PMDG Products Frame Rates FAQ

From PMDG Ops

PMDG developers and members have spent hundreds of hours helping people tweak/tune performance problems out of their FS setups- so we have a pretty broad base of experience.

Here are some suggestions we have collected along the way:

Contents 1 Hard drive defragmenting 2 Removing Symantec products 3 Improving the Windows pagefile 4 Drivers 4.1 Graphics 4.2 Motherboard Chipset 4.3 CPU 4.4 Sound

Hard drive defragmenting

Properly defragmenting your hard drive(s) has a MASSIVE impact. You can't rely on windows internal defragmenting process to handle this for you. We consider this a good first step, but certainly still very inefficient. One suggestion is to use O&O Defrag and set it up to defragment by using the "Name" method. We saw a decrease in loading times of about 80% (subjective) and an increase in FPS of about 30% (measured.)

Other good defrag utilities are:

• Perfect Disk 8.0
• Diskeeper 2007
• O&O Defrag 8.6

The built in Windows defrager (which is a stripped down Diskeeper actually) is adequate, but lacks many of the advanced features of the commercial utilities. We highly recommend purchasing one of these if you want maximum performance out of your machine.

Removing Symantec products

If you have ANY product related to firewall/anti-virus/ad blocking that was written by Symantec Corporation (Norton) then we'd recommend uninstalling it and finding other solutions that are more well written. When we removed the Norton Firewall/Virus/Ad software from our system (And all of it's various minor installations that it likes to leave behind) we went to NOD32 and Privoxy and saw a DRAMATIC increase in FPS (40% measured).

Free Antivirus suites like Avast! or AVG are also likely to be much better for FPS than bloated suites like Norton, McAffe, etc...

It's probably a good idea to just shut down the anti-virus suite all-together when running FS, especially on older systems. Ken Salter's FSAutoStart is a great tool for automating this as well as shutting down other background services and programs that can suck up memory and CPU time during an FS session.

Improving the Windows pagefile

Find and read up on the various discussions related to page files. We personally have never had a problem with the page file in windows slowing down MSFS. We guess we're just lucky. Many people have fiddled with their page files and created unintentional side-effect of slowing down MSFS.

We recommend setting up Windows to manage the page file - schemes for creating a permanent swap file may have been useful back in the Windows 98 days, but XP is very good at managing it on its own and if you use one of the good defrag utilities above, it will be able to move the pagefile to a spot on the disk where it can't get fragmented and slow down.

To set the swap to Windows managed:

1. Go to Control Panel/System/Advanced
2. Under Performance click Settings
3. Click the Advanced tab.
4. Under Virtual Memory at the bottom, click Change
5. Highlight your main drive where the swap file is placed and press System managed size
6. Press Set then press OK
7. Reboot your machine and run an offline defrag with one of the programs above.

Drivers

One of the most important keys to making an FS PC or any gaming PC run smoothly is having up to date drivers installed. Hardware manufacturers are constantly adding features and bug fixes that are important to have!

If you have a prebuilt system such as a Dell, HP, etc - do be aware that the drivers availiable on their support pages are most likely out of date - unless there's specific custom functionality that you need from the branded driver, it's almost always better to go straight to the manufacturer of the componet to get the latest reference driver.

You should ALWAYS get the latest Windows Updates availiable - they most likely won't improve frame rates in FS, but what they will do is protect you against many viruses, worms, and other security holes that are found in Windows, as well as give you bug fixes. Installing Windows XP Service Pack 2 at a minimum is absolutely necessary.

Graphics

This cannot be said enough: Graphics drivers should be up to date. If you haven't installed new drivers in the past two months then you are likely out of date and a good update might help you!

• If you have an Nvidia-based card go to Nvidia ForceWare Downloads
• If you have an ATI-based card go to ATI Catalyst Downloads.
  • It may also be worth trying to the Omega Drivers, an ATI-sanctioned modified set.

Motherboard Chipset

The motherboard chipset drivers also play a role in managing the flow from the graphics card to the CPU and memory. Improperly installed or out of date chipset drivers can cause all sorts of problems.

• If your motherboard is based on an Nvidia nForce series chipset, go to Nvidia ForceWare Downloads.
• If you have a board with an Intel chipset, download the Intel INF Update Utility.
• If you have a VIA based board, you'll want to download the latest Hyperion 4-in-1 Driver.
• If you have an ATI Radeon Xpress based board, you'll want to go to ATI Catalyst Downloads.

CPU

Many of the newer CPUs coming out have a driver that can improve performance and power management. This is particularly true of the AMD Dual Core series.

• If you have an AMD processor, look here for potential driver updates.

Sound

Many sound cards today are integrated onto the motherboard. Most likely you will find drivers for these at your motherboard maker's website. (ie, Asus, MSI, Abit, DFI, etc)

• If you have a Creative Labs sound card (Soundblaster Live, Audigy, Audigy 2, X-Fi, etc) go to Creative Downloads.