Tweaks

I came across this blog entry setting out how to get rid of the dreaded blurries. As the article points out, quite often you can end up with a lot of “texture shimmering” as a byproduct of getting rid of the blurries.

I’ve tried the 2 part fix detailed on the blog and have had fantastic results, so this now goes on my own personally maintained list of  FSX Best Tips :)

In summary (I’ve only tried this on my nVidia card - not sure if it’ll work with any others):

• Add MipBias=6 to the [Display...] section of fsx.cfg
• In your nVidia display control, find the section for “Negative LOD Bias” and change it to “Clamp”

This resulted in even clearer scenery than from my previous suggestions and also removed virtually all of the shimmering. There’s still a little left, but nothing too distracting.

I’ve decided to put this short guide together due to the number of requests I’ve received for advice on tweaking Flight Simulator X.

Before starting, I need to advise that, although all of these tips have worked fine for me, I offer no guarantee that they will provide you with the same results and you make any changes at your own risk. Always back up any files you’re about to change before changing them. I would suggest you make these changes one at a time, and in between each one, start up FSX and check to see if it’s made any difference. If it’s had an adverse affect, you then know what to undo to get it back the way it was.

Enough of the caveats and on with the fun stuff

I’m going to keep things to a minimum, as I think too much tweaking can cause more harm than good. So, to start with, a small system tweak for Windows XP users.

• Disable the NTFS timestamp. Every time a directory is accessed using the NTFS file system (which is used by the majority of XP users), it changes the LastAccessed date and time on the directory. For a system with many directories (which is certainly the case with MSFS), this can amount to a significant overhead. I therefore recommended disabling this if you are using the NTFS file system. You can read more here, where you will also find details about how to make the change itself.

Now, on to the changes to Flight Simulator X itself - make sure FSX isn’t running before making these changes:

• Fixing the blurries. One of the biggest complaints seems to be blurry ground textures, which causes the ground to look all fuzzy. You can change a setting in your “fsx.cfg” file (remember, back up the original first!). Open “fsx.cfg” in Notepad, which you can find in C:/Document and Settings/YourUserNameHere/Application Data/Microsoft/FSX/ assuming you have a default setup. You should be able to just double-click the file to open it in Notepad. Once open, do a search for “FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION” (without the quotes). Mine was set to a value of 0.33. Try changing this to a slightly higher value. Some people have reported that if you go too high, the blurries are cured, but their frame rates suffer. I set mine to 0.7. This actually increased fps and also results in pin sharp scenery.
• Once you’re happy with the above, open up “fsx.cfg” in Notepad again and search for “[SCENERY]“. Immediately under that line, add the line “SmallPartRejectRadius=4″ - again, without quotes. What this tells the simulator is “don’t bother drawing anything in the scenery that would be smaller than 4 pixels”. You can also try 2. 0 is the default. This can cause some “popping”, i.e. objects may suddenly appear because they are suddenly bigger tahn 4 pixels. I don’t find this distracting and is well worth the 10-15% performance improvement I gained. You can find out more about this one on Peter Taylor’s excellent blog.
• Rename “default.xml”. There’s a file that generates some autogen objects, such as shopping malls etc. It’s only about 5Mb in size, but seems to cause all kinds of performance problems and has done since at least FS2004. So, best thing is, get rid of it! Simply rename it (i.e. to something like default.xml.old) and FSX won’t load it. You will hardly notice any difference in the scenery (to be honest, I don’t notice any difference at all), but I gain a nice performance improvement by not using it. You can find it at D:/Program Files/Microsoft Games/Microsoft Flight Simulator X/Autogen/. You may need to change the D at the start if you’re FSX is installed to a different drive.

There are literally hundreds of tweaks available on the net, but I’ve deliberately kept this simple. I’ve offered a small number that have made very significant improvement gains on my system and hopefully you’ll find them useful. If you know of any others, please let me know and be sure to let me how you’ve got on with these.

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I’ve just been looking over this blog from topomatt which has a very extensive list of tweaks for fsx. It looks as if the author has collected a vast amount of information from various sources, all credited and linked back to the original source and it looks like it’s updated regularly, so be sure to bookmark it and check back regularly.

The transition of the site to a blog is almost complete. Hope you like the changes. They will allow us to post more frequent updates more easily, which will hopefully benefit everyone.

We’ve kept the forum in place, so if you have any questions, or just want to chat to other flight simmers, please join up (for free, of course).

PMDG, producers of some of the very best add-ons for FS9, have published a free FSX performance guide on their site. This is absolutely essential reading for all FSX owners.  The performance increase on my system after carrying out the tweaks in the guide is nothing short of outstanding. Be sure to also check the PDF document mentioned in the guide.