strange-video card performance answer?

[Guest byoung]

Didn't work for me...I have the TI 4200 AGP 8X...Barry

[Guest GZR_Frenchy]

Wheeeoo. Finally got up enough guts to try it out. Made a backup of the original .cfg. Created the new entry and and gave it a whirl. Sim dropped down to 800x600 res. and thought I had it made. Then set it back up to 1600x1200x32 ---- Not so. GeForce3 card here and the OS is ME. First things first -- the .cfg change stuck and let me fly the default Cessna at the default airport. Went to spot view and Whammmo. Lost all the skins off the Cessna. Only tiny white and blue checkerboard stuff wrapping around the default Cessna. Good Golly, Miss Molly.Put back the original .cfg and all was well again. Most definitely this is system specific. Not a problem. It was running decent to begin with.Just my two pennies worth. Oh yeah, thanks for all the excellant input.Frenchy -- out.

[Guest]

Ok.So this is what i have done.First i deleted both Display.device entries.Yup both..Fired up FS9back to the default 800x600x16bilinear.Didnt touch a thing..just taxied around spot view cockpit view and such ...lots of clouds though..sim = jerky set at 20FPSSO..Look at the FS9.cfg..no display.divice line 0 nota..no Nvidia Ti4600.0 anywhere.Shutdown flightsimFS9.cfg..no ti4600 no display.device line at all.Fire flightsim up again.Looked at the config..not there, Changed the display to 1280x1024x32.FS9.cfg..yup my card was there..way down..last entry display.device Ti4600closed flight simFS9 CFG display.device has moved!!..its up above Joystick Main below show flight history.But only the ONE entry.I am about to put everything back to the original2 entries. and will post again with the results.

[Guest]

Well .Sim is smoother than before...same clouds.Frames are the same,,i guess..dont care..sim is SMOOTHERI forgot to mention that i also went to trilinear filter when i change the display..sim was still jerkyThese are my entries in the FS9.cfg as of now.(above Joystick Main, below show flight history=1)[DISPLAY.Device.NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600.0]Mode=1280x1024x32TriLinear=1(above Display after Sound_Quality=2)[DISPLAY.Device.NVIDIA Drivers on Win2K/XP]Mode=1280x1024x32TextureAGP=0PanelAsTexture=0TriLinear=1So i ask youWhich one of these 2 entries are smoothing out my sim?

[Guest Offmysix]

This tweak sure helped my system.Athlon 2600 GF3-200 W98seNot sure about any big FPS gain, I keep mine locked at 18 but it sure helped keeping the numbers up there.MUCH smoother.Here is what I ended up with (after 10 hours of tweaking ) ( can't believe I paid for this, AND IT'S A MICROSOFT GAME ON A MICROSOFT OPERATING SYSTEM). My FS9 config file reads:DISPLAY.Device.NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 200.0I created this entry is my display.cfg file:;----------------------------------------------------------------------; NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 200;----------------------------------------------------------------------[000010DE:00000201:nvdisp.drv]Disable=1[000010DE:00000201:nvdisp.drv.1]MinDriverRev=4.13.01.3082Disable=2The MinDriverREV is my current driver version.That did the trick.Each time I tried to create a different entry than the default display device that showed in the FS9.cfg file originally, the FS9.cfg file would create a new display device entry in the FS9.cfg file which seemed to take priority and no gain seen.So I gave in and created a display cfg to match what was originally there.This sure worked for me.Not sure what the Disable= does. I took a crap shoot at picking a device from the device list that looked close to my card settings and modified it, I'll take what I can get.I can finally fly this thing with out getting aggravated.Time to go flying. ( till the next post )( 10 hours of tweaking included 2 hours of reading all these posts ).Thanks for the tips, Geofa and everyone.

