I was reading some stuff in the forums and found a discussion in which our good friend Rafal gave someone advice about the importance of not mixing DXT3 textures with alpha and those without. He mentioned a utility that is available at Alpha India Group's website called AlphaSearcher. I went to their site and saw a discussion in which someone thanked the author and said that he had used it to identify textures at Aerosoft's Maastricht and having fixed them, he was now getting smooth performance.
I downloaded the utility and gave it a try with Maastricht. I set up a flight with the R22 and was getting 37-38 fps. I ran the utility, identified a bunch of textures that needed to be fixed and fixed them using DXTbmp. I then went back to the saved flight and my fps at Maastricht was 78-83! A HUGE IMPROVEMENT! I can't recommend this too highly to any of you who want maximum performance from FS9.
It's not difficult to do, though time consuming. But with an improvement like that, it's crazy not to do it!
Simply run AlphaSearcher and point it to the folder you want to check. Select "Procress subfolders too" and run it. It will identify the textures that need to be fixed. Then open that scenery and simply move the offending texture into DXTbmp. Save it, (Say yes to overwrite the original file). That's it! By putting it into DXTbmp and saving it, it will automatically regenerate the alpha channel. (I have no idea what an alpha channel is BTW!)
This is the best thing I've discovered since the last best thing.
I'm off to do a bunch more sceneries..... TTFN
Cheers
Ian
FS 2004
A must to read at Avsim !
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