Possible to lower resolution on the shkval screen?

[Kaptein_Damli]

I have this system: AMD Athlon X2 Dual Core 2.7, 535W PSU, 3GB RAM, ATI HD4670 1GB DDR3, XP SP3 newest updates.

 

I have around 30 fps while starting the sim ready to takeoff. When I enter the "O" button, the shkval screen turns on, and the fps drops to 13 at worst places (over cities etc). I think my system should handle this sim with the settings I have. I have high textures, low scenes, low water, low viewdistance and no civilian traffic. I have tried to set affinity on both cores, not gaining any fps. It´s a shame this sim is not optimized better...Lock On runs smooth on my system but I belive it´s the comples FM that puts the CPU on stress...I have tried setting my ATI CCC panel on High performance, but resulting in ugly cockpitgraphics and still the same shkvalscreen. Would be nice to lower the res on that screen as the CPU struggles with both that and the rest!

 

BTW: My LCD is a 24" 1920X1200. I have the english version (europe) boxed version. Hope the new engine will be better optimized.

Edited April 20, 2009 by Kaptein_Damli

[EtherealN]

Setting affinity will not give you any benefits on XP, since XP doesn't have the good multicore management features that Vista and W7 does.

 

You can set resolution of screens in the options screen, under "Res of Cockpit displays". Default is 512. You could try 256 and see if that improves things - I think that governs both Shkval and ABRIS.

[Kaptein_Damli]

Setting affinity will not give you any benefits on XP, since XP doesn't have the good multicore management features that Vista and W7 does.

 

You can set resolution of screens in the options screen, under "Res of Cockpit displays". Default is 512. You could try 256 and see if that improves things - I think that governs both Shkval and ABRIS.

 

Will try when I get back home from work. I tried setting water to 1 and effects to 2. Got better fps with these settings.

[Distiler]

Just change to Vista 64 and you'll get like 50% more frames (above 20fps all the time for sure).

 

Also, other real fps killers are mirrors and playing it in windowed mode.

[Safari Ken]

I used to have the same problem with the Shkval killing my fps when it was looking at certain things (was worst when it was positioned around the horizon). I finally turned my cockpit display res to 256, and performance improved noticeably. And since the displays are usually pretty small in my overall cockpit view, I never notice any difference in display quality (playing with a main resolution of 1680x1050).

[Kaptein_Damli]

Just change to Vista 64 and you'll get like 50% more frames (above 20fps all the time for sure).

 

Also, other real fps killers are mirrors and playing it in windowed mode.

 

Hmm...I don´t like Vista, but is it possible to buy Vista 64 bit and update from XP SP3 without reformating? (Timeconsuming!) Also, will old sims like Falcon and IL-2 work with 64 bit Vista? Why isn´t the affinity thing working with XP? The new engine will support dual cores right? Even with XP SP 3 32bit?

[EtherealN]

The affinity trick doesn't work with XP because XP is very very very bad at handling multicore processors. Vista was designed from the ground up with multicore processors in mind, with XP the support was pretty much just patched in.

 

As for liking Vista, I like it quite a lot. It has superior security (not that that is difficult to achieve compared to XP, and it's still aeons after systems like OS X, Linux and BSD), better multicore handling and a bunch of such stuff. But we might not want to bog the thread down with the ages old Vista vs XP ranting. Suffice to say that XP is now only on extended support, so one should expect it to rapidly lose support for new stuff. (In fact, Microsoft seems keen on starting to phase out Vista quite soon as well, once W7 is released.)

 

The engine in DCS will move to native 64 bit support before multithreading though. This is because it will give substantial gains but requires a lot less work than the multithreading. (Porting a large and complex application like this to multithreading is a MASSIVE job.)

 

Support for older games, I don't know specifically for 64-bit vista, since I haven't run either of those on my 64-bit install. But I have run them without any problems on my 32-bit system, and the only compatibility issues I've had so far with 64-bit Vista was on extremely ancient (talking mid-nineties and older) games, as well as the 1.08 version of Arma which had a devastating bug for those running a 64bit Vista system with 4GB RAM. (Patch 1.14 solved that.)

 

If you are to upgrade, I would probably recommend waiting a bit and moving to W7 though. It seems like it's pretty stable and well polished from what I've heard from people running the beta versions - and it's basically a re-labeled, slightly modified upgrade of Vista anyway, so there should (hopefully) not be as big teething issues as Vista had. (Which was admittedly pretty horrid for a while, but with Vista all the big issues are solved since more than a year, imo.)

[Cap_Z]

Vista did get off to a bit of a rough start, and got it's knocks on reputation that still stains it. But, as much as I like Win XP, I like my Vista even better. I have a 32bit and a 64bit machine and would not go back to XP. That said, I would wait for Win 7 unless Microsoft offers free upgrades from Vista. I plan to upgrade my 32bit Vista to 64bit Win7 if the upgrade price is not too steep.

[Safari Ken]

Support for older games, I don't know specifically for 64-bit vista, since I haven't run either of those on my 64-bit install.

 

I use Vista64 (and like it very much), and I have yet to run into a game incompatibility. There have been a few 'non-games' that I've had to switch due to 64-bit incompatibility, but very few, and the alternatives I've found have always been better anyway.

[EtherealN]

Vista did get off to a bit of a rough start, and got it's knocks on reputation that still stains it.

 

Project Mojave was pretty fun on that point. :P