Adjust FlightGear terrain and scenery settings for sharper detail and better FPS, including visibility, objects, vegetation, paths and TerraSync.
Adjust FlightGear terrain and scenery in the launcher’s graphics or rendering settings before starting a flight, or through the in-simulator Rendering Options dialog. Set the correct scenery folders or TerraSync cache first, then balance visibility, terrain detail, buildings, vegetation, shadows and clouds. Restart the flight if a data-path change does not appear.
Where are FlightGear terrain and scenery settings?
FlightGear separates scenery-source settings from rendering settings. Launcher wording varies between releases, but scenery folders and automatic downloads are normally managed in the scenery, downloads or add-ons area; visual quality controls appear under graphics or rendering.
Once the aircraft has loaded, look for Rendering Options, commonly under the View menu. Many changes take effect immediately, although scenery paths, renderer changes and some quality options require a flight reload or complete restart.
These controls perform different jobs: a scenery path or TerraSync supplies terrain, airports and objects, while rendering settings decide how much of that data FlightGear draws. Raising a quality slider cannot restore a tile that was never installed or downloaded.
| Control | What it changes | When to adjust it |
|---|---|---|
| Terrain detail or LOD | Terrain detail and, where exposed, the distance at which higher-detail terrain is drawn. | Raise it when nearby terrain looks coarse; lower it if terrain-heavy areas cause stuttering or long frame times. |
| Visibility | The distance over which terrain and scenery must be loaded and rendered. | Reduce it first during high-altitude flying if a long horizon is hurting performance. |
| Buildings and objects | Procedural building density and the display range of some scenery objects. | Lower it over large cities or complex airports. Hand-placed objects may not respond to every density control. |
| Vegetation | Tree and random vegetation density or range. | Reduce it for low-level flying over wooded regions when frame delivery becomes uneven. |
| Shadows and shader effects | Lighting and surface effects rather than additional scenery data. | Reduce shadows before sacrificing core terrain detail on a GPU-limited system. |
| Cloud detail | Cloud rendering quality and density. | Lower it separately when poor weather, rather than terrain, causes the slowdown. |
Not every FlightGear build exposes a separate terrain LOD control. If yours does not, use the overall rendering-quality preset, visibility and object-density controls instead of editing undocumented properties copied from an older guide.
How do I balance scenery detail and FPS?
The best balance comes from testing one setting at a time in the same aircraft, location, weather and camera view.
- Start from a balanced preset. This gives you a known baseline and avoids conflicts left by previous experiments.
- Identify the demanding part of the scene. Over a city, test buildings and vegetation; at altitude, test visibility; in poor weather, test clouds; at a complex airport, test objects and shadows.
- Change one control by one step. Large simultaneous changes make it impossible to identify the setting causing stutters, blurred terrain or low frame rate.
- Apply and reload when necessary. In-flight rendering changes may be immediate, but scenery-source and renderer changes should be checked after restarting the flight.
- Save the working configuration. If an in-flight adjustment resets at the next launch, make the equivalent change in the launcher or save it to a launcher profile where supported.
If resolution, anti-aliasing, aircraft complexity or the renderer is the real bottleneck, use our detailed FlightGear graphics and performance tuning advice rather than reducing scenery indiscriminately.
Should I use TerraSync or manually installed scenery?
Use TerraSync for automatic worldwide coverage and manual scenery for selected airports, enhanced regions or flying without a dependable connection.
- TerraSync: keep its cache in a writable folder with adequate free space. A first visit to an area can look incomplete until the required tiles finish downloading; our automatic scenery download set-up walkthrough covers the cache and download controls.
- Manual scenery: add the package’s root folder to FlightGear’s scenery search path. The selected root normally contains folders such as
Terrain,Objectsand sometimesAirports; do not select theTerrainsubfolder itself. Follow our manual scenery-folder and search-path instructions for the full procedure.
Keep custom scenery separate from the TerraSync-managed cache. Where FlightGear allows scenery paths to be reordered, give the custom package the intended priority over default coverage to prevent an older duplicate from being loaded instead.
Why do FlightGear scenery changes not appear?
Scenery changes usually fail because FlightGear is reading the wrong folder, the required tile has not finished downloading, or the active flight still has the old tile loaded.
- The scenery path points one level too low, such as directly at
Terrainrather than its parent. - The TerraSync cache is unwritable, unavailable or still downloading the region.
- A duplicate scenery root or launch option is taking priority over the folder changed in the launcher.
- The flight was not restarted after changing a path or scenery source.
- The installed package lacks detailed terrain or objects; rendering controls cannot create source data that is absent.
For ocean tiles, flat terrain, missing airport buildings or persistent loading errors, work through our FlightGear scenery fault-finding checklist.