Performance Tuning:

In order to get the best performance out of RealScenery with X-Plane, please look at the following screen shots of the Rendering Options and Weather settings. If you are experiencing slower performance, we recommend turning off most rendering options and setting visibility to a lower value. If performance is acceptable, increase texture resolution and increase visibility. If you have a newer computer, you may want to start out with a texture resolution of "Very High" or "Extreme Res." In the Rendering Options window below, all overlays, such as forests, roads, cars and birds have been turned off. You may also want to turn off the "Pixel Shaders" as this also will slow down performance, however the X-Plane water will look much better with it turned on. You may also want to check the "set color-depth and monitor resolution on X-Plane startup" option and set it to "16 bit". This will require less video memory and may offer better performance. Decreasing the "lateral field of view" will also increase performance. Experiment to find the options that are best for your system.

Trying to load the imagery at full resolution may make your system run out of memory and cause an "XMapped Error" in X-Plane. If you receive this error message, set your rendering options lower in your Settings > Rendering Options menu.

Very important: Turn anisotropic filter textures to a value of 2x or greater. This is necessary for the images to look clear in the distance when flying. If this is set to 1x, the images can look blurry or out of focus when flying in X-Plane. Values greater than 2x don't seem to add any additional clarity to the images to the RealScenery textures.

Important performance note regarding video cards: One of the greatest ways to increase X-Plane's performance can be done with a simple video card setting. If your video card has a "vertical sync" or "v-sync" option, turn this off. It may be set to a default value of "application controlled." X-Plane does not need the vertical sync capability of the video card. Turning this off can increase X-Plane's video framerate dramatically. Your specific video card may not have this option.

Version 9 Rendering Options:

In the Weather options screen below, set the visibility to a lower number, such as 7 miles. Also, make all levels of the atmosphere clear since clouds also slow down system performance. Higher-level clouds, such as cirrus, don't have as much performance impact as lower level scattered or broken cumulus clouds.

Version 9 Weather:

A note about airports: No changes have been made to the airports that are included with X-Plane. Runways at most major airports will align very well with the imagery used in RealScenery. Taxiways and many smaller airports do not have the positional accuracy of larger airports and therefore, may not match up correctly with the imagery. Many of X-Plane's airport taxiways and ramps are not based on actual airport diagrams and will not match the underlying imagery. If you would like to make adjustments to any of the airports so they better align with RealScenery, you may use World Editor (WED) which is an editing program specifically design to edit both X-Plane version 8 and version 9 runways, taxiways, and ramp areas. WED is available at no cost and can be downloaded here. WED is not produced by RealScenery. Please post questions about using WED to the appropriate X-Plane scenery discussion formus which can be found online.