HI AdamThanks for your post, very informative read.It would seem the way texture updating is handled has changed a lot from FS9.After downloading the demo I was amazed at the difference capping frame rate made to seeing sharp clear ground textures in the FSX demo.In FS9 ,especially in photoreal scenery as with UK VFR scenery as an example, flying with unlimited framerate made huge difference with regard to ground textures keeping up with the aircraft.Since trying the demo the difference the new high res textures bring to the flight sim experience is night and day.As soon as I saw the 1m texure( after lowering the water textures) I knew there is no going back.:)John

Thanks Adam. Much appreciated.I am just wondering..if Video card manufactures would be able to use the RAM.Like If I have 4 Gigs or 8 Gigs and the OS and FSX/FS9 uses only 1.4 gigs.. could the Video Card ever use the remaining RAM? Maybe, it may not be as fast as the memory in the Video card. But it would beat going to the HD. I know its not a Fsim issue.. I was just musing. :)DX10 cards need to come with atleast 1Gig.Manny

Adam,Thanks for making the effort to explain this. May I make a suggestion? I believe that Adrian Woods is compiling an FAQ for FSX on his blog. Would you kindly submit your post to Adrian so it can be included on his FAQ? This information is very valuable, and I would hate to see it get buried here in the forum.Best regards,Owen

Adam, with your permission I'd like to include that information in my upcoming FSX guide. I'll send you a copy before publication for your review. Thanks for all the professional explanations.

>c) Turn down the setting of the "Global Max Texture Size" slider.Here's something that really ought to be changed in FSX in my opinion. The "global max texture size" slider controls the aircraft textures as well as the scenery. You can't turn it down for better performance without also degrading the textures of your plane, it seems. You should be able to control the max scenery texture size independently of the aircraft.

Thanks Adam!From trying your "tweaks" I have extracted an even better view with smoother response than I thought possible from the sim.Fantastic=no blurries (with the still beta)-and great response/graphics.Geofhttp://mywebpages.comcast.net/geofa/pages/rxp-pilot.jpg

Bruce,Good idea. The plan is to put my presentation on fsinsider.com in the next few weeks. One of the reasons for the delay is that I'm a slacker on vacation right now. :-)-Adam

Owen,Good idea. I just sent your suggestion to Adrian. He's on vacation right now, so it may not appear immediately.-Adam

Manny,Applications can set up some system memory as "AGP memory" that can be shared by the CPU and the GPU, but I think it's usually a much smaller amount than 1 GB. Vista/DX10 is supposed to have a much better GPU memory manager, but we have yet to see it in action. We'll know more in the next few months hopefully.Cheers,Adam

Marten,That would be fine. Good idea.-Adam

Dan,That's something that was talked about, but unfortunately we didn't get around to implementing it. At least the terrain textures are controlled independently.-Adam

I hope this does get tabled again. :)Best,Owen

>Owen,>>Good idea. I just sent your suggestion to Adrian. He's on>vacation right now, so it may not appear immediately.>>-AdamYeah, I've been sending lots of questions to Adrian for him to include in his FAQ - I hope he gets around to putting it up on his blog soon! :)Best,Owen

To reduce this cause of the blurries, we reworked how Flight Simulator's scheduler prioritizes background tasks in FSX. Now much more CPU time is devoted to loading scenery data, including terrain textures, at the expense of somewhat lower frame rates. Great post sir. Lest anyone miss this important point, minimal FPS loss are a trade-off for better scenery loading and less blurries. Of course, this will not stop some folks from balking at their frame rates regardless of the results. This process simply proves that nothing is really free.I can absolutly live with this since my FPS are pretty good to start with and CPUs have not exactly hit the Great Wall YET. With Intel's new CPU technology using Silicon Lasers the future is looking bright and fast ;-)...Best,Randy J. Smith

Terrific comments Adam. Would it be possible for you to post the link to your Blog pleaseGraeme