Why Autogen brings FSX to it’s knees

In another fascinating insight into the workings of Flight Simulator X, Phil Taylor’s latest blog entry explains exactly why Autogen has such a dramatic hit on performance:

Now, a typical scene has 50 1km x 1km cells in the scene. Autogen trees are pegged at 4500 max per cell (when the slider is all the way to the right). You can set the max up to 6000, so let’s call it 5000 for easier math. 5000*50=250,000 trees.

Holy Autogen Batman! Yes, this is why autogen brings the system to its knees. Crysis doesn’t try to render 250k trees.

Now, as much as I admire the team for their creation, I really do have to ask myself why these calculations weren’t done a few years back during development! In Phil’s (and the team’s) defence, he does confess that they should have done so and at least they’re looking at them now. And it’s good to know WHY it has such a performance hit.

You can read the rest of Phil’s article here.

• FSX tweaks
• Team changes at Aces
• FlightSimX weekly summary for week ending 18th April, 2008
• Phil Taylor explains video cards
• Flight Alps South Autogen Pack