[Hoochy 6]

I Have a GEForce3 Ti200 Card will it work with this?Rgds, John

[Guest]

Hi to everybody,this post has been a very interesting reading but, I believe a certain amount of confusion has been generated around this topic. If you don't mind I'll try to summarise here what I know in order to explain in a little more rational way what I believe is happening. I'll also add some more technical hints on possible further tweaking tricks. I apologise in advance as thisi is going to be a very long post but if you take your time to read it, it may prove useful at the end.In FS2004 (like in all heavily demanding graphics application there's no magic wand. If you want to increase your frame rate you have to give up something for a change. People will start immediately saying .....but it's working for me so the trick is doing something really to the way FS2004 run. I've to admit that this seems really the golden pot at the end of the rainbow but I'll try to explain what I think it's really happening.Everybody that tryed the trick have surely noticed as, after you edit the FS9.cfg file and restart the sim, it restarts in 800x600x16 with almost all the setting related to graphic hardware set to some default. This is happening simply because what we are causing by editing the fs9.cfg is simply making FS2004 unable to identify the card at the startup thus forcing it to set up safe preset for the graphic card capability. As soon as we change the resolution to what it was before (in my case it was 1280x1024x32) FS2004 calls the video card graphic driver library to check if the card is really capable of delivering what we are asking for so it is now able to identify it properly. As a matter of fact if you reopen the fs9.cfg and scroll the text past the point you edited last time you'll find another entry relevant to the display adapter that is identical to the one you previously replaced. This is the result of FS2004 restoring the original information of the graphic adapter (it is unclear why it leaves here also the edited portion instead of overwriting it but it's not that important). Again at this point you are probably about to ask me, why then my FPS improved ? The reason I believe lies in the reset that FS2004 has performed when the FS9.cfg has been edited. Most likely as a consequence of this reset some parameter that you previously set up in an effort to maximize the visual quality of the sim (e.g. filtering, mip map, TnL, AntiAlias, texture size etc) got changed or disabled and magically that parameter was the one responsible for the reduction in frame rate as your video card was not really efficient to render that DirectX graphic function. One of the things that seems to prove this theory is the fact that, looking again on the original post, the greater improvement have been witnessed by people having older or less poverful card. So finally, the improvement of the FPS is the result of the removal of some feature. This is not necessarily a bad thing as far as you are still satisfied with the appearance of the sim. After all it's pretty normal using nowadays technology to espect that a slight improvement in graphic quality (that indeed has already improved a lot over the past years) comes at a huge cost in term of graphic performance.I'd like to hear from you guys if you check all the preset for the setting/display tabs and restore them to the original ones (enable evrything if you do not remember what were the original settings) maxim everything out, if the FPS comes back to the previous values.Finally, I'd also like to mention that FS2004 has been compiled using the DirectX9 graphic libraries. If we talk about Nvidia graphic adapters (I'm not familiar with ATI but I guess a similar logic apply also there) the only DirectX9 compliant cards are the ones of the last born FX family (NV32 chipset). Even the GeForce 4 Ti 4800SE is "only" DirectX8 compliant. Older cards (like the GeForce 2 or 3) can even be DirectX7 compliant.Is it nothing else we can try then ? The answer is yes. There is some tweaking that we can still do but has nothing to do with the FS9.cfg file but rather with the display.cfg file.The display.cfg is a list of video cards or, more precisely of video drivers and video card requiring some special adjustment without which FS2004 would be unable to work properly (or even to work at all). Each section of the display.cfg file deals with a particular card or with a particular family of cards. The lines that starts with ";" are only comments useful for identifying the card the section refers too but are not really read by FS2004 (and that's another reason why the trick described at the beginning of this post is not really doing what it's described in the original post). You can try renaming all sections with fictious names (try to replace the "Nvidia drivers on Win 2000/xp" with "Whitesnow and the 7 dwarves" and you'll see no difference in FS2004 behaviour.To understand how FS2004 interacts with your graphic card we have to think to the so called DirectX HAL interfaces (HAL=Hardware Abstraction Layer). All 3D graphic based games written for windows are based either on the Open GL or on the DirectX graphic libraries. Both libraries are basically a set of API's (Application Programming Interfaces) that provide to the games programmers the facilities needed by modern games. I will focus the rest of this post on the DirectX which I'm more familiar with, but I believe a similar approach is used by the Open GL libraries. To be able to be "independent" from the specific hardware (and independent it's written between quotes as this independency is not 100% true) the DirectX implements a structure of standard calls valid for all kind of hardware (it's the so called HAL). The game (FS2004 in this case) will use the DirectX API to activate specific graphic function (e.g. display the shadow of your aircraft approaching touch down, or change a texture appearance based on directions from which the sunlight is shining on it). This DirectX calls are then tranferred to your specific graphic hardware by another library this time developped by the Graphic card manufacturer that translates the standard DirectX request into a specific (and hopefully optimized) set of instructions for the Graphic chipset. This is the reason why updating the drivers sometimes improves performance sometimes reduce performance on the same graphic card. It is a consequence on how well the graphic driver library has been coded by the