XP Difficulties - Slow performance w/ B7 vs earlier B6

[DuckFan]

I've been using FMS B6 for several months and have enjoyed it under Windows 98. I took my TX & PIC cable w/ B6 over to my cousin to install on his Windows XP and, of course, the controls didn't work. I found out that B7 will work on XP but I needed a different PIC cable. After installing the new PIC cable, the FMS controls work but the graphics are very slow. I looked at the FPS and it shows 4. I even installed the Alpha 7 version and even though the graphic settings offer a solution to smoothing the textures, the speed of FMS is too slow to want to continue. The speed of FMS was fine with B6 & B7 installed even though the PIC cable wasn't compatible and the controls didn't work. For example on the graphics, the tree in the foreground has a black background and the X-Y axis is clearly visible. Is it the new PIC cable that's causing the problem?

I'm using Futaba XAS6M in PPM mode, Windows XP and the computer is brand new, and I just bought my PIC cable from kjs1xx@nabbnet.com.

[sanjay]

As far as I can tell you are out of luck. FMS seems to have problems with certain graphics card/motherboard/OS combinations.

I have a similar problem running with an ATI graphics card under XP. On the same hardware it works fine under win98.

The Alpha graphics settings sometimes helps but did not help me.

It would be great if a future version of FMS solves some of these graphics issues since a number of users have reported the same.

[Michael_Moeller]

Yes there are some problems with graphics on some systems and I am looking for some new graphic routines ... but this may take still some time ... and may give some new problems as well ...

But the problems are not always a problem with the FMS. Sometimes the 3D acceleartion just doesn't work at all ( with all applications ), because of bad drivers for Win 2k and XP. I have an ATI Rage 128 that doesn't work well with 3D apps on Win 2k.

Check wether it is really just the FMS that doesn't work, or wether it is the whole 3D accel that is slow ...

Michael Moeller

[sanjay]

In my case I did run the Dxdiag tests and the 3d tests all ran ok.

I also downloaded the latest ATI drivers (ALL in wonder pro) for xp but that did not seem to make any difference.

I know ATI drivers are quite shaky.

Lets hope Michael does find some new graphics routines. I would be more than happy to test it.

Maybe a simple graphics test suite that allowed all possible graphics options to be tweaked could be provided and if many users test it you could get some useful information about what works and what doesnt.

[Michael_Moeller]

[sanjay]

[Pooky]

If you look round the web for custom developed drivers you will find that compared to some of the manufacturers XP drivers releases they are much more compatible with your hardware. I did this for my 3DFX card and got some good results, i also found that by tweaking the windows hardware acceleration for the graphics card and that trying some different compatibility modes i got suprising results. However i did find that if your frame rate stinks on XP compared to you original OS then just reinstall the OS and use XP's OS selection screen at the startup to boot your desired operating system. A bit long winded i know but i play most of my games by doing this and it saves hassle tweaking things. However i suppose this really defeats the purpose of developing FMS to suit multi platforms.

[HankF]

I'm using Beta 7 on Win2K and what it does is more like slow then fast then slow then fast, etc. It's rather erratic.