MegaScenery Forum Post
To see just how poorly a fragmented disk can perform, here is the forum post that I made (from July 2005). I've always been a big fan of Microsoft's Flight Simulator and have about 1,000,000 files. These are photo-realistic textures for parts of the United States, very much like Google Earth. Because the frame rate depends so much on reading many files per second from the slow disk, any fragmentation is going to make things even worse. You can see the significant improvements by 1) defragging the MFT (Master File Table) and 2) moving important files (e.g. textures) to the outside tracks of the spinning disks. This demonstrates that the outer tracks are moving much faster than the inner tracks (angular velocity), thereby increasing the performance.This is an actual screen shot of the simulation using photo-realistic scenery:
This is the forum post that I made after experimenting with these utilities:
Well, it turns out that this tip has finally solved my performance problems with MegaScenery. I had been trying all of the tweaks that have been suggested here (including MegaBooster), but nothing seemed to improve things for me very much. I kind of knew the bottleneck was with the disk I/O as I have a P4 3.2 GHz with 1 GB of RAM and a Radeon 9800 Pro video card.
I originally simply ran the (almost useless) built-in defragger in Windows 2000, but that made no difference. After reading about O&O Defrag here, I did some research on the Internet and also came upon Diskeeper. DK has this new feature where it can optimize the MFT (Master File Table). This also sped things up in MegaScenery. After running DK on the MFT, I then ran O&O, arranging the MegaScenery files alphabetically by name. (They are all under G:\AAA_MegaScenery now.) Here is a list of the actions I took (in the order I performed them) and the results. The test was simply to load a saved flight from SeaTac (KSEA), which uses the PNW scenery files.
Files status Load time
===============================================
1. Original (fragmented) 7:25
2. Win2K defrag (built-in) 7:25
3. Defragged MFT (Diskeeper) 4:55
4. Defragged by name (O&O Defrag) 2:10
5. Optimized for MegaScenery 1:40
6. Quit FS, reload flight (no reboot) 0:53
These times were all taken after a reboot (except #6), to clear any files that might be cached in memory.
Defragging the MFT (with Diskeeper) took about 15 minutes and a required a reboot. Defragging by name (with O&O) took about 8 hours. The drive is a 200 GB IDE and has about 1.1 million files on it. A little extreme, but the MegaScenery games account for most of them. The drive is only about 60% full and is dedicated to “games” only. (The system and the rest of my programs live on a separate 120 GB drive.)
I can’t say whether or not defragging the MFT was necessary in the end. The higher performance may have been realized simply by running O&O from the beginning. But, since re-arranging the MFT was a pretty quick operation, I figured I’d give it a shot. It did make a significant improvement in a relatively short amount of time.
What “Optimized for MegaScenery” means in the table above is that I set my Display options as indicated for MegaScenery. I don’t always fly over MegaScenery areas, so I like to turn things up for those areas. I’m lazy and don’t want to change my display settings every time I choose a flight. Not only that, but I have a pretty decent machine and shouldn’t have to “dumb it down”. Once I’m in FS, the frame rate is fine. (I run at 1920x1440x32 with almost everything maxed out.) The real issue has been the load time. (BTW, I never had “extended terrain textures” enabled.) The difference between lines 4 and 5 above is mostly related to having “dawn/dusk texture blending” enabled, as most of the other settings don’t affect load times. MegaScenery recommends disabling it, but I prefer to fly at dawn/dusk as the view is quite impressive at times.
My initial tests also show that the blurries have been reduced and only take a few seconds to “tighten up” as I fly. Previously, it could take a minute or more for the blurries to clear up.
I might possibly achieve faster load times if I put each MegaScenery product on it’s own drive. I have all 4 areas (LA – PNW) and that means that about 950,000 files are competing for the outer tracks on the drive. Of course, 90% of the files on the drive are from MegaScenery, but they only account for about 25% of the used space. However, things are really good now and I don’t see the need to go further at this point.
On a side note: Windows reports that there are about 1.1 million files on the drive, but Diskeeper reports only about 827,000. (O&O no longer works.) I don’t know why there is a discrepancy. Also, I never got O&O to work on XP, and only once on Win2K. I successfully defragged by name yesterday on Win2K with O&O, but each time I load O&O today it doesn’t show any drives in the list view. This is the same problem I had with it on XP yesterday. Strange. Before I decide to purchase the full license, this will have to be resolved. The trial claims to be a fully functional product with no limitations except an expiration date.
Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Diskeeper or O&O Defrag. I simply read Robert’s post here yesterday, downloaded the trial versions, performed the indicated actions, and reported the results just as I observed them. For me, these techniques have made a dramatic improvement and I am now a poster child for using them! Some users on the Internet claimed that O&O screwed up their system, and others say it is the best defragger out there. (Google is your friend here.) The truth probably lies somewhere in between. As always, though, YMMV.
The bottom line is that now I can finally start to enjoy more flights with all of the MegaScenery areas loaded, especially PNW. I live in Sammamish, WA and can see my house when I fly over it!
Well then, there it is.