I have GEX, REX, FS Genesis, and UTX. My FSX experience is excellent, and I enjoy it thoroughly when I don't enable UTX. I usually have frames in the 30s or higher, and twenties at worst. My sliders are close to max in most cases...including water. My experience however is MUCH MUCH worse when I enable UTX, because it really affects my frame rates. It could be that I don't have it in my Scenery config properly, or I'm turning on the the wrong areas in the UTX setup. I appreciate the change it brings to my scenery with roads where they are supposed to be...among other things.I keep hearing so much about how UTX is so important in the overall scenery department, but please tell me how I can use it without it having such a negative effect on the fluidity of the sim. What can be done to make the addon more integral without having such an impact on performance.Stan

I have GEX, REX, FS Genesis, and UTX. My FSX experience is excellent, and I enjoy it thoroughly when I don't enable UTX. I usually have frames in the 30s or higher, and twenties at worst. My sliders are close to max in most cases...including water. My experience however is MUCH MUCH worse when I enable UTX, because it really affects my frame rates. It could be that I don't have it in my Scenery config properly, or I'm turning on the the wrong areas in the UTX setup. I appreciate the change it brings to my scenery with roads where they are supposed to be...among other things.I keep hearing so much about how UTX is so important in the overall scenery department, but please tell me how I can use it without it having such a negative effect on the fluidity of the sim. What can be done to make the addon more integral without having such an impact on performance.Stan

The UTX landlasses should not influence frame rates at all, since they are rearranging the pattern or order of textures, and the UTX textures related to their custom landclass shouldn't make much of an impact either. I suspect it is either the UT lighting or roads that are having the most impact on your system. It is possible to enable their custom vegetation, urban and city textures without enabling the road textures or traffic, using the UT config app. In that application you can tone down the burden on your system by disabling things like bridge extrusions which take quite a hit, and you probably don't need the network of minor roads or rivers. You can also disable the extended grass surrounds to the roads, choose whether to have the circular road interchanges and also cut down the overall texture resolution, all using the same configurator.Apart from road traffic, I think by far the biggest hit is the night lighting and road lighting. But of course this is not relevant to daytime flying. You can also enable/disable various aspects of UTX by simply going to your scenery library with FSX running and tick or untick the various combinations until you get satisfactory performance.Rob Young

I believe there was a bug in the early versions too in that the road traffic files caused a significant performance hit even if you had road traffic at 0%, so make sure you are patched up to the latest version as this is fixed. I must admit though that I didn't bother reinstalling UTX when I did my last system upgrade, it doesn't float my boat that much to be honest, it certainly doesn't have the same visual impact as it did in FS9.

Stan, I had the same problems with UTX when I upgraded from version 1.2 to 1.3. When I was on version 1.2 everything was working great, good frames and no blurries. Then I upgraded to 1.3 and started having problems with frames and blurries once in a while. It turned out that in the version 1.3 upgraded they found a way to add more ground traffic (cars) to more roades and prevent some of the occasional drops out of ground traffic. I never minded the way 1.2 ran with the way ground traffic was, so they gave me directions to revert back to the 1.2 ground traffic while keeping version 1.3. Once I did this everything was back to normal. Here is the link to the thread. http://www.simforums.com/forums/forum_post...D=28671&KW=And the directions:I had hoped to find a way to quickly generate new highway-only traffic files for the USA today. But, it looks like the process is too involved to tackle right now, with the other stuff going on.So, I will try and give you some instructions to try yourself. The goal for you is to install a temporary copy of UTX USA (prior to version 1.3) to a new location. Then, you will need to do some manual renaming and moving of files. I am typing this from memory. So, there is a slight chance that I may miss something. At the very worst, you may have to reinstall UTX USA from scratch if something goes badly. I don't think that will be the case. But, I wanted to mention it anyway beforehand.First, go into your production FSX installation and locate the Scenery\UtUsaRoad\Scenery Folder. Inside this folder, you will see a bunch of files starting with RTX*.BGL. Rename these files to something else, like RTX*.BAK. Or, just move them to a safe storage location. You need to make sure that the RTX files are renamed or moved before going any further.Now, start the full UTX USA installer (pre version 1.2). Hopefully, you have the installer on your hard drive somewhere (usually at C:\Flight One Software by default). After you start the installer, you will need to override the default install location (VERY IMPORTANT). The installer will attempt to install to the FSX location stored in the windows registry. But, you can always override this from the installer screen. See the screenshot below. In the image below, I am telling the installer to write to D:\TEMP.After the installer is complete, you will need to rename and move some files around at the new (and temporary) install location. Lets assume that you installed to the E:\TEMP folder like I did in the image above. So, go to the E:\TEMP\SCENERY\UtUsaRoad\Scenery folder and rename all the RT1*.BGL files to RTX*.BGL. In the pre V1.3 release, the RT1*.BGL files contained highway only traffic.After renaming the RT1*.BGL files to RTX*.BGL, you will need to copy these RTX*.BGL files that you just renamed to the production UTX USA installation (where FSX is installed). After copying the RTX*.BGL files, you could delete everything in the E:\TEMP folder (or whatever location you actually used).That should give you highway only traffic for UTX USA (with some dropouts of course).I don't know how confident you are with moving and renaming files in windows. So, if these steps are not completely clear to you, I would not recommend doing them.Feel free to ask for more help if I need to clarify a thing or two. Allen Try this and see if it help you. BTW, I don't use the night lights either.

