when looking out the left or right side cockpit view i can see the textures loading up. sort of a fast pause or hesitation then i can see a large square texture pattern pop up right before the scenery falls into place then it'a all there. now this only happens with add-on aircraft, the defaults seem to load up fine. is this unusual? i just got a new raedon6800 video card and other than that it seems to be working good. maybe someone can suggest some tweaks for the card? anyway just wondering if the texture loading i mentioned a common concern or just something to live with as far as addons go. thanks, william

Hi William,If you have not done so, try PCI Latency Tools. Most people would tell you to drop it to 32, I noticed that 96 for the video cards works best for me. My video board is the Nvidia 6800 Ultra Extreme. Everything else on the PCI Latency Tools screen I change to 0.Hope this helps.Mike

I found that when I went from 512 to 768 megs of ram those secenery texture load issues all but dissappeared. I almost never see those bald grey scenery blocks anymore...

hi mike, thanks very much for your info. i was just playing with the settings on my video card and it was set at 2x anisotropic, default i think. i changed it to 8x and also changed a couple of other settings to the performance side. BIG DIFFERENCE!!! the anisotropic goes to 16 i think but will leave well enough alone for now. question is this: is 8x to high a setting? i don't want to overstress the card or anything else. i have an amd3000, a gig of ram and the card. i'm not much of a wizard at this type of stuff so that's why i'm asking. just did a flight with real weather and plenty of good clouds, NO pop-up textures and no stuttering. almost scarey, kind of waiting for my machine to start smoking from the back. hopefully finding the right settings on the card will make the difference. please hang with me on this thread, please,please please. i have AA set at 2x, that's fine for me. the card manual has no info on this stuff. looking foward to hearing from you. thanks, william

thanks for your reply. i didn't notice any difference when i went up to a gig of ram from 512 but that may be because i wasn't taking advantage of my video cards settings. i'm tweaking it out now and maybe the extra ram is working with it now. i am seeing a difference. thanks again, william

There's also an option in the fs9.cfg:TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=XXXIf you increase the number (XXX) textures will load faster and the pattern "pop up" will be decreased, although it will demand more of your system. If you decrease the number, you may see more "pop up" but smoother performance. Try adjusting this value to see if it helps--I know it does with ground textures.As for aircraft, you may just need to reconvert the aircraft textures from one format to another using DXTBMP or Imagetool. I get the same issue with a fewer number of aircraft, but I also load minimal or no Autogen so I'm not stressing my card's video RAM as much.Hope this helps...-John

thanks john, i wasn't aware of that. i have autogen off also. it does make a difference. thanks for the help. william

i made a mistake about my video card, i have a 9600pro, not what i said in the above. william

HiSlow or fragmented hard drives can cause slow texture loading as well.Almost full drives can also be a factor.Troy

hi troy, i don't have much on my HD and i defrag to much also. it seems to be my video card which i hadn't tweaked. played with it last night and all is well now. thanks, william

WilliamGlad you worked it out.I was just throwing out that tweak for whoever was interested.Troy