On Thursday 07 September 2006 02:05, AJ MacLeod wrote: > On Thursday 07 September 2006 02:23, Donn Washburn wrote: > > Which video card for a AGP x8 system would improve flightgears ability > > to be a larger image. I current have a NVidia FX 5200 with 128 meg of > > DDR video memory. I also am running NVidia's file.run file > > The FX5200 should give you quite useable framerates even at 1280x1024. I > know because it's what I'm using, on an Athlon1900+ with some AA set too > which slows things down a little bit. > > It sounds (maybe wrongly!) like you're getting fgfs starting up in a > small-ish window, 800x600 or something? If you'd like it to start up at > full screen size, use "fgfs --geometry=1280x1024" or whatever your full > screen resolution is. Starting fgfs and _then_ maximizing the window is > likely to result in glacial framerates; just start it at the desired size > and it should be fine. > > As another thought - do you have any anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering > set? They can have a heavy impact on fps too. > > Apologies if I've misunderstood the question - as others have suggested, > buying a newer, faster nvidia card will certainly improve performance > considerably but it may be that this isn't necessary for you quite yet. > > Cheers, > > AJ
Just to make things clearer. Fairly modest Nvidia cards can give OK performance even at very high resolutions but the CPU and memory are also factors. I have a system with an amd64 4800+ CPU and 2 gig of RAM. So for me the CPU and RAM are not issues on my system. I started running FlightGear when 0.9.9 was the current release. At the time I had a 6200 class card in the machine. Running in game mode on a 1600x1200 display this card was too slow and at times would drop to below 10 frames/sec and with enhanced runway lighting turned on to as low as 3 frames/sec. I upgraded to a LE6600 card with 256meg of VRAM and my frame rates about tripled. So with enhanced runway lighting turned off I was seeing about 40 to 50 (some times as low as 30) frames/sec most of the time at 1600x1200 running FG 0.9.9. After upgrading to FG 0.9.10 the problems with enhanced runway lighting went away and I was seeing 35 to 45 FPS with this feature turned on. Since that time I did some software upgrades to my machine (X.Org 7 and the Nvidia drivers) and I am now running FG across both of my displays in game mode which gives me a 3200x1200 display. I am seeing frame rates in the 15 to 30 FPS range (mostly 20 to 25) which is just good enough to be very usable. The fact that a machine with an LE6600 (not a high end card at all) can handle this much display resolution speaks volumes. I would imagine that with a high end card that this same basic setup would be able to produce much higher frame rates which might make things slightly better. I would suspect that a FX5200 should work OK in a single display setup even as high as 1600x1200 as long as the CPU is up to the job and there is enough memory to avoid paging. If you are seeing really low frame rates then you need to do some diagnostics to isolate the problem. Perhaps your nvidia driver and/or X.Org needs updating? Others have already written about memory and CPU possibly being issues. There may be other things that need to be looked into as well. Once you understand what the actual problem is then you can correct it with out spending you money on things that do not help. If you do conclude that a video card upgrade is what is needed then almost any current nvidia card other than the 6200 series should give you acceptable performance. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Flightgear-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-users
