FSX-SE How to change plane texture resolutions?

[Garry Wan 1]

Hello! So I have now the Carenado Cessna citation S550. Since everyone including me are getting low FPS with this aircraft, I have disabled the cmeteo.dll file which gains me 3-5 FPS. But on the other hand I think the texture 4048x4048 is kinda high, I guess even PMDG has lower. So I want to lower the texture resolutions to 2024x2024 instead. The quastion is, but how? I believe it will gain me a bit more frames. 

[cmpbellsjc 2,960]

1 hour ago, Garry Wan said:

Hello! So I have now the Carenado Cessna citation S550. Since everyone including me are getting low FPS with this aircraft, I have disabled the cmeteo.dll file which gains me 3-5 FPS. But on the other hand I think the texture 4048x4048 is kinda high, I guess even PMDG has lower. So I want to lower the texture resolutions to 2024x2024 instead. The quastion is, but how? I believe it will gain me a bit more frames. 

Are you speaking of the interior or exterior textures? 

Large texture sizes like that usually manifest issues with VAS more than FPS, but FPS can be effected as well, especially if the large textures are 32bit format.

What I’ve done over the past 10 years with my FSX addons that employ huge textures is to use a program like Photoshop or freeware Gimp to manually resize the textures to 1024 and either DXT5/3/1 depending on the alpha channel. I never use 32 bit format as they consume to much memory and have a significant FPS got on my system, not to mention that the visual difference between DXT and 32bit textures is not that much different in my opinion.

Just make sure to back up any textures before you attempt to modify them in case you make a mistake. 

Rather than type out the instructions as I’ve done many time, you could use the search bar to find some posts by me and others explaining how to resize.

One other note. You can limit the VC textures in the FSX UI under the cockpit resolution tab, but exterior textures will always display in their native size regardless of any FSX setting. 

[Bjoern 1,157]

The only user friendly tool to do this that I know of is TextureManager, but it can be awfully touchy and more often than not refuses to read or write a file, requiring you to start the process over.

http://stuff4fs.com/newpage.asp?Folder=TM&Docs=TextureManager.pdf

[scianoir 610]

On this subject, I don't really play around much with FSX textures but I have simply kept the Texture_Max_Load in the Graphics section of the FSX cfg at 1024, as I only have a mid range system. My understanding was that this would prevent any textures such as those in some Carenado addons displaying at higher resolutions such as 4096. Is my interpretation of how Texture_Max_Load functions just too simple and is it actually necessary to modify the actual texture files to avoid a VAS/FPS hit? Perhaps someone could correct me if I have got this completely wrong!

Bill

[Bjoern 1,157]

As far as I know, the base texture is loaded into FSX' VAS regardless of Texture_Max_Load, so the only advantage you'll have from lowering that value is in the framerate department.

[scianoir 610]

5 hours ago, Bjoern said:

As far as I know, the base texture is loaded into FSX' VAS regardless of Texture_Max_Load, so the only advantage you'll have from lowering that value is in the framerate department.

I didn't know that but thanks for the clarification.

Bill