My FlyTampa Las Vegas Working FPS "Fix"...

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FlyTampa's Las Vegas is spectacular, but depending on one's system and graphic settings, the FPS can be less than optimal. 

I was able to gain substantial performance while retaining both the city and airport by removing all the PBR Maps (reflections) and Normal Maps (bump mapping) as well as their associated .json files from the respective city and airport folders. Reflections and bump mapping are gone of course, but the scenery boots without errors, and all the buildings, night lighting, animated signs, and Bellagio fountains are essentially unaffected.

FlyTampa has indicated a fix for FPS will forthcoming this week, but it's effectiveness has yet to be tested. So in the meantime, if you're having FPS issues you may want try this. For the record, my current (relatively modest by 2021 standards) rig is: Razer Blade Pro 2017 4k Laptop, i7-7820 HK processor, GTX1080 8GB, 32GB ram, porting via HDMI to Alienware AW3420DW 3440x1440 monitor. (I'll have an Alienware R11 with i9-10900kf and an RTX3090 arriving this week though and it'll be interesting to see the difference, but that's for another post).

Before the following fix everything at night (airport and city) was 12-13 FPS slide show, period. Day time was a bit better but not by much. I am now able to fly the strip at night and at and over the airport at a consistent 20-24 FPS, sometimes much more, with dips to 18-19 FPS only near the Bellagio fountains area. For the record both were tested with FlyTampa's expanded night lighting addition active, and at 3440x1440 resolution with MSFS settings on the HIGH preset. Naturally, lowering your graphics settings or screen resolution will result in a relative improvement with or without the fix below.

Here's what I did:

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1. For good measure, back-up your "flytampa-lasvegas-airport" & "flytampa-lasvegas-city" folders from the Community Folder to a secure location outside the sim. As you've backed up the default files, we'll DELETE rather than BACK-UP redundant files in the steps below for expediency. Steps 2 thru 4 should repeated for both the city and airport folders. We'll start with the airport folder...

2. In your Community folder, navigate to your "flytampa-lasvegas-airport > scenery > global > scenery > TEXTURE" folder.

3. Do a folder search for "_M.PNG.DDS" (without the quotes of course). 106 files should be found with those characters ending their filename. These are the PBR (reflections) files.  Delete them all.

4. In the same TEXTURE folder, do a search for "_N.PNG.DDS". 54 files should be found. These are the Normal (bump map) files.  Delete them all. 

5. Repeat steps 2 - 4 in the city texture folder ("flytampa-lasvegas-city > scenery > global > scenery > TEXTURE"). For the city folder there are 160 "_M.PNG.DDS" files and 166 "_N.PNG.DDS" files.

6. Boot MSFS and see if your FPS have improved.

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All together, the total removed files equal almost 1.5GB and I noticed a relative reduction in VRAM usage by removing them too.

As stated, you'll lose bump mapping and reflections in both the city and airport, but for me at least - compared to flying in a slide show - it doesn't vastly detract from the overall immersion that everything else brings to the table.

We'll see what patches or improvements FlyTampa brings to the table (perhaps a "Configurator" as in previous releases), but until then, this gave me the 8-10 plus FPS I needed to fly "relatively" smoothly throughout this spectacular scenery.
 

Edited December 14, 2020 by Truthan
added underscore to search parameter, bolded text for emphasis