I think a oft overlooked cause of low framrates is the number of flight plans. The first time i customized my flights I simply swapped out the default planes and put in 300 of my own planes, but I added no additinal flight plans - I kept the 23 or 25,000 original plans and I had little or no performance hit. WorldAI2 comes with about 41,000 flight plans, I am wondering where the number of active flight plans starts to hurt performance. This time around I am going to have about 500 aircraft and I am hoping I can keep the number of active flight plans to about 25 - 30,000 and still have acceptable frame rates. Most of the planes are PAI, about 80% and I am running an AMD 2100 with a Geforce 2Ti 64MB. So I am just curious as to howmany flight plans and planes people are using and what kinds of framerates you're getting. Good FPS for me is 12-16, I locked at 16.

The total amount of flight plans and your aircraft doesn't mean nothing... What matters is how many aircraft are there at the given moment at the airport where you are and that depends on the number of avaiable gates. SO how many flight plans you have doesn't really matter, for example I can have 50+ aircraft at the airport (KDFW for example) and when I do not see them I have 12FPS (20FPS when there are none at all) once I see them they go down to 5fps might be higher depends on how many I see at the moment how far they are etc.Any how don't compare my FPS to what you will get cuz I run a P3 866MHZ so that's about twice as fast as your RAM is :-lol, but the point is that the number of flightplans alone won't have any impact, but the number of planes that surround you which depends on number of gates available for them.MS did in my opinion good job here with windwsXP and FS2002 that when you do not see something it doesn't hug your resources (kind of) what I mean is that even though I have 50+ aircraft I am able to achive fair, playable performance when I do not see them all at once, but little by little all the time.FlightPlans 28340TotalFligts 120224Aircraft 1391 (includes double entries actually only apprx 300 different ones)Andy

You are right that the numbder of flight plans doesn't determine your performance but, the way I see it the more flight plans you have the more planes you will see an a given airport on an average basis. I see it as more flight plans equals more constant traffic equals slower performance. With the default number of flight plans and my traffic turned up 100% my system could easily handle the most detailed airports but if I use all the world AI fligt plans and double my number of flight plans I expect on average basis to see twice the number of planes at my airports - that is why I am intersted in the number of flight plans. As for performance across systems, you are right that every comparison is not an apples to apples on, but it makes for interesting info. Anyway, thanks for the response.

Your reasoning is a bit flawed. The first reply to your question nailed the issue at hand. If you throw all these worldai and pai and what not plans into the fold, it will redistribute your ai traffic. Many of your airports will become empty and a few of your airports will become overwhelmed. This is because these flighplans are based on real world traffic which will weigh your ai towards airline hubs and their actual destinations, not a random distribution of departures and destinations. For example, if you had previously changed the default random ai 737 flightplans touching KORD to UAL and AAL repaints and then subsequently replaced those flightplans with actual UAL and AAL plans, you will find that KORD may become completely overwhelmed, while some airports such as say Cheyenne or Moline all of a sudden lost all their ai airliners. A more pertinent question you may want to ask is how many ai planes can I have at an airport at a given time before my system performs unacceptably at that location. You can have 100 flightplans or 100000 flightplans in your system, but if everytime you go to O'Hare, there are 100 ai planes milling on the ramp, you're still going to have 1 fps at that airport.

What I have done to counteract the overloading of ariports is to sort my flightplans in excel by airport and then simply delete anywhere from 0% to 50% of the flights into some of the airports with more flight plans. What I didn't realize and you pointed out is the redistribution of flights away from certain airports. Hopefully the GA traffic will still provide flights to the Cheyenes of the world.