Scenery - Direct or Cache

[Mike_CFII_MEL 788]

Hi,What's the better setup? Should I use FS2004 scenery directly or should it be Cached?.

[John_Cillis 2,406]

Never cache the scenery if you have room on your hard drive. The MSFS cache (not to be confused with the O/S cache) is a holdover from the days when we boasted about our 500 megabyte hard drives and MSFS taxed every bit of that hard drive space. MSFS offered (and still offers) the option of reading scenery directly from CD. But reading from CD is slower than reading from a hard drive, especially back when the cache was first implemented. So the cache offered a way of reading the most often used scenery from CD and writing it out to the cache folder on the hard drive. The sim would then read from the cache folder on subsequent reads.So what does caching accomplish if the scenery is already on the hard drive? It moves the scenery from point A on your hard drive, and places it in point B (the cache folder) from which subsequent reads are done. In other words, it adds overhead to the overall running of the sim.Hope this is helpful!Regards,John

[Mike_CFII_MEL 788]

Hi John,Thanks for the info and quick reply.