How many layers of clouds?

[bburkley 0]

Hello all, I've been playing around with some settings lately to get the NGX to a certain sweet spot performance wise. I have found that running ASE with REX 4096 HD clouds, and especially the amount of cloud layers you have running through ASE, can have a huge impact on performance. I'm just curious as to how many layers you all have running. I started with 5, now I'm down to 2, which still looks pretty damn realistic. How many layers do you all have running, and what kind of performance are you seeing? Thanks so much for your help,

[Timeerror 0]

Hi, I have the same "problem". Meanwhile I have only 1 or 2 cloud layers, depending on how "bad wether is". In cloudy conditions, I only have one layer and on beautiful days 2 layers. I think, in my case, the ATI card is the problem. However, FSX with ASE and REX looks realy nice, much better than without ASE and REX (even if you have only 1 cloud layer). So don't mind. In my opinion, a good performance (many frames) in bad wether conditions is more important then 5 cloud layers. So go down to one cloud layer. It still looks realistic. best regards Markus

[clum 2]

Running 5 in ASE, with REX 2048 clouds. No noticeable performance hit when in heavy weather since putting in the 580. Had terrible problems with weather when using my old 280 though, so GPU seems to make a huge difference in this department at least. I really struggle to see any difference between the lowest and the highest resolution clouds anyway, so that would be my first port of call if performance was a factor.

[Wynthorpe 51]

I run 5 REX 4096 and dont seem to have any issues at all.

[synape 16]

i am using 2 layers of clouds at 1024. But i am considering to lower the resolution and also make lt down to 1 layer to gain some more performance. In my opinion flying this bird as smooth as possible is worthier than flying with more eye candy but stutters.

[JC75 22]

I have 7 - looks gorgeous and see no performance issues - REX 4096 clouds with ASE pumping the weather in (my ASE runs on a networked PC)

[Paul Deemer 13]

I use 5 in ASE sometimes 20. Clouds have a big impact on your frame rates, especially if your using high levels of anti-aliasing and aniscopic filtering. Although the CPU is the most important, having a video card that is capable of keeping up with the CPU and not bottlenecking it is important too.

[Vulcan 14]

13 layers although i may have to reduce this if/when I hit heavy cloud. I have gone down to 2GB clouds in REX and 80ml draw in FSX. I find it quite confusing looking at peoples perceived performance and then their rugs. There seems to be no link between the two, some have poor performance even with a CPU clocked way over 4GHz My modest system, E8400 o/c'd to 3.6, Win7 64bit, GTX460 1GB, 4GB DDR2 RAM Dave

[synape 16]

13 layers although i may have to reduce this if/when I hit heavy cloud. I have gone down to 2GB clouds in REX and 80ml draw in FSX. I find it quite confusing looking at peoples perceived performance and then their rugs. There seems to be no link between the two, some have poor performance even with a CPU clocked way over 4GHz My modest system, E8400 o/c'd to 3.6, Win7 64bit, GTX460 1GB, 4GB DDR2 RAM Dave

Oh my god, ihave the same graphic card and OS with you plus i5 o/c'ed to 3.9 , and 8 GB DDR3 RAM and if i would run with 13 layers the FPS i would get would be around 10 in the clouds, i believe.

[bpcw001 22]

Hello all, I've been playing around with some settings lately to get the NGX to a certain sweet spot performance wise. I have found that running ASE with REX 4096 HD clouds, and especially the amount of cloud layers you have running through ASE, can have a huge impact on performance. I'm just curious as to how many layers you all have running. I started with 5, now I'm down to 2, which still looks pretty damn realistic. How many layers do you all have running, and what kind of performance are you seeing? Thanks so much for your help,

I'm running 5 layers. But I'm using 1024x1024 textures only.

[Michael Moe 495]

i am running 5 layers HD2048 REX and reduced from HD4096 as i was getting massive OOM. Dont know if it has anything to do with it or maybe a combination rather with Ultimate traffic ect. I use 60nm visual. btw sometimes it actually INCREASE PERFORMANCE the more cloudy the weather is /Michael

[Paul Deemer 13]

I

find it quite confusing looking at peoples perceived performance and then their rugs. There seems to be no link between the two, some have poor performance even with a CPU clocked way over 4GHz

It is not all about the CPU. You can have the fastest CPU out there and suffer poor performance if your system is not balanced and your fsx.cfg not optimized or tweaked correctly. CPU Accounts for about %75 percent of your FPS - Video Card accounts for the other %25 - Having Enough Ram and Running 64-bit Windows has a big impact too. Even the Hard Drive comes into play. Ie FSX should have its own dedicated Drive and not be located on the Windows drive, Should Defrag and keep drive optimized. So it is all about balance. Reason your having good results is your pretty much balanced at 3.6 ghz and a GTX460. Not bottlenecks there. If you want a more technical explanation read the article below. http://forum.avsim.net/topic/321806-how-fsx-works-and-how-performance-is-affected-by-different-hardware-explained/

[niyoko 7]

I'm using ASE with 9 layers of coulds with REX setup with non-HD 3D clouds and HD cirrus clouds at the 2048 texture cloud set. FSX's cloud range is set at 80mi/128km. I get solid and smooth frames from 15~30 and 25~40fps when in the air. Japan's weather today is heavy clouds and rain, and I had no slow down.

[radorabatin 24]

Hi All, I use ASE with 10 layers and REX clouds at 1024 lowered from 4096, and I'm having nice preformance. My frames are locked at 20(most of time stable at 20).I use UT,GE and REX, airports mostly default because of my config. Water at 1max because any of shader 2 are killing my frames.NGX runs smooth on my config which is E8500 at 3.16GHZ, 4GB of RAM,ATI4870 GPU with 512VRAM, My FSX is installed on E drive in nondefault folders and on Intel SSD, until I buy new PC I'm happy with performance of my PC, FSX settings are almost on highest except of water, and traffic, autogen very dense and scenery complexity on max. Using external frame limiter. Rado

[bburkley 0]

Wow, quite the spectrum here. Are you guys using Texture_Max_Load at 4096 as it says in the Intro doc for the NGX? Or have you lowered that along with your cloud resolutions? Thanks for the replies!