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

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

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 )

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

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.

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