FS2004, Weather... It's all in the layers baby.

[Guest wathomas777]

I have been facinated by folks who claim they can't get above 6 FPS on their super whamadyne Pentium 3.2 Gigaherz, while folks near product minumums say it works BETTER? What was that about? I think I have found part of the answer, and it is in how the weather is "layered"To illustrate my point, I started the flight McKinley Tour from the Premade flights and went to take off, and I was horrified!! My frame rates had gone into the toilet. I mean it wasn't like it was overcast or anything and There was no traffic or nothing.I tried all sorts of modifications and could only get small changes. But then I chose the fair weather 'theme' and it cleared up.It seems the themes use one or two layers of clouds at the most, yet the McKinley tour has BY DEFAULT 4 sepaerate cloud layers, two right on top of each other, and 3 of them at 3/8 or more.No wonder. I read somewhere that you should limit your cloud layers, and that can't be more true.

[Guest Steve K]

I agree completely. My system is paltrey compared to some of the ones I've seen and it runs FS9 great! My framerates were NEVER this good in FS2K. If I could have achieved 20-40fps in FS2K I would have never bought the new version. The only thing I miss is not being able to turn the AA option on without dropping the fps to unacceptable levels. Even without this feature the sim still looks pretty good and flys great.I also agree with your comment about not going overboard on adding cloud layers. I've found that a few "lighter" layers doesn't seem to effect framerates hardly at all and it still looks great. However, you can get into trouble quickly by wanting to see "too" much of the nice new clouds Microsoft has provided.I can understand why some of these folks are upset. They have great systems that should power right through this program and for some reason it's not happening. Maybe for once Microsoft wasn't trying to force everyone into buying new computers to keep up with their flight sim.

[Guest oyvindhansen]

But I guess the most important thing is the number of clouds you have hanging there in the sky. Since clouds are complex 3D objects too many of them is a real fps killer. The amount of clouds is to a certain degree controlled by the number of layers, but also by other parameters like the cloud density and the relative amount of 3D vs. 2D clouds. Fair weather theme naturally gives good results since it has very few clouds. Anywho, if you, like me, frequently use real weather there is no way of controlling the amount of layers.- Oyvind