It seems that some particular clouds that show more movement really chew up the FPS. My sliders are at very moderate settings.I have been flying around the clouds for about 45 minutes and I have attached a screen image of the culprit. Can anything be done via FSUIPC or any other utility?Flight One Flight Environemtn DXT3 vs 32 bit? I have selected create lower resolution and quality, but high speed clouds 32 bit.See Below:http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/116711.jpgBarry

The clouds are no less framerate friendly than the defaults, actually and with resized and/or DXTC textures they should actually be more framerate friendly. NVidia cards in particular have problems with rendering lots of clouds. You should try both using resized textures and compressed textures to check for performance improvements and loss of quality. You may even use both at the same time.You can use FSUIPC to limit the number of cloud layers and the max thickness of the layer. This may also be worth trying. Also make sure cloud draw distance is at no more than 40 miles in the display options.

I don't have FE yet. Do you need the registered version of FSUIPC to control the settings as you have described?Thanks,Thomas

HiNot 100%... but i think you do. steve

Hi there;FPS is always an issue with clouds. Some video cards benefit from the lower res and DXT3 clouds and others don't. Some testers reported upto a 40% increase in fps and others none at all when using one of the performance options. Personally, I've not seen an improvement using the DXT3 clouds but some testers swear by them.Performance increase, if any may be marginal to none so unless you can see a clear improvement it's probably best to stick with the normal sized 32bit clouds as they are higher visual quality.If you are using real weather some of the complex weather engines like Acitve Sky and FS Meteo can have a big affect of frame rates.I find the best frame rate friendly weather engine, and IMHO the best looking cloud scapes are made from FS Metar the Freeware weather engine and it's the one I normally use. I get at least 50% more frames with this engine. The most frame rate freindly payware one is Weather-Maker Pro which controls refeshes and stops pauses etc. Also, very frame rate friendly.Peter (FE Developer)

Yes, you need the registered FSUIPC for those options. I wasn't quite sure buying it was going to be worthwhile but now I'm finding I'm using many of the provided features and couldn't live without it.I guess I should play around some more with WeatherMaker considering I bought it and all - never managed to figure out how to create sensible weather with the early versions but supposedly it ahs improved now.

>It seems that some particular clouds that show more movement>really chew up the FPS. My sliders are at very moderate>settings.>>I have been flying around the clouds for about 45 minutes and>I have attached a screen image of the culprit. Can anything>be done via FSUIPC or any other utility?>>Flight One Flight Environemtn DXT3 vs 32 bit? I have selected>create lower resolution and quality, but high speed clouds 32>bit.>>>See Below:>http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/116711.jpg>>>Barry>I use FE clouds with Active Sky and I get really good frame rates and really great looking clouds. I limit the layers in Acive Sky to 3. I use a Nvidia 6800 GT video card.

Hi There Barry, with a high end video card like that I doubt if you would see any advantage of a DXT3 cloud or a smaller performance one.Peter