mutley 4,488 Posted February 1, 2014 Report Share Posted February 1, 2014 Just published is Brian Cowell's review of Steve Parson's DX10 Fixer.Read about how this much talked about utility performs and how to get the get the best from it... Read on Link to post Share on other sites
britfrog 180 Posted February 1, 2014 Report Share Posted February 1, 2014 well written Brian, however i am a long term convert to dx10, i have come across no negatives at all just a far better performance from FSX. Personally I have my fsx set at 30fps also in nvidia inspector, so obviously I dont see any increase in FPS after all you dont need more, however I have seen a huge reduction in my VAS , and I would go as far to say that dx10 when set up correctly is uncrashable, I have certainly never had an OOM or ctd in it and that is with ftx scenery the NGX and some heavy duty airport scenery. I think it reasonable to say if you spend a bit of time ironing out the odd bug that comes up, then you hardly ever look at dx9 again, there is no point Link to post Share on other sites
brett 2,286 Posted February 1, 2014 Report Share Posted February 1, 2014 Well done Brian, a review that can be used as a quick start guide to this program. Will I get it, probably not because I am far from being a techie. Would I want it, not sure. I have a lot of older stuff installed that I like to use, a shame that it would not be usable. I also think along the lines, that you mentioned, that if someone offers a product for money it should be an easy install for the average user. On the other side of the coin, users can finally use DX10. At first I was think that this would not be much use to me having a 15" laptop for simming but I am wondering if it would actually be better. Does less use of the CPU mean that my laptop would run cooler or does the video card also produce heat? If it would help me then even though I'm not a techie, I am lucky enough to have this detailed review to help me along. Another question I have is, does thinking that 33 dollars is a lot of money make me have old timer's disease or am I just lower, lower, lower, middle class. Link to post Share on other sites
britfrog 180 Posted February 2, 2014 Report Share Posted February 2, 2014 Brett i am the first to think this is overpriced, but it is difficult to know how much time he has had to put into it to repair dx10, however it does make it better and acceptable and he is still working on things. as far as helping your lap top (i am still amazed u guys use a laptop as my I5 powered one wont look at fsx ) it must help the issue by reducing the load on the cpu and spreading it over onto the gpu , this will enable the cpu to run cooler but the gpu will run hotter. I have one of his earlier free updates that does make some important changes which I could wing over if you want to try it. in fact this alone made dx10 useable for me. Link to post Share on other sites
Bruce (a.k.a. brian747) 142 Posted February 2, 2014 Report Share Posted February 2, 2014 Overpriced? <*cough*> Er, forgive me, guys, but I can only assume that you can have no concept of how many hours it must have taken Steve to get these results. Speaking as someone who started programming in the days of paper tape and punched cards, I can only have enormous respect for what he has accomplished. But each to their own. Cheers, B. Link to post Share on other sites
britfrog 180 Posted February 3, 2014 Report Share Posted February 3, 2014 Brian, I also go back to programming on cards I with cobol and fortran till I found an easier way to earn money, and not putting aside the work that steve has done making the small fixes to dx10 it still has to be born in mind that he is fixing a very small part of FSX , which is only used by maybe 5% of fsx users, and he is charging close to 50% of the retail cost of FSX, That is why I consider it expensive,. we can also buy very good aircraft that have taken several years to create by a fairly large team for a similar sum as well, Judging by the response on other sim sites, he would have sold a load more if it had been more reasonable, especially as the fixes he has made are mostly unseen or require a close look to see the difference. but ya pays ya money and ya takes your choice Link to post Share on other sites
brett 2,286 Posted February 3, 2014 Report Share Posted February 3, 2014 Overpriced? <*cough*> Er, forgive me, guys, but I can only assume that you can have no concept of how many hours it must have taken Steve to get these results. Speaking as someone who started programming in the days of paper tape and punched cards, I can only have enormous respect for what he has accomplished. But each to their own. Cheers, B. I didn't mean to offend anyone by my statement. Did he do a lot of work on this, yes, does he deserve to get compensation for it, yes, are folks are willing to pay that, then that's fine with me, it's capitalism at it's best. I'm saying that as a retired person on a very limited income, thirty+ bucks is a lot of money to me. Especially for something that involves much work to install and get working. Link to post Share on other sites
