Plan-G and FS-performance

[Kurt2404]

Good afternoon Tim,

this thread does not contain the usual questions but a short report about Plan-G and the perfomance of FSX in online-flying-sessions just as information for you and as a base of possibly future improvements regarding the consumption of resources:

System and test setup:

As main system resp. main PC I'm using FSX + Acc-Pack on an overclocked and watercooled i5 system (@ 3,57 GHz), based on a MSI-mainboard P55-GD80 with 4 GB DDR3-SDRAM. My graphics adapter is an ATI 4850 with 500 MHz GPU-clock and 512 MB @ 1,1 GHz memory clock. The OS is Windows 7/64 bit. The frames in my FSX are locked to max. 33 fps. If not other stated FSX was used in full screen mode. The used sceneries were based on Austrian Professional X. The emergency center software and the emergency data transmission software are two small programs to send and receive things like target adress, hospital adress, mission status and so on. The performance demands of these two programs are proved to be not relevant.

As secondary system I'm using a Medion-Laptop with a P6000 CPU @ 1,9 GHz and 4 GB DDR3-SDRAM. The OS is Windows 7/32 bit.

The tests were made on identical flights from and to LOAN/LOAW with a Nemeth Designs EC 135 in rescue helicopter layout. All frame rates were measured while using the virtual cockpit view on the right hand seat.  The weather was taken over either from the Hovercontrol-Server (for the online flights; conditions were scattered clouds and visibility ~ 17 km) or from Active Sky Evolution (for the offline flights; conditions were scattered clouds and visibility ~ 10 miles). The crusing altitude was about 1500 ft.

Test 1 - Offline flight with FSX +  ASE:
Framerates between 30 and 33.

Test 2 - Online flight with FSX + FSUIPC + Wide-FS + FSInn/FS-Copilot + emergency operation center software + Teamspeak TS RC2 running on my main PC while connected to the laptop with Wide FS + Plan-G + emergency data transmission system running:
Framerates between 29 and 33. Almost the same values as in test 1.

Test 3 - Online flight with FSX + FSUIPC + Plan-G + FSInn/FS-Copilot + emergency operation center software + emergency data transmission system + Teamspeak TS RC2 running on my main PC:
Framerates between 15 and 30. Losses up to appr. 50% are possible - could cause dia shows on weaker systems!


Summary and conclusion:
Plan-G appears to have a relevant influence on the system load and can eventually cause problems on weaker systems while flying over more sophisticated sceneries.  Tweaking the FSX.cfg could at least partly compensate the experienced frame rate losses. Anyway my today's recommendation is to use Plan-G on a external networked PC or laptop with a at least average system perfomance.

I hope this data will probably help a little bit to think over some tweaks to reduce the consumption of resources by this wonderful Plan-G!