Advice on installing games for best performance.
 

I realise that this might get moved to gaming but I felt it was more likely to get a response here.

I play Flight Simulator 2004. I also have lots of add-ons but want to talk specifically about one type, namely photographic scenery.

As you can probably guess if you aren't aware of the product, this replaces the generic textures in the areas it covers with aerial photographs.

England and Wales comes in four parts and together they take up about 7GB of disk space.

Naturally, for good performance they require a fast and defragged hard drive otherwise the textures never come properly into focus.

However, the waters are muddied as it is recommended that these add-ons are installed on a separate drive to the game itself.

What I'm trying to find out is given my specs below how should I install the game/add-on combo?

At the moment, I have the game and these addons on the Raptor and every other addon on the IBM.

Will I see a performance increase in separating the game from the add-ons and if so, what should have the privilege of going on the Raptor, the game or the add-ons?

I hope I've made myself clear.

Thanks for any help.
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Forgot to add that I'm happy with the performance but would like to be able to use it with faster aircraft.

Re: Advice on installing games for best performance.
 

I've got all sorts of VFR scenery installed for FS2004, I've stuck the game along with all addon content on it's own seperate drive which is defragged at least once a week, going up to 2 gig of memory helped reduce disk swapping (marginally), my machine is no slouch but whacking everything up full with lots of extra's installed, AA and AF and resolution maxed will slow it down, I've found decreasing the visibility range also helps though as it doesn't have to load so many textures.

Re: Advice on installing games for best performance.
 

I'm concerned that moving everything to the 7200rpm drive will actual worsen performance.

Stuck between a rock and a hard place really.

I thought about using the 60gb as my Windows drive but again, I'm concerned that I will see a decrease in performance on the whole.

Also, I have tweaked Windows to force the OS to stay in Ram. Is this a bad idea for gaming performance?

Cheers.

Re: Advice on installing games for best performance.
 

Depends how much memory you have, FS2004 will suck a load of it up and if you run out it might well worsen performance through disk swapping.

Re: Advice on installing games for best performance.
 

One gig.

Re: Advice on installing games for best performance.
 

Unfortunately you're in the same boat as everyone with FS2004, it's performance never was anything to boast about and the more addons you install the slower it gets. On a plus note though, FS10 (2006) is expected sometime between August this year and March next.