Most of FSX fixes involve texture size reduction. Couldn't this be aleviated by a card with larger memory size? Would it then increase the frame rates? While extra memory and/or lower texture size would decrease stutters when changing views, I can't undrestand how it would increase frame rates. How?

frankla,About a month or so ago I replaced my old AT X800XT (256MB) with an ATI X1900XTX (512MB) and experienced a 35% increase in frames. Clearly the sim enjoys more video RAM and I have to admit the visuals and smoothness are amazing. So yes, a more powerful video card will give you better frames (of course, YMMV) but the CPU remains the more critical component.I believe the FR increases due to not having to load textures as often. With more in memory at any given time there's less loading than for a given time period with a smaller video card.However, I'm no expert here, a bit out of school for me. If anyone can explain this better, please lend us a hand.DougDell XPS Gen3 (3.6GHz/540FSB) | 2GB DDR SDRAM | 74GB SATA, 10k RPM (C: ) | 120GB SATA (D: ) | 512MB ATI Radeon X1900XTX (Catalyst 6.8) | Audigy 2 ZS Sound | MS Force Feedback 2 | WindowsXP Pro (SP2) | DirectX 9.0c

Same here-upgrading to a 512k 7600gs made a huge difference-as did a 3 gig ddr upgrade fron 1gig...FSx seems to love memory.http://mywebpages.comcast.net/geofa/pages/rxp-pilot.jpg

Even at 512 MB, this is not nearly enough space to load all the available textures (and other graphic information) that FS needs to use on a regular basis. So the card is constantly swapping in and out various textures and other graphic information. The smaller the textures are, the more textures you can fit in graphics card memory. Hence, reducing the size of textures allows you to load more textures on the graphics card, resulting in an increase in FPS.Of course, it is more complex than this, but this is the basic idea.Thomas[a href=http://www.flyingscool.com] http://www.flyingscool.com/images/Signature.jpg [/a]I like using VC's :-)N15802 KASH '73 Piper Cherokee Challenger 180

As you can see from my specs below I currently have 2GB of RAM. It seems from reading the boards here that going to 4GB will provide some additional performance gain. I realize you experience quite a jump from 1 GB to 3GB, I'm just wondering if going from 2GB to 4GB will help much at all.DougDell XPS Gen3 (3.6GHz/540FSB) | 2GB DDR SDRAM | 74GB SATA, 10k RPM (C: ) | 120GB SATA (D: ) | 512MB ATI Radeon X1900XTX (Catalyst 6.8) | Audigy 2 ZS Sound | MS Force Feedback 2 | WindowsXP Pro (SP2) | DirectX 9.0c

Got it, and that's a great point! How much is sharpness reduced (subjectively from your point of view) when reducing ground textures to 512x512?DougDell XPS Gen3 (3.6GHz/540FSB) | 2GB DDR SDRAM | 74GB SATA, 10k RPM (C: ) | 120GB SATA (D: ) | 512MB ATI Radeon X1900XTX (Catalyst 6.8) | Audigy 2 ZS Sound | MS Force Feedback 2 | WindowsXP Pro (SP2) | DirectX 9.0c

This would also explain why when you're panning around in the VC, it's slow the first time you look in a new direction, but then subsequent pans in the same direction shortly after don't drop the frame rate. However, if you wait 20 seconds and do another pan in the same direction it hits the FPS again briefly. The card has swapped out unused textures and then is having to pull them back in again.So, even if you have 512MB video memory, having smaller texture files means more of them can stay on the card's memory longer which should reduce how often it has to swap them out.--2002cbr600f4i

I was thinking more along video card memory. But again, I don't know.

The nvidea flagship DX-10 video card that is coming out on Nov. 5th has 768 mb of ram. I wonder what that will do for FSX! But then I also wonder how much that poppy will cost! The specs are : "The core clock will be factory clocked at 575 MHz. All GeForce 8800GTX cards will be equipped with 768MB of GDDR3 memory, to be clocked at 900 MHz. The GeForce 8800GTX will also have a 384-bit memory interface and deliver 86GB/second of memory bandwidth. GeForce 8800GTX graphics cards are equipped with 128 unified shaders clocked at 1350 MHz. The theoretical texture fill-rate is around 38.4 billion pixels per second." from Daily Tech.

