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Region questions concerning performance


rdg

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Hi, I just recently purchased Northern and Southern CA. Regions along with 4 airports for Northern. They are truly great products. I have always owned PNW which for myself and so many others fell in love with, and most would only fly in that region and northward. But, I am just curious about performance of Northern CA vs PNW. I know KSEA and surrounding area is heavy in terms of processing, and when flying a semi complex AC like the RealAir Lancair, there is considerable lag and performance issues around the KSEA area both day and dusk/night. But, when I fly out of say KSFO even with 50% traffic, I lock at 30 frames and it is really smooth. So I was wondering if there is any differences as far as how the areas are programmed, or the assets that were used between the two regions.  Are there differences in performance due to different programming techniques possibly? I even chopped the Autogen in 1/2  and still issues. I then cut the shadows from high to medium, to no avail. I then when from high to medium radius, and still no change. Logically it would seem there is a difference somewhere . I have done no tweaks with the exception of the RUNWAY lights, but that is of course the same between regions. 

 

One other question. Vector Road Lights ON/OFF. Is this a Global addon, as I see no difference using Regions. This might be answered in the docs but computer is off (-:

 

Bob

 

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This should really be posted in the support forum, so I'll move it and leave a link for you ok?

 

The Seattle area and indeed the Puget Sound area has always been an FPS black hole, even before you add the denser autogen of PNW. Similarly people are finding the same issue with the LA Basin. You could also say Greater London, Paris, NYC suffer from the same issues.

 

The reason for the FPS dip in Seattle is hard to explain because it's not a big urban sprawl. The only thing we can think of are that Aces (the original developers of FSX) spent considerable time making their home city a bit more polished, but in doing so they added a lot of unoptimised models in the area.

 

As for the LA Basin that is purely an autogen issue. FTX regions use much, much denser autogen building placement that default textures, mainly owing to using a truer scale of streets and housing, and by introducing inner urban classes that do not exist in default. As such, it's unwise to set your autogen slider past "Normal" unless you have a NASA-powered PC and a top-class GPU (if you're using Prepar3D).

 

You need to find a balance of visuals versus FPS in those areas. That's one of the reasons we created FSXgo, a launcher app that allows you to create different profiles depending on where you want to fly.

 

Try a process of elimination: Turn all sliders to the left, try a flight, move one slider one notch to the right, then repeat.

 

Pay particular attention to the vehicle and aircraft and boating traffic sliders, they are FPS killers. Read our user guide for the suggested settings as well; those are there for a reason. Finally avoid layering too many 3rd party addons on top of the sim, like real-time weather, AI traffic packs, camera apps, TrackIR - this all adds up to sucking horsepower from the CPU, and FSX needs as much CPU power as possible because all geometry is rendered using it.

 

Regarding Vector Road lights on/off, that is an FTX Central setting for regions only. There is a separate app shipped with FTX Global VECTOR that controls lights specific to all the globe. Keep in mind that our 3D lights use very little FPS, they are just autogen 'trees' using some trickery. You are far better off paying attention to the sliders, AI, traffic, weather distance, clouds - those things are far more FPS heavy than our lights.

 

Hope this helps.

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Thanks John, I will continue my optimization quest. With the vector road lights, I saw no difference with it on or off. What should I be seeing, say in and around KSEA? I took a snapshot both ON/OFF and see no difference. I have no addons for weather, traffic etc., just ORBX. I will try the bare bones approach and see where the biggest bump is. As mentioned previously,  I did cut many sliders but to no avail. 

 

You guys were able to supply a program which removed the lights during the day, but I do not remember what the exe was. Do you think that could be an issue? I was not sure if this removal of the lights during daylight hours was a feature the P3D supported.

 

Regards

Bob

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You need to install the latest Orbxlibs, that will ensure you are using the libraries applicable to our regions. Also make sure you are using the latest build of PNW, it was patched a while ago to add the FTX Global style 3D lights. Those older app to turn lights on/off have been redundant for over two years now.

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You are probably eating dinner about now, but yes I am in process of that. But, had to kill some weeds around the house, clean the pool filter, wash the dog, wash my truck, sweep up the dog hair in the house, bug spray inside and out. Now I can sit down for an hour or so. YES!

 

Thanks for you help!

 

Bob

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  • 4 weeks later...
Quote

You need to find a balance of visuals versus FPS in those areas. That's one of the reasons we created FSXgo, a launcher app that allows you to create different profiles depending on where you want to fly.

@John Venema

Yes FSXgo is small but of great use. I use it a lot with FSX.
Now I decided to take a look at P3D, but unfortunately FSXgo doesn't seem to work.
So a simple question ! Do you plan to have a version for P3D.

Best regards

Claude

 

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Tweaks for FSX ruin P3D.

Oui ..

Quote

so are the tools

Not necessarily, for me FSXgo is a tool just to edit the config file without the risk of mixing everything, and it will be nice to have it for P3D.

 

By the way Richard... Any news about Clacton.

 

Cheers... 

Claude

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