Frame rate comparison

[FlyerMike]

A question for Toprob
I get a much lower fps with the old Auckland City scenery in FSX than I do with the Wellington scenery (which is brilliant - I love the flight Wellington to Paraparaumu).
Is there a reason for this in the design or do you think it is my setup? (I am of course using the same display settings for both)
Cheers
Mike

[NZ255]

It's probably all those boats in the harbour. I havn't got it so can't really comment.

[scon]

Post SP2 I can not use RNZ AKL in FSX, I get these black lines down my screen, I can only put it down to how SP2 changed the way FSX handles scenery.

Best to wait for a FSX native version I think.

[creator2003]

Ive been running Auckland fine for ages even through sp1 sp2 and accerX ,since then ive removed buildings and left the default main ones installed this helps heaps to increase flps ,im waiting for XAucklandX
wellingtonX has always been heavier on flps for me so ive always thought Auckland ported version to X has worked better ...

[toprob]

The results reported here wouldn't surprise me -- there are a lot of variables with Auckland City, and different setups will give much different results. Part of the problem, of course, is backward compatibility -- scenery designed for FS2004 will never perform as well as scenery optimised for FSX. I admit that I don't know much about how the Auckland City scenery was produced -- I don't even know what tool was used to model it. The other issue is the autogen -- there is a lot of it around Auckland. I think it is the combination which slows it down. Wellington Airport is similar -- there is a lot of autogen close to the airport, and it is tricky to get the right balance of settings.

One thing I'm not too sure of, and I'll have to check on, is the texture format for the city buildings. It may be that they could be optimised a little. My city textures are DXT1 with mips, but I don't remember if the Auckland City release had these -- I might have changed them at some point. I'll have a look sometime and see if this could be an issue.

But with a scenery made up of large-scale aerial textures, 3D models and heaps of autogen (like Wellington and Auckland) two different systems and settings may produce vastly different results, depending of where the system and performance bottleneck is. For instance, a slower processor coupled with a good, fast graphics card with plenty of memory would be more bogged down by older-style models, whereas a fast processor but limited graphics would suffer from unoptimised textures.

Although it is possible to build a highly optimised scenery for FSX, and I plan to for Auckland, the sheer size of the scenery means that you won't get as good performance as default scenery. Good scenery requires more complex models, more textures and more autogen, so something has to give. You can't just wish that away. The goal is to create a scenery which is worth having despite the performance hit:)

[FlyerMike]

Thank you for the reply Rob.
Having a beefy system now I get good results with Wellington but was surprised that Auckland performed less well.
I think that as you say there are many variables and some can be optimised for FSX.
Certainly SP2 seems to have had an impact as I was running one of Gary Summons' extreme sceneries that was released in the early days of FSX, and getting ridiculous fps of 3-4! Then I found that he had released a post SP2 version and although it has had to forego some features, at least it is back to 40 fps - so I am happy.
Incidentally I noticed that he had corrected the "peculiar" tree problem - slight hint ....
I look forward to your new Auckland scenery but meanwhile back to Wellington.
Cheers
Mike