FSX and texture loading times

**magnetite** · 06-20-2011, 10:19 AM

Hey guys,

Had some questions about texture loading. Currently, I have FSX installed on a 2 TB WDC Black drive and seem to be getting some blurry textures when flying at 250 knots and around 3000 ft. AGL. I just wanted to confirm, is this my hard drive that's making textures blur? Or is it FSX's engine not being able to keep up? My system specs are in my signature. I get around 40-50 FPS sitting at KLAX with most settings on Ultra, except for those which eat up FPS, such as AI traffic (planes, road vehicles, ships). Autogen is dense/dense.

**noell** · 06-20-2011, 11:11 AM

Blurring should not be an issue at 250 KIAS and 3000' AGL.
I don't have the problem with FSX on an SSD nor did I have the problem when running FSX from a hard drive.
I'm thinking your problem is probably related to system/FSX settings.
Have you:
Set up up FSX following this guide?
Are you using Nvidia Inspector as detailed in this guide?
Have you optimized your fsg.cfg file using this utility?

**magnetite** · 06-20-2011, 11:20 AM

Thanks, I'll look into it. I guess the blurring wasn't happening with the textures close to me, but say 10 miles ahead, they were blurry.

**cianpars** · 06-20-2011, 01:12 PM

That being the case, you could try a higher seting for the LOD_radius in the fsx.cfg

I use 8.5. This does give a greater area of sharp coverage but flights take longer to load.

If you use this, it alutomatically reverts back to default if you make any changes in the graphics area of fsx though.

IAN

**magnetite** · 06-22-2011, 01:53 PM

Sounds good. I've been considering putting FSX on my SSD again, which should help loading times, but mine is only 128 GB, so I might have to buy another one in order to fit my 90 GB install on there. I was concerned though that if I was to put it on there that since FSX reads so many textures that it would use up my reads/writes since SSD's don't have infinite read/writes like regular hard drives.

Also I guess after reading through those guides, everything is fixed, and I got an extra 10 FPS or so to boot.

***loki*** · 06-22-2011, 02:41 PM

I was concerned though that if I was to put it on there that since FSX reads so many textures that it would use up my reads/writes since SSD's don't have infinite read/writes like regular hard drives.

Reading textures won't wear out the drive. It's the process of writing and deleting that wears them down. Even then you would need to constantly write to and delete from every sector of the drive 24/7 for the next 3-5 years before running into problems. This isn't really all that different than most consumer level hard drives which often die due to mechanical failure after about 5 years.