killer clouds

[jonathandevers]

Greetings,

I'm having some trouble getting reasonable FPS on my FS9 install in the presence of clouds. My computer isn't fantastic, but it's running a dual core process, 2gig memory, 256mb shared graphics card, and I'm pretty much able to have all my sliders far right w/o a problem.

I have autogen on extremely dense, 100% ai traffic, and I can get 40 fps in the air, down a bit at an airport but generally still high and always smooth.

Until the addition of clouds. Clouds kill my FPS. I can't stomach the non-3d clouds, so that isn't an option. I tried turning everything off, all sliders left, no AI, and the clouds still drop my FPS to the single digits.

Hm, what other info. I have antialiasing set to trilinear within FS9. I read that it's better to use your graphics card settings to control your antialias, but to be honest, when I use the graphics card setting, my FPS drop to nothing. When I let FS9 control it, my FPS goes back up to 40.

My computer isn't fantastic, but I'm running dual core processor, 2gig mem, 256mb shared graphics card (the card is crap, but like I said, everything can be ultra high, just not the clouds).

Clear skies is killing me, I want snow!

Thanks for any advice...

[windrunner]

Well your pc is not that bad (and it's 100 times faster than mine). Clouds are textures requiring a big amount of memory of your video card. My advice: install other clouds files (do a search at usual places for DXT3 clouds that are 1\2 heavier than default ans still 3D). Weather settings should be:

Visibility: 60mi-80km (you don't get more than 80km in real life anyway)
Distance: 50mi-80km (samw thing here)
Clouds %: 80-90 8try with less if you still have low fps; around 50 still will be more than nice)
Detailed clouds: maxed


And, of course, you can't have it all: ai traffic at 100% THAT SETTING is an fps killer (and may be a little unrealistic). Put it on the 40-60% region.

Trilinear is OK.

[jonathandevers]

Hrm, cloud replacement textures helped a bit, instead of single digits I can get 14 fps in heavy clouds. Maybe defragging would help too. I might just do a full reinstall as well...

[jonathandevers]

Best solution found: Active Sky 6.5. Ah, I feel like such a goober...it's almost 2009 and here I am just now getting into FS9 and purchasing payware for it....

In any case, FPS will still be an issue on my computer, but the 64 bit DXT3 textures from AS look better than the 256x256 32-bit I was using, and I can work the sliders to get workable FPS. Plus, it does haze really well which means I can turn off distant scenery and it still looks good ;D