PMDG 737NGX - Hints For Smooth Running

29th January 2012 - UPDATE ON POOLSIZE TWEAK AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS DESCRIPTION. CURRENTLY A WORK IN PROGRESS!

OK, first things first, I do have a pretty hefty rig. That said, with the amount of addons and tweaks I'm running, a PMDG aircraft can still offer a fairly serious challenge. This video is long and in one constant take to demonstrate the stability that can be achieved with a little care and attention

My rig

intel Core i7 2600k @ 4.5Ghz (CURRENTLY 4.8)
8Gb Corsair XMS3 DDR3 1600 (CURRENTLY 16GB)
Zotac GTX 470 (1280mb) (NEW CARD, MSI GTX 560TI @ 960MHZ CORE)
Primary Drive - 1.5tb Samsung Spinpoint
FSX Drive - 300Gb Velociraptor
Storage Drive, also used to record to - 640Gb WD Caviar
Cooling - Noctua NH-U12P SE2
Motherboard - Asus P8P67 Evo B3 Revision
Power - Corsair TX750W
Case - Cooler Master HAF X

Addons Running

FS Global 2010
UTX
GEX
REX 2.0

Major .cfg tweaks

Texture res - 4096 (up from the standard 1024)
Autogen trees - 3000
Autogen buildings - 2500
L.O.D. Radius - 7.500000 (NOW 8.5000000)
Affinity Mask - 14 (tried 244, too unstable)

Use the following site to tune your cfg file
http://www.venetubo.com/fsx.html

And this site for tuning nVidia Inspector
http://www.simforums.com/forums/fsx-and-nhancer-settings-for-new-drivers-upda...

A few hints

Firstly (and most importantly), don't use FSX to limit the frames. Set FSX to 'unlimited' and set an external limiter to 30. Even when recording with FRAPS, the limiter will take the extra load into account and keep things stable. I record at 24fps and, extreme circumstances such as Manhattan excluded, always achieve it.

http://www.venetubo.com/fsx/FPS_Limiter_0.2.rar

Trade a few pixels of ground texture or a few metres of mesh detail, trust me, it's worth it.

Don't bother setting your screen mode to 'wide' in the fsx.cfg file. It makes everything look fisheyed and personally, I've seen drops of a few fps too.

EDIT#1 - I don't use, and have never used, an ATI/AMD card, so I can't vouch for any tweaking having the same results.

But, I did a little searching and have found a setup guide for using the Catalyst Control Centre.

http://uk.gamespot.com/users/LTZH/show_blog_entry.php?topic_id=m-100-25600394

Update 29/01/12 - Bufferpools.

I recently changed my GPU to an MSI GTX 560ti 2gb and have been paying special attention to how much video ram is being used.

One of the supposed holy grails of FSX tweaking is the bufferpools poolsize=0 trick, which is supposed to make FSX use as much vram as it needs at a driver level, rather than software.

I had a lot of problems with flickering and blacking out ground textures, so I set my poolsize to the default, which is somewhere around 4000000 (four million).

I noticed, when looking at my memory useage in MSI afterburner, that on default poolsize settings, FSX wasn't using more than a couple of hundred meg of my 2048.......so I started upping the figure.

Compared to standard, I've been running it today set to 40000000 (fourty million).......ten times the standard setting!!

MSI afterburner indicated that I'd used a max of 1051mb, so I've just upped it to 70000000 (not quite double). I've yet to test it, and to be honest, I'm slightly aprehensive about running such a massive figure.

POSSIBLY IMPORTANT - MY NVIDIA INSPECTOR SETTINGS.

My nVidia inspector settings are 8xS [Combined: 1x2 SS + 4x MS] for AA, Anisotropic filtering at 4x, negative LOD bias clamped, high quality texture filtering, power management set to prefer maximum performance.......and one other thing changed from default, which also seemed to yield good results.

I set the multi-display/mixed GPU acceleration to Single display performance mode (default was multiple display, which I thought seemed a little pointless!)

In FSX, I have AA checked (even though inspector overrides it) and anisotropic filtering selected

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• pmdg
• stability
• stable
• fps
• tweaks
• tuning
• hints
• smooth
• frames
• advice
• fsx
• cfg
• simulator
• flight
• 737NGX
• 737
• NGX
• tips
• help

[aaronrodgers77]

hi great vid! where can i purchase this plane for under $50?

[PrivateCustard]

@aaronrodgers77 Amazon do it for £50 at the moment. I think that's as cheap as you'll find it though.

[aaronrodgers77]

@PrivateCustard thanks. i checked amazon and it was just barely cheaper than other sources (i live in the States- it think it was $55) thanks though

[PrivateCustard]

@aaronrodgers77 Gotta love it that someone from the UK can quote his own currency and it's the same number in USD!

We really get ripped off over this side of the pond!

[dxb8788]

did you felt a big difference from 4.5 to 4.8GHz ?

Now Im @ 4.5GHz HT off , do you think its better to keep it off ?

[PrivateCustard]

@dxb8788 Every little helps!

I'm leaving ht off for the time being. I'll turn it back on again soon though.

[lucasemepe]

what if you have a great pc and know any shit about 737?

[Pulsemax]

@aaronrodgers77 yes..it does.

[aaronrodgers77]

@PrivateCustard ikr! hopefully this will change after the election

[aaronrodgers77]

@Pulsemax thank you but i am 100% against pirating. just out of curiosity, does it work?

[Pulsemax]

@aaronrodgers77 or download it like i did for free..

[awesomerikd168]

you should see the PMDG MD11, its like $70 to $100 dollars!

[DaanRoes]

@boing7371 Watch out for viruses bro...

[boing7371]

@DaanRoes i got this plane from piratebay :D