or rename. File distributions and other items are subject to change, as well as all relevant copyright and licensing regulations. The author will make reasonable efforts to maintain links where needed and allowed, however we cannot guarantee availability of cited files and items. This document was compiled by Greg Germanowski from various posts and threads at a variety of flight simulator community websites. If you’ve discovered a tweak that is not in this guide but would like it to be, please email be at spamgerm@gmail.com. Conversely, if I have included a tweak of yours that you would like removed, please also email me and I will remove it from further editions. FSX Tips, Tricks and Config Guide October 22, 2006 Page 1 Introduction Welcome to my Tips and Tweaks guide to Microsoft Flight Simulator X. This is a compilation of various ideas, tips, configuration changes, and tweaks which may (or may not!) improve your experience with FSX. Like its predecessors, FSX is very demanding of your hardware. Unfortunately, we virtual pilots are very demanding of our simulators! This creates a bit of a problem because as of this writing, no single desktop hardware platform can run FSX at its most lush settings at a reasonably acceptable degree of smoothness. This document may help you tweak you FSX install on your existing hardware to try to get the best presentation possible. FSX is such a rich and capable platform, it would be a shame to purchase the simulation only to cast it aside in frustration from performance. For the sake of any personal examples, my relevant PC specs are… AMD Athlon 64 x2 3800+, 2 GB of reasonably generic RAM, and an nVidia 7900GT 256 MB card. What to Expect from Tweaking The art of tweaking depends entirely upon your expectations for performance. Some folks are more interested in great image quality, and less interested in smoothness – others are solely focused on smoothness at the expense of visual detail… most of us fall somewhere in between – interested in trading off some visuals for some performance to achieve a happy medium. When tweaking FSX, patience is a key. There doesn’t seem to be a single magic bullet that will cure all your ills – when we jumped from FS2004 to FSX, we gained huge improvements to the visual systems which provide major improvements to the visual world. Unfortunately, these huge changes cost a lot when it comes to processor time. Yes, the ACES development team spent hundreds of hours on optimizing the simulation engine and visual system, but even the most expert of optimization cannot make up for sheer processing power – and that’s what FSX is ready to use down the road. Any way you slice it, the fact this document exists is a testament to those intrepid explorers who went out, experienced FSX, and found ways to help improve the experience for everyone else. FSX Tips, Tricks and Config Guide October 22, 2006 Page 2 FSX In-Game Settings Understanding and properly setting the in-game system sliders is the foundation for nearly all tips and tricks for FSX performance. With that in mind, I thought it best to briefly go over some of the performance-related settings and sliders with their capabilities. Graphics Tab Target Frame Rate: The target frame rate is thought of as the FPS lock. FSX does much more than just display pretty pictures on the screen – it needs to calculate your location, weather effects, system states, and a slew of other items in order to determine what to show on the screen. If you set the Target Frame Rate slider to an appropriate setting, you can give the sim the breathing room it needs for all the other calculations before it gets to rendering graphics. By locking at a reasonable rate, you also take steps to prevent wild FPS fluctuations, such as going from high detail to low detail areas when flying. Important Notes – Is the FPS Lock bugged? Some users have indicated that when they lock their FPS, stuttering and *lower* than expected framerates seem to creep in. When they unlock their rates, smooth flying returns along with higher rates. I experimented with this, and found there is some truth to it. Your mileage may vary, of course. Filtering: (Bilinear, Trilinear, Anisotropic) The filtering selection sets up what texture filtering mode will be used by your video system. Bilinear is nice, Trilinear is usually better, and Aniso proves best – One word of caution, though. Users have experienced slowdowns when selecting Aniso, so perhaps it’s best to use Bi- or Tri-. Most users are finding best performance is gained by setting this at Bi or Tri, and using your video card’s drivers to “force”-adjust the Anisotropic settings. Anti-aliasing: (On/Off) This turns the sim-driven antialiasing mode on and off. It is often recommended to turn AA (OFF) in this location, and use your video card driver settings to turn AA on. This will give you more control over which AA mode to use, and may result in both better image quality and frame rates. Global Texture Resolution: (Very Low / Low / Medium / High / Very High) Your preferred setting may very, but I tend to keep this at High or better. Very High allows for the largest possible texture sizes, stepping downward cuts back into smaller textures helping to free video memory and texture swapping resources, benefiting performance. This setting matches the custom texture resize process that some tweakers are using, but it does it without actually resizing. Lens Flare: (On/Off) Turns the lens flare effect on and off. This imposes a slight performance hit, and sometimes is considered a nuisance (as you usually don’t get lens flare when looking out the window of a real airplane). From my experience, this poses only a small performance impact and is a pleasing effect, so it remains on. FSX Tips, Tricks and Config Guide October 22, 2006 Page 3 Light Bloom: (On/Off) Turns the blooming effect on and off. Light bloom is a new feature with FSX and displays a dynamic halo around bright lights and bright reflections. Bloom looks gorgeous, but imposes a high performance penalty – especially with mid-to-low end graphics cards. Bloom requires the graphics system to draw the screen image twice, hence the slowdown. Faster video cards may yield better results. I fly with bloom off, but I may sacrifice some AA or AS settings on the video driver settings to see if I can make it workable. Advanced Animations: (On/Off) I fly with this on, but haven’t compared performance with it off to know if there is any difference. Informational Text: No performance impacts… FSX Tips, Tricks and Config Guide October 22, 2006 Page 4 Aircraft Tab High Resolution 3D virtual cockpits: (On/Off) This probably adjusts the detail level of the VC textures. I’ve left mine on, but haven’t done a comparison with it off. I tend to fly in the 2D cockpits more, so VC hasn’t garnered much attention from me yet. If you are an exclusive 2D pilot, you may be inclined to move this to off to potentially save some resources. If you are an uploads/Management/ fsxtweak-guide.pdf