Scenery & FPS question

[CanadaOne 36]

If I fly the PNW often, for example, and another area only once in a while, will the PNW run better if I simply don't install the other scenery?I was wondering if the total "weight" of FSX could drag the FPS down, even with a good install on its own clean HD.

[kjb 0]

I don't think another scenery would have any effect on how the PNW area runs. The thing working your system is the number of polys it has to draw and not other sceneries on your hard drive. The Seattle area takes an FPS hit with the number of buildings. Under SP2, LODs don't work so those buildings get drawn from a distance when they shouldn't.

[Guest jshyluk]

If you just fly in one region, deleting default FSX scenery in unused regions won't positively affect FSX performance. You will just cause more problems.The physical size of FSX won't affect your framerates unless you are running an old computer. Since it's so big, it would be hard to find an old hard drive large enough to run it. Modern, large hard drives, say anything bigger than 50GB, should also be fast enough to run FSX without causing issues. That being said, it's important to make the FSX install as clean as possible. You will want to keep the FSX drive defragged. I like having FSX on a different physical drive from my OS drive. FSX drags down from graphical content, so RAM, CPU, and especially GPU performance are bigger bottlenecks to flight sim than hard drives, as long as your hard drive was manufactured sometime after Mr. Clinton was President. Jeff ShylukAssistant Managing EditorSenior Staff ReviwerAVSIM

[CanadaOne 36]

Thanks for the answers.I should have been more specific; I meant add-on scenery, not default. But I appreciate your thoughts anyway. Good to have the info.FYI, I have FSX on its own 75GB HD, all nice and clean and defragladated. My rig is an E6700/2GB RAM/8800GTS 640MB. It runs the sim well.

[Guest jshyluk]

Add-on scenery is a little different than default scenery. Having too many add-ons could affect loading times, but the physical size of the files won't affect actual flight performance unless you have a really slow drive. Again, its memory and CPU/GPU that will slow down flight performance.However, there are three things you can do with add-on scenery that you shouldn't with default scenery: disable the add-on, change its priority in FSX, or plain delete it.If you know you will never want to look at the add-on scenery again, you can just delete it. Maybe there's an incompatibility, or it just plain annoys the geewillikers out of you. The only penalty is that if you want it back, you have to re-install it.If you want to keep the scenery on your drive, but you don't want FSX to call on it, you can disable the scenery in the Scenery Library screen in the Setup Menu. The file will take up hard drive space, but FSX will ignore it completely. You can do this to test whether or not an add-on is causing you issues without actually deleting it. The only penalty is that it still takes up space on your hard drive. It's easy to re-enable the scenery later. One last thing you can do is to lower its priority. FSX will load more "important" sceneries before it loads less important ones. This may improve your load times, or it may not. I usually keep sceneries I like a lot near the top of the list. Sometimes I have to adjust the scenery priorities becasue of compatibility issues - usually the developer will mention that in their documentation. Jeff ShylukAssistant Managing EditorSenior Staff ReviewerAVSIM