game loading time

[sagamol]

How can one speed up the load time when starting FSX. what causes the slow load times?

[JSkorna]

Hi,

1. Buy a ssd.

2. Defrag, defrag, defrag.

3. Add-on scenery, planes, AI planes.

[torkermax]

Specialy the amount of AI planes.

[cianpars]

Photoscenery is the worst culprit.

IAN

[noell]

Hi,

1. Buy a ssd.

2. Defrag, defrag, defrag.

3. Add-on scenery, planes, AI planes.

So no one gets the wrong idea re defragging - if you have an SSD, you DO NOT defrag it. Doing so can shorten the lifespan of an SSD and is not necessary anyway as reading adjacent data blocks is no faster than reading data blocks that are spread out over the drive. Jim's defrag advice, therefore, applies only to mechanical drives.

As for FSX load time, another thing that can lengthen load time is the value you've set for LOD_RADIUS in fsx.cfg.
For example, going from the default value of 4.5 to a value of 6.5 pretty well doubles the load time.

[cianpars]

Yep, the LOD_radius thing really does make a difference. I have to use 8.5 to make my UK VFR scenery look anything other than blurry and you can imagine the loading times I experience (LOD_radius and photoscenery).

IAN

[Foxtrot789]

Out of curiosity, what OS on your running?

Before my HDD crashed last month; XP would take about 10-15 minutes from 'computer off' to 'plane sitting on ground at chosen airport.'

With Windows 7 it's about 3 minutes - pretty much the same settings and add-ons as how it was before with XP.

Of course the down-side seems to be Windows 7 having a significantly larger volume of programs that are running in the background and it's nowhere near as stable as XP - go figure.