alexjameshardy

Take part in events. One of my major tests was fling Gatwick to Edinburgh during an event where near enough the whole UK was staffed, and I had everything. Clearance to clearance. It was also very busy, I was about 6th in line for takeoff at Gatwick with planes coming in to land as well. Another thing to kick things up a notch is fly harder approaches, one of my first Vatsim flights was to Madeira doing the 05 approach. I had control for that and it was nervewracking but so much fun. If that's not your style then ask for a different type of approach, such as an NDB or something, kick things up a notch and make your flight harder to do while following ATC instructions.

FB's is Flightbeam, a scenery dev. NGX is the name for the "Next Generation" Boeing 737's, the 6/7/8/900 vatiants. OOM is out of memory. FSX is an old program and the code is pretty poor. Essentially when you load too much, it runs out of available memory and crashes. Right, as for the main question. What are your specs? Have you changed your MAX_TEXTURE_LOAD to 2048/4096, if you have bring it back down to 1024. Load radius? Keep it on the large setting within FSX, it wasn't designed to run higher than that, and it takes a miracle to fly a decent flight with it. As for the rest just tone down textures and stuff a bit, gradually bring everything down in small increments, although autogen and clouds are two large killers in terms of performance.

It's slightly overkill, you don't really need that much for P3D, or any sim really, but it's good for the use and you'll be able to run all games on good settings. You most likely will have to overclock the i7 to get the best performance though, but you've got good cooling so it will be fine. Make sure the case is good for airflow and get some good fans so your hardware doesn't get too hot.

Anti-Aliasing should be on. FPS caps are a must, however there's two ways. You can use the FSX internal limiter, and you can use external limiters from Nvidia Inspector or a small program, however I stick with the FSX internal one. To see what the best applicable setting would be, download Fraps. Then use the benchmark feature, showing the MinMax Average. Start up a flight in the most intensive area, for me this would be UK2000 Heathrow in the NGX, and fly a circuit while doing the benchmark. Make sure your frames are unlimited for this and then do the benchmark. After this, view the benchmark and limit it to just below the average FPS. Although it may not be perfect, a smooth stable sim is better than a beautiful jerky sim. Let me know if you need anything else

Okay. Long story time. Firstly, you are going to have to balance your settings in FSX. Go to settings and then click on customise. A new window will appear and you will have more options. If you play on full screen, which I don't recommend, then make sure you choose the correct screen resolution. Then choose your anti-aliasing. Bilinear or Triliniear will work best on your system. Then you have your global options. For your setup you can keep your global texture resolution on Very High. Have lens flare and advanced animations on, bloom off. Also check advanced animations. Moving on to the next tab, you will want to have high quality VC checked, and aircraft casts shadows on itself/shadows on the ground off. Onto the scenery tab, this confuses a lot of people, and I still don't understand it. However, the advice I can give you. Level of detail radius, medium. This dictates how much is loaded around you. The settings below that are up to you, however, higher settings will impact performance, badly. I'd recommend keeping them somewhere around the middle. Water effects, low 2x, 1x is not nice and high 2x is a killer of fps. Autogen and scenery complexity are up to you, see what works best. Special effects on high. On the weather tab, change your draw distance to 80 miles. Here's a good time to advertise weather programs. Flying with real world weather from a program like ASN, Opus or REX can make flying a whole lot better. This also fades the horizon out and gives you a much better quality of weather, including clouds, with roughly the same performance. Lastly, the AI traffic tab, turn it all off. Unless you want some other planes in the sky when you fly, but I fly on Vatsim so I have everything off. Cars especially, they're awful on performance. Fun part. Press Windows+R, and then type %appdata% (with the percentages) and then click on the Microsoft folder, then FSX, and then open FSX.cfg with notepad. Tweak 1: Open Task Manager, go to Performance, and then click on CPU. Check how many physical cores there are, and if hyperthreading is enabled. Input the information here (http://www.gatwick-fsg.org.uk/affinitymask.aspx?SubMenuItem=hardware) and then you will get a new piece of text that says [JOBSCHEDULER]AffinityMask=X. Take this line and paste into the very first line of your config. Tweak 2: Under the [MAIN] heading, paste "FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION=0.2" into it. Seeing as you have Orbx, keep it at this setting or higher, although 0.2 should work fine. Tweak 3: Under [GRAPHICS], paste HIGHMEMFIX=1. There are more tweaks available, but I don't want to bombard you. A quick google search will find you some reliable stuff. Just so you know, I get an average of 19.5fps, capped at 20, on the PMDG NGX, with an i5-4220u at 2.3Ghz, Intel 4400HD graphics and 8GB RAM. Also running 2 screens and multiple other programs, just in case you think this isn't something that doesn't help. Last tip, tweak for performance, not eye candy. Good luck

