Hey, good day to everyone (or night!)

 

I was curious to know whether GEX+UTX would impact RAM usage whether negatively or positively.

 

Confirmation would be nice on the idea that GEX+UTX do not hurt FPS performance as well.

 

I would be getting GEX and UTX North America because that's the area I'm going to focus on for, most likely, the rest of my FS Career.

 

~Thanks, and no, I don't want FTX Global!

The only issue i can see ii the UTX night lighting as that can cuase a big fps hit so you will need to do a little tweaking to get the best from it. Other than that GEX should not have any negitive effect performance wise on your sim. You will notice more ram is being used due to the higher res textures that GEX use but that should not have any real impact on your sim and the aircraft you fly

I wouldn't expect GEX to have much if any impact on memory usage, but UTX on the other hand will use a fair bit more I think. After all the terrain data of UTX is a lot more detailed then FS default, even in areas such as the US which had OK data supplied by MS to begin with. As such it is bound to have be more memory intensive then running default scenery.

I can also confirm that UTX won't hurt your fps unless you use night lighting or use too much road traffic.

The night lighting in UTX is beautiful.  You can control the density using your scenery complexity slider.  When it starts to affect your fps negatively, you can gain it back by lowering your autogen slider.  You get two options for night lighting, one being street lights and the other is intersection lights.  Enabling both will have great impact on fps.  I'm using street lights only and it looks awesome.  Totally changed the night flying experience.

As mentioned GEX shouldn't hurt you very much unless you use the night lighting system. However, the one thing that wasn't mentioned is if you have the road traffic turned on in the UTX UI it will add a lot more road traffic than what comes standard with FSX which will hurt your FSX and RAM overhead. The only way around it is to turn that option off in the UTX UI but then you will not have any road traffic in FSX at all. If you leave that option on in the UTX UI but turn off traffic in FSX, it will still have a negative effect on your FPS and RAM believe it or not. This was found out years ago by NIckN when he was doing some testing. As a result I have uncheck the road traffic option in the UTX UI as well as set the slider to zero in FSX.

 

 

 

 

 

You will notice more ram is being used due to the higher res textures that GEX use but that should not have any real impact on your sim and the aircraft you fly

 

That's not true. The GEX ground textures are the same size as the default ground textures and make no difference in the RAM overhead. Also, the GEX ground textures have better autogen annotation which actually improves performance over the default ground textures.

 

On a side note, ORBX's FTXG ground texture package also uses the same size ground textures as both default and GEX. 

are you sure as i thought GEX uses 1024x1024 ground textures and stock was lower, you could be right mind you

GEX not only wont hurt your performance, it will improve it. UTX, in you are not carefull will hurt a bit.

 

GEX is a 'fire and forget' addon, install it and you are done.

 

UTX has a lot of options that you can customize for your machine, to minimize any impact, so it will take some experimenting to get it right, but it's definatly on the 'must have' list

I concur with others about the outstanding performance of GEX textures.  The last time I reinstalled FSX, I ran fsx without any tweaking or addons and I was receiving fps well into the 100's.  Then I installed GEX and fsx frames nearly reached 300 fps.  Then I started installing addons.  Things went downhill from there!  The developer of the GEX textures has some special settings you should try at the bottom of his (now obsolete) fsx.cfg guide - http://www.simforums.com/forums/setting-up-fsx-and-how-to-tune-it_topic29041.html.  The guide may be mostly obsolete but the section on UTX near the bottom still applies.

 

Best regards,

Jim

GEX NA and UTX will work great together. You just need to disable the UTX traffic (cars) and night lighting. There's a way to do this using the UTX control panel. Let us know if you need any help.

Does it hurt VAS usage? I only have 2GB RAM and run the NGX fine but i dont know if the combo will kill me or not. Also my ground textures look bad near cities, is this due to mesh or what? I really just want an improvement in ground textures.

 

 

Does it hurt VAS usage? I only have 2GB RAM and run the NGX fine but i dont know if the combo will kill me or not.

 

We've already explained that GEX does't effect VAS usage since the ground textures are the same size as the default ground textures. As well as the fact that the better use of the autogen is made due to the way the autogen is annotated.

 

It was also mentioned that UTX shouldn't hurt you either as long as you turn off the 3D night lights for the roads and intersections and turn off the car traffic on the roads.

 

I ran the GEX/UTX combo for 4 years on a 2GB system and it didn't give me any issues. Flight1 has a 30 day refund so you can try both products and if they dont work for you, you can get your money back.

 

 

 

 

Also my ground textures look bad near cities, is this due to mesh or what? I really just want an improvement in ground textures.

 

Mesh controls the elevation data (mountain, hills, valleys, flat land) and has nothing to do with textures. You need to be more specific when you say the cities look bad, but mesh wont effect the way a city looks, only landclass, textures and vector data contribute to the look of a city.

I apologise if this is a stupid question, but would having UTX lights enabled have any impact on frame rates and VAS usage in the daytime?

The ground is just so messy and pixelated in the cities that it irritates me when I see it. Is there anything to fix that?

 

 

The ground is just so messy and pixelated in the cities that it irritates me when I see it. Is there anything to fix that?

 

Post a screen shot for us to see. Maybe the problem is more to do with your video card settings rather than the actual ground textures themselves when you say they are pixelated.