04: Higher frames and better looks

*Click images for larger versions

By installing the texture pack I referred to in chapter two I was able to get the sim up to mid twenties on the frames in the 757. In the air however frames went up to 50 as autogen had less impact on the system. Flying with normal framerate is nice and I tried several settings to see if I was able to get some decent clouds. On my "home" sim I use Prepar3D v3 with REX soft clouds and as I have an official license to use the software I installed it in FSX as well. Even on the ground I was rewarded a few additional frames per second (sidenote: 512 x 512 low resolution textures installed). My frames nearly reached the thirty mark from a few hundred feet above ground to fifty at cruise level.

At UK2000's Luton and Aerosoft Dusseldorf I was getting mid twenties which I accept as it looked smooth enough and well... Let's be honest, it is a tablet after all. 

Now that I had decent frames on the ground it was time to try make the simulator look appealing to the eye. 

First in line was FTX Global which is replacing the default ground textures in the simulator for much better looking ones. I'm not sure if I gained better performance from the sim or not, but I do know for sure that it had absolutely no impact on the frames in a negative way. 

FTX Global does make the simulator look much more realistic and at no frame hit there is absolutely nothing to lose. Second I installed REX textures direct and again I went for the lowest resolution possible however I omitted the cloud textures as these were imported via soft clouds.  The picture at the start of this chapter is from 10.000 feet above Holland using FTX Global, REX soft clouds and Texture Direct. I deliberately left the framecounter active which was locked at 30 when I took the screenshot.

I also installed the QualityWings 146 pack but the flightdeck didn't look great on a sim where only anisotropic filtering is used as anti aliasing is causing to much impact on the frames. Furthermore I think that the 2D panels of QW aircraft leave much to be desires compared to the PMDG 737 or the recently released Dash 8 Pro by Majestic. 

Lately I installed FTX Open landclass EU just to see the effect on the sim and it's performance. Again the folks at fullterrain did a good job in making sure their software did not slow down the simulator while improving the terrain graphics even more. 

Below is a picture with OpenLC Europe enabled when we fly at 5.000 feet Southeast of Amsterdam near Hilversum. 

You might have noticed there is no autogen present. Even with FTX Trees I experienced lower frames and blurry ground textures as the system had to shift to much resources in drawing autogen. However with FTX Global and OpenLC enabled I think the sim looks good enough already and I am prepared to sacrifice some trees and houses for crisper scenery and higher frames. 

Below are the in sim settings:

I have not tried to activate any traffi yet but as I start using this system more often it will be nice so see how the system copes with some IVAO traffic added. In the next chapter we see if the Dash 8 from Majestic and the PMDG 737 NGX are viable options on a low spec system.... 

03: Flight gear on the go

Sure you can fly using a keyboard, but it is a frustrating experience when you're used to a full flight yoke system with throttles and rudder pedals. Now the 757 did rather well on the system I was  prepared to spend €25 on a controller and bought the Speedlink XEOX Pro (right one on the photo). This is an exact copy of the Xbox 360 controller so it also has a lot of buttons that you can assign a function in the simulator. 

It works well and flying became enjoyable on this system. When I had to stay the night in a hotel in Brussels for my work I killed some hours before sleep flying the 757 with this controller. I even flew some IVAO flights and landings were smooth. It was however a bummer that windows did only detect one of the two joypads  on the controller. A solution to that is installing Xpaddr, a freeware yet verry effective program that does detect all your buttons and joypads on a controller and let's you assign functions to them. The right joypad was assigned as a  mouse with two other buttons function as left and right mouse buttons. This allowed me to change settings on the MCP and interact with other flight systems. Throttle/reverse thrust as well as flaps were assigned on the ABXY buttons and the left thumb joypad as a joystick to have control over the aircraft at all time. Another great feature of a controller is that you can assign a rudder axis so you'r able to keep the aircraft on the runway during takeoff and landing, or to taxi to and from the gate. 

However the Speedling Xeox is a great and inexpansive device that works well, I wouldn't recommend it for the simple fact that you're unable to upgrade the controller with a chatpad. There are however third party xbox 360 controllers that can be upgraded with a chatpad but these come from China and their quality is something one might have second thoughts about. please also note that Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 do not recognise the chatpad and that a unassigned third party driver is needed. This driver is know to give all kind of issues and on windows 8 and 8.1 your only able to use it if you start windows in a mode that allows you to use unassigned drivers. After a system reboot your settings will be lost and you have to start over. 

