Hello everyone!I am currently running Active Sky X and thinking about Active Sky Advance for the future.But i wanted to ask you people if there are any other Weather Engines that are using better (more real) weather coverage than ASX does.Which WE is recommended for FSX?Thanks so far!Thomas Rank

I'm a long-time user of Hifi's weather products, and have never been disappointed. I am curious what REX2's weather engine does compared to ASA, however. Love to learn more!

Personally I think REX does a better job in making a realistic haze type effect, especially up at altitude - it doesn't ever just pop out of existence the way I sometimes see ASA's haze do. REX does have fairly frequent large wind shifts though when it updates and it doesn't have nearly as many options as far as detailed control of the weather engine as ASA does. They're both good but each has flaws I guess is the way I'd describe it.

Hey!Ok, ASX does a good job for me.The only thing i don't like is the Visibility thing. With Low vis popping up when descending throuh around 4000' feet its quite unrealistic to me.Has REX any affectson framerate? Are there low res texture available for REX?RegardsThomas Rank

Hey!Ok, ASX does a good job for me.The only thing i don't like is the Visibility thing. With Low vis popping up when descending throuh around 4000' feet its quite unrealistic to me.Has REX any affectson framerate? Are there low res texture available for REX?RegardsThomas Rank

For me both REX and ASA have similar performance. IMHO ASA is working more efficiently and effectively than ASX and is worth the upgrade cost.

Hey!Ok, ASX does a good job for me.The only thing i don't like is the Visibility thing. With Low vis popping up when descending throuh around 4000' feet its quite unrealistic to me.Has REX any affectson framerate? Are there low res texture available for REX?RegardsThomas Rank

First off, everything has an effect on frame rate. Example: we look for a good traffic addon that gives us Traffic and hopefully low impact on fps, but then often see people complain that the textures on the AI planes are terrible. They get a traffic program that has great textures but then it isn't as easy going on the fps. There are small examples of addons that some may say improved fps, such as GEX, but they are uncommon.That being said, REX 2.0 has optioins up the kazoo as far as different textures to load. 512x512, 1024x1024, all the way up to 4096x4096. So in my opinion, my fps is better when I run the 512x512 textures than FSX default, but fps hit will increase the more you increase your textures. Not as much as I would've thought though. I'm currently working on my own project and have the textures cranked at max settings for great screenshots and am very happy with my FPS.Standard (default) textures in FSX are 1024x1024 and something to keep in mind is when you access the "Settings" for FSX, FSX will rewrite 1024x1024 to the FSX.cfg file.For the record, I have ASA and REX2.0. Currently I am using the Rex textures but FSX weather engine. To be 100% honest and just my opinion, FSX seems to put the textures together better when picking them for whatever weather scenario. I agree with Ryan on his post on the haze effect. Rex is new to the weather engine side of things from what I've read and look forward to seeing it get better. I use ASA because it has the snapshot feature which compliments REX2 in the way that it will load different textures according to the weather if you have created a snapshot. I also use it like I'm sure many other PMDG users do for the weather smoothing option, although it's not as good as I would've hoped. In conjunction with FSUIPC.dll however is much better. Lastly, I use ASA because I can create a route and create the weather changes in detail throughout the whole route, so raining on departure, then go through several weather changes enroute, and land in a blizzard, and once again, with ASA snapshot feature and REX textures it is (as I like to say) the cat's Meow and the best of both worlds. If I could have only one it would be Rex2, but why have only one:P?Sorry Tom if I'm running off here, let's recap. I use Rex2 for textures, ASA for weather smoothing and more user interaction, but am currently using just the FSX weather engine. To note, I am helping experiment with just FSX weather to try and duplicate a TAT issue that effects PMDG and Leve-D aircraft currently being reported to be an ASA issue, but in doing so love the way the FSX wx handles the REX2 textures (placement/choices):)Ok, one last thing,,, I love the detailed map of the WaSys wx that comes with Rex 2

Texture size alone is not going to cause FPS to drop - it's dependent on how much memory your video card has. I don't see any real loss of FPS from the REX textures, but if too many of them get on screen at once (which saturates the video memory) you see it as a stuttering effect. Overall lower framerate, not this chop/stutter thing, can only be caused by the CPU or GPU needing to do more actual calculation work. The only thing the large textures are going to do is starve it of memory if it doesn't have enough for whatever resolution you've picked. If you've got enough memory to run different levels of them, you're not gaining FPS by picking the lower one.

Texture size alone is not going to cause FPS to drop - it's dependent on how much memory your video card has. I don't see any real loss of FPS from the REX textures, but if too many of them get on screen at once (which saturates the video memory) you see it as a stuttering effect. Overall lower framerate, not this chop/stutter thing, can only be caused by the CPU or GPU needing to do more actual calculation work. The only thing the large textures are going to do is starve it of memory if it doesn't have enough for whatever resolution you've picked. If you've got enough memory to run different levels of them, you're not gaining FPS by picking the lower one.

