How bad are airports in total VAS and OOMs?

[MouseMan]

I read a article that said the main VAS killers are photogen scenery and things like ORBX global, GEX, UTerrain but how bad are airports?

The article said the VAS is used up by these products even if your not around them. Like if your in Asia, your GEX textures for North America are still sucking up some of the allotted 4GB of memory, thousands of miles away.

So I would like to ask FSDreamteam, is it bad to buy too many airports? Since each airport would suck up more of the 4gb allotted VAS and make you come closer to OOM?

I do not use any texture/mesh add-ons like ORBX, GEX, UT or photoreal stuff so do you think I'm safe to buy a lot of add-on airports?

Doesn't the Steam version handle VAS a lot better than the boxed?

Thanks

[streichholz]

Because of this I'm using the Scenery Config Editor. http://sourceforge.net/projects/fs-sceditor/

With this little awesome tool you can select and deselect all airports you don't fly in or out. For example, I'm always selecting two airports. My departure and my destination.

But with FSDT airports you don't have to be afraid of. As far as I know they don't use any VAS on startup. Their technique allows them only loading the airport when you fly in or out. But Virtuali can say more about the technique.

For other airports stick with the SCE.

[virtuali]

Yes, I can confirm that 90% of the memory needed by our sceneries, is not loaded until you enter the area of the airport (which might change from 10 to 16 NM, depending on the airport size), and it's unloaded when you exit the area. This means, you can safely leave them always enabled.

Note that, keep changing the Scenery Config Editor for each flight, will trigger a GSX cache regeneration at each startup.

[pcubine]

Like if your in Asia, your GEX textures for North America are still sucking up some of the allotted 4GB of memory, thousands of miles away.

This statement is incorrect.