Isn't that Stutter? Isn't it different than a low frame rate?

isn't X1900XTX a faster video card than X800xt regardless of memory?

Yes, absolutely... so that's an obvious additional performance factor.DougDell XPS Gen3 (3.6GHz/540FSB) | 2GB DDR SDRAM | 74GB SATA, 10k RPM (C: ) | 120GB SATA (D: ) | 512MB ATI Radeon X1900XTX (Catalyst 6.9) | Audigy 2 ZS Sound | MS Force Feedback 2 | WindowsXP Pro (SP2) | DirectX 9.0c

Reducing the size of any and all textures in the game will have an effect on framerate simply due to the fill rate abilities of videocards, and the texture caches on each. This does provide a secondary effect of freeing up vram, but FS just gobbles it up anyway. Smaller textures take less time to load, and so produce fewer stutters, but more importantly they take a lot less time for the videocard to display on the polygons that use them. As well, videocard processors contain a small cache memory just like a cpu, and if a texture is small enough, and used often enough in a scene (ie: clouds) then, having that texture reduced to a small size can produce large performance gains. The texture is resident in the cache more often, and the gpu doesn't need to fetch it from the video card's slower main memory all the time. However there are a couple of things to consider when deciding what to reduce. 1. The number of polygons that a particular texture is applied to in the scene. The more polygons that re-use a certain texture, ie: autogen, the more benefit you'll see from reducing the size of those textures. By comparison, reducing the size of VC textures will get you a faster load of them, but really doesn't have much effect on the framerate as so few polys use them. (ultra complex VCs excluded of course). I personally don't care how detailed autogen is, because if I'm close enough to count the windows, I probably have some issues with my plane. :)2. Polygon striping. If several polygons are vertex connected (adjacent to each other), and and are known by the engine to use the same tiled texture, then most modern rendering engines will essentially disregard the individual UV data for those particular polygons, instead re-using the data from the first poly in the chain, until it runs into a polygon that uses a different texture. This results in less data needing to be rendered per poly. If the engine can assume that a polygon and its neighbours use the same UV coordinates and texture, for a certain linear section of polys (a stripe), then it has one less thing to worry about for part of the rendering cycle. The part of FS rendering that benefits most from that of course is the terrain and water. So, although you might get faster loading by reducing ground texture sizes, and you'll see some increase in fps due to reduced fill rate needs, you might not get as much framerate back as you'd like, given that terrain rendering is already pretty efficient. I think older cards with lower fill rates would see more gain from reduced ground textures than modern ones.In my experience so far with FSX, the water seems to be the biggest fps killer of all. Whether its reflections are mirrored geometry or some sort of post process effect, it just murders my fps. I really get the feeling that it's rendering the whole scene twice. If I drop it to 2.x low, or lower, it goes from complete slideshow to something (almost) playable. ;)Not sure if any of that helps, just my two cents, derived from 8 sleep deprived years of game art development, hehe.Cheers.

Good info. Have you tried the reduced water textures?http://www.fox-fam.com/wordpress/?page_id=41

Nope haven't tried reducing the water textures, but that's next on my to-do list. Thanks for saving me some time on that. I doubt its the size of the water textures, but the post process reflections that are doing the real damage. Low 2.x uses the same textures as max 2.x, but ditches the reflections, and boom, goes from single digit to double digit fps. Just finished decimating the autogen ones tonight. Bought myself a few frames back. :)Thanks for your hard work in helping to ease the pain for everyone though. That batch file you made for the ground textures was some sort of mad, redbull fueled, 2am work of art wasn't it? :) Nice one.I wish MS had given an option to use pretty much exactly the same autogen models that were featured in FS9, at least until the hardware catches up. Too much variety, textures too large, too many objects even at the lowest settings, cfg tweaks or otherwise. The trees for instance are made up of way more polys than needed. I don't need a canopy layer on them, can't remember the last time I looked straight down and cared what they looked like. Nor do these things need to be bump mapped, or reflective.The thing that boggles is that MS actually thinks a sim running at 12-21 fps is just fine. Apparently they've never tried to land a helo on a downtown manhattan building with a gusting crosswind. Try *that* at 12 fps! 30 fps really should be the minimum target, with sliders middle, on an average/high system. Can't do that? Keep optimizing guys. It's not like we're asking for 120 fps like the first person shooter crowd. :)That said, it still rocks.