I'm sure I grabbed your attention with that thread title, but no kidding here, you can increase your FPS with a simple dataref change.

First, make sure you have DataRefEditor installed.  If not, you can go here for it: http://developer.x-plane.com/tools/datarefeditor/

Once you are in XP11, have a flight scenario started, go to your upper menu and select Plugins->DataRefEditor->Show Art Controls

You should have a transparent window that appears, which is the dataref overlay.  Place your cursor at the bottom left of the window (there is a text input area in this region), click there and type fft_water.  This will filter the dataref listing to display the entry you want to edit.

Once you see the "reno/draw_fft_water" dataref, click on the value shown (should be 1), and change it to '0'.

Now close the dataref overlay, which will bring you back to your main screen.  If you have your FPS data shown (if not, use CTRL+SHIFT+F), the FPS should have increased.  The amount of increase may vary, depending on the scenery, aircraft, geographic location.  In my own personal test, I found a 10 FPS increase, but your increase may be higher.  Be aware that this change will only work per session, unless you create a Lua script and place it in the appropriate directory so that it will activate every time you run X-Plane.

 

This little tip can be done by following the above steps, or you can simply download the Advanced Render Settings, which is here: http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/36925-rendering-options-for-xp11/

As is always the case with manipulating datarefs, there can be downsides, and in this case, what you have effectively done is eliminate the animated waves on the water, so you will be left with calm, featureless water.  If you don't mind this change, what you will gain for FPS makes up for it.

I'm still torn on this option. Yes, the FPS increase is good, but it makes the water look very strange (portions of it become grey and move around based on your viewpoint). 

By the way, it's a lot easier to edit this and other datarefs with the 'Rendering Options' utility- all you need is FlyWithLua. Here's another good FPS tip- use this tool to disable Ambient Occlusion. You'll gain performance and truly won't be able to tell the difference. 

http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/36925-rendering-options-for-xp11/

There is a lua for this already.  It's called FPSboost.lua and is part of the Lua Environment Booster plugin:

http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/36188-lua-environment-booster-xp11/

If you just want to turn off ambient occlusion, you can create your own lua script to do that.  Just put this in a text file and save it with a .lua extension (instead of .txt) and put it in your scripts folder (\X-plane11\resources\plugins\FlywithLua\Scripts): 

--Ambient Occlusion. 0 (off) or 1 (on)
set( "sim/private/controls/ssao/enable", 0.00)

 

Can someone post a before and after pic?

I thought that Ambient Occlusion could simply be turned off in the rendering options (using "HDR" instead of "HDR+SSAO").

3 hours ago, Murmur said:

I thought that Ambient Occlusion could simply be turned off in the rendering options (using "HDR" instead of "HDR+SSAO").

Exactly what I thought.

But why make things simple ?

@Jimm: great tip, thanks! I'll try it with Flyinside, always good to grab a few more frames per second in VR. Maybe a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is a bit expensive in a shader. It should cost no texture memory at all and probably facilitates animation, which is why Ben might have chosen it.

Pascal

Ah, so THAT'S what SSAO means!  Learn something new every day! (Especially when you actually are new to the sim!)

1 hour ago, Griphos said:

Ah, so THAT'S what SSAO means!  Learn something new every day! (Especially when you actually are new to the sim!)

SSAO: Screen space ambient occlusion

Acronyms are cool... for those who know what they mean, and can overuse them. Not so cool for all the others.

My fps actually dropped lol...  43 down to 27.  Weird.