Dust causes slowdowns

[miguez]

I'll preface by saying that I understand I am running DCS: BS on a laptop, and that it has its limitations.

 

That being said, I have great frame rates for most of the time, it only drops below 25 over large cities, which is understandable, or when dust is animating outside the helicopter, when on a really low hover.

 

The second part bugs me because I can be in an environment where I am getting 40 fps, and as soon as the dust starts to animate, it will drop to around 4 or 5 fps. The smoke trail from the ATGMs does the same thing. As soon as the dust/smoke disappears from view, the fps jump back up to where they were.

 

So my question is: Is there a way to disable the smoke/dust animations?

 

For the curious, I have a 512MB GeForce 8600M GS on an HP dv9000.

 

Thanks,

[Shrubbo]

http://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=572304&postcount=35

 

Some graphics options can be set in the options.lua file found in the \...\BlackShark\data\scripts folder. Specifically, you can change water to either '1' (low setting) or '0' (texture only). If you experience a frame hit when inside a dust cloud, setting the effects parameter to '2' will disable the visual effect.

[miguez]

Man, I can't believe I didn't find that. Thanks Shrubbo! It works. I still get smoke from the weapons, but I tried effects = 1 and effects = 0, and it doesn't turn that off. I wonder if that's possible.

[Boberro]

Yes it is, same as in LO. Go to folder \Bazar\Effects\PFX.

 

There are 3 folders, low, medium and high. In each folder are files *.pfx which represents example smoke effects. Try remove few of them to get desire effects. You can example remove "mushroom.pfx" (name tells us for what it is - we can guess mushroom is for explosion and "mushroom" effect). As far I know do not remove gunsmoke.pfx - it causes game freeze and crash. You can rename it to lower effect of gun and same for another effects.

 

Try experiment with this. I removed dust smoke when I am near ground. By this you can save other good graphic eye candy effects which are good and don't do bad FPS, and cut only bad.

Edited January 2, 2009 by Boberro

[miguez]

Hi Boberro,

 

Thanks for the tip, I'll try it.

 

The interesting thing is that other effect, like explosions and the smoke associated with that, cause no fps hit on my setup.

 

Thanks,