Bought a NVidia GTX 640 [I couldn't get any more muscle becuase the power supply in this PC only lets me have 500 Watts. 16 GB of Fast RAM. 320 GB SSD The SSD seems to write very fast, it might just be my wishful thinking. I am sure it will read very fast, SSDs are fast reading. The RAM is some sort of gamer's RAM sticks, the PC can handle the GHz too, yup. ANd the Video card seems to be okay, but I will know for sure how OK it is once the X-Plane has been installed, so I can give this New Modded Rig a decent try. [Yes, the SSD is write fast as hell, the X-Plane installer takes about 20 minutes to a half-hour to finish up with Disk number 1.... It took five just now. So, quad core 3.7 Ghz stuffed full of goodies, best I can afford and that will work in this PC. Pictures soon.
Right then, 22 gB of RM, a pretty good [for me] Video card. Lots of screen-space, good sound, good joystick. I make a RAM-drive and stick X-Plane into that drive and 'fly' the X-Plane from in there. I installed it in a SSD drive, which has nice read times [loading all the scenery on-the-fly] BUT, when done from a RAM-disk, oooh, frame rates are such that it is like looking at a movie when using my X-Plane. I turn the graphics to HIGH, except clouds, I hate em and they drag the graphics down to UNACCEPTABLE. When the graphics are set for 'Fast-As-Hell' I can attain between 150 and 200 FPS, yep. I think it gets displayed at 72/sec, because that is the refresh rate of the monitors. Still, when graphics set at 'NICE' I can easily get and stay over 20 FPS, which is all I need when sight-seeing. WHen I am doing tricky stuff, I change the graphics to FAST AS HELL. Maybe I will send a screen-cast, but recording does make this PC slow down like hell bastard.
I create and mount and format a 20 GB Ram drive. When starting the X-Plane, I give it high CPU priority, which is the command 'nice.' I set it to -19, which is almost real time cpu scheduling. I confine the X-Plane to using the #1 and #3 CPU cores. IF I had a true multprocessor PC, I would use a WHOLE processor, but I can't. If you don't know what I am talking about that is your loss. Don't be proud. This software is native 64 bit. It can handle multiple Virtual CPUS AND Multiple REAL CPUs. I think there is a big difference, but I don't have enough money to find out what the difference is, in this shop.
And too: This GNU+Linux caches stuff in 'unused' RAMspace. So, I could, I suppose, just use the preloading [cache] thingie and see if that makes a difference. EDIT: Oh hell, al the fancy shit I am doing seems to make little difference, just fune to learn. BECAUSE: X-Plane is already doing very well and why fix a thing that is not busted? With all seeting UP HIGH, except fr clouds [no clouds]... Uh. 40 to 50 FPS while in a 2d cockpit [3d cockpits are BIG load]
I dunno about the MSWindows world. In this box, I really don't need to fiddle with the shit I was writin about, above. Unused RAM in a Linux box IS used for disk caching and file buffers. Those are dumped when an application needs to take up some RAM space,where they then are dumped into a hard disk, into the place where buffers and cache files go to. What that means, is I don't have to do anything, Linux manages memory well. I have adjusted 'swappiness' and it is 1. Meaning swap to disk will only happen if the machine is in danger of an out of memory condition. COOL
