Hi All,

I was playing around with filemonitor to see if I could find out why FSX frame rates where dropping for me after about an hour of flight. Memstatus would start off at about 800K and end up around 1700k an hour later in the same region. Anyways in searching I found out something else that interested me. (BTW I have no mem leaks I can see)

Understanding that I do not have any programming knowledge, I was wondering HOW MUCH the following would contribute to the reason framerates are such a hit at larger airports, or why studders are so promminant near them? Or if this sort of thing is normal. I noticed that most of the land textures, buildings etc and related items are always found on the first query. It it most promenent with the aircraft, boats and ground vehicles.

A: Only the main texture folder of each aircraft has the pilot, bump, specular & reflection - textures in them. All other variants (ie: texture.2) do not. On average I see that about 10-14 unsucessful queries are made until these textures are located and read.

B: Repeat the above searching for the Specular,Bump & LM textures for the Ships and ground vehicles.

B: Most of the VEH_air ***** ground vehicles, the calls for textures end up on a goose chase - again making about 10 or so queries (including ones like D:/Program Files/Textures ??) Some of them are within thier respective folder, but others are in the main Scenery/Global/Texture folder (even though they are only for that model)

C: Every time GLOBALENV_AC_CHROME.DDS is called for (on every airplane), it again takes an average of about 14 unsucessful queries until the texture is finally found. This includes it going back to read the scenery index to find the location (which for me is on a different drive), and then it still takes about another 6 queries to finally find it in the root texture folder.

D: You can repeat this whole "query chase" thing for quite a bit of "NON TERRAIN" textures, including queries for gauges (eg: 737_400.dll).

You should download filemonitor and try it to see exactly what I mean. You can get it here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/FileAndDisk/Filemon.mspx
I configured mine to "include" FSX, and HIGHLIGHT "NOT FOUND".

Hey Garret. Your post got me thinking about the consistently worsening stutters I've been getting with fsx, especially during long flights. So taking your suggestion (thanks!) I loaded up filemon, ran a complete session for an hour, jumping all over the place, saved out the log and sat down to take a good long look at it.

All I can say is, what a mess!

It's not just aircraft textures that FSX is having issues locating, it's just about everything. Aircraft textures are mostly load once and forget about it, so I was more curious to see what insanity was going on with the scenery, which is constantly being loaded and dumped.

1. It looks in the fsx/texture folder for textures that are in fsx/scenery/global/texture or fsx/scenery/world/texture folders about half the time. The other half it does exactly the opposite, and generally looks two to four times until it gets the right one.

2. Half of the autogen textures are in the wrong format. It'll be looking for a DDS file and there's only a BMP, or vice versa. On top of that about half the bmp files are inefficient palettized 8 bit images, when they'd be better off as dxt1's. Yuk.

3. It's constantly looking for a series of missing fs9 style AGN autogen description bitmaps that simply don't exist. And by constantly I mean every 10th sim event at least, no matter where you are.

Ugh!

So I set aside the better part of the day to sort out this mess, starting with autogen. I moved all the textures that were named correctly to the places FSX wanted to find them first. Then I loaded in all the bmps that were supposed to be dds files and converted them to that, and vice versa with dds's that were supposed to bmps. I tried creating dummy agn files to replace the missing ones it was looking for, but that just resulted in losing rural autogen for the most part, forests etc. Really not sure what's up with that one, but then I'm no scenery design guru.

Anyway, the upshot of spending a day fixing some of this dog's breakfast?

Scenery load times are considerably faster, microstutters are down about 90%, and framerate is up at least 20%. All my track-ir quick panning stutters are all but gone. Seattle, full autogen, both seatac and boeing field in view, as well as downtown, silky smooth 25 fps locked. Prior to that I'd be lucky to get 20 fps with normal autogen, and turns were a stutter fest. And yeah, the drive is in perfect shape fragmentation wise, and dedicated to FSX.

Umm...optimization? I don't think they had time. Ouch.

I'll post a full list of what I did soon, but the results so far just with fixes to non-region specific autogen are amazing. I haven't even looked at aircraft yet.

Cheers, and thanks for the tip.

Haldir