FSX SP1 released

Rotorblade · Post by **Rotorblade** » Wed May 16, 2007 11:59 am

http://www.fsinsider.com/downloads/Page ... Pack1.aspx

It supports multi-core systems and should help with performance.

I'll post my results soon!

Enjoy!

Burner · Post by **Burner** » Wed May 16, 2007 12:39 pm

Cookin thru the tubes @ 1.3Mb/s! Nice link RB, I'm looking forward to hearing your results b/f I take the time to install FSX.

Rotorblade · Post by **Rotorblade** » Wed May 16, 2007 5:09 pm

It is hard to be exact with my findings because there are so many variables with the graphics settings so I will be brief. I have definitely received a 20-30% performance increase with my test system, Core 2 Duo 2.33 4m, ATI X1600 256, 2GB ram. On my test box I had to have the scenery objects sliders all the way down in order to get decent FPS and now with the patch I can easily have them set to dense and normal. I can't wait to apply SP1 to my main rig, I was already getting decent frames (30FPS) with the scenery on dense and I am betting I will be able to max out more of the settings.

I run with AA and AO maxed out and forced on the test rig and my main.

Post by **Lawndart** » Wed May 16, 2007 7:54 pm

Rotorblade, would you say for someone who's opted not to pick up a copy of FSX yet mainly due to poor performance out of the box, that this resolves many of those initial woes?

What about single core performance increases?

Rotorblade · Post by **Rotorblade** » Wed May 16, 2007 8:57 pm

Definitely! I just got done flying around New York City with the Scenery objects cranked as high as they go and had the road traffic on 75% and it was awesome! Textures are all on high, I even had the area that it loads set to high. I kept the FPS locked at 20FPS and it never went lower then that, it was glass smooth.

I consider my system to be medium grade system because of the video card and I have no reason to want to upgrade the video card unless i want
100% AI air traffic and boats along with the 75% cars that I already have.

I am running a Core 2 Duo 3.0Ghz 1333FSB (e6600), ATI X1900XTX series card 512MB, 2GB of ram

A person definitely doesn't need a Nvidia 8800 series card for this now. If i could make a recommendation I would stick with the 7950 series until DX10 is actually released.

I installed SP1 on top of my terrain mesh and landclass updates and I don't see any issues. I did not perform a clean install on both of my systems and both are working fine without issues. I did remove the couple thirdparty DLLs that reside in the fsx/modules folder because they are now not compatible. The FSGenesis terrain mesh still works fine and so do the few addon aircraft that I have.

I can definitely see myself flying a Snowbird high show in Malmstrom Montana with the scenery and textures on high this weekend.

Snowbirds check in!

Ageis · Post by **Ageis** » Thu May 17, 2007 5:46 am

I would agree with Rotorblade, performance has been greatly enhanced.

Rotorblade · Post by **Rotorblade** » Thu May 17, 2007 11:53 am

Just tried a quad Xeon core system 2.66Ghz, 2GB Ram, 7300GT 256MB card. Resolution at 1024x768x32. The scenery object sliders set to max and road traffic set to 75%.

In a 2 core system both CPU's seem to being fully utilized and on the 4 core system 1 CPU appears to be maxed out and the other 3 look identical showing consistent spikes in loads about 1/3rd of the time so it looks like the work is getting spread out over the other 3 cores and 3 cores idle a along with spikes of usage.

I think having 4 cores or more is overkill for FSX. Maybe down the road with more scenery addons 4 cores will be needed.

The graphics card is the true bottleneck now. The 7300GT was getting about 6-12fps before the patch and after the patch it is getting 16-20FPS. I performed a departure from Laguardia with fair weather. With the scenery pretty much cranked the only way to low the FPS was to increase the screen resolution so I turned the resolution up to 1680x1050 and the FPS was solid at 10FPS. That pretty much confirmed what I thought would happen to the performance.

I talked to a close friend last night, he runs the triplehead to go with the 3000+ wide resolution, 8800 640m card, 2.13 Core 2 duo and he said with the new patch his system is glass smooth with everything maxed. Now thats great to hear. I believe the reading on SP1 talks about the 8800 being considered more in this patch which will make it the flagship video card to have for any FSX enthusiast.

Both CPU and GPU play huge factors here and I would recommend a Core 2 Duo any speed even the 1.8 E4300 would do well with a $130 7950 series nvidia card for the budget minded system builder until DX10 comes out. But if you consider yourself an enthusiast like most of us here you may not be happy until you get a 8800 series card with 640m or more. I am not sure how the 8800 320m version compares. Hopefully we can hear soon from people with a core 2 system with the 8800 320m card.

Post by **Lawndart** » Thu May 17, 2007 11:57 am

Thanks for the reviews Rotorblade! Anyone try this service pack on a single core processor yet?

Rhino · Post by **Rhino** » Thu May 17, 2007 1:44 pm

I will re-install tonight or at some point soon. With the GTX and the 2.4 GHz C2Duo I have in here, I can't wait. I remember zooming around a bit with it in Vista on DX10, but it didn't look right for some reason. Now that I'm back on XP I will definitely have to try it.

Rotorblade · Post by **Rotorblade** » Thu May 17, 2007 4:09 pm

Rhino wrote:...I remember zooming around a bit with it in Vista on DX10, but it didn't look right for some reason. Now that I'm back on XP I will definitely have to try it.

I wasn't aware that DX10 was even out yet. The 8800 series is a good card for sheer performance in DX9 but I personally am going to steer clear of the DX10 cards until it is actually released. By then there should be even nicer ones and the price of the GTX 8800 will be nicer.

airchief · Post by **airchief** » Thu May 17, 2007 4:14 pm

DX10 is out. Vista uses DX10.

The DX10 update for FSX has NOT been released. Currently FSX uses DX9 on both XP and Vista.

There are good DX10 cards available. But you can not use the DX10 function of them for FSX yet. The NVidia 8800 series cards come to mind.

The DX10 update for FSX is scheduled for later this year.