ASG some clouds = bad performance

[denver69 0]

Hello, I have been a long time user of AS6.5 with ASG for fs9 and am running on an ASUS 80ULVT laptop on a larger monitor. Overclocked I am doing decent with frames and a highly modified fs9 with some of the 3rd party heavy irons like ifly and pmdg. The other day I had a strange thing happen and that was upon entry into a flight and an ASG auto submit, as soon as the clouds appeared my fps crashed to 7. When I did not look at the sky fps went to locked limit of 20 but as soon as those clouds came into view I got 7. This has never happened for I run the 128/128 bit clouds, second up from lowest and even with many layers the hit is allways negligable. This happened more than once untill I figured ASG probably does not auto submit unless it is open, correct? This performance hit did begin after an ASG submit when I had ASG open with Active Sky, but I do not allways have ASG open with Active sky. Anyway I opened ASG and forced a submission of a different texture set and my performance was back up to normal. I then forced another "wx influenced" and performance is still good as normal. The "bad" texture set was a different "wx influenced". Could it be that there may be a bug in an ASG texture set. It was impossible for me to figure out which texture could have been the culprit, or is there a way to do that. My setting from ASG cloud textures with 128 bit as stated above never changed the whole time. I wonder if some 512 clouds made it in there somehow through that texture set even though I have 128 selected. I hope that was not to confusing. Thanks

[Damian Clark 1,231]

Hi, Please remember to sign your posts with your full name! Reviewing your system and your results, I'd say you are experiencing the performance drain of transparency anti-aliasing which is almost exclusive to clouds. Some video cards do much better at this than others (for example, nVidia has traditionally been good, ATI has been bad). Lower resolution helps, but even more, setting to DXT mode instead of 32bit will really help. Not sure you have tried this yet? Also, since we're talking about cloud performance, setting a lower cloud draw distance may help. I am not sure about what is happening when you get good results in one set and bad results in another, but it could be related simply to the models that FS chooses to render (very random), as well as the conditions, and the conditional and random logic that AS applies to cloud layers. The texture for clouds is in the cumulus01.bmp file (FS's Texture folder). You can easily see the affect of resolution and 32/DXT mode changes to verify that something "strange" with erroneous resolution settings isn't happening here.. but I do think that is extremely unlikely... Hope that helps!

[denver69 0]

Yes this was a one time thing, very strange indeed. All clouds are dxt for best performance. I do not know what happened there but hope it does not happen again but it may. Thanks Marc Lynn