company that makes your beloved 3D card.Let's start talking about business now. The graphic driver under both windows XP and Windows 9X comes in the form of a DLL. For example the new generation of Nvidia drivers (valid for all cards as Nvidia has adopted the UDA = Unified Driver Architecture) uses the NV4_disp.dll under Win XP and the nvdisp.dll under Win 9x, while the ATI Radeon family of cards use the ati2dvag.dll under Win XP and the ati3d2ag.dll under Win 9X. Other cards use other drivers. Looking inside the display.cfg file we may have further example of graphic drivers (the comment lines are not so useless after all). Let's concentrate ourself on the Nvidia sections. We can see that there is one generic entry for "NVIDIA Drivers on Win2k/XP and other more specific entries for the FX5200 or the QuadraFX. If we look to the generic one we see that there is an entry between two square brackets ( [nv4_disp.dll] ) while if we look at the FX5200 one there are also two hex number preceeding the dll name ( [000010DE:00000322:nv4_disp.dll] ). The two HEX number are Windows registry entries that are used to identify the maker of the graphic chipset (000010DE = Nvidia) and the Family of graphic chipset (00000322 = GeForce FX5200). During startup FS2004 gets from the registry the type of card installed on your PC by checking the driver DLL name and the vendor/chipset codes and then scans the display.cfg file to check if there's an entry either generic (e.g. only the driver library is called up) or specific (driver library, vendor code and card code). If it finds a match then it looks to what is present in the section and behaves accordingly. So far everything is pretty straightforward. I know, I know, you are about to ask me two things: 1) How can I know which are the codes to use with my video card ?2) What do I do after I find out the codes ? The answer to the first question is pretty simple. Launch MSINFO32.exe (it's an utility present in WinXp and Win9x often under the full name of Microsoft System Information) open the display adapter section and check the line called ID PNP Peripheral (or something like that, my copy of WinXP is in Italian). You should find something like this: ID periferica PNP PCIVEN_10DE&DEV_0250&SUBSYS_00371545&REV_A34&618BA55&0&0008 the 4 hex digit code after then VEN_ label is your vendor code while the four digit code after the DEV_ label is your card code. The reason for which in the display.cfg you have to write down these code with 4 leading zeros is simply because the Registry entry are in double word format. The answer to the second question is a little bit more tricky.After you have discovered the code values, you can create a new section inside the display.cfg file. In my case I've created this one (I have a GeForce 4 Ti 4600):;----------------------------------------------------------------------; NVIDIA GeForce Ti 4600 on Win2K/XP;----------------------------------------------------------------------[000010DE:00000250:nv4_disp.dll]Disable=1[0000010DE:00000250:nv4_disp.dll.1]MinDriverRev=5.13.01.1241Disable=2 Again you can write whatever you want after the ";". I've decided to use the card name to remember better which line I'm going to play with. Note that deliberately I've chosen an entry that is different from the one inside the fs9.cfg (that on my system is [DISPLAY.Device.NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 .0], as it is irrelevant what you write here.As a starter I recommend you just copy the generic section for the Nvidia drivers and simply edit the part between the square bracket to match you card. Now you can save the display.cfg file and you are ready to experiment with the switches. Yes, the switches as this is exactly what is the meaning of the entries in these section. I'll try to list some of the ones I've discovered but I beleieve there's more to it than I know now so I'll be back to you with updates is I discover something new.Before going on a little remark on the second subsection (the one identified with the lines: [0000010DE:00000250:nv4_disp.dll.1]MinDriverRev=5.13.01.1241 This is just a repeater of the previous one whose setting will be taken into consideration only if the version of the driver installed onyour system is the one listed or an earlier one so, considerin that the revision is quite old, you can leave that section alone and concentrate all of your tweaking effort on the first one. In general terms all the switches listed here are function foreseen by the DirectX libraries that shall be provided by the video card driver. Some of this I've already discovered and some have still to be "explored". These switched are of two categories:ON/OFF flags (that can be either equal to 0 or 1) Multistage selectors (that can have different values)I cannot provide you with a complete and exaustive list but here's what I've found. Disable=0 to 5 (I believe should have values from 0 to 5 and is equivalent to the DirectX acceleration slider present under the display property/troubleshooting tab (again I don't know the exact name of the tab but is the one were you can reduce the amount of acceleration in case of compatibility of the video card driver with the full range of DirectX functionalities). RenderToTexture=0 or 1 (enables or disables the Render To Texture DirectX function that I believe is the DirectX9 enhanced option that was present in DirectX8 as Multitexturing) MultiTexture=0 or 1 (enable or disable the DirectX8 standard MultiTexturing) Trilinear=0 or 1 (enable or disable Trilinear filtering) DXTn=0 or 1 (enable or disable the use of DXT compressed textures) MipMap=0 to 4 or even 8 (the exact range is to be confirmed but sets the maximum level of mipmap) TnL=0, 1 or 2 (select the Tranform and Lightning mode) TextureAGP=0 or 1 (disable AGP texturing) TableFog=0 or 1 (enable or disable fog table emulation) AntiAlias=0 up to 4 (select the level of antialias)Again in general terms all the switches are used to disable certain functions or to prevent FS2004 to stimulate a specific DirectX call that is either not supported by the card or which the card is not fully compatible with). I cannot recommend any specific setting for all cards yet but I'll run some experiments on my system (GF4 Ti 4600 under WinXP) and post the results. I invite other users to do the same.Also note that some of these switches are present in the control panel of the Nvidia Drivers but not all of them Happy tweaking and happy flying always. Mikey4468

