Stutters vs. Smooth display using AS 4.5

[Guest cvj4]

I am a long time user of ActiveSky. After tweaking my setup (Pentium 4 3.0, 1Gig DDR RAM, FS9 running on a fast RAID0 set of hard drives, Radeon 9700 Pro w/ 128 Mb) I have FINALLY obtained a smooth running video at 25-29 fps (locked at 30fps) with most settings at a reasonable high level.However, in the course of trying different combinations, I discovered that whenever ActiveSky 4.5 was running in an area with a lot of clouds - the fps would not only drop to about 16 - 20fps, but even worse, begin to stutter. The only way I can get an improvement is to decrease the "weather" settings to about 30% with the 3D settings.I am running AS4.5 on a secondary PC together with Squawkbox, FSInn, ServInfo and other ancillary programs, so I don't think that ActiveSky is depriving the CPU running FS9 on the primary PC of any resources....Since (IMHO) stutters ruins the flight sim experience, I am resigned to run ActiveSky at at the above low level settings...but perhaps there is another tweak out there that will enable me to overcome this bottleneck.Any ideas/suggestions would be most welcome...

[Damian Clark 1,044]

Hi Claus!Yes there are other means to increase performance. Remember this is not really related to AS2004.5, but rather FS and the overhead involved in depicting clouds. In AS we allow quite a wide range of settings here to get what you desire within the means of your system.These suggestions are listed in the order of maximum effect on frames:- Decrease sight distance and cloud draw distance in FS. This has the biggest effect on frames as far as clouds are concerned- Reduce max cloud layers. There are thousands of variations of how AS might render the clouds given certain conditions. Sometimes low-frame-penalty clouds (such as low coverage stratus and cirrus) sometimes high-penalty clouds (cumulus, tstorm). There is no real way to control the overall penalty except by limited the max cloud layers drawn. Try max of 2 or 3 to start, then increase until you find your limit of penalty.- Turn off overcast enhancement. This doubles-up overcast layers, with a preference for cumulus draws. These can hit frames pretty hard.- Do not extend TSTORM layers. TSTORM layers are huge and have many polys and can really eat frames as well. Don't extend them and you'll get better performance (in such conditions).Please try this and let us know how you make out. I'm sure you'll be able to find some settings that work good for you, and when you do please share them for others to see! Thanks Claus!

[Guest jumpjet]

Changing over to FS Sky World cloud textures may help here as well.http://fsw.simflight.com/fsw2004.htmlGraham

[Guest cvj4]

Hi Damian,Thank you for your prompt and very helpful reply.The following settings gave a decent result on my setup:(FS9)Sight Distance: 80Cloud Draw distance: 403-D Cloud Percentage: 50 (Seems the most critical of all settings)Cloud Coverage Density: Medium(AS2004.5)Limit Cloud Layer: 4Overcast Enhancement: OFFWith that and my other tweaks I now enjoy non-stuttering frames and nice clouds. :DAgain Thanks!

[Guest cvj4]

Graham,I already use FS SkyWorld - but have not played around with the various settings yet....