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This document is long but if you're interested in why you're suffering from OOM errors and how to avoid them, grab a cuppa something and read on... What do you mean I have to reinstall again? Since installing Prepar3d v2.4 and v2.5, I too have been suffering from OOM errors as well as 'random' crashes to desktop. This has resulted in four reinstalls of Prepar3d and two system reinstalls. Not a pleasant way to spend my spare time but I learned a lot doing it, so time well spent. After my most recent reinstall of Prepar3d v2.5, a few weeks ago, I made the decision to only install native add-ons or non-native add-ons that I can install manually, without the Migration tool. I also decided to install them one at a time, instead of all at once, to compare their performance, evaluate their use i.e. 'do i really need this?', as well as optimising them for use in Prepar3d. 'These go to 11' If more third parties optimised their add-ons and if consumers were more conservative with their settings, a lot less people would be suffering from OOM errors and random crashes. As consumers, we shouldn't have to optimise our payware but as most third party add-on developers focus on looks and not performance, you will never get the best performance you can 'out of the box'. There are a few exceptions where developers provide optimised products that need no further optimising but they are still the minority. The main problem is that most consumers still don't know how to optimise their add-ons and/or want to spend the time doing it. The attitude, 'I paid for it, it should work' prevails, which, as a consumer, I understand, but as someone who wants their sim to look and perform as best as possible, I can't accept. From a developers point of view, I understand the old arguments but they hold no weight with modern graphics cards and recent versions of Prepar3d, there are simply no excuses for not providing optimised products for Prepar3d. I haven't had any OOM errors in Prepar3d v2.5 since optimising my add-ons but I can easily trigger one if I want to. I don't get them any more because I check and optimise every add-on that I purchase and use realistic in-game settings that achieve a compromise between looking great and performing excellently. Multum in Parvo It is possible to have a great looking and smooth sim experience without having all the sliders to the right. By optimising my textures, I have seen a huge drop in VAS consumption and a very noticeable boost in performance. All I did was resize oversized textures (reduce from 4096 to 2048 or 1024 pixel width) and save them in the correct format with mipmaps (DXT1 no alpha, DXT5 with alpha). This cost me a lot of time but everything looks and runs much better now, no more shimmering in the cockpit and no more shimmering in external view. It's the difference between 1.3mb and 16mb PER texture in some cases. Multiply that by ten and you can see what's consuming your VAS. The irony is that the optimised version nearly always looks better. Compared to the time you can spend looking for that elusive holy grail tweak, this one actually has visible and immediate results. The mipmap VC panels option in the simulator does not work as you might expect, you will need to optimise the textures yourself if you want the best result. I have this option off. A quick example, I recently bought a brand new GA third party aircraft developed for Prepar3d. After installing it, I loaded it up only to see that the cockpit gauges shimmer, small text is hard to read and straight lines in textures look like marching ants as soon as I move my head using Track IR head tracking. Half an hour later, I had an optimised product, that looks much better and performs much better, with cockpit text and labels that are clear and easy to read, the gauges now look smooth and the external textures load instantly. The best bit, it consumes much less VAS and frees up resources to run the sim more smoothly. Plane spotting AI aircraft also consume VAS and can easily cost you 20 fps on top if set up too optimistically. UT2 is, in my opinion, the best looking and the best performing AI package, as long as you mipmap the textures correctly, but unfortunately unsupported for Prepar3d, and the last time I used the Migration Tool to install it, I had to reinstall Prepar3d after files became corrupt. My attempts at a manual install also resulted in a reinstall of Prepar3d. The only official AI package that I know of that has been developed for Prepar3d, My Traffic 6, fills the skies with all kinds of wonderful aircraft, even the textures are correctly mipmapped, but unfortunately the models are not as optimised as UT2, so unless I am extremely conservative with the AI sliders, I can cause my fps to drop by 20 frames, great for plane-spotting at airports but not that great if I want a smooth flight out of EGLL. Unification Everybody's setup is unique and no two systems will perform the same, even with the same hardware. This is why the process of 'unification', as practiced by people like Michael Greenblatt or Nick Needham, is so important. Unification doesn't mean tweaking cfg files or resizing textures, it's understanding how to design a system and then set it up correctly for optimal use. The right hardware, the right software, the right add-ons, the right settings... it takes time to learn and it takes time to set up correctly but once you get it right, you get the best sim experience available to the public. You don't need the latest hardware to run everything well, you just need an optimised system and a fast quad core processor. VAS is my currency The FSX/ESP engine was not designed to work with uncompressed textures larger than 1024 pixel width. Even if they load, there is always a price to pay. The currency is VAS. It's not just incorrectly sized textures without mipmaps, high resolution mesh has a price, even third party weather and ATC add-ons can cost you an OOM if not set up correctly. When I met the developer of FEX a few years ago, he showed me FSX running with 4096 pixel width ground textures. Not just at an airport, the whole world was covered in 4096 textures. FSX loaded and ran fine, no signs of an OOM error. This was proof of concept only and ran in a default install of FSX Acceleration but I bet if we had added all of the popular add-ons that we use today, the sim would have crashed too. Some developers have wised up and now offer an extra set of textures for their products, in a 'lower' resolution and are very active in trying to prevent OOM errors. Lower resolution doesn't have to mean it looks worse, default size 1024 textures that are well made look great too. 2048 is the maximum size I allow into my sim. Here's the reality... 4 badly optimised textures can consume around 100mb of VAS. 4 correctly optimised textures consume around 5mb of VAS. Mipmapped textures might appear to have a larger file size than same dimension non-mipped textures but in reality they ease the load on the CPU/GPU and prevent a kind of shimmering that people often confuse with geometry shimmer and try to combat with high levels of forced anti-aliasing. Ever wonder why when you load an aircraft in the Scenario Editor, it takes time to load the textures and when they appear, they are hard edged and unclear? Mipmaps is why, or rather the lack of. Wouldn't you like it if the textures in your shiny new third party aircraft were clear and readable and smooth? Maybe you don't care but the lack of proper custom anti-aliasing options in Prepar3D make the lack of mipmaps even more painfully obvious. Most Payware add-ons are designed to look amazing, that's why uncompressed over-sized textures are used so often. Why should a developer care? They have made a product that looks great and works fine on a default install of Prepar3d. They have done their job. We are purchasing the right to experience this product, no more, no less, it's like buying a ticket for a ride at the fair. We are therefore responsible for ensuring that these products are optimised. But if we combine an unoptimised aircraft with two unoptimised airports and then add high resolution mesh, terrain and cloud shadows, AI, full cloud cover, thousands of buildings covering huge Ultra LOD areas, hundreds of unoptimised cloud textures, what else could happen but... tl;dr - optimise your add-ons