After numerous tweaks and adjusting sliders each one from nothing to max here's my take. Now running the TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_TREES_PER_CELL=2000TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_BUILDINGS_PER_CELL=1000 and the "33 thread"I believe its not so much the ground textures, as much as the building textures & the reflective VC glass. Why?B737 Sitting at KSEA 34R Fair Weather.Heading - Frame rates (Spot)340 - 19, 250 - 23, 160 - 23, 70 - 23, Looking Direct at Terminal-19Heading - Frame rates (VC)340 - 15.9, 250 - 23, 160 - 19.5, 70 - 19, Looking at Terminal-15If I look down in the cockpit (no glass visible testing Hi-res VC its 23). Every time I pan around by the Terminal the textures flash real quick like they are loading. Looking ahead, its the same with the downtown buildings.No matter what setting (turn them all off) you get a signifigant drop when the terminal is in view, or buildings (not autogen houses) are in view. With or without traffic doesent matter.Maybe to many polygons on the fancy terminal buidings & gateways or too big of textures? Not sure yet. I am not a guru, just trying to use some deductive reasoning to explain why such the drops near airports or downtown.I think we are going to see a major frame rate increase if we can identify whats the deal with the buildings and turn of the VC glass.My Settings in Order:23 locked, Bilinear, Very High, Lens Flare, Advanced AnimationsMed High, HiRes VC on, Cast on Ground, Lights On Gnd,Large, 80, 19, 2, 2.x, Land Detail On, Scen Comp Dense, Autogen Norm, Medium Animations60Miles, Detailed Clouds, HighTraffic 18, 11, Medium, 10, 25, 20My Rig: AMD64X24800 @2.75, 2G PC4000 Mushkin, A8NSli Deluxe, Raid 0 Barracuda drives, eVga 7800GT @ 500/1.1, Logitech 5500THX spoeakers. 8" TSR-80 Monitor (Kidding)Input?Regards'Garett

I have no substantive input other than agreement. Airport buildings (and glass) as well as city buildings place a significant load on frame rate. I am confident that many in this enterprising community will create replacements or refine the existing to ease their burden on performance.Thanks for the detailed testing.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

From what I have seen so far, there does seem to be some large impact near larger airports. I just finished another flight from London (CYXU) to Toronto (CYYZ) and on each flight now, at about 50 NM out, my frames are cut by half. Anything I do within that 50 nm really has no effect on the FPS.I have UT, MRAI, World of AI flightplans all transferred over, all of the latest tweaks.... and outside of any 'major' center I really have no problem holding 20-30 FPS in any slider configuration. But within that 50 mile thing, something seems to change.duttonhttp://dutton.fsblogger.com/

Maybe the radar is kidding us here. Seriously, does FSX actually render anything that far away?

Radar? What Radar?As said I can see the buildings from downtown far off in the distance, whether they are white or not don't know. (they look textured as something) Maybe there not miped, redering the entire texture from far? But this is why I asked the questions if its the polygon count or something else.I do know that as I pan past them, frames rated drop. (not signifigant, but down) The terminal up close is a hole different story. AI Traffic or not.Regards'Garett

I'm not particularly fond of the reflective glass in the VC and I hope there's a way to turn it off. I know Dreamfleet allows the user to toggle VC reflections on/off in their Baron and Bonanza.

No, no, no. Go ahead and crank up all your scenery settings to the right. Leave scenery complexity at dense and no autogen.Make sure you have the lesser bit textures for the clouds as FS9 proved the 32 bit clouds are a killer on frames.Your framerate impact is not in the building textures, etc.It is in these key areas:Airline and GA densityAirport vehicle densityLand and sea trafficWaterLight Bloom.AutogenIt is these areas which have to be addressed. Most of us have used numerous ground texture enhancements, Mega sceries, mesh enhancement, addon airports, Ultimate Terrain, etc. in FS9 and still able to crank up the resolution and other settings.The problem areas are largely related to the additional features added on FSX. With the exception of airline and ga density (which can always be problematic if cranked too high) the last 5 areas can be a significant problem.

