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Remember FSX is a 16yr old 32bit, DX9 (or DX10 fully if patched) graphics application that can only utilize 4GB of memory and is CPU bound as far as graphics. Your CPU speed is good & plenty though so if not the above, it's probably related to some needed Nvidia Control Panel settings and/or a proper FSX nvidia profile, one exists you might want to tweak using one of the "guides" advice. I've even changed some settings on the fly and am able to observe the results immediately in FSX. One thing for sure, make sure you set your general 3D graphics setting to "Use my preference emphasizing:" "balanced" not "quality" or your FSX ATC screens will get scrambled.
The slow but eventual successful textures display is a sign of sluggishness caused by...something.....perhaps just maxing out cpu or could be combo of things or just one thing, you will figure it out. Just note that, when fsx is going through a period of "sluggishness" its "hands off", don't start clicking things or changing views etc, those invoke the crash. My older system (4cpu 3.0ghz and gtx770 2g video) will "sometimes" do that to me but only when other conditions such as weather and/or high dense scenery or both are extremely intense, and when it does, I know it's "hands off time ", until the period of sluggishness goes away. Sometimes that sluggishness is just the OS doing something in the background.
I also notice your extremely blurry ground textures. Yep your system is not processing fsx graphics well at all. There are a lot of guide's on tweaking FSX graphics with the nvidia control panel, their is already a profile for FSX that you can tweak without influencing the default profile. Or lookup the use of the "nvidia inspector" software and profiles.
Couple of other recommendations to improve performance:
Set FSX target frames per second at the recommended maximum of 30fps (31 if you want to see it display 30.x, instead of 29.x). Even though a system with newer graphics cards WILL get more fps at HIGH elevations and I do too, the jumping up and down effect is what we want to avoid and the limit is imposed by the CPU bound graphics and speed not the graphics cards full speed/capabilities.
Turn off any "real time" anti-virus protection while running FSX. It interferes with every fsx read of a file. When mine is on, it takes very long for file reads, the splash screen to come up, without it, splash comes up immediately. Although with you having SSD Drives I would think the speed increase would cover up delays like that BUT we do still have limited "bus" speeds, meaning bottlenecks/transfer rates between devices, mine is 32mb per second between drives and other devices.
For better performance with memory swapping, having 16GB memory, set your VM Virtual Memory size to a "fixed" size of 10240 (thats true 10gb), start and end. DONT keep it at "system managed". This will stop an issue (result of the OS algorithm that decides if it wants to expand the swap space or not) that can affect FSX performance profoundly negatively, causes instability and even random crashes on some systems. This VM setting also helps stability and increases VM swapping times on your OS overall.
Some FSX graphics functions do get better performance/are sent straight to the GPU when patching and utilizing FSX's DX10 mode with Steves freeware Shaders Release 3.2.3 patch or his payware DX10 Fixer. While a caveat exists that you can't fly older FS2004 aircraft in DX10 mode that weren't full model conversions to "fsx native models", they will display as gray or white like in your picture all the time because they are only DX9 compatible models.
Hope this helps
That's exactly what I'm saying, your system is beefy, but that doesn't change the realities of working with older technology software that can't utilize much of it, but wants every single bit of what it can. And that's everything the CPU's can give it to send data back and forth between it and the GPU, because FSX graphics are CPU bound and cannot dump all that work to the GPU exclusively like newer programs can.
To access task manager, right click on the taskbar, select "start task manager"
But if you're wanting to play around with 16yr old 32bit FSX, these are just "some" of the realities, limitations and quirks we have to get our hands dirty with and our minds techy about to make it work well after all these years and changes in Hardware & Operating systems technology. Soon video card chipsets and OS's won't even support DX9 or DX10 technology anymore.
I tried lowering the target frame rate, it didn't change anything to my issue. As for the other suggestions you mentioned, I have no idea how to use them. I opened Task Manager while FSX was running but I don't see the game in the list of tasks, I only see Steam. Turning off real-time virus protection also didn't improve anything. I also installed FSX Manager and FSX.cfg Editor, just in case.
1. I strongly recommend you keep the target frame rate at 31. Even though it's not enough to stop that particular issue.
2. You didn't need to look at applications or processes tabs in the task manager. Select the "Performance" tab. It should be showing graphs of your 6 cpu's and memory usage. If it's not you should configure it to do so. I meant for you to look at those while running FSX to observe if it is using all your cpu's or just one.
3. I don't know what FSX Manager does and I don't use an fsx.cfg editor, I have a shortcut to all the "live" config files under \username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\FSX
and just use notepad to edit them when I need to. I organized the sections inside them to be easy to find what I'm looking for and to interpret the "logic" in the .xml's.
