Hi,anyone can tell me the impact on the fps with the ai traffic. The watereffect is a juge impact on my system amd 2,8 and Ati 9600 pro and 512mb.SincerelyTFT

I think AI traffic causes a big FPS hit and its not the graphics of the planes either. I think it is the processing power that each little plane takes away. To see this in action: set your traffic at 100% and go to your busiest airport. Enter slew mode and go 5 miles in any direction. Exit slew mode and look at your FPS. You are out of visual range, but FS is still keeping track of every plane that is in that traffic sector. Now, set your traffic % to zero and watch your FPS jump up. Yes, at airports the graphics of the planes matter.Hope this helps,JimActiveSky Supporthttp://www.hifisim.com/images/as2004proudsupporter.jpg

I concur with Jim's reply. Even if there are no AI in sight the poor old processor is still having to do its sums to calculate AI movements. If like me, you've got lots of repaints it can be a real FR killer. AI could do with it's own separate processor.....

It depends which aircraft you use for your AI. Actually, very little processor power is used for calculating AI aircrafts movements, but a lot of power is used for displaying those aircraft.If you would use for example Posky 747 for your AI, it would eat your FPS down to zero, but lucky enough, there are a few groups that specialize in producing AI aircraft that are FPS friendly. First thing that comes to my mind are AI-Aardvark planes. These are very detailed and very FPS friendly. The best, no doubt. By using them for your AI, you can afford large numbers of AI aircraft even on low-end system. I have loads of AI traffic, but my FS is still running smooth. Only problem with my AI is that amount of traffic is so big, that ATC isn't efficient enough and can't handle all of them. That's why I have traffic jams, go arounds and stuff like that all the time.For the planes that are not in AIA library, I would recommend you to use ARNZ aircrafts (IMO they don't look as nice as AIA, but they have a neat feature: when parked, you can see a lot of ground equipment around them). For Fokkers I would recommend you AI model from guy named Fernando Morientez (or something similar), for others FS Painter or Project AI models. Cool thing about Project AI is that their planes use autoinstallers and you can add new airlines by just few clicks. But if you want the best of AI, then use aircraft from www.ai-aardvark.com and filghtplans from http://www.mostrealisticai.com. You will spend some time installing it, but it will be worth every single second.

You're right about Aardvaark planes being the best in detail and FP friendly.....only wish they had the range of repaints that Project AI have. As far as processing power is concerned, when planes are out of view, I admit I don't have knowledge of how the processor actually handles the AI of screen, but I find that even if I don't have AI on screen but know there are lots in 'existence' in a forty mile or so radius my FPs take a tumble until I take down the percentage.

AI traffic does take much processing power.JimActiveSky Supporthttp://www.hifisim.com/images/as2004proudsupporter.jpg

Hi,On my sys I would say the hit is not as big as you would expect, I have a massive amount of added traffic, and the FPS always stays above 20.The biggest hit on my system is shadows, especially when there is a lot of AI in site as all the AI have shadows too, I just turn shadows off and get a great boost.Dan.

I agree Dan, unfortunately, I CANNOT live without shadows ;-)Takes the realism right out of the sim for me.Be interesting to see what FS9 looks like on a top of the line rig in a year! LOLRegards, MichaelKDFWhttp://www.calvirair.com/mcpics/PBTMCa.jpgCalVirAir International VACougar Mountain Helicopters & Aviation[link:www.cgrmthelos.com]Cougar Mountain Helicopters

Hi Mike,To be honest, if its a toss-up between having a major airport packed with real-life carriers, or some shadows, I'll gladly toss out the shadows ;).Now, if someone could come up with a way of just have a shadow on a player plane, and not an AI, I could have the best (almost) of both worlds :)Dan

AI has a pretty big impact on the framerate. I get about 25 FPS with the default MS KSEA flight and 100% AI traffic. Without AI traffic I think it was around 36-38 FPS.

I went ahead and purchased "a popular AI addon" after getting tired of messing with AI traffic on my own for a year. I had used Aardvark wherever possible with my old custom AI traffic installs. I had forgotten what a big increase in FPS performance I got with Aardvark craft over others. Needless to say, I have gained simplicity and more flying time at the price of performance. I like my new purchase for alot of reasons, I just wish to heaven that other model makers would catch on to the Aardvark philosophy - it is superior.Cheers,

If you get into spot view then keep hitting CTRL-W you will "jump" to a spot view of all the AI aircraft in the area. I don't know for sure but would assume that these are all the AI aircraft the sim is keeping track of at the time. Tony

The AI itself gives less reduction of fps. The reduction came from the textures and in you case the "watereffect". The "watereffect" is total build on processor power, so youre graphic card didn't help much.Normal AI planes reduce the fps, because most Addon planes use high resolution textures. The MS build in planes and most of the AI Addon planes use textures of 1 MByte or less for the whole plane! Some of the Addons you could buy or download here, use textures of 1 MB for one wing! So the total size of those planes is sometimes more than 13 MBytes! Youre graphic card has 128 MB, it use ~7 MB for displaying (if you didn't use Antialisaing) and the rest is for textures (121 MB). If you use such high texture planes for AI you graphic card will soon be out of memory and FS9 is swapping memory in and out and you get low fps. Keep in mind that the ground and sky textures also use memory also the plane youre in.To reduce this I recently programmed a function for my upcoming "GA-Traffic" programm to reducte texture size of GA planes down to 1 MB. After some recent feedback it worked and you can use ex high texture planes like the 'Maule' or 'Decathlon' (both freeware versions from avsim) as AI traffic.

Hi Jim,if you take the MS SDK for AI Traffic and open the 'Tools->Explorer' or 'Tools->Map' you will see that often there are less tha 100 AI planes around you, even with Ultimate Traffic.I have programmed a 'GA-Traffic' generator and now have ~200-300 planes around me and the fps are still high. The fps will be reduced if the planes come insight and the textures must be read in youre graphic card. One reason is that many planes have to big, means highres, textures. So youre graphic card must swap in and out the textures to show you the planes. If you slew 5 miles away from the airport FS9 didn't remove the graphic from the card, this is normaly done by the graphic driver, so you fps stay low. If you set the AI traffic to zero, MS starts the graphic part new and load only textures it needs. So you couldnt compare the before and after value. Rename the traffic.bgl, and similar, files (to traffic.old) from FS9 to see the difference. I guess that this didn't give you a very high boost outside the airport area.