Decrease Texture Quality?

[Russell Irwin]

Fair warning: I know next to nothing about how textures are categorized and rated. All I know is that 32bit is better than 16bit and that 2048x2048 is as high as FSX can go.

If this thread is in the wrong category, forgive me; this was the best match.

I'm having bad frame rates with some of the payware and high-end freeware I download, such as Just Flight's 757 Freemium. The aircraft (esp. the VC) has extremely low FPS as opposed to my other aircraft, and I believe that the HD textures (the Just Flight website doesn't provide the exact pixel count, but it's certainly up there) are to blame. Is there a way to adjust these textures so that they are more frame rate-friendly, preferably with Paint.net?

[garymbuska]

You need to provide system specs. Without them it would be a wild guess .
The only thing I can tell you is that FSX is CPU speed hungry and ram hungry as well.
If you want to get good frame rates than you need to have a solid system.
Now that does not mean you need to rob a bank but if you have to create a brand new system it will cost you around $900.00 and this will get you a fairly descent system.
But if you do not have a good case to put every thing into that can run around $200 to $300 extra.
I just finished building the system I have in January this year I had to get the following new equipment.
Mother Board;CPU;RAM;Video Card;Power Supply and a new Operating system.
mother board Asus P8Z68-V/Gen 3
ram 12 gigs 1800 hz
CPU intel Quad core processor with Sandy bridge (ivy bridge is out now)
Video Card GTX 550 TI
Power Supply 1,000 watt gold sata ready
Operating system Windows 8 64 bit
mother board alone was $200.00

[Fozzer]

The Lads are definitely right when it comes to computer specifications suitable to run FSX smoothly at anywhere near maximum settings...

My lowly computer* will run FSX after a fashion, but many of the most useful/desirable settings have to be reduced to the point when the result is vastly inferior to my FS 2004 with its maximum settings.

So until I am prepared to spent a LOT of money on building a special, suitable FSX computer (which I am not, at present) I have to suffer the disappointment until I am prepared to do so!

* My satisfactory FS 2004 set-up:
Dell Dimension 5000 BTX Tower. Win7 Home Edition, 32 Bit. Intel Pentium 4, dual 2.8 GHz. 2.5 GB system memory, nVidia GF 9500GT 1GB. SATA HDD 500GB + 80GB. Philips 17" LCD Monitor. Micronet ADSL Modem only. Saitek Cyborg Evo Force. FS 2004 + FSX.

Spending money depends upon priorities... ...!

I reckon if you want to get the very best from FSX, you have to be prepared to spend quite a lot of money!

Paul... ...!

[Russell Irwin]

Guys, I'm sorry, but you're not answering my question. If I had wanted to increase FSX performance in general, I would have asked. What I need is a way to increase performance with this one aircraft, which tends to cause a 5-8 FPS loss as opposed to other aircraft.

[Apex]

In my experience with texture adjustments in FS9, and maybe this could apply to FSX also altho I cannot say for sure, the answer is that texture adjustments will not greatly, perhaps not at all, affect frame rates.

I have experimented with converting from 32 bit to DXT3 with no change. These formats are not used in FSX (I don't think), but the same principal should apply.

I have seen certain aircraft in FS9 cause a drop in frame rates. It's probably one of those aircraft that I experimented with.

But again, I can't comment specifically on FSX.

For me personally, when I encountered a problematic aircraft in the past, and there have been enough of them, whatever the problem is, be it frame rates, not so great flight dynamics, whatever, I usually just drop that aircraft. There's plenty to chose from out there.

So in conclusion, I don't think there's a way to improve frame rates by texture adjustments. There's much more to frame rates than just textures, the entire aircraft may be coming into play.

[CHUCK79]

Seems to me that if your TextureMaxLoad in the FSX cfg. file is set to 1024 or below FSX won't even display high res textures. If this is true, changing the res of your A/C textures will have no effect on performance

[Fozzer]

I

......For me personally, when I encountered a problematic aircraft in the past, and there have been enough of them, whatever the problem is, be it frame rates, not so great flight dynamics, whatever, I usually just drop that aircraft. There's plenty to chose from out there......

Also my cure for all annoying problems involving aircraft, etc, etc... ...!

So many other excellent choices!

Any problems with any of my Payware/Freeware Add-on Scenery, etc, and I just dump them!

Paul... ...!