Len, With ALL mentioned turned off, you get a very noticable frame rate reduction when :A: looking in the direction downtown.B: looking at the terminal.That is why I am to tring and figure out whats dragging with the buildings. Of course if you crank everything up, the slide show you get adds to the issue. But then what was it, the boats, the ga or the light bloom.Try it, turn everything off - then watch your frame rates as you pan around at the scenery. Now do it from VC. The reflective glass makes a signifigant impact on my machine, as do the terminals. This is before we load landclasses, meshes, aircraft, weather programs, scenery, ai traffic sets, new textures, more gates, etc, etc... If I'm wrong I'm wrong, I've chased ghosts before over the years of doing this, but something just doesn't seem right with such a drop.Garett

maybe its not the building texturs. Just too many polygons?

Don't know ...Checked the texture folders with dxtbmp, almost all the textures used in the airport as a whole including the runways and taxiways, and the "scenery" buildings are running 1024 tiles, 688K each. Parking areas are 1366K. Lost of stuff at the custom airports.Probally adds up ... fastWhy would you want a 1024 tile for a 30' tall building, same with the runway & taxiways. I mean its not like I'm gonna run around on the ground in this game as a FPS shooter. Checked FS9, (remember most of us did the Airport Improvement textures) that were alot smaller and just as clear...Well actually flying the sim is only about 1/4 of the hobby anyways. Garett

hi :-)i agree with one exception: water. i'm sure it's rig-dependent and will vary for different machines, but dragging the water slider left and right all over the scale does not significantly impact my frame rates. perhaps not at all, too many variables to tell...which makes me very happy as i fly almost exclusively bush :-)

>No, no, no. Go ahead and crank up all your scenery settings>to the right. Leave scenery complexity at dense and no>autogen.How can you say "no no no"? I can tell you, that this is not the case on my setup.As the original poster said:With ALL mentioned turned off, you get a very noticable frame rate reduction when :A: looking in the direction downtown.B: looking at the terminal.I have found this to be true on my setup. The textures at airports/big cities cause way more fps hit than the autogen. Way more fps hit than water.Maybe that's not the case on your setup, but on mine, I know what I see and experience.RhettAMD 3700+ (@2.5 ghz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (94.47), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2 GB Corsair XMS 3-3-3-8, WD 250 gig 7200 rpm SATA2, CoolerMaster Praetorian

and i second that"The textures at airports/big cities cause way more fps hit than the autogen."i limit my trees at 2000, building at 200 (yup, ten times fewer autogen buildings than trees)i get smooth 20-30 fps in the norther ontario lake country, at any altitude; single digits over big cities with big airportsanother example: cytz is an island/lakeshore airport in downtown toronto. the shore is pretty straight there, cuts the scenery in two. i park on the apron, look south towards the lake, 25-30, look north towards the city, 7-10. building density in this particular city is approximately half of what i had in fs9... in other words, compared to fs9, half the buildings kill the frame rates, ten times the trees, don't

Exactly Vilk! See my third post in this topic. Same experience to the letter.With all of the other tweaks, this sim is performing and looks far better than FS9. We just need to figure out the city thing now.duttonhttp://dutton.fsblogger.com/

Hi Guys,I just finished downloading two files from Mat Fox.1) The reduced building textures (terminal, etc - not autgen)2) The reduced runways & taxiways. Both are the main texture folder stuff, not the autogens.Will post shortly with my findings. I am trying to leave may main ground textures alone, as when I am done tweaking I want to be able to get to 60cm or less textures for vfr stuff. Thats the cool thing about FSX, now you can tweak and save your graphic settings and load them based on what your doing (wild weather/high traffic/big Airports) or (lonely low & slow mountain flying).Regards'Garett