Could some of you try this out and report back in this thread please?Load up the Cessna with engine running in FSX at say Honolulu International on runway 8R so that we have essentially no autogen. Do a spot view at the Cessna from at or as near to ground level as possible looking in the direction of the sea, and record your range and estimated average unlimited fps. Now if you have a hat switch swivel the view up quickly until your at about 60 degrees looking down at the aircraft on the runway. While your doing this watch the fps. Now do the same in FS9.Question: Why should there such a relative dramatic drop in fps in FSX and yet a dramatic increase in fps in FS9? On my system the in FSX the unlimited fps varies from about 21 to 64 fps! Average about 30 fps. But at 60 degrees it drops and sits at a consistent 5.1 fps !? Drop the view down to ground level and the fps immediately comes back to the previous range. (but always with the prop rotating erratically when set to unlimited) In FS9 the fps range is about 40 to 100+ fps and then increases dramatically at 60 degrees.(No erratic rotation of the prop under any condition)Yes, OK the aircraft in FSX is visually more complex but I don

Adam; I've experienced the same thing at St. Louis downtown. My take was ithad to be the runway surface textures somehow, as if you taxi out intothe grass the problem goes away. I haven't replaced any of the texturesyet, but I'll just about bet that will cure it. I noticed the 60 deg thing, but even at nearly 90 deg the problem isstill apparent. Down near ground level the texturing of the surface isnot as apparent....so maybe that has something to do with it. Just for the heck of it, move the 172 far enough off the pavementso that you can circle it at 60 deg without getting a shot of thepavement in view and let me know what you think. If thats the problem it would sure go a long way to explain the crappyFPS on take off and final, wouldn't it.

"I noticed the 60 deg thing, but even at nearly 90 deg the problem isstill apparent. Down near ground level the texturing of the surface isnot as apparent....so maybe that has something to do with it."Thanks for your response Denny. Yes 60 degrees was just arbitrary - its a problem for about any angle from the horizontal. Yes the problem goes away when your kite is on the grass where I can maintain constant fps. However, I just replaced all of the runway textures in FSX with those in FS9 that have less pixels. The problem remains with a dramatic drop in fps on an angle view of the kite on the runway. I can only conclude that its not the texture(s) itself but the way the runway/taxiway textures are being handled in FSX. Lets hope this is a DX9 versus DX10 thing.Cheers

Thanks Wiz; You saved me having to try the texture replacement from FS9, whichwas my next step. Maybe someone will see this who has more actual knowledge and come upwith a solution....sure seems strange to me that looking down on therunway should smack my rig harder that flying over NYC does. At least putting the plane in the grass kind of eliminates it as theprimary culprit.

Hi guys this got me to thinking I had an addon scenery in FS9 the only problem is I can't remember now which one.:-doh But I do recall it was a light causing the FPS to drop down.A simple rotating beacon light of some sort dropping my FPS down to around 6. I found the effect file for it and that helped a lot. Maybe something is in each of the big airports like a little FPS sucking blackhole and thats the key who knows just a thought.Anybody know whats common to all big airports maybe we can track it down.

OK I have found the culprit. It was the internal FSX anti-aliasing (IAA). Turning it off stops the dramatic drop in fps when viewing from a significant vertical angle on the runway/taxiway but the consequence is some very evident jaggies. The decrease in fps in the vertical view is also affected of course by the settings on the video card that I had turned off. I have now compromised with settings on the 7900GT video cards of Anti-aliasing=2x and Anisotropic=2x (I find I need to reboot to make the settings effective in FSX). This still gives some very minimal, but not all that noticeable jaggies at my TripleHead2Go resolution of 3840 x 1024 but now no significant drop in the fps as seen before and the props are not running erratically as before. Higher AA settings on the cards re-introduce drops in fps as before.I also did a re-install and have all the original high-res textures and tree varieties back. It turns out the tweaks of reducing the resolution of these textures did not have a great deal of impact on my system. Nice to see those cirrus clouds with all the detail again. I now have my autogen set to sparse with max =300 for both trees/build; Bandwidth =400; Fiber =0.2 in the FSX.cfg file and fps clamped at 25.

Will give this a try any FPS improvment is good.:)