Mario Donick

It has always, since v1.0 of the Saab, been said that this limitation exists and won't be changed.

The GNS530 is X-Plane's default GNS (plus some fancy startup screens) and therefore uses the same navdata as the 430.

Thanks a lot!

Test flight of the REP-enhanced Carenado 210:

That's the display of AutoLOD (slightly modified in size and appearance). AutoLOD automatically ensures that your FPS are > 19 by adjusting the LOD of the visible objects (on my weak computer, it has success most of the time; sometimes, as on this screenshot, graphic settings are too high that even AutoLOD can't help anymore). It also allows you to enable or disable AA on the fly.

I suggest you use the OverlayEditor solution. It comes with a manual which explains everything in detail.

In the settings of your graphics driver, you should be able to select a scaling mode, usually you can select between proportional scaling, non-proportional (full screen) scaling or no scaling. Non-proportional means that the picture gets distorted (so that circles become ellipses). On my system, my native screen resolution is 1440x900, but since a while I play in 1280x720, because this is better for my FPS and also removes the need for resolution changes when recording videos (1280x720 is 720p HD). This gets up-scaled by the graphics driver in a way that the screen has no borders left and right. But as I chose proportional scaling, I have to live with black bars on the top and the bottom. Also, the picture is not as sharp as with native resolution. However, in the tradeoff between FPS, HDR and sharpness, I chose HDR+FPS, not sharpness without HDR. You'll need to find out the compromise that suits your own needs best.

Then please try my suggestions and see if it improves. Also (as I already said), using SkyMaxx Pro instead of default clouds + Autolod will give you a significant performance boost.

Okay, thanks. 20 to 25 is enough for real-time simulation. Things to try if you don't want to switch off HDR: reduce world detail distance to "low"disable antialiasingreduce your screen resolutionyou can probably increase texture quality to "very high" and set anisotropic filtering to 16Of course, if you combine these suggestions with switching off HDR, you should only rarely get any frame rate problems any more.

It depends. If the people telling you it's a waste simply would buy a new computer then yeah, it's a waste. But if you can't buy a new computer in the next few months or even in this year, but you can upgrade your RAM, I would say absolutely go for it. I consider 8 GB the absolute minimum one should have for XP 10 + addons.

Don't necessarily try my settings, but find the optimum for your system. That's why I asked you to post a screenshot of your settings, so we can look at it together. (To make a screenshot, press SHIFT + SPACE. It will be saved in the X-Plane directory.)

I'm not sure if you should give up that early. Your graphics card is 10% faster than mine, your CPU is roughly the same, the only thing worse than my computer is that you only have 4 GB RAM. So if I can use the Saab without problems, you should, too. The following are my rendering settings: Please note I have HDR enabled, but thanks to SkyMaxx Pro and Autolod I STILL get 20 FPS most of the time, esp. when in the air. Can you please post your settings in the same way?

Could you post your exact specifications, please? You said you are usually above 20 (when not recording), and so I'm sure we could also optimize your settings for the Saab. My computer is very weak (NVidia GT530 2 GB, 8 GB RAM, i5), and the Saab runs fine.

Video recording is of course an issue that worsens the problem. My suggestion is the following: Go to a town with dense autogen, for example Los Angeles, New York or Paris. Put yourself in the Saab. Set weather in a way that you have three cloud layers, incl. at least one overcast and one stratus. Set visibility to 20 sm. And then adjust your rendering settings that even under these conditions you get 19-20 FPS -- you will get much more FPS then in less straining conditions and are on the safe side. If don't know if you use SkyMaxx Pro, but I suggest you do, because performance of X-Plane's default clouds is not good. SkyMaxx Pro can give you between 5 and 15 FPS more (that's an estimation based on my own experience; depending on your system and your settings, of course. But even in low settings SkyMaxx Pro looks very good). If nothing else helps, don't use HDR, esp. not when making videos. On my system, I use HDR for screenshots and when flying just for fun, but I switch off HDR when making videos.

15 FPS is way too low for X-Plane. You need to have at least 19 FPS for real-time simulation. That it felt smooth to you is because X-Plane slows down the simulation when it's below 19 FPS. This way the animations are visually still smooth, but the in-game time is slower than real. Side effect is very often that systems don't work as intended, and fuel imbalances are a common issue then. I suggest you reduce your graphics settings until you get 19 FPS. Or you could try autolod which automatically decreases visibility of objects to ensure a given FPS.

How are your FPS? Sometimes aircraft system's logic brakes when FPS are too low.

Much better question: Is still being worked on this?