Just Upgraded to MSI lightning xtreme
 

Hey guys I just upgraded to the MSI Lightning Xtreme 580 3gb and I can tell the game is much smoother from my gtx 260 and thats with the graphics turned all the way up. Before with my 260 I had everything on medium and a couple of things on low.

However, with everything maxxed except for the AA I get around 25 fps over London and 60 over the countryside.

I am very happy with that performance except that the stuttering is almost worse that when I had the 260. The game doesn't stutter at all unless I am at a very low altitude.... Like a couple of hundred feet.

Have other people seen this as well? I noticed people complained about a FPS drop since the beta patch. Has anyone with a similar build experienced the same thing?

I know the game still needs to be optimized more and so far I absolutely love my new card. It runs everything else at max except for this game.

Congrats on the new card. :)

Stuttering is stuttering and, from everything I read on this forum, is not really related to fps. Your system is another example of someone having a much better system than me, yet there is stuttering.

It seemed to me from reading through the forum that textureloading is a much contributing factor to the stuttering problem.

Maybe someone else has a more expert explanation.

You may also be interested in a thread in the perfromance subforum titled "a nice article on gpu testing", it is long, it won't give you a solution but it is a really, really great read if you want to get some insight beyond fps.

I have lower fps, yet the game runs smoothly, no stuttering at all (knock on wood, don't want to jinx it ;)), over London I am in the 30s with settings high to medium.

So if texture loading is a culprit maybe, just to try it out, lower the textures from original to high. I would like to know if that does anything for you.
You may also want to use the search function and search for "ram drive", Ataros has made a post on how to reduce stuttering, maybe that will help.

Hey thanks for the comment... Quick question. What exactly are your settings (if you don't mind)? Also what driver are you using?

Sorry for the late response, shopping for a new psu since mine is a piece of....not so good one, was a budget decision at the time.

Driver 270.xx whql, so far my favorite, the ones after that imo gave me less performance, still have to try the new beta driver though.

Settings:
1600x900 60hz (native monitor res is 1920x1080, I do not get any better fps if I lower the resolution more)
full screen
1xAA (looks better than 2xAA and up currently)
ssao on (cannot notice any fps increase without it)
anti epilepsy filter off
model detail high
building detail medium
land detail medium
forests medium
visual effects medium
texture quality original
damage decals medium
building amount medium
land shading medium
grass, shadows, roads on

vsync off in game, force on in nvidia cp (launcher.exe)
in nvidia cp
default quality settings exept:
prefer maximum performance
AA enhance application
prerendered frames 8

I am very sure that land detail and forests determine draw distance, maybe building detail as well.
One of the moderators, Blackdog, set things with a different approach, i.e. setting one parameter of the same things low so he can raise the other.
For example land detail low, land shading high.

It took me a while to get settled with these settings, been trying and testing more than actually playing. The biggest performance hit comes definitely from clouds ( clouds and grahics are still not the final version so with patches improvements can be expected ).
The thing is clouds are a realism option since they actually influence your aircraft when you fly through them (aircraft performance decrease, at least for me, the gauges go nuts unless you turn on the pitot heater if your aircraft has one and of course much lowered visibility), so I really want to have them on even though they cut my fps in half...ish.

Try turning clouds off and see if maybe that helps with the stutters.

If you searched for "ram drive ataros" and you came across the suggested procedure then you may have noticed that it looks like a pain to implement it, I luckyly didn't have to do it, but it still might be worth the effort. I went through something similar with another game and the solution involved installing a second HDD and then making a symbolic link for files to be written onto that HDD......and it worked like a charm.

Let me know if things go better for you in flight, good luck :grin: