Clouds Killing my frame rates

[Dan Morera]

What do you guys use for clouds? Any trick to ease on the frame impact of them?

I need my clouds and storms without them the sim lacks reality in my book. I would love to get those really dark storm clouds with nice lightning strikes.

Thanks
Dan

I almost forgot my current settings:
Sight distance: 60mi/90km
cloud draw distance: 30mi/48km
3d cloud percentage: 30
detailed clouds is checked
cloud coverage density: medium

[a1]

What are your computer specs? I have my cloud settings at in the order 60-30-100 Detailed Medium. I get around 15-18 FPS in the storm weather depending on the area. From my experiences I don't think that changing the cloud textures help in the FPS.  ;)

[Sir_Crashalot]

Hi Dan,

Changing cloud textures will help. If I remember well there are freeware alternative DTX3 cloud textures that reduce the load on your frames. Don't ask where to find them. I use them from Flight 1 Flight Enviroment. Maybe somebody else can help with that.

Changing the sight distance to 20 or 30 miles instead of the 60 miles you have now could also help. You can do this in 'User defined weather' under the Advanced button.

Crash

[garymbuska]

What do you guys use for clouds? Any trick to ease on the frame impact of them?

I need my clouds and storms without them the sim lacks reality in my book. I would love to get those really dark storm clouds with nice lightning strikes.

Thanks
Dan

I almost forgot my current settings:
Sight distance: 60mi/90km
cloud draw distance: 30mi/48km
3d cloud percentage: 30
detailed clouds is checked
cloud coverage density: medium

I use Active sky which comes with its own cloud textures and find they are more frame rate friendly than the default textures. One of the options is the ability to pick your own clouds to form a theme so to speak that way if you find one cloud type harder on frame rate then you can try a different type of texture for that cloud.
I know I have said this before but Active Sky is the best weather program out there and they just made one for use with FSX. 8-)

[DizZa]

What videocard do you have?

My X850XTPE runs 512x512 DXT3 textures awsomely.

[Dan Morera]

This is my set up:

Intel (R) Pentium(R) D CPU 3.00GHZ (2CPUS)
1 GB RAM
DIRECT X9
RADEON X300 SE 128 MB HYPERMEMORY (ATI) 32 BIT 60HZ
160 GB Hard Drive

Sir Crashalot:

Changing the sight distance to 20 or 30 miles instead of the 60 miles you have now could also help. You can do this in 'User defined weather' under the Advanced button.

Can I do that and still use real weather?

Any more votes for Active Sky?

Thanks guys
Dan

[garymbuska]

I hate to sound like a sponsor for Active sky but I can not help it. To me this program is that good I love the clouds and it leaves FS real world weather in the dust. That was one of the things that used to bother me was you use real world weather with updates but when you fly the weather does not change very realistically. No problem with active sky You can load your flight plans into it and it will down load the weather from the closet point for each of your way points giving you the weather at each point. And it comes with its own radar that you do not have to put in any plane just press crtl + F12 and it pops up you then load your flight plan into that as well and it gives you live weather radar. 8-)

[DizZa]

Hyper memory is were the videocard will use your system RAM as VRAM. This is incredibly slow.

Try using 256x256 DXT3 clouds or even 128x128 DXT3 clouds.