Performance tweak advice needed

[nhill40]

So, I've had a great deal of success using this as a guide for FSX tweaks:

http://forum.avsim.net/fsx_guide.pdf

And by "success", I mean I have been able to lock in a very steady 30 FPS - in stock planes - which gives me a nice smooth experience.

However, I've just started in with A2A's Piper Cub (which is wonderful in terms of depth & detail BTW; please don't take any of this as a complaint about the product itself) and now experience mild stuttering using the exactly same settings.

What's odd is that, when flying a stock plane, the frame counter (using the in-game Shift+Z counter) is pretty much locked @ 30. As I pan my head around, it will occasionally do a split second dip to 29-point-something, but then jump right back to 30.

When flying the Cub, the framerate is always in the same neighborhood between 29.6 and 29.9, but it *never* actually hits 30. Working under the theory that the A2A models - given the sophistication of the flight model, the extra accu-sim stuff, the fine details of the cockpit, etc - are just a little bit more taxing than the stock models, I've spent some time trying to back off a few of the graphics settings thinking maybe I'm just really, really close to hitting that 30, but not quite...but - and this is where it starts to not make sense to me - no matter what tweaks I try, I am right there in that same range where I'm within < .5 FPS of hitting my target framerate.

Is there any clues anyone could offer up to help steer me in the right direction? e.g. any particular setting you would hone in on given my symptoms?

I've thought about lowering the target FPS (I'm not obsessed with hitting 30 for the sake of 30 by any means), but one of the breakthrough settings performance-wise for me was going into the nvidia control panel and setting VSync to 1/2 refresh rate...so I'm reluctant to mess with that magic 30, since my monitor runs @ 60.

Sorry for the ramble, but as you can tell, I'm a bit green yet with the ins & outs of tweaking!

[Scott - A2A]

Believe it or not, the J-3 is our "heaviest bird" in terms of performance requirements. Some of this comes from the detailed modeling required when things are so close in that cockpit, the engine, and also Heidi's a pretty smart girl

Scott.

[nhill40]

Believe it or not, the J-3 is our "heaviest bird" in terms of performance requirements. Some of this comes from the detailed modeling required when things are so close in that cockpit, the engine, and also Heidi's a pretty smart girl

Scott.

Yeah, that actually kinda makes sense when you think about it. When you think Cub, it's easy to just assume everything about it would be simple, but there's a lot going on in that little cockpit!

Thanks for the response. This airplane is a blast - you guys should be very proud of this product! I'm definitely going to follow up with a Spitfire and/or P-40 sometime later.