[Guest John_Cillis]

To Mikey4468I'd say you have a good grasp of what's going on...something I also suggested at the beginning of this thread. Your breakdown of the display.cfg options is a good one, although I don't believe some of the flags work exactly as you laid them out...the highest entry I've ever seen in the display.cfg is "2". The display.cfg for FS2004 works like an exception table. You could basically delete the content there, and FS2004 would treat all video cards as if they had "max" features. Obviously, some don't--hence the need for an exception table. Also, the table is there for Microsoft's protection. It allows them to deliver a sim with features that are questionable for certain cards disabled, even to the level of certain card drivers. It's interesting that the Nvidia 4XXX series didn't seem to have any entries at all. All in all, good post, although I have to warn you, some people won't be swayed and they'll think they've hit the holy grail. Remember, when the going gets technical, the tough get flying :)-John

[Guest]

Excellent work;)

[Guest SoarPics]

Nice work, Mikey4468. Though I agree with JohnCi about your theory of the "Disable" calls in the Display.cfg. We need to learn more about what they do before fully understanding the full power of the file.FYI, after tweaking with this for a couple of days I went back to my original FS9.cfg and Display.cfg. But then, my card (9700 Pro) was listed in the Display.cfg.

[WebMaximus 372]

Amazing thread :-) Read it at work and was eager to get home and check it out myself, but unfortunately I couldn't notice any difference.I have another question, has anyone tried to modify this default setting in FS9.CFG with good results?TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=40/Richard

[Nickdj 0]

Um guys, what do i change do you know? my reads as follows:DISPLAY,Device.Inno3D GeForce4 Ti 4200 with AGP8X.0any ideaS?

[Guest SoarPics]

Nickdj... see the post by Mikey4468 above. He explains how to do it.WebMaiximus... "I have another question, has anyone tried to modify this default setting in FS9.CFG with good results?TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=40"Some folks increase this to 400 in an effort to eliminate the grayish/brown textures when you change views in flight. Sometimes it can take a second or more (depending on system) for those ugly things to be replaced by real ground textures. The downside is that if you set it too high for your system, you'll get stuttering. It's one of those things you have to play with to find what works best for you.And finally, for those who still think there's a miracle cure in this FS9/Display.cfg tweak, I suggest you read this... http://www.flightsimnetwork.com/dcforum/DC...mID21/4370.htmlPlenty of things to check after doing this tweak just to make sure your sim is returned to the same settings as before.

[Geofa 108]

Thank you-this is the answer I think I was looking for with the post that started this huge avalanche!Again-what I was interested in is that my sliders started working-and your post leads me to beleive that one of those switches may have tripped or allowed this.Thanks for the great information-now there is a direction to head. :-)http://mywebpages.comcast.net/geofa/pages/Geofdog2.jpg

[ulisses 1]

I'm using TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=120and it is good...Ulisses