dolph98

According to some earlier in this thread, the answer is no impact noticed. It's the shimmering that is holding me off. It shimmers enough already.

ASHA script is for XP11. I'd be careful with that one.

I will tell you what I do: I open the file "settings.txt" located in the Resources folder. Find five lines that start with "SETTING_1 renopt_shadow_quality_" and at the end of each line, change the number to 4096. EXAMPLE: SETTING_1 renopt_shadow_quality_04 0 shadow/scenery_shadows 0 shadow/total_fade_ratio 0.999 shadow/csm_split_exterior 1 shadow/csm_split_interior 3 shadow/csm/far_limit_exterior 500 shadow/csm/far_limit_exterior 500 fbo/shadow_cam_size 4096 This helps in almost all situations. There are still some shark teeth in cockpits of some aircraft. Your FPS will dip considerably if you use 8192 so beware.

When I was a software engineer, we had to be very careful about announcing releases because our customer planned their flight testing based on our release date. If we slipped, it was a major thing and the contract payout was affected. We went on (unpaid) overtime to make things work out. It didn't happen often after we learned to seal our lips until things looked ready enough.

I have noticed that if I run the default lights.txt then open X-plane 12 in windowed mode instead of Full Screen mode, the city lights look exceptionally bright and much more realistic. IMHO. They don't look that nice in full screen mode. My vid card is a 5070.

I used LiveTraffic most of the time, but right now with v12.4.0b1 there is a bug that crashes to desktop at certain airports. CYYZ is one that I found, but there are some other airports that do the same and I won't test to find them all. LT works great if you fly the released XP12 version. This beta problem has been reported to LR by the LiveTraffic dev so no need to send in any further crash data. I am flying with Traffic Global until it is fixed as it does not CTD that I know of.

I have SFD Global and I use the Urban and Terrain textures when I'm not running XPME. I use SimHeaven and these two together with GF2 and it works good with some heavy-FPS aircraft. I don't use the whole package anymore, not since XP11 days. Just the terrain as it look a bit better than default. Just a bit though. I don't think I'd spend money on it but if it suits you, go for it.

I believe it is the shadow changes that fixed things mostly for me. I could not run shadows before, now? No problem. All scenery and plugins and I now have 30 FPS most places with 3 monitors! It is truly game-changing. EDIT: I also upped my shadows to 4096 in settings.txt to smooth out the cockpit shadowing. Couldn't do that before either.

BTW I've removed that worthless set of junk software the support site gives as a "driver" and things have been good since.

I use Saitek (Logitech) yoke and throttle. They work fine. First, calibrate them in WIndows USB Game Controllers, then you have to reverse the axis inside of X-Plane's setup menu if it is reversed.

I bought it and I think I will like it. I have a DHC6 I fly often, and this will be a break from that. The throttle setup was nasty, but I figured it out. I don't have a detent so it will be weird setting reverse for awhile.

The MU-2 is 50% off over at X-Aviation. Considering spending money I ain't got on that one.

I used to adjust the AA down for night and it bugged me to have to do that. Upgraded my RTX 3060 to an RTX 5070 and now I leave AA on full - night to day has no big FPS changes, and the GPS numbers never go higher than the CPU numbers anymore.

It must not affect everybody or I'd see this and some info like "remove your plugins that create models" plastered all over the place. But I don't. I can tell you AutoDGS and LiveTraffic both do it to me with this release, started on Nov. 5.

I flew a full sortie with the Sparky B744 for the first time in days, after removing LiveTraffic from the roster. Before that, I flew the Zibo without any problems with LiveTraffic. I am still not sure why I had freezes based on this. Is it aircraft related somehow? It isn't that bad to fly without traffic, thanks to X-ATC-Chatter to keep me company.