Gents, How do I strip off the livery to improve my frame rates? I want to get a bare skin model just like they do flight tests with - you know with the green coated alumninum? :-) Okay - i'll settle for anything close - can i get a model with no paint to see if my frame rates pick up?Other side of the coin - how much video CPU does drawing the skin/paint consume? I know something is going on because when I switch views with "S", I can see a lag sometimes in that the bare model is drawn, and then the skin is applied a second or two later.cheers,Josh

Delay of reading the skin is normal, it will appear on everyone's computer, sometimes faster, sometimes slower. It's simply due to textures being loaded from the disk I believe. But next time you switch to the spot, it should switch instanteniously.Btw. you can't strip the skin, but you can install the skin that was used in testing screenshots, it's in the downloads section on the pmdg website.Model with no paint is still a model with a texture. Texture has a same size always I believe, it doesn't matter if it's green, red, or blue color on the texture picture, doesn't make the texture-size different.You will see no difference in fps IMO.

Try turning off "aircraft casts shadows", "landing lights" and "virtual cockpit quality"If you want, turning all the scenery sliders right back helps too, as does setting visibility to one mile or less-try that one, it's good IFR practice!Another fixe is AI traffic to 5% or less.HTH

change the textures to DXT3 format that will lower the file sizes quite a bit.

Well, an aircraft without textures won't look nice like the real aircraft without textures.The aircraft and it' other parts will be the colour specified to each part by the modeller in gMax etc. which is commonly grey. And it usually looks very ugly, you don't want to fly a plane like that.Sometimes an aircraft model without textures may crash, I don't know if this happens with gMax and/or FSDS models but i've seen it happen.Though you could try using the model with no textures at all. And fly a plain textureless model.The loading of textures and their placement is one of the most demanding things about MS. A normal 2.4GHz and above CPU with atleast a decent AGP card should have the model rendered quite quickly yet the textures are what will cause the actual strain.Textures are swapped of the Hard Disk in the RAM. If you have less RAM this means it will need a good amount of virtual memory which is a small place on the HDD.Accessing textures directly off the HDD is very slow compared to accessing it from RAM. So in conclusion having higher amounts of RAM solves texture problems most of the time.The only real place where graphics cards come into play is adding more performance and most importantly the quality of everything which includes the rendering of models and textures.

Did you try buying it a drink?Best Wishes,[h4]Randy J. Smith[/h4]http://www.rawbw.com/~bdoolin/shinault/Animation1.gifCaution! Not a real pilot, but do play one on TV ;-)AMD 64 3200+ | NEC LCD 1980SXi 19" | ASUS KV8 DELUXE | GFORCE 5700 ULTRA @535/1000 | Maxtor 6Y080M0 SATA 80 GIG | 512 DDR 400 | Windows Xp Pro |

>> Did you try buying it a drink?:-lol

>>Model with no paint is still a model with a texture. Texture has >>same size always I believe, it doesn't matter if it's green, red, >>or blue color on the texture picture, doesn't make the texture-size >>different.Word Not Allowed,there is a setting in FS2004 that says "Texture Size" - small, medium, or Massive.i played around with all 3, but didn't see much of a difference*shrug* I will try loading the PMDG testing screen and see what this does,rgdsJosh

Randy,She drinks JET A-1, too pricey these days ;-)cheersJosh

Hey, Colour me stupid, but the easiest way I can see is to create a new texture folder with no textures in it and then simply create the necessary entries needed in the aircraft.cfgDone it before on other aircraft and it works fine in my experience.I don't know if it'll cause a crash like a poster above mentioned but there's only one way to find out :)David

don't know how it works on aircrafts... but in a scenery if you create an empty texture folder you are looking for trouble as it's a known memoery leak.Is it possible to switch every texture from standard BMP to DXT3 as somebody suggested? I'm not sure, I ask because of the problem I sometimes have finding the right format for textures while repainting.. :) Hope some of this helps and sorry for the added questions. Bye, Luca

I've found reducing the traffic makes a HUGE differnce to FPS. A little lonely flying into empty airports though.

Josh, If you want to fly the pre-painted aircraft there are textures in our download section with the Boeing treated aluminum skin. I think there are textures for the 800/900 but I don't remember if I did ones for the 600/700. Look for the PMDG Chromate livery (I think that's what we called it ;-))

Pete, Thanks - exactly what I was looking for! Will download and try it out. cheers, Josh

Pete, Thanks - exactly what I was looking for! Will download and try it out. cheers, Josh