Firs let me say that fex is a great product, the water and clouds look great. But I simply cannot run fex with any clouds in the sim, even at 256x256 the clouds brings my system to its knees reducing the frame rate to a miserable 14. Look at my specs, something isnt right here.

I'll say. What happens when you use the default clouds?Regards,Jim Karn

Ouch! I run similiar spec and notice no difference between 256 clouds and 1024x1024. There is likely another factor going on, can you try doing a restore from within FEX of your Initial Backup entry.. this will put the default textures back in (or the textures you had installed prior to running the back-up) and then do a comparison in a saved situation? Hopefully we can discover the cause!

Tried uninstalling? See what you get then?I don't have a great system and the clouds don't really affect my FPS....Or, after install, defrag your HDD..

I restored the backup and tried again, but no luck. I guess I could try a defrag, but ive never solved a problem or made any progress because of a defrag. Maybe its because im running a 1680x1050 resolution? What res are you running? Ive never had a problem with clouds either, until now which is a shame because these new clouds just look awesome.

As I run such a similiar system I am convinced something else is effecting this. I am also convinced we can find out the cause. If you don't mind I will PM you and we can perhaps do a work through on voice conference?Warm regards,Chris Norris

Ok that sounds great, thanks.

Heres an update, reducing the aa and af in nhancer caused a noticable performance gain, but now the aa quality is really bad. Im using a 640mb 8800gts thats overclocked pretty high, this is not what I expected from it.

Yeah, that shouldn't be required. I will get AIM installed and get in touch :-)

You should beware Mike.I use an EVGA 8800GTX KO ACS3 768 Mb (626/2000 Mhz) with 8AA & 16AF and have no problem at all with the 1024 clouds.I'd suggest to lower your o/c because 648MHz/2106MHz for a GTS seems to be really too heavy, IMO.(the EVGA 8800 GTS 640 Mb KO ACS3 Edition which is already o/c runs at 576/1700 Mhz!!)

Alright, Chris helped me out, now the problem is fixed. What great support, I would definitely recommend fex to anyone who owns fsx, they really did a great job with it. Oh and btw, the oc is supposed to help my fps not hurt them ;), but idk is there some special case where an oc might actually reduce the fps? The card is rock solid at that frequency though as far as stability is concerned.

Please share the fix for others.Thanks.Randall

Yes, can you tell us what the cause was?You imply, but don't specifically state, that when you overclocked your 8800 card, it caused fps to go DOWN in FSX.Is this what you saw?RhettAMD 3700+ (@2585 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2gb Corsair XMS 3-3-3-8 (1T), WD 150 gig 10000rpm Raptor, WD 250gig 7200rpm SATA2, Seagate 120gb 5400 rpm external HD, CoolerMaster Praetorian

To confuse some even more.Nothing to do with FEX.I was getting random crashes,hangs ect.The ones out of now where for no reason.I went into bios and disabled any overclocking my cpu was getting.That ended all my FSX crashes,hangs.I also had a game where OCing the card caused it to hang.So for those out there with any wierdness going on. Try running stock and disable any overclocking to the card and cpu.I am running AMD nvidia based computers.