Has anyone tried this (yet another tweak)

[Mozz]

I was searching for any new tweaks that may have come to light that might improve FS performance. I stumbled upon this one:
http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az= ... _id=143032
Sorry if this has come up before but has anyone tried this tweak?
Thanks

[4_Series_Scania]

I was searching for any new tweaks that may have come to light that might improve FS performance. I stumbled upon this one:
http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az= ... _id=143032
Sorry if this has come up before but has anyone tried this tweak?
Thanks

If you have XP and your HD is NTFS format, then perhaps, I'm not convinced it'll make that much of an improvement.

The best improvement I've found for FS9 was my new card....

[sonic]

I'll try it now Got to reinstall xp so got nothing to lose. Let you no how it goes.

[sonic]

I really didnt see enough of a diffrence I went from 9 gigs to 4.5 though, But really no noticable diffrence If disk space is low might be worth it.

[MattNW]

I don't really see how that will help much. If you compress the folder then to use a file out of it the computer has to decompress it before loading it into memory that's one extra step so it shouldn't help performance at all. If anything it should make it worse because of the extra decompression step.

[Hyperion2]

If you guys read the entire thread it talks about the same topics.  There was one poster I agree with that said something to the effect of "Who cares if it should or shouldn't work?  If it's working for you, that's all that matters."

It wasn't long ago that the Wright Brothers were told "that will never work, it just doesn't make sense"...

[Mozz]

Good point there  ;D. Thanks for all the help guys. Might give it a go, and if I do, I'll post some results.

[w4p]

On my "middle of the road" machine, noticed no fps change, but did notice a bit more smoothness when making that first 360* pan.

[Tom.]

how do you compress the folder just zip or rar it?

[Mozz]

If your system is NTFS, then you can just right click the drive/folder and click on properties on the drop down menu, and then just tick the compression box.

[Jared]

If you read the rest of the posts in the link provided above it tells you how to do it..

I've done this for some time now, not really to get performance or save space, but just because I could.

I have had no problem in doing so.

One of the responses on the forum provided in the link kind of made sense when he said that doing so would decrease the amount of space used on the Hard drive, thus allowing the read head of the drive to read more files, more quickly in a way...

Anyways, made sense to me...lol

[Weather_Man]

There is no reason to compress your files unless you are running out of disk space. Decompression adds more work for the CPU and that's supposed to increase performance? I think most of those who say it's great only "feel" like they've improved something. It's a very subjective thing. No one provided any data to show it's faster and I'm dubious anyone can prove it.

I may see a valid point on slower systems/HDDs where it can find the compressed files (milliseconds) faster, load into memory and then decompress faster than the HDD can find an uncompressed file and load it to memory. But, that's probably stretching it.  Faster HDDs and memory should see no real benefit from this and probably would impact performance negatively.

It sounded like many of the posters believe that the game is actually reading and displaying the compressed files in the game, which are smaller and thus give a performance boost. That does not happen. ALL files must be decompressed first before the application can use it. It's an extra, unnecessary step. In the end, the game is using the same uncompressed files as everyone else whether you use compression or not. This tweak defies logic.

[bschott]

There is no reason to compress your files unless you are running out of disk space. Decompression adds more work for the CPU and that's supposed to increase performance? I think most of those who say it's great only "feel" like they've improved something. It's a very subjective thing. No one provided any data to show it's faster and I'm dubious anyone can prove it.

I may see a valid point on slower systems/HDDs where it can find the compressed files (milliseconds) faster, load into memory and then decompress faster than the HDD can find an uncompressed file and load it to memory. But, that's probably stretching it.  Faster HDDs and memory should see no real benefit from this and probably would impact performance negatively.

It sounded like many of the posters believe that the game is actually reading and displaying the compressed files in the game, which are smaller and thus give a performance boost. That does not happen. ALL files must be decompressed first before the application can use it. It's an extra, unnecessary step. In the end, the game is using the same uncompressed files as everyone else whether you use compression or not. This tweak defies logic.

True.  I have a high end system with a monster HDD (with an 8MB cache) so this would actually hurt my performance.

The other tweaks could help.