Most barbaric tweak ever.

I mean, why would you throw away some of that precious autogen?
After all, it's one of the few huge improvements over FS9...

OK where is the fsx.cfg file? I can't find it!

Because it is the most effective way to increase performance. And there are still LOTS of trees visible in my game.
Most of all those other tweaks on the net really don't do all that much. I spent a lot of time playing around with 'this and that' suggestion, downloading this and that utility. Done this and that and rebooted something else even held Mass for yet another thing. None worked all that well.

I read about lowering the amount of trees drawn and sure enough, nice smooth performance was the results.
Some people like to play with their games, some like to play their games. I fall into the latter group.

Cool, but FSX isn't a game. At all.





http://www.google.com/search?q=fsx.cfg+location

LOL

My box says in a few places it is a game.
Games for Windows
Airport scene and screenshots taken from in-game footage.
It even says Microsoft game studio.

And once, when I ran out of fuel and landed on a hi-way, I didn't even get a call from the FAA.

I'm sorry my friend. FSX is a game, like Quake is game, like Morrowind is a game. They differ, sure, but they are all games.

Just kidding around, but I'm sure you were too, hehe.

Err...yeah, sure...

I agree completely! If all of these tweaks and changes have such dramatic effects on performance I can't understand why the developers wouldn't have tied them in to menu settings within the game. Nothing is more annoying to me than to be wading through .CFG files manipulating things and then trying to figure out if it is a placebo effect or an actual performance gain. After having done many, many of these tweaks I've concluded that the time spent doing them is definitely not worth the performance gain (or perceived performance gain). That's just me though..I'm sure some of those things work and I'm glad that people can figure it out and help themselves out..



I disagree - you can certainly play FSX as a game if you want to play all of those missions. Many of them are so fantasy based that they have only fleeting ties to reality. I'd submit it can be a sim or a game based on what you want to get out of it.

Erm, yeah sure finding out the initial values that work best for you costs some time, but once you got them nailed down, you can keep them forever.

The effect of those standard tweaks has been watered down by the service packs. Back in RTM days, they were the key for the quality of your FSX experience. Now, they are "just" very helpful to for fine tuning to get the best out of the sim.

And how someone refuses to at least roughly try to find his/her optimum settings is simply beyond me. Editing a .cfg file isn't magic at all and the internet offers a lot of other sites where the effect of those values in there is at least roughly explained.




Even though not having an entirely realistic setting, the missions still centre around simulating aircraft, right?
So this makes FSX a sim.

I don't fly them though, I prefer *simulating* airline flights.



Oh, by the way. FSX isn't about frame rates, it's about smoothness. And this is where the FSX.cfg tweaks come in *very* handy.

Some time? Hours for this guy. And I've tried multiple different guides and advice and I still don't see any worth to doing it. Again - just my preference that I'm not a fan of digging around in CFG files.


Well, I wonder if more of that has come down to the hardware finally catching up to the software. I have no complaints with my FSX setup right now, although I still can't max everything out. Perhaps someday.


Just drop me in the 90th percentile of people that don't want to screw around with that stuff. I figure I'm paying the software developer to think of those things for me. Perhaps I'm mistaken.


If you slide all the realism sliders to the left, no damage, unlimited fuel, external view, etc..you are playing a game. Game or sim - I think it can be both. And if you really want to get technical then even the most tricked out FSX is still a game when compared to the training in a real "sim" I get each year at SimuFlite.


Just as some users prefer playing the missions as a game. /shrug/ You get out of it what you want.


I'm not a frame-rate counter..I realized in the first week of getting FSX that the FPS counter isn't a reliable gauge of how smooth this particular sim (cough er..game) performs. And it has just not been my observations that FSX.cfg tweaks are all that helpful (or should I say dramatic) in increasing the smoothness of FSX.

Back in RTM days...a whole day for me if I remember correctly. Worth it though.




Well, better hardware is a factor for sure. Still, SP1 and SP2 did a great thing for improving handling certain costly elements of the engine, say autogen (SP1) or native aircraft (SP2/Acc) so I think they contributed a bit more than the "brute force" (say hardware) did.

The day when one can fly into KORD with all sliders and settings maxed plus tons of realistic AI traffic, a custom scenery and bad weather with rain, etc...at 20+ FPS will never come. FSX's engine is simply too old and not flexible enough. It may respond well to overclocking, but the limit for your CPU's clock (or more specifically its heat emission) is far too low to achieve excellent performance in the highest stress areas.
So now you're stuck with squeezing out every percent of performance you can - e.g. by .cfg tweaks or some Windows tuning.




Sad though that the software developer can't optimize his code for the brazillions of hardware and driver configurations out there. That's where config file settings come in.




The FPS counter is great for identifying the quality of some add-on aircraft (= performance hit when flying them), although this mostly only shows in bad weather and at airports.