If there ever was a Dunce Award....

[beeker46]

..then I would have won it hands down today. I should have known, how many years I have been doing this now..going on, what, 30 years of flight simming? Hand me that danged Dunce Award, I earned it for today.

Why?

Over the past year I have been adding a little more and a little more to FSX-SE (ORBX, REX Skyforce, etc.) and other than using the recommended settings for ORBX, I had left pretty much all other display settings alone. Then, when flying in high(er) density areas like NYC, my frame rates would suffer badly. So, I started tweaking stuff, lowering traffic percentages, bringing scenery complexities down, overclocking the GPU, you get the idea. Some improvement, but nothing at all what I wanted to achieve, nothing like it had been before I started adding stuff. Then I was looking at the scenery tab, and way down at the bottom, the last setting there.. 'Water', and where did I have my setting at? 2X Max. Yup, the highest. I never bothered to move that slider since none of the added material mentioned it, so I had left it where I had placed it from the beginning, before I added all the goodies. Sitting at LaGuardia, and seeing numbers in the low teens for frame rates..then I changed that slider to 2X Low, and Wham-o, frame rates back up to 25+ (I have my frames locked at 30, and 1/2 setting in that nvidia tweaker program thing).

There are some new forehead-shaped dents on the top of my desk, and matching bruises on my forehead right now, lol.. I can set my shiny new Dunce Award there, to cover those dents... Hey, I'm getting older, pre-Senile stage here, or close enough to it to start using that as an excuse...

[Tom/CalClassic]

I also keep my water on Low, glad you got yourself squared away.

[Herman]

Interesting discovery. I'll have to try that change in the Water setting. Don't be too hard on yourself. Watch out for concussions.

Herman

[beeker46]

If you are using the default water textures it may not be a big change, as I was using REX water textures which is more detailed. Anyhow, anything to ease the burden on the CPU would be a boon. Since I spend the majority of my flight simming above 5,000 feet, those pretty waves I had going where not showing up anyway, and since LaGuardia is nearly surrounded by water, the impact there is very high. Like motor vehicles, your individual mileage may vary.

[stansdds]

The water setting in FSX can bring a significant improvement in scenery realism, but it comes at a cost. The same goes for cloud coverage and cloud textures. High resolution cloud textures look nice, but the higher the resolution, the greater the impact on performance. Add on 3rd party scenery and aircraft, plus AI and the CPU can quickly become log jammed.