Lately there has been a lot of talk about how Windows 7 will run faster than Vista, and how this should be great for gamers (apparently it runs a little faster than XP did). With FSX however, often the standard ‘gamer tweaks’ do not actually affect performance, because it has a fairly odd architecture compared to most games – so I was wondering if Win7 would actually mean anything for FSX performance. I installed Win7 (RTM) on my desktop PC to give it a try.
I started by setting all the FSX sliders to the same I had under Vista (DX10, most things in the ‘very high’ range). There did not seem to be much difference – in fact it seemed to run a little slower if anything. I thought, well that was a bummer. For some reason I thought let’s try it on DX9 mode – and wow, what a huge difference that made. While with Vista FSX ran considerably faster under DX10 than DX9 (with a few caveats), with Win7 it seems to run faster than DX10/Vista when in DX9 mode! Even with the water reflection factor set to 2.High (reflections of the terrain mesh on the water), there seems to be only a small impact on frame rates.
Flying around Seattle used to give me around 10/11 FPS, but now I can stay around 18 with very good visuals.
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Click for full size
Even Madrid (which previously game me single figure FPS), I can now get around 14 FPS while it still looks pretty nice.
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The ultimate frame rate killer, Tokyo, even hits about 9 FPS now, which is slow, but definitely flyable.
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Click for full size
Also, textures seem to load faster in general – for instance, texture loading delay when switching between outside view/VC and vice-versa is minimal now.
I did make a couple of sacrifices to the visuals though – Here are the settings I am using:
And then the next big question – what about the tools? FSDS v3.5.1 runs completely fine; no graphical glitches, slightly faster updates than Vista. And of course, the FSDSxTweak suite of tools runs perfectly! (mostly that is the .NET framework’s victory, but I take credit for choosing to use it 
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[...] Getting the most of FSX in DX10 mode UPDATE (9/20/09): If you are running FSX under Win7, read this: Running FSX under Windows 7 [...]
Dave,
I am not vert technically oriented to FSX or the computer, so if you respond, please speak “low tech”.
I am running FSX, Deluxe Edition, on Windows 7 Ultimate through Boot Camp on a Mac Pro, dual quad, Xeon at 3.0 Mhz with 10 G of RAM. The card is an NVIDEA Quadro FX 4800 with 1.5 G of RAM, and the 64-bit drivers are installed. I seem to have plenty of processing power and am achieving frame rates of 47-70 FPS when set to unlimited. I have all settings on high to very high with the resolution set to 2560 x 1600. The game runs smoothly until I try to change airports or go from day to night or vice versa (anything that causes scenery to be reconfigured within the simulation). When the changed scenery begins to reload, it gets to 15% or up to 40%, and the machine locks up and I have to restart FSX.
Any suggestions?
Thanks and best regards,
Paul
I wonder if it is related to BootCamp? I am not too sure how it works, but it sounds like you are having issues with when the UI displays. Are you getting the crash with when the menus com up, or do you hactually have to open up another window in flight for it to crash?
That sucks because you are getting awesome performance. Can you at least work around it by ending the flight and then setting up a new flight with the main menus?