I'm not quite sure how this changes anything I said, or if it was meant to, maybe to give a further explanation of what's going on? Am I wrong? Using your own explanation let me ask you a question in an example for my better understanding.Example A = 1024x1024 textures loaded. 3 Tier's of clouds equalling a total of say, 100 textures. Video memory is 5 Terabytes on the video card.Example B = 4096x4096 textures loaded. 3 Tier's of clouds equalling a total of say, 100 textures. Video memory is 5 Terabytes on the video card.Now from your comment "Overall lower framerate, not this chop/stutter thing, can only be caused by the CPU or GPU needing to do more actual calculation work."How can texture size not be the major factor here with FPS, when the GPU/CPU has to (from my understanding) work much harder in example B than in A? Also higher texture size would also get someone to memory saturation faster, especially when you take into the concideration that an average higher performance gamer will have a 1024mb video card and have other addons taking their own huge chunks of VM.I know this is outside of a support request, but I just want to make sure I am getting this. I do know that the amount of textures is also key, this can easily be seen even when using default FS textures and creating the 3 Tier scenario. Even then with no addons running you can see a sad 4 or 5 fps on a great rig. I just want to refine and maybe correct my way of thinking before I give incorrect advice.Thanks,(Before anyone says it, I too would like a video card with 5 Terabytes of VM :( not that it would matter much though).

Because the actual application of a texture to a polygon isn't a very resource intensive thing for a video card to do. It's the actual calculation of the polygon geometry (which is really done by the CPU in FSX unfortunately), shader effect stuff, and framebuffer effects like AA that really tax a card. You'll sometimes see a "triangles per second" figure in reviews of video cards - that's the card's ability to do geometry setup.Textures really are only an issue so far as there's enough RAM to store them. Shader effects can be applied to them as well, but the real tax from that is in things like real time lighting via shaders, which FSX does not do.

Thanks Ryan, Appreciate the lesson. That's all understood, but I guess all these years had no idea the polygon count was being done by the cpu in FSX, that makes 0 sense to me. I mean that's a key measure of a graphics card, why on earth would Microsoft throw that on the cpu? Unless of course they made some deal with Intel and AMD, heh. I've always known simulation in general is cpu intensive but thought it was due to the more obvious things, mostly flight modeling, various engine characteristics like weather, AI, the more physics processing aspects, etc... etc... . I always understood it as the video card did the Poly's but the cpu was involved with the texture vertices, and some geometry of the shadows cpu calculation wise and that was it. Anywho, as I said above I was surprised that the change in texture size had such a little effect, but I guess it also depends on the system, amount of memory, amount of addons, all the things that fill the video memory faster and the outcome makes for choppy performance.

Those are very good questions. The reason is basically that the core FSX rendering code really didn't change all that much from FS98 & 2000 through to FSX. Yes, things were made to look a lot better and features were added, but the core way that the engine operates still relies heavily on the CPU to do what's called "triangle setup". It's a shame, because modern GPUs are basically capable of doing literally everything graphics related, leaving the CPU free to do other things that it's better at. Even physics can be put on the GPU/GPUs now too. If you've played any current games besides FS like the Crysis series, Left 4 Dead, the Modern Warfare series etc you're seeing engines that use the GPU correctly. They run great on the same machines that struggle with FSX and their polygon counts are often whole orders of magnitude higher.

Have a look at my three pics over Genova here and tell me what you think!Vololiberista

Those are very good questions. The reason is basically that the core FSX rendering code really didn't change all that much from FS98 & 2000 through to FSX. Yes, things were made to look a lot better and features were added, but the core way that the engine operates still relies heavily on the CPU to do what's called "triangle setup". It's a shame, because modern GPUs are basically capable of doing literally everything graphics related, leaving the CPU free to do other things that it's better at. Even physics can be put on the GPU/GPUs now too. If you've played any current games besides FS like the Crysis series, Left 4 Dead, the Modern Warfare series etc you're seeing engines that use the GPU correctly. They run great on the same machines that struggle with FSX and their polygon counts are often whole orders of magnitude higher.

Thanks for the reply Ryan, it is a shame for sure. I have a dedicated GTX260 running PhysX and would be great someday to see the FS engine changed. I always thought is was messed up but never knew to what extent until now. I think I own every game that takes advantage of PhysX and the rest of my hardware, yet I am always in FSX,,, something is wrong with me :(PS. Actually think I may load up F.E.A.R(2) again later this week just to get my fix.

Have a look at my three pics over Genova here and tell me what you think!Vololiberista

Very nice. I found the setting in FSX.cfg also, I may experiment with it just to see if I can get an overcast that thick looking. I think the biggest issue with overcasts in FSX are how it makes it so I hardly every have clouds directly below and above me. Well, aside from the other 100 or so problems with weather limitations that is, hehe. Even in 8/8 overcast. There must be something in FSX that says to clear textures around the aircraft or something to that effect,,, not sure. Great pics.

Because the actual application of a texture to a polygon isn't a very resource intensive thing for a video card to do. It's the actual calculation of the polygon geometry (which is really done by the CPU in FSX unfortunately), shader effect stuff, and framebuffer effects like AA that really tax a card. You'll sometimes see a "triangles per second" figure in reviews of video cards - that's the card's ability to do geometry setup.Textures really are only an issue so far as there's enough RAM to store them. Shader effects can be applied to them as well, but the real tax from that is in things like real time lighting via shaders, which FSX does not do.

RyanSince you seem to know what you're talking about and while we're on the subject of weather, could you explain why is cloud rendering so hard on FS performance then? I don't know how clouds are presented in FS but is it also basically a polygon (surely not a complex one) and a texture?