Judging by the fact you calibrated it via FSX I'd be right in assuming you don't use FSUIPC? Simple things to do: Turn it off and on again. Make sure the sensitivity and null zone sliders are at 0 (full left). Reinstall drivers/update drivers. If you've tried everything then I'd really recommend getting FSUIPC, it's honestly one of the best addons I've ever used.

Inasm, thank you very much. That has helped me a lot and I'm a lot more confident that I can do transatlantic flights now

Hello. I've been simming for near enough half my life now, but one thing I've never really been able to get to grips with it Trans-Atlantic flights. I don't know where to find tracks, how to request clearance for it (I fly on Vatsim near enough always), ETOPS planning, I know nothing about it, but I'd really love to do it. So, my request is, can someone write a short dummies guide on how to find the active tracks, how to put them in the FMC or MCDU, expected conversations with ATC, how to calculate ETOPS alternates, etc etc. Thanks in advance, Alexander.

UTC = Universal Time Coordination. GMT = Greenwich Mean Time These two are the same, the thing that upsets it is daylight saving. BST is UTC/GMT +1. All times in aviation are in UTC. Also known as Universal Coordinated Time and Zulu.

Right Click, Air Traffic, Choose an AI plane, done. If you want to do it while flying yourself, use [ or ] to open up another window and you can use this to watch it while you fly.

How much tweaking to your config? If you have and you've gone all out, that'll explain it. A great phrase I've seen around is "balance tweaking." Tweak for nice graphics and great performance. I'm running a laptop with an i5-4220u, Intel HD4400 Graphics and 8GB RAM, I can still get 15+ frames on the NGX in VC flying into addon airports. Take something like the Majestic Dash 8 and I'm getting about 30, although I lock it at 25, personal preference/good medium. If you've not tweaked before, there's guides available, I personally use Kostas' guide, google it. To test it, load up something like the NGX and get it established on the localiser for an addon airport and everything configured for a CAT3 landing. Then load up this flight and use something like fraps to benchmark it, keep doing that, adding tweak by tweak, messing with settings, and then hopefully you'll get it so that it's running at around 30fps stable on approach, it may not be as pretty, but it'll be a lot more fun to fly. Good luck, Alexander

ASN is great, although if Opus is set up well, it can be just as good. I also use Rex for textures. I've stuck with Opus for so long because of the Live Camera feature which, allow not as good as EzDok, saves me a lot of hassle as EzDok doesn't like working on my laptop. -Alexander

Provided it's a high end HDD, with good read speeds, it'll run fine. It's like my phone, it's rooted, and I have a Class 10 Sandisk SD card, I can run mobile games with no issue, but with older ones, even my music would skip. You seem to have a good setup, keep it if it works, just know that external storage isn't as reliable as internal, in most cases. -Alexander

I think I have figured out your issue. The max fuel a 737-800 can take is 20891Kgs, and this is around 46000lbs. Do you by any chance have the "Unlimited Fuel" option selected within FSX? If you do then it may have kept the weight at full fuel, giving you your 45000lbs ZFW, but a 91000lbs GW. -Alexander

I can only speak for the A2A C172, and I can confirm that it lives up to the reviews. My only quirk with it is the control surfaces. In FSUIPC I've had to add a slope to reduce the sensitivity of them as a slight touch with no null zone and no slope/sensitivity changes can cause very jerky flight, although it's an easy fix, and even if you don't have FSUIPC, I'd recommend getting it. I have heard of some issues with the Saitek Pro Flight Switch panel, some things aren't configurable with it in the A2A C172, and personally I think it's a bit of a waste of time. If you need to quickly change something, you can change views or zoom in and then click it easily, and because you'll have the yoke it'll be very easy to maintain your current attitude, and although you may tilt a bit or your angle of attack may change, it's really not that much of a sacrifice. Hope this helps, Alexander.