A more expansive but "less hassle" solution is to go the official Microsoft way and get an official Xbox One controller (for windows) and the chatpad. Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 do not detect this chatpad,  however Windows 10 does without the need for installing a driver. I have a wireless Xbox One controller with the chatpad  (left one on the photo) and it works so well that the keyboard is not used anymore during simming. Why press a "G" key on the keyboard while you have the gear lever control on your controller? (and other keyboard assignements you use during a flight).

Another benefit for not having to use a keyboard is that it is easier to connect your Surface Pro to a TV with HDMI cable. All you need is a Mini Display port to HDMI adapter and a cable to hook it up to your telly. These adapters can be obtained from any electronics store or for under $2 from China including chipping. 

Using the telly reduces the resolution of your sim, and your CPU will thank you for that and will reward you with some additional frames per second. Told you we were not there yet.... 

02 Performance tweaking

Fourteen to twenty frames per second is far from perfect and however I was pleased that the CPU was capable to run FSX it is far from "playable" let alone trying to land an airplane. 

Drastic changes to the program had to be made to get it to a usable level, where my personal bottom line is 25 frames per second. As FSX is a rather old program there is a ton of information on how to get it to perform much better. Changing the config file for instance is where one usually starts. But as this is the Steam Edition this is already done out of the box and apart from the affinity mask tweak there is little to be gained here. Actually I never experienced any additional performance from this tweak so I didn't put it in my config file. As performance had to come from elsewhere I searched on google for other ways to improve the frame rate while omitting the config file. 

It turned out there was/still is a rather large file library that will replace most of your game textures into a much smaller format while keeping a good quality. I downloaded the files from

http://www.mileswebsolutions.com/FSXTextureConversion/ and it worked wonders. In the Dash 8 pilot edition I gained around 10 frames per second. Still 16 to 22 frames are far from ideal but in the QualityWings 757 I was getting the high twenties in the 3D flight deck and did a flight from Dusseldorf to London Luton. Frames never dropped below 22 and it proved I was on the right bearing. 

Would I be able to get even more from the system and take a spin in the PMDG 737 around Amsterdam or Copenhagen?

01: Introduction

On behalf of the captain and the crew we would like to welcome you on board this flight through Microsoft's flight simulator while not at home.

Running FSX on a laptop or Tablet PC requires some out of the box thinking, accepting that not everything will work like it does on your big and heavy desktop PC at home and it requires some time to get most out of your system. 

I am running FSX steam edition on my Microsoft Surface Pro 3 with 2Ghz i5 CPU, 8GB ram and 256GB SSD. The graphics are on board the CPU. Far from ideal one would say to run a flight simulator. Yet I managed to achieved very satisfying results with frame rates in the thirties while not having all the sliders in the sim to their bare minimum. In this series I will show you what I did to get FSX running on a low spec system that you can take with you everywhere you go. 

Everyone with a decent flight simulator like Lockheed Martins Prepar3D knows that a lot of the performance comes from the CPU. Many of us have taken the time to push their systems to it's limit by investing a lot of time in stable over-clocks. Great performance with beautyfull eye candy where you see reflections of the lightbeams of the position lights flickering on the main instrument panel or masses of autogen trees near your aircraft ore volumetric clouds are just a few of todays features. 

 Less then a year ago I swapped my Macbook air for the Microsoft Surface Pro 3. The reason behind that decision was based on the much more clearer display and the ability to have a laptop that could also be used as a tablet, while still benenfitting from a full OS. In the same time FSX was released on Steam and I bought a license for five euro just to have a backup of my boxed version. Little later I switched however to Prepar3d 2.5 and FSX was dead to me.

 The timetable changed in the railways and I had a shift with a long four hour wait between trains so I brought my Surface Pro 3 with me for some entertainment. As the station canteen has a strong wifi signal I was surfing the internet when I spotted an add of steam and thought "wait a minute". I did a speed test on the network and the 10GB file was downloaded in less then 20 minutes. Secondly I downloaded the QualityWings 757 as it is a rather easy jet to fly for performance testing. I was able to get 14 frames a second from this 2Ghz CPU with on-board graphics. I immediately opened fsx.cfg but was surprised to find that all known basic tweaks were already implemented. The performance had to be obtained from lowering the settings in the sim itself. I moved all the sliders to their most minimum position and tried again. This time my frames went in the low 20's but the sim looked like a bread knife and was horrible to look at. I did a few test flights that evening and came to the conclusion that the Majestic Dash 8 with a high detail 3D flightdeck was a long shot and too intense for the Surface Pro 3 let alone the PMDG 737.

 However the QW 757 in 3D cockpit did rather well, only being it just 14 to 20 frames a second. The following day the big FSX "under the hood" tweaking changed everything I expected from the sim on this TABLET PC in a positive way.