1 GB ram and my HD still keep flashing!!!

[Guest LSangiovanni LIML]

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[John_Cillis 2,406]

Even with 1 Gig of Ram, FS still has to fetch data from the Hard Drive at some point--and this may cause a slight pause or microstutter depending on your hard drive, your motherboard, cpu, etc... This is very obvious in the way we fly. If you fly point to point--say from Milan to Bologna, FS will load the scenery from the HD as you go along. But if you fly from Malpensa to Linate, chances are you'll get less Hard Drive activity because most of the scenery's already there.Also, there's some activity that will cause momentary pauses (again dependent on your hardware) without accessing the hard drive at all. One example is centered around 3-d clouds. Clouds are drawn in a radius around your aircraft based on the draw distance you've defined in your settings. You can fly within that radius all day and notice very little negative performance--in fact, even on a lowly P3/800 my fps hit with a deck of clouds is very small given the excellent cloud sets available for download. But, there is a momentary hesitation when you travel through the 3-d clouds, and FS destroys the clouds behind you and builds new ones ahead. Depending on the system, you may notice it or you won't. But the more cloud layers and the greater the cloud draw distance, more likely you will. Since it's related to rendering and not related to retention of clouds, there's little RAM can do to help. I suspect Microsoft may be able to improve this in the next release by buffering already drawn clouds in memory somehow vs. rendering them from scratch. For me, the problem is so minor that I don't mind--I'm usually too wrapped up in the flight to notice any minor hesitation in the sim.-John