Why Is My Airplane Slow?

Sometimes I get reports of a slow airplane, and I do a quick audit for performance problems. The trick to spotting performance problems is to divide and conquer: turn off various aspects of the airplane to see which aspect is really causing performance problems, then optimize that aspect.

Here are some of the specific tricks I do:

• Change views; the panel will be drawn differently in the 2-d view, 3-d cockpit view, external view (when close or far - zoom out and the panel won't be updated) vs. 2-d no HUD.

  If the 2-d view is slow but forward-no-HUD is not, your panel is expensive. If the 3-d view is slow but 2-d is not, one of your panels may be more expensive than the other (copy them in Plane-Maker from one to the other to see) or it could be that the preparation of the cockpit texture is slow.

• Remove 3-d objects from your plane to test the cost of OBJs. Turn down X-Plane's texture res or shrink your textures to see if texture memory is at issue. (Some airplane textures are not affected by the texture res settings, so you may have to manually shrink them.)

• Be sure to play with X-Plane's rendering settings; the GPU-specific options don't always cost "the same". For example, per pixel lighting is more expensive when there is more translucency on screen. If your airplane has a lot of overlapping surfaces or translucency this otherwise manageable setting might become too slow.

• If you use panel regions, try switching to regular ATTR_cockpit. Panel regions provide superior lighting effects but can take more CPU time when you have a lot of instruments.

The key is to divide the many possible causes of performance problems to isolate one thing that can be optimized.