Bruce (a.k.a. brian747) 142 Posted February 3, 2014 Report Share Posted February 3, 2014 <grin> As a retired person on a very limited income myself I wasn't debating the money, simply my own perception of the worth of the product, which I feel is certainly worth (say) a third of the price of the PMDG 777. Each to their own, and all that jazz. Cheers, B. Link to post Share on other sites
RickSinGA 0 Posted February 5, 2014 Report Share Posted February 5, 2014 Great review IMHO. I will never go back to DX9 and the $30 odd dollars was a steal. I would pay double plus, maybe more, to keep it if I was threatened to lose it!! You have to use it to know what a game changer it really is. This from another retired, fixed income, person with a bad case of O.L.D.. Rick S. Link to post Share on other sites
brett 2,286 Posted February 5, 2014 Report Share Posted February 5, 2014 Great review IMHO. I will never go back to DX9 and the $30 odd dollars was a steal. I would pay double plus, maybe more, to keep it if I was threatened to lose it!! You have to use it to know what a game changer it really is. This from another retired, fixed income, person with a bad case of O.L.D.. Rick S. Well that sounds like a pretty good recommendation to me. Link to post Share on other sites
Christopher Low 63 Posted February 7, 2014 Report Share Posted February 7, 2014 and I would go as far to say that dx10 when set up correctly is uncrashable That's a bit of a daft comment, Brit. If you try to run too many detailed addons, you will get an OOM. DX10 mode does not give any "magical" protection for this. It just gives you a bit more time and space. As for the DX10 Fixer itself, I have mixed opinions about it. Whilst it is very true that it reduces the risk of OOMs, I did not see any visual improvements when running FSX in DX10 mode. In fact, FSX looks better on my PC when running in DX9 mode. That's because DX10 mode doesn't seem to be able to handle the level of AA and AF that I run at (8xS, 16xAF, and 2xSGSS). The scenery in the distance "shimmers" more than it does in DX9 mode because of this. There are also "white flashes" in the distance on a frequent basis, and the water looks worse. Some people claim that the water looks better in DX10 mode, but that is not the case on my PC. The water textures and wave animations in DX9 mode when using REX look far superior to the bland "flat" looking textures that I see in DX10 mode. In addition, if I activated the REX wave animations, parts of the water turned purple in colour! I tried running the water textures in default mode, but it never worked for me. AI plane strobe and navigation lights never worked when I was in DX10 mode, so that was another negative. I have no idea if this has been addressed in the latest version, but the other problems associated with DX10 mode make this an irrelevance to me. In short, I returned to DX9 mode several months ago, and I have no intention of returning to the DX10 experience in FSX. To be honest, I really wish that I could be confident that I could install and run my most important addons in P3D (without having to keep FSX installed at the same time, or using migration tools), because if I knew that for certain, I would "jump ship" in a heartbeat. Link to post Share on other sites
Bruce (a.k.a. brian747) 142 Posted February 8, 2014 Report Share Posted February 8, 2014 "Whilst it is very true that it reduces the risk of OOMs..." Strange — you have had an OOM error whilst using The Fixer?! Like BritFrog, I never have, in spite of combining high-end aircraft (PMDG NGX/777) with complex airports and long flights. Are you sure that you're using the latest version of The Fixer? It's just that I understand that some of your comments have been addressed by Steve in recent months, so if you "...returned to DX9 mode several months ago..." then you won't have seen the benefit. Unless, perhaps, you're referring to Steve's earlier giveaway patches, which were a partial solution now superseded by The Fixer? Cheers, B. Link to post Share on other sites
Christopher Low 63 Posted February 8, 2014 Report Share Posted February 8, 2014 I recently installed the latest version of the DX10 Fixer, but the water texture problems were still evident, and the graphics just did not look as nice as they do in DX9 mode. That was enough to switch back again. To be honest, I am also suspicious that installing the Fixer caused other problems after I returned to DX9 mode. I can't prove that, but it makes me somewhat hesitant to try it again. I am actually in the process of reinstalling FSX and all of my addons, so I will see if those "other problems" have disappeared. EDIT: On a side note.....installing GenX Volume 7 Scotland Central is an appallingly slow process. The setup routine doesn't work properly when trying to run it directly from the DVDs, so I am having to copy the contents of each DVD to a temporary folder on the hard disk. Each DVD copy (there are five of them) is taking roughly 50 minutes to complete! Why the hell PlaySims decided to change the install routine for this volume is beyond my ability to understand Link to post Share on other sites
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