Hi PMDG TeamI love and spend so much time with this add-on it is causing my family to go "nuts" :-) Thanks for a great effort.I fly the 737-800 in 2D panel mode. Last night I took a short hop in the VC to just compare things. One thing I noticed is that the VC side views appear almost as soon as touched the keyboard. In the 2D panel, the side views take much longer to load and there is a lot of HD activity.Two questions, why are the load times different and have you guys ever thought about using the VC side views with the 2D panel? I noticed that Eaglesoft did this very thing with their Citation X.Thanks Again for a really great plane, and looking forward to the update.CheersBob JohnsonKDEN

Welcome to the "driving the family nuts" club - all been there, all still there, and no clear solution in sight either...As far as loading times, here's the deal: FS9 caches textures, and for speed, releases those it doesn't use, especially large ones. Textures are used for scenery, the VC, and of course, your plane's skin when in spot view for example. Any 3D view loads textures. With scenery moving forward, it's less obstrusive than when constantly looking around, causing a lot of texture swaps to take place.When you switch to the VC from 2D, you typically have the simulator load the textures in memory. Then you go from VC to 2D, the textures are released to make room for other textures.Unfortunately, the default behavior of the rendering engine in FS is that if you are in 2D, and switch to a view that does not have a 2D view associated with in the panel.cfg, but has a VC view available, it switches to the VC view and loads the entire texture set for the VC (this is the same delay you'd have going from a forward view 2D to a forward view 3D). The VC is much worse than regular scenery because first it is rentered in high quality (since you see it up close), and second, it has a bunch of buttons and gauges to load on top of that. This happens even if you look left, and have no gauges/cockpit geometry to render aside from say the window.I've always found th caching in FS9 to be rather mediocre in terms of predicting what textures need to be loaded next. I believe you can help the issue by not loading the VC model at all, and selecting the 2D panel only options for each of the NGs.You may still experience a delay if a change in the view direction causes the scenery textures to load.You can optimize the texture memory and the bandwith used by FS9 if you look in the pinned tips section of the FS General forum. It includes some tweaks you can do to speed things up, but it is highly dependent on the amount of memory you have (both system and video) and how fast your graphics bus happens to be. The defaults are horrible for most current hardware.Hope this helps,

Etienne,Thanks for that input. I was aware of the texture loads and cache situations. As you suggest, I do only use the 2D versions of the NG. What I did last night was to load up a VC version just to see how it would fly on my system.What caught my eye however as I said in my initial post is that when I look from side to side in the VC all the textures must have been loaded since there was no disk activity.I will look at the tips section now.Thanks Again, BTW, do you live in Denver? I live in Westminster near Jeffco Airport.Bob