Performance issues at NZCH

[toprob]

I'll elaborate on this when I get back to work, probably next week, but in the meantime here's a few things you can try if you are having performance issues.
Both high-quality shadows and dynamic reflections can be heavy hitters, and while I recommend having both on, these can be tweaked to see if it makes a difference. Personally, I prefer high shadow settings, (with almost everything casting/receiving shadows) but this does slow it down a bit.
Dynamic reflections are use at NZCH, but I like low to mid settings rather than all the way up. This helps the appearance in some cases, as well as the performance.
On lower-end systems, you can set the scenery complexity to normal, and this will thin out the vehicles and clutter.
With the nearby city, with almost 140,000 autogen buildings and an estimated half a million trees, this can also tax some system, so try lower settings for both building and vegetation autogen.

[Nodrog]

Thanks for this. It solved the issues I was having with stuttering/lag. After playing with the Lighting settings in P3D a bit, I found I could still have shadow quality at high or ultra, needed to reduce the shadow draw range down to medium, so long as I un-ticked 'terrain' as it seemed to be the heaviest hitter for shadows.

NZCH is a bit of a masterpiece! I can't get over how much of Christchurch and the surrounding area you've included and the airport just looks awesome, especially at dusk when the lighting just adds to it all. Well done on persevering with such a big project.

[toprob]

Thinking this over lately, you are certainly right -- although I recommend having shadows (cast/receive) turned on for buildings and simobjects, this does mean a lot of shadows on the thousands of autogen buildings in the city. Although it's great to see autogen all the way to the Port Hills, that's probably not going to help performance-wise. So leaving autogen settings high-ish, but reducing the range, is a good way to go.