slow VFR scenery pop up

With 1 gig of ram and the rest of your specs you should get it done right.

Something is "stealing" the ram from the scenery rendering.
The most common, programs running in the background.

You can try turning down some of your setting sliders, clouds (as low as possible), traffic (sucks ram fast) and autogen.

Turn off shadows, water. Mip map at 4-5, don't have AA box checked in settings, do that in the cards control panel.

You seem to like "eye candy" (scenery)as much as I do so leave that alone even though it also eats ram.

Cap your FPS at 30.

You have to "play" with your settings, let us know how you do and watch what those background programs, sometimes rebooting before you fly gets rid of some.
I've never used this but I understand it works quite well, look at all the downloads.

https://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/files/2948/fsautostart-v11/

Thanks for the reply - I'll carry on playing, and certainly try some of the tweaks that you mentioned like turning down the clouds which I hadn't thought of.

I find the settings of FS2004 incredibly frustrating - it almost seems that microsoft have gone into nanny overdrive have provided all these sliders and buttons within the display settings but except for silly tips like 'increasing this will decrease performance', there is no real technical details about what each option will do and which parts of your system it will affect i.e. which parts eat the ram, and considering that the majority of FS2004 users generally have a fairly good technical ability (I'm an Aerospace Systems Engineer) it would have been nice to have a few more details in there.

Oh well - I'll get back you if I have any results.

Thanks once again 😀

I know just what you mean. The "mouse overs" that show you the messages are of some help but there wasn't any documentation from MS about the sim.

MS builds the sim to be faster than existing computers and then lets the machines play catch up. Just when you have a machine that can handle it maxed out they come out with a new bloated, graphic intensive version.

It's a tradeoff when you play with the sliders, some are more "delicate" than others.

Good luck and let us know how you are doing.

Just thought I'd get back and give you progress report on my problems with VFR scenery.

First off - I downloaded that utility for closing the programs and the services and it makes one hell of a difference. I can now run FS2004 with everything, and I mean everything turned up full with little or no reduction in performance. I've also managed to overclock my video and PC by about 10% so another improvement.

Unfortunately, no luck with the VFR - I think the simple fact of the matter is that I need more RAM. It's fine when you start flying but after a while the PC has to transfer different files to the RAM, and at that point everything slows down - it just can't keep up.

It's been an interesting bit of research anyway, and thanks for your assistance.

Glad to hear that the utility helped, too bad that you can't get the resulkts that your looking for.
You have a very good computer setup but I guess more is needed for something like that.

Hi,

Check your drivers. I have got rid of some similar and quite annoying issues (Radeon card, for sure) by installing replacement drivers by Omega. Go to their website at www.omegadrivers.net and get yourself a new set. They are free and might just be your solution.

Sidney Starkey (Sid Star)
Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Hi Sidney,

Thanks for your help - I've replaced my drivers with the ones you've suggested, and I think it is a bit better.

I've also made some more progress with the blurry scenery problem. It seems to be all about knowing how to tweak the fs9.cfg file - I've found one link (shown below) but I've also found that by typing in different variables of the cfg file into a search engine that there is a lot more info out there.

(dead link removed)

I've also had a look at the forum at Justflight.com and found a lot more information there, so finally I've got my system to a point where I'm happy with it. 😀

I have the VFR series(though its not on the PC at the moment due to a reinstall of Windows )

If I remember correctly 🤔 If you click Start/programs/VFR Scenery you get a box where you can tweak the scenery.I seem to remember a distance setting(before you start Fs9 🙄 )

Or am I thinking of something else

I've had a play around with those settings, but it doesn't seem to make all that much difference - I've found the terrain settings in the .cfg file have the most effect as it allows you to set a circular boundary from your aircraft that defines the drawing distance - it may well be that these settings in the VFR control panel thingy are hooked up to the variables in the .cfg file, but for me they didn't seem to make much difference.

Dave C

Only just found these forums so I know its gonna be a late reply but do you have extended terrain textures ticked? I had a similar problem and that solved it. Didnt even realise that it unticked itself when I installed the patch