4. If you don't know basics of navigating your operating system and optimizing IT, and you don't like to Research/Tinker, your in trouble in getting to the level where you can really troubleshoot or optimize FSX (or your OS should it be the culprit) and you should probably invest in a newer 64bit simulator, they are not as finicky as 32bit FSX running on a 64bit OS. As I mentioned, the student version of P3D by Lockheed is essentially 64bit FSX. If I had your computer hardware I would be jumping to the new MSFS 2020. Your computer will handle those better than it will FSX without having to be a technical expert which is somewhat required with FSX IF you want to get the MOST out of it, meaning best possible graphics, weather and performance.
It takes quite a bit of knowledge of how FSX works to optimize both your OS and FSX for FSX's best performance and to keep it that way. Fortunately a long history of developing and documenting has already been done on Fan Forums and Vendor websites and is there for late comers to take advantage of. Lots of articles to read, videos to watch and learn from. Things like enabling/disabling default traffic and using free add-ons like AI (WOAI), elevation meshes (FREEMESHX), terrains (ORBX or photo-real), Aircraft and liveries and gauges. Little tweaks/add-ons that add lights to airport vehicles, stars in the sky. Watching out for "duplicates", add-on compatibility (or not), etc. It's great fun IF you are "I like to tinker" minded and technically savvy. It's not for the; I just want to play and have great graphics with no effort gamer, they often find themselves not able, don't like it, and of course start placing blame on Steam or Microsoft when its just the realities that occur when using older technology software with newer advancing hardware technologies. Soon the hardware and operating systems will no longer support FSX's DX9 or DX10 at all and we will have to let FSX go or find old hardware/OS's to run it on.
How soon will operating systems no longer support DirectX for FSX?
The target frame rate at 31 doesn't do anything for me, in fact it rends my aircraft invisible when starting a flight path.
The Autogen, Vehicle Traffic and Water setting are 3 that, in particular were most always recommended to Not be set at max, even on powerful video cards. Because I still have old 2-gtx770's (SLI) I keep my Autogen at Normal, If I had yours I "might" bump that up to Dense but not Extreme Dense on Autogen. Vehicle traffic I keep pretty low 25% i think and water at second highest setting of High x 2. The Airport Traffic and Airport Vehicle Traffic settings around 70-80% cause I have ALL WOAI airlines installed. And I don't max out my MESH complexity on the graphics tab because the edges and tops of close mountains are a little softer and blend better when set a little less than maxed. I'm not looking at it right now but I think I max out everything else.
And I too still get the blurriness and texture draw delays "sometimes" when switching views very frequently. Spot view is particularly problematic, it can be, at times very blurry, while switching to a right wing view of the same area, AT the SAME TIME is perfectly clear (looking around w/SHIFT-O mouse view).
https://puu.sh/HE7Rb/cc517b29a9.png
https://puu.sh/HE7RQ/8d290d9748.png
https://puu.sh/HE7Sv/2a3d0c50d2.png
https://puu.sh/HE7SV/83a53f521f.png
I have put screen shots of my FSX settings here to give you an example of a tuned FSX. My computer hardware and specs are:
processor- 6th gen i5 4 core 3.5 hz
ram - 32 gb
video - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4gig vram
Windows 10 ver 21H1
500 gb SSD drive C
1 tb SSD drive D
Anyone wanting to view the results of my setup can go to my profile page under content and look at my posted screen shots
P.S. I also use Steve's DX-10 fixer
Ken
With DX10 more graphics functions are pushed to the GFX card instead of the CPU doing the work, that said FSX-SE's DX10 implementation was incomplete and never finished as the dev studio was disbanded by Microsoft.
Enter Steve's DX10 Fixer, which will "Fix" the incomplete DX10 functionality of FSX-SE. It is of course a payware application and if you wish to continue with FSX-SE, will be pretty much a necessity.
Also some CPU tuning is of likely assistance.
You'll probably find the CPU is maxing out all cores, and an affinity mask applied to leave one core free from FSX-SE usage will improve performance (try searching for affinity mask FSX in Google).
Turning off SMT in the motherboard bios and applying an overclock to the CPU may also help.
Personally I run P3D v4.5 HF3 (x64) with a 1070Ti GFX card and 2700X Ryzen clocked to 4.3 Ghz with SMT set to off where, unlike FSX-SE, P3D will use all the GFX card resources and the challenge is to tune the sim to keep the GFX card use to below 100% and thus not overload.
Some further info:
https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/600075-p3d-v4-settings-for-improving-performance/
https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/598863-how-to-make-p3d-v45-look-better/
Note P3D v5 is DX12 based and would likely require more GFX card memory than the 6 GB your 2060 supports however P3D v4.5 is DX11 based and would be fine with your limited system.
Alterantively be prepared to get your hands dirty and start delving into guts of FSX-SE, being ~ 15 years old there is a wealth of information available on the internet.
Cheers
I appreciate your help but it didn't work out for me with those settings, I guess I will purchase the DX-10 fixer perhaps.