Does photoscenery make FPS better or worse?

Question

People are going absolutely crazy installing photoscenery.  It takes alot of time and storage.  Does it make FPS better or worse?  Cheers.

Answer 1

Hi, it is not such a big hit on FPS, and it depends on the resolution. ZL16 is most of the time enough, ZL18 is perfect when the satellite coverage allows it and when the area is worth it. You can most certainly judge on that on Youtube.

Laminar Research recently made big improvements in the code, so that the impact on FPS is less strong with orthophotos. It never harms to try anyway.

Comments

One good thing to know is that you can have X-plane installed on a SSD and your photosceneries placed on a Hard Drive, with cheaper storage. For that, you just need to place shortcuts in X-plane 11\Custom scenery folder. The name of the shortcuts matters, when X-plane is creating the missing scenery_packs.ini.

The loading time will be a bit longer but that's all.