Howto:Improve framerates

Anything below ~ 15 fps can probably be considered to be hardly playable or at least enjoyable. Not only that, but the more the framerate decreases, the less functional systems such as the autopilot become.

FlightGear's framerate is influenced by various factors, among others:

• scenery complexity
• cockpit complexity (2D vs. 3D)
• environmental options (i.e. visibility)
• FDM update interval
• AI scenarios
• Aircraft speed (scenery paging)

You can usually disable pretty much most features that may be framerate killers, here's a collection of settings that you may want to try, please note that some of these options will only take effect if they're passed at startup time and won't affect the game at runtime:

TODO:

• LOD
• AI traffic
• 3D Clouds
• Scenery textures resolution ($FGROOT/Textures vs $FGROOT/Textures.high)
• ...

Contrary to what many people believe, the impacts of high vertex-count models on framerate is fairly minimal. For graphic artists, the key things that should be avoided are:

• high resolution textures
• textures containing alpha
• textures themselves
• unwant polygons casting shadows

External links

Optimizing file size, performance and streaming of 3D content