[Flightgear-devel] FG runs -much- better under cygwin than the native win32 binary, why?

[Sebastian B. <seb...@we...>]

Hello everbody!

I have a question concerning FlightGear's hard disk access behaviour in 
different environments/versions. I'm using an AMD Athlon XP with 1024 MB 
RAM, Radeon 9500 graphics adapter (128 MB memory) running Windows XP. I 
have installed FlightGear both as the latest CVS version compiled under 
cygwin and the latest native win32 binary installation package 
(0.10-pre3). When I compare the smoothness of my flying experience 
between these two installations, I notice that while the cygwin 
version's graphics performance alone seems to be lower (around 1/3 less 
fps compared to the "true" win32 version when there's no scenery loading 
in the background), it makes -MUCH- less hard disk accesses, so that the 
great reduction of HD read bucking (again compared to the win32 binary) 
more than compensates the slower rendering. The win32 binarys always 
seems to rip my harddisk apart, I can't fly a somewhat faster aircraft 
without having to wait for up to several seconds every 50 kilometers or 
so, all the time accompanied by HD access noise from my computer case. 
Can anyone tell me the reason for this?

Best regards from Germany,

Seb