I have been having no trouble loading textures; however, the textures that are loading are the ones directly below the aircraft, which I cannot see at FL350. I have been tweaking the LOD_RADIUS value in fsx.cfg to above the maximum that the slider allows, but have not been having much luck. Based on my specs (bottom of my signature), does anybody know what value I should be putting in this and if I should be tweaking any other variables?

Thanks,
boeing247

boeing247 wrote on Jul 17^th, 2011 at 5:38am:

I have been having no trouble loading textures; however, the textures that are loading are the ones directly below the aircraft, which I cannot see at FL350. I have been tweaking the LOD_RADIUS value in fsx.cfg to above the maximum that the slider allows, but have not been having much luck. Based on my specs (bottom of my signature), does anybody know what value I should be putting in this and if I should be tweaking any other variables? Thanks, boeing247

All the changes that I make regarding the level of detail are in the Settings > Display > Scenery options. I move the sliders up or down to make the changes. I do not ever remember changing the LOD_RADIUS in fsx.cfg. The ones that you are dealing with are probably controlled by

Terrain and water
Level of detail radius: Small/Medium/Large (see image)

Mark

---

Yes, I have been using the sliders, but setting the radius to large gives a LOD_RADIUS value of 4.5, which does not load enough textures and is less than my computer can handle, so it seems. By tweaking the fsx.cfg file you can set the radius to higher than the slider allows, and I was wondering if anybody knew the best above-maximum setting.  ;)

I use between 5.5 and 8.5 depending on what and where im flying. An example would be, Over PNW 5.5 to 6.5 and over photo real scenery 8.5 :)

The best setting depends on what your pc can handle as using a high lod will chew up gfx memory but at FL350 the textures are not as detailed as if you was flying at 4000ft. This was done to save memory but it has more side effects than good ones imo and one of the things that ruined fsx ( multi lod textures are not always needed if you have a visibility limit but that was not put in to fsx )

Thanks.  :) I tried 9.5, which worked but made the textures under the plane a little blurry, so I set it to 7.5, which I haven't tested yet. What are your system specs?

My system specs are,

CPU - i7 960 @ stock speed
GFX - GTX470
Memory - OCZ 6gig DDR3 @ 1600mhz
Boot Drive - Corsair F60 SSD
FSX Drive - WD 150gig velociraptor
1tb drive for photo scenery
XFI Extreme Music ( Using Creative Alchemy to force fsx to use openal as it works with win 7 but not vista )
Windy 7 Ultimate x64

Its not the fastest pc but i have tuned fsx to the way i fly which is slow and low and high and fast so i do use more than one fsx.cfg :)

Okay, that's more or less similar to my system, so your settings should work on mine. 7.5 is working pretty well for me on the 767, so I'll try 8.5 with a smaller aircraft.

Just so you know,

A high LOD settings tends to work best with a high AF setting, i have my anisotropic filtering set to x16.

You would be better off asking about this at the AVSIM Hardware forum or the SimForums. Seems the real hardware gurus hang out there. I am not one of them, but I read all that stuff.

If you have not read Nick Needham's guides on setting up your operating system, loading FSX and tweaking FSX you really should, as HE is, by far, the ultimate guru on everything FSX ---- hardware AND software. His guides can be found here:

XP Guide -

http://www.simforums.com/Forums/topic29041.html

Windows 7 Guide -

http://www.simforums.com/forums/forum_posts.asp?TID=34141&PID=198187#198187

As FSX is so very much CPU bound I would guess that all the advanced tweaking, and high scenery settings, including LOD, require an overclocked cpu at 4.4 or above. That's along with the rest of a well balanced high end system.

I have a 5 year old system that was state of the art back then. It's a Q6600 quad core running at 3.6Ghz, 4 Gigs of ram and 3 WD 10000 Raptors etc and I run LOD no higher than 5.5. I also have Affinity Mask set at 14; Buffer Pools at 80g; and a couple other tweaks from Nick's guide. Am waiting for Flight and Ivy Bridge for a new rig.

I would recommend NickN guide to any beginner in tweaking fsx and windows but for me only some of his tweaks are good for me as now i tweak fsx in a different way to almost every one in order to balance the performance of fsx and my pc and it works really well for me :)

The best thing i can recommend to every one is.. don't fly the fps counter.. fly the sim or you will end up like i did.. endless tweaking and re-installing which takes you away from the the beauty of flying in the sim.

Scott, LOD does not need an ultra fast cpu or mega over clock. Ive stopped over clocking as i don't need it and my current cpu is slower than the over clock i had on my old one ( over clocking can help and im not anti over clocking to boost fsx performance ). Ive tweaked enough to fly at almost mach 1 in the IRIS F16 using REX clouds in low/poor visibility at just over 500ft agl in the Orbx Seattle region and the ground textures can keep up.

Anything is possible in fsx but its a balancing act with the hardware you have and what you are trying to do with the sim. I don't fly the lonely planet so i always have AI running in the shape of UT2 :)