FS2004 - Performance as airports are approached - more observations

[Guest SoarPics]

I just re-flew my test as outlined in post #6 of this thread... but this time with gound shadows off. I had no loss of FR at the airports and approaches I had them previously. Everything was smooth and at my locked FR.Now, the glitch in all this is the fact that I had also tested earlier at night and suffered from lowered frame rates at the same airports as the daytime tests. Perhaps the fact that ground shadows are completely OFF now may mean that the sim is completely ignoring creating that feature, and is devoting CPU cycles elsewhere. Those who know more about this software stuff would have a better persepctive on all this than I.All I know is the ground shadows were making a nasty and perplexing hit on my system. Now with them off it's even better than it already was.Just more stuff to ponder...

[Bruce Nicholson KMFR 20]

Here's some history...When shadows were first introduced, they were not true shadows (as in solid black) but more of a cross-hatch pattern. It was a cool effect, they didn't take much of a performance hit, and people loved them.MS beefed up the features of FS2000 and left out the solid black shadows because they knew it was too much for the hardware back in those days to handle. But the users screamed murder and the shadows were reintroduced, among other fixes, in the FS2000 patch.There was a lengthy discussion about the performance hit systems were taking when the shadows were turned on. Most people left them off. As hardware power increased, some people chose to switch the shadows back on. So it's no surprise that FS2004 is released and we are back to the discovery that shadows impact performance. I'm sure there are a number of users, like myself, then never turned the shadows back on since FS2000. I made the choice long ago that shadows are not worth the performance hit, even on a machine that can handle them.So when I made my comments about approach studders, and the degradation of performance the longer the sim runs, shadows were never a factor. Other posts also point out that shudders occur without shadows enabled. So the question remains - what is causing the approach studders?During more testing today, I noticed that in spot view, if I was overflying an airport as part of the background scenery, I would get studders. As soon as the airport was out of view, the sim smoothed out. This was at lower altitudes where the full detail of the airport was visible. So there must me something inherent in the airport graphics that are causing the studders, whether viewed with a panel or viewed in spot view.Bruce

[ulisses 1]

right Bruce,same case here, let's do a test with scenery complexity at minimum and see what happens. Maybe the objects are heavier in FS2004, maybe the code in FS2004 that handle objects was changed, maybe it is using more CPU than Video in airports, maybe that is a bug...Ulisses