AusFlightSim - Koorby's 2 Minute Performance Tweaking Guide for FS9 - The Aussie Flight Simulation Site for Enthusiasts Around the World!

Ed: John "Koorby" Venema, the mastermind behind the revolutionary freeware scenery package for Australia "Vista Australis" (VOZ), provides the following short guide to getting best performance out of FS9. For more info about VOZ head on over to the website at http://www.vistaoz.org.

There is no reason a mid-spec PC spec running Windows XP, with 1024MB RAM and a video card like a Geforce 6600GT should have any issues whatsoever running FS9 as smooth as silk, simply none. I don't have a lot of time to get indepth, but here's my 2 minute guide, some of which you may already know:

INSIDE FS9

1. Set visibility (vis) to about 30mi/48km - that's the real world and this single adjustment will a) make FS2004 textures look much nicer and realistic, and B) Give you back lots and lots of fps
2. Avoid large amount of cumulus clouds - they eat fps. Create a new weather theme which looks nice but avoids those. If you must use real-world weather then get Active Sky 6 and install their 128x128 DXT3 mip cloud sets - perfect solution
3. Slide mip down to 4 - no need for more than that (for nVidia 7 series & ati 18xx/19xx cards, set to 8 )
4. Slide lights down to 6 (for nVidia 7 series & ati 18xx/19xx series cards, set to 8 )
5. Slide 3D cloud density to 50%, will still look great (set to 100% on high end cards )
6. Turn off lens flare (pilot's sunglasses don't have lens flare
7. Turn off anti-aliasing inside FS9
8. Set to Trilinear filtering always
9. Run FS9 in Full-screen mode at the same resolution as your desktop
10. Lock your fps to 25 - seriously, you won't notice anything higher and it really does help. At the worst set it to 30fps, but I never run it that fast, because pal video runs at 25fps and 3.5 billion people can't be wrong eh? Movies in the cinema run even slower.
11. When flying in *any* mode, press the "-" (minus) key to zoom out to 75%. It offers a better field of view and also has the side benefit of "crisping" up the textures. A must-do, and I save all my pre-saved flights at 75% zoom. For great screenshots, pull back to 50% or less.

Optional
Disable the autogen library by renaming the fs9Autogendefault.xml to default.xml.off - this will make very little visual difference to your flying but gives back fps also. You won't see those dinky take-away food places and petrol stations, no big loss though.

Leave everything else maxed out.

YOUR VIDEO CARD

1. Set AA (Anti-Aliasing) to 4XS (anything else is overkill if running = > 1280x1024, but AAx8 will make chain wire fences appear much nicer at airports, so use that if you have a high end card)
2. Set AF (Antistropic Filtering) to 4 (On nVidia 7 series and ati 18/19 series set to AFX16)
3. In your video card control panel applet, set the quality setting to "Quality" - avoid "High Performance" or ""Performance" settings - they will degrade the textures and mipping. Also avoid "High Quality" - the difference is not noticable to the naked eye, but takes a performance hit.
4. For nVidia cards, visit http://www.nhancer.com and download the nhancer tool. Create a custom profile for fs9.exe and play with the settings. Pretty soon you will know how every nVidia tweak works for FS9.
5. For ati cards, the best tool is RivaTuner.

YOUR WINDOWS XP

1. Not running XP? -- Doh! Buy it, install it with Service Pack 2 and make sure you have automatic updates running.
2. Shutdown about 40-50 Windows XP services you don't need. Grab a program called FSautostart, which will do this for you with tips on each setting. I have 1024mb ram and when I start FS9 I have 860MB free. Trust me, it makes a huge difference to performance.
3. Turn off any programs in the tray you are not using. This includes Anti-virus, anti-spam, anti-anything. Also turn off all those silly tray icons like quicktime and countless others. They are all consuming cpu cycles and the Anti-virus will most definitely interfere with FS9 performance.
4. If you can afford it, add another 1024MB of ram for a total of 2GB. This will give FS9 all the memory it needs without the need to remove too much from memory prior to flights.

THE DREADED "BLURRIES"

The most common thing that can ruin your flight experience is a case of the "blurries". I see this in so many screenshots, and it's completely avoidable.

Here's a few rules to follow:

1. If you are flying low (below 5,000 ft) (not slewing), keep your ground speed around 140Kts

2. If you are slewing (not flying), always tap Y to go back into flying mode so the textures can be reloaded in your immediately area. So (a) slew to the position, (tap the 'Y' key and fly for a bit to let the textures catch up, tap 'Y' again and just slew back to the best position for the shot.)

3. Make sure your [terrain] section of your fs9.cfg file has these last 3 entries in the section:

[terrain]
terrain_error_factor=100.000000
terrain_MIN_DEM_AREA=10.000000
terrain_MAX_DEM_AREA=100.000000
terrain_MAX_vertex_level=19 (20 for 38m mesh, 21 for 20m mesh)
terrain_texture_SIZE_EXP=8
terrain_autogen_density=5
terrain_USE_gradient_MAP=1
terrain_extended_textureS=1
terrain_default_radius=3.500000
terrain_extended_radius=4.000000
terrain_extended_levelS=232

4. In the [display] section there is this line:

texture_bandwidth_MULT=40 <--- this is too low for current video cards

Change it to read:

[display]
upper_FramERATE_limit=25
texture_bandwidth_MULT=55 (try values from 50 through to 200, depending on video card speed. 55 is a good start)
TextureMaxLoad=10

Another tweak that you can do is to add these lines directly after the TextureMaxLoad-entry:

runway_lights_surface_scalar=0.9 //scales edge, center,end,touchdown,runways
runway_lights_vasi_scalar=0.5 //scales vasi/papi lights
runway_lights_approach_scalar=0.5 //scales approach light bars
runway_lights_strobe_scalar=0.9 //scales rails and odals

This tweak change the size of the different lights around the airport and makes it look more realistic. You can change the numbers to your own needs. Larger number gives bigger lights and lower number gives, of course, smaller lights. To get the best out of this tweak I have edited the Halo.bmp. Just follow this link:

halo.rar, unpack it and drop it into your FS9 exture-folder. Make a backup of your original first...Just in case.

There's plenty more to talk about, but doing the above will help you enormously, make your visuals look much better and give you a big hike in fps.

Hope this helps

Note: 24/11/2006 - Updated to Version 3.0