I've recently installed all three Horizon Gen X scenery volumes and am getting very poor performance compared to the small demo area they released (which ran very well). My main problem now is stuttering, although load times are also longer than I'd like them to be (but nowhere near as bad as some have reported).I've found the tip about increasing the in-game texture resolution slider to max (7cm iirc) helped considerably (despite the photoscenery only being at 1.2m res) and I've also seen some improvements from tweaking TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT in fsx.cfg, but despite these changes the stuttering has only improved from "unbearable" to "sometimes okay for a while, interspersed with very bad periods".I ran filemon to see what was being accessed on my system whilst flying and, as others have reported, saw that stuttering seemed to coincide with the loading of textures from areas many hundreds of miles from my plane (i.e. the other side of the country), despite my lod radius being set to low.I also observed that the stuttering gets much worse if I'm within a few feet of the ground or on the ground, which, as you can imagine, tends to make landing pretty tricky. The difference is very noticeable - I'll be flying along in a chopper getting a fairly steady 20fps and as soon as I get within a few feet of landing fps will generally plummet to less than 5. (This also occurs when landing in the middle of nowhere so it's not being caused by airport buildings etc). Getting near the ground seems to trigger a burst of inappropriate texture access (from different scenery volumes) which is what in turn causes the stuttering.Finally, I've also noticed that pausing the game has the same effect i.e. as soon as I pause, I'll see textures being accessed seemingly at random from various other volumes, although obviously as the game is paused no stutters are visible.Hope this helps in tracking down the problem, I'm really looking forward to a fix - I've even considered reinstalling FS9 but I don't think I could face going back to 4.75m/pixel.Cheers,DDP.S. I uninstalled the demo before installing the scenery volumes and defragged after each installation, applied all the Horizon patches, and defragged again. I've also installed the MS FSX photoscenery patch. My system is an athlon xp3000+ with a 512mb nvidia 7600gs, 2 gigs of ram and an nforce 2 motherboard. My FSX is installed in C:GamesMicrosoft Flight Simulator X and my Horizon photoscenery is installed in E:SceneryVFR-Gen-X. Finally, my hard disk controller is not set to PIA mode.P.P.S. I'm no coding expert, and I appreciate FSX must contain quite a lot of code, but I reckon all that you MS guys need to do is trawl through them till you find the following:Do While (user banging head on monitor in frustration) <> true. . . Pointlessly access a random texture from the other side of the planet. . . Use it to clog up memory and generally bring system to its kneesLoopThen just snip those four lines out and everything should be hunky-dory. What time tomorrow can we expect a patch with this fix? ;)

I've recently purchased perfect disk, is it possible to defrag by Name using this software? It seems to default to SMARTplacement which I gather is the most recently accessed files to the front - not much use with the photo scenery issue.One thing I have observed is that the performance issues (stutters near ground, stutters in turns, occassional stutters when it feels like it) are common on my system to both the Horizon and Just Flight sceneries.Something else I've observed is that I see no difference to having the scenery on my RAID 0 FSX installation or on a single dedicated drive. The issue is identical.Made me wonder if it is a drive issue at all?Typically with the generic scenery I run at 40-50 FPS. It never dips below 40 and all is smooth.When I have the photo scenery enabled it will dip into the 30s or lower this is when I see the stutters.Just my observations and wonder how this compares to others experiences as I'm keen to see this issue resolved.

Just another of my wanderings, but I would appreciate the thoughts of those who understand these things better than me!For now the most important bits of my photoscenery are those surrounding my local airfield (for circuit practice) and a small area so I can recreate my first trial lesson. Is their any mileage in moving all the other files off the drive so they are not accessed? (i.e. those files I'm not actually flying over, it wouldn't bother me too much if the distance were made of the generic scenery as I keep my visiblity fairly low.I would guess to do this I would have to move blocks of the files off the drive until I worked out which I needed and which I didn't, or is their a way of nowing from the file names which textures relate to certain real life areas? Would it upset things if some of the files were no longer there, i.e. would FSX expect them and then throw a wobbly?I have no idea if this can be done but if I could get rid of the stutters and just have the scenery around my local field I'll be a happy bunny until I have to plan a real life cross country flight, so any thoughts on if or how to do this would be appreciated.

It's a shame Adam Szofran hasn't responded for quite a while.There is one new development. At least one user of the Just Flight recently-released photo-real scenery has reported exactly the same problems, so it's not specific to the Horizon scenery (although that has been clear for a long time). Clearly this is a FSX problem and will become more common as more people use these high resolution photo-real sceneries.Although he's been quiet I Adam is well aware of the problem and I think there is a reasonably good chance that there will be a fix in the upcoming FSX service pack (technically known as a patch!)By the way, if you look at the Horizon forums you'll see there has been a *lot* of discussion about this problem.Best regards, Chris

"There are several obvious questions:1. What causes the long delay between the FSX GUI appearing and it being useable?"FSX is trying to pre-load the scenery, the idea being that while you select your aircraft, set up your weather etc, FSX will silently load scenery in the background. This doesn't work that well with huge photographic sceneries."2. How can the installation of VFR scenery cause extremely long flight loading times, even when the VFR scenery itself has not been selected?"No idea, it doesn't happen on my system."3. If FSX is performing some kind of indexing or texture pre-loads, is there an option to switch it off?"Yes:disablepreload=1in the [Main] section of the FSX.cfg file.