I noticed a few things that I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere yet on the forums. A few more observations:

– The sim seems to perform BETTER when NOT using the Cessna 172. For example, sitting in KSEA in a B747 gets me 19fps. In same conditions, loading up the C172 gets me 15 fps. Very strange. IN flight the different is even worse.

– The sim is not constant in the fps. Something changes as the simulation advances in time. I can takeoff at 20 fps, climb and as the sim goes and goes, and as my flight advances, the frame rate drops as if something was stucked in some kind of loop.

– Changing the 3D view to look at my seat only (no external view at all), DOES NOT IMPROVE THE FRAME RATE at all. Very strange and you probably have a point of optimization right there. Version 9 would increase the frame rate by a lot when the view changes to just inside the plane vs. external. This is very strange because the frame rate does go from 19fps to 60fps in clouds.

– The F-sim and F-ACT is very confusing. The F-SIM is constantly sitting at 19.90 fps. However, I’ve seen it climb by stutters to 20 and even 23, only to drop back to 19.90 again, stable for 10 minutes or so. What causes the F-sim to go up like that??? Even with F-ACT being 24 fps, the F-sim stayed at 19.90. There is some loops that are not working properly. I have looked at the log.txt after. There are a lot of errors all over the place. Error finding this, error finding that, etc. That’s after a brand new installation of the demo. (last night)

– Flying faster seems to be getting more fps. Strange, completely the opposite of FSX. FSX, the faster you went, the more the computer struggled to display the same amount of things in less time. In X-plane 10, flying faster provided me with faster fps.

– I’m repeating myself here but, something is blocking the fps from going up, even if the GPU is not used to its maximum and the CPU either.

I think I’m confident things will improve a lot in the near future.

:0
Patrick

F-act is the actual framerate. F-sim is the framerate the sim is pretending to have to try to keep the flight model from blowing up.

What is the difference between F-SIm and F-ACT in the frame rate display. that is new. also, my F-Sim is stucked at 19.0 always, while the F-ACT is very low. I’ve seen the F-SIM go up above 19 only once. Even at very very low settings it still shows 19

Patrick

Wow, I can’t disagree with this more. Less is more? You want to head over to Microsoft Flight Simulator X then. X-Plane is all about giving the users power and control. That’s what it has always been about and hopefully will remain so. X-Plane offers so much tweak-ability for everyone, which is why it has been so successful. You have to spend the time tweaking, as Ben recommends. Start with all options off, and go from there. Learn what each one does, it’s part of the fun of X-Plane man!

No one’s denying that there may be something that can/should/will be improved in the sim. You did exactly what you’re supposed to and you now know that your bottleneck is not your CPU or GPU or RAM…so perhaps it’s bus bandwidth. You can try to reduce things that consume bus bandwidth. This also means you can INCREASE your settings so that you consumer more CPU/GPU and make the sim “prettier” without hurting performance so long as you don’t increase bus traffic. We’ll be getting to performance tuning soon where we can talk in more specifics and we’ll have tools to help figure out what’s going on.

If I put everything to default, and HDR on, and 40% clouds, I still can’t MAX the GPU Activity, nor the CPU activity, nor the memory ? How am I supposed to find the “bottleneck” ?????