With some third party aircraft (generally ones with complex models and really nice textures) when I switch from cockpit view to external view, the aircraft doesn't show any textures for 3 seconds, it's just white. Then the textures pop in. Any way to make the aircraft skin textures load faster or stay persistent in memory? Video card is a 9800 Pro, 128 MB, is that not enough video memory to contain the terrain textures, cockpits, and aircraft exterior without having to swap or reload textures?I don't have this problem with the default FS9 aircraft, which tend to have less complex models and less detailed textures.

Well, one never knows for sure but I had gotten used to the default Baron and Cessnas doing that...But I haven't seen it since a did a serious defrg on both sims. Serious, as in using the O&O and/or Ultimate defrag. Smoother, faster, and even XP loads significantly faster. It may even make a noticeable difference just using the Windows defragger. What's to lose?Loyd

you are correct: the video card is dumping out old textures while trying to load the new ones. Thus everything is grey for a few seconds. FS9 is a texture hungry game. I've seen paywhere planes that use up to 80 megs of textures, and airports that can easily be around 200 megs. Now add textures for clouds, terrain, AI, etc; even a 256 meg card will get filled quick. 128 is not enough for fs9. But you can help reduce some load on the card. Convert textures to DXT3, AI textures to DXT1. Reduce auto-gen textures, clouds, etc down. And try to avoid switching views. It also comes down to the developer. Some models don't do a very good job of calling its textures (espeically when it comes to VCs). This usually has nothing to do with texture size....just priority of code and loading (for example, loading the guages before the VC textures, thus causing a delay). A fast GPU with 512megs of vram will help a lot though. -feng

How do you convert these files? Are there any problems that might be caused by this?

>How do you convert these files? Are there any problems that>might be caused by this?Hello there I may be able to help you here.I was given this tip(been trying to find the post as i cant remember the posters name but thanks to him)I was having this problem of texture drawing particularly with IFDG airbuses and the tip is this go to the ifdg site and download the airbus 319 Frontier airlines pack(you will get four very nice models too)but within the download there is a program called A32 texture converter and it will convert your ifdg from 32bit to dxt3(i think)you will find a slight loss in the textures but i don't even notice now(there still excellent models)I wont describe how to use the program as it is simplicity itself and very quick.One thing you will have to do is reinstall the panel of the plane you are converting (or remove before you start)as the conversion process does funny things to your panel.PS i now have virtually no problems with greyed out texturesiFDG A319-111 FFT 939-942 This is the file to download from IFDGto get ifdg just google IFDGHope this helpsAndy

Thanks for the tip.

My pleasure BillAnd it really does work to(well has for me anyway)and i have had no problems with the aircraft models either (lots of two to three hour flights)cheers Andy

I had a real bad problem with this issue on the DA Cheyenne. I used Martin Wright's converter flyto/mwgfx to convert these huge textures (some 4MB each) on the plane to DXT1 which were about 660kb. I really didn't care about the loss of eye candy quality, but the load times are now about a second when switching to external view and less than a second when switching to side views in the cockpit. I think I also got a few fps bump also. Mike

Thanks everyone! I converted some of the textures to DXT3 and that helped considerably.

> I had a real bad problem with this issue on the DA Cheyenne.> I used Martin Wright's converter flyto/mwgfx to convert>these huge textures (some 4MB each) on the plane to DXT1 which>were about 660kb. I really didn't care about the loss of eye>candy quality, but the load times are now about a second when>switching to external view and less than a second when>switching to side views in the cockpit. I think I also got a>few fps bump also.Am I to understand that the converter you mentioned is only designed for the aircraft's exterior bitmaps and/or the 2D cockpit bitmaps? Does anything convert the graphics/bitmaps in the VC?