04: Higher frames and better looks

*Click images for larger versions

By installing the texture pack I referred to in chapter two I was able to get the sim up to mid twenties on the frames in the 757. In the air however frames went up to 50 as autogen had less impact on the system. Flying with normal framerate is nice and I tried several settings to see if I was able to get some decent clouds. On my "home" sim I use Prepar3D v3 with REX soft clouds and as I have an official license to use the software I installed it in FSX as well. Even on the ground I was rewarded a few additional frames per second (sidenote: 512 x 512 low resolution textures installed). My frames nearly reached the thirty mark from a few hundred feet above ground to fifty at cruise level.

At UK2000's Luton and Aerosoft Dusseldorf I was getting mid twenties which I accept as it looked smooth enough and well... Let's be honest, it is a tablet after all. 

Now that I had decent frames on the ground it was time to try make the simulator look appealing to the eye. 

First in line was FTX Global which is replacing the default ground textures in the simulator for much better looking ones. I'm not sure if I gained better performance from the sim or not, but I do know for sure that it had absolutely no impact on the frames in a negative way. 

FTX Global does make the simulator look much more realistic and at no frame hit there is absolutely nothing to lose. Second I installed REX textures direct and again I went for the lowest resolution possible however I omitted the cloud textures as these were imported via soft clouds.  The picture at the start of this chapter is from 10.000 feet above Holland using FTX Global, REX soft clouds and Texture Direct. I deliberately left the framecounter active which was locked at 30 when I took the screenshot.

I also installed the QualityWings 146 pack but the flightdeck didn't look great on a sim where only anisotropic filtering is used as anti aliasing is causing to much impact on the frames. Furthermore I think that the 2D panels of QW aircraft leave much to be desires compared to the PMDG 737 or the recently released Dash 8 Pro by Majestic. 

Lately I installed FTX Open landclass EU just to see the effect on the sim and it's performance. Again the folks at fullterrain did a good job in making sure their software did not slow down the simulator while improving the terrain graphics even more. 

Below is a picture with OpenLC Europe enabled when we fly at 5.000 feet Southeast of Amsterdam near Hilversum. 

You might have noticed there is no autogen present. Even with FTX Trees I experienced lower frames and blurry ground textures as the system had to shift to much resources in drawing autogen. However with FTX Global and OpenLC enabled I think the sim looks good enough already and I am prepared to sacrifice some trees and houses for crisper scenery and higher frames. 

Below are the in sim settings:

I have not tried to activate any traffi yet but as I start using this system more often it will be nice so see how the system copes with some IVAO traffic added. In the next chapter we see if the Dash 8 from Majestic and the PMDG 737 NGX are viable options on a low spec system....