Can anyone please tell me why so many of the planes I download from the file library (and other places of course) do not draw cleanly. Whenever I switch from cockpit to spot view I get a white plane which then fills in over a space of several seconds. The default MS planes do not do this, so I assumed that the 'fault' is with the downloads, not with my PC. (I hasten to add I am not looking gift horses in the mouth - this is not a complaint!!).On the other hand, planes which draw like this one session may behave rather better the next, so my PC is clearly at least partially to blame, though frame rates are good, around 30fps, even when I am getting white planes. My PC is should be able to cope better than this - AMD XP2800+ CPU, Radeon 9800 Pro, 1024 DDR RAM, even if the downloaded planes are not quite as 'PC friendly' as the default ones. Changing my display & hardware settings etc. doesn't help much at all.Any advice welcome, because it obviously spoils the flying experience. Thanks,Martin S.

That is a good question! I'll bump you back to the top of the forum.Barry

This 'problem' is very common, and is a result of larger, more detailed textures being used on the third-party planes, as opposed to the lighter and smaller texture files used by the simpler default aircraft. If a downloaded, third-party 747 uses full 32bit textures to cover the aircraft, these textures will take longer due to the fact that they could, and frequently do, run to several megabytes in size. If you swap views at a busy airport, it'll obviously take longer for all the aircraft textures; the skins, to load into memory due to the sheer number of aircraft, and you'll also see that the scenery textures may take a short time to catch-up too....you could be talking several tens of megs, maybe hundreds, all trying to load instantly......PC hardware just isn't fast enough yet, despite all the hardware available....all those textures have to be read from all those hundreds of files within dozens of folders on your hard-drive, cached, and then displayed. Rmember, at a busy international airport, it'll take all the textures for all those aircraft that you can't see too, so that when you start moving, or just pan around, they're all there and ready.One of the first things that I do before a flight is to flick through all the different cockpit views and side/rear views to let all the textures get loaded - that way you don't get too much of the scenery and aircraft appearing naked and then suddenly filling-in with it's skin when you taxi. The larger the texture, the longer it will take to appear....take a look at the AI aircraft textures; you'll see that they are frequently those DXT3 textures that are still good, but very small in size so that they load fast and don't put too much strain on your system. If you tried to populate Heathrow Pro for example with all POSKY and IFDG aircraft for AI, you'd be there all day waiting for those textures to load and your frame-rates would be crippled beyond belief; not just because of the detailed models, but mainly because of the high quality 32bit large textures used.Hope this helps....

Thanks for this. I take your points, but I am surprised that I get the same problems even at 30000 ft., well away from airports. If I change views within five seconds or so, there are no problems. Much longer and the plane has to redraw. Also, (I use Ultimate Traffic) I note that the AI traffic can also take some seconds to draw (probably all resources going in to creating my 747 or whatever at that time).I had hoped there was a way to force Windows XP to cache the aircarft texture files so that they are instantly available - I too usually scan through all the views before I start by the way, but it doesn't seem to help much.Martin :-)

So which technology will help the most? The OS will probably remember which disk sectors it has in memory, so you will only take the load-to-memory hit once, until you run out of memory and the texture gets paged out. More memory is relatively cheap, so if this is the problem then you might help by doubling up.A faster disk will help if you're doing a lot of first-time loads, like when you fly from one detailed scenery to another, seldom re-using textures. But then, you're going to run into bus speed limitations, and that's something you won't fix without a lot of new hardware.And don't forget the graphics card. The textures have to go from memory to the card. I've got a clunker - a Geforce 2 with "only" 64 meg. I suspect that most of my "White-On-White Airlines" AI traffic is caused by a lack of graphics memory, not main memory, but I'd be interested to hear from anyone with any authoritative info. Most of the posts on this subject have been kind of inconclusive, but by concentrating on this one subject (i.e., AI aircraft showing up white and slowly painting in) we could get a feel for what would be the best approach to curing the problem.

Just as an aside to this, I have set up a shortcut to fs.exe which automatically sets the programme priority to 'Above Normal'. This certainly gives FS a smoother, 'silkier' (?!) feel, but if you minimize the programme in order to, say, look at an Encarta atlas page, other programmes do suffer and are slower than usual - or can even stop responding (Word). I also tried starting FS9 in 'High Priority' mode too - but this causes all my AI traffic to be 'white on white'. Maybe this gives a clue to something. (Or maybe not??!).Martin