Thanks for some of the advice. I KNEW there was something going on with this program. Allen, your information seems very logical...but tell me, can't we just UNINSTALL UTX and reinstall the original and 1.2 WITHOUT installing the 1.3 update? I think I have the various updates saved in one of my folders for FSX. What's so important in 1.3 that we even need it at all? Perhaps there will be a 1.4 upgrade some day that fixes everything.I thought I once remember reading that the Scenery config had to be arranged or "sandwiched" some way. I know I didn't manipulate my scenery config at all.Stan

Stan,The two elements in UTX which can have a major negative impact on framerates if your system is not powerful enough are road traffic and night lighting. Details about this are clearly covered in the 'Diagnosing UTX Performance Issues' FAQ on the UTX support forum over at SimForums.Now, while the link with instructions provided by one of the other posters in this forum has an impact on the level of road traffic between some of the UTX updates, you really have to understand underlying elements as well.To simplify it, just like a car towing a trailer, you can not expect to keep piling more load on it and still keep going at the same speed. At some point the car will start slowing down as it no longer has power to overcome the load. The same with FSX on your PC. You cannot expect to keep adding scenery or others add-ons and keep the same framerates no matter how many you add. At some point, your PC no longer has the ability to handle them all and so as FSX is a CPU bound application, your framerates will drop.Your PC is not a top-end system, and will not haul all the things you have added, especially as you say you have also pushed your FSX scenery settings to the right. If you want to keep the same framerates as you have now, you therefore have to compromise on your FSX settings and whatever else is running in the background. UTX is highly configurable, and is also unique in that it provides features in the UTX Setup Tool to see what the overall impact of various options you have in both UTX itself and FSX are. See the manual supplied with the product for more details.Jeff

Thanks for some of the advice. I KNEW there was something going on with this program. Allen, your information seems very logical...but tell me, can't we just UNINSTALL UTX and reinstall the original and 1.2 WITHOUT installing the 1.3 update? I think I have the various updates saved in one of my folders for FSX. What's so important in 1.3 that we even need it at all? Perhaps there will be a 1.4 upgrade some day that fixes everything.I thought I once remember reading that the Scenery config had to be arranged or "sandwiched" some way. I know I didn't manipulate my scenery config at all.Stan

Stan, sorry for the confusion, I'm not Allen. Allen is with UTX, that was just a copy from the thread and his name was at the bottom. Anyway, I guess you could just run it up to version 1.2, but doing the steps above would probably be quicker that uninstalling and then reinstallin up to 1.2. Version 1.3 added these fixes and features. Either way it would work, but doing it the way I did would mostly save you some time. Either way you'll get the same results.Version 1.3 Feature Enhancements Race Tracks UTX USA now provides race track polygons, similar to those released in UTX Canada. UTX Europe Style Tunnels UTX USA tunnels have been converted over to the newer and improved style present in our UTX Europe product and most recent UTX Canada patch. The tunnel entrances now look more realistic, instead of just a black hole in the terrain. Alternate Extrusion Bridge Texture The recommended road surface texture for all UTX road types is asphalt. In order to have the extrusion bridges match the asphalt road textures, an alternate extrusion bridge texture has been included. You can change road and extrusion bridge surface textures by running the UTX Setup tool and selecting

Stan, sorry for the confusion, I'm not Allen. Allen is with UTX, that was just a copy from the thread and his name was at the bottom. Anyway, I guess you could just run it up to version 1.2, but doing the steps above would probably be quicker that uninstalling and then reinstallin up to 1.2. Version 1.3 added these fixes and features. Either way it would work, but doing it the way I did would mostly save you some time. Either way you'll get the same results.Sorry for calling you Allen. I should have known that if your Avatar is a picture of you!Stan