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From Rick: Blurries, Take Two!

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Hello again:Blurry textures take two!System Specs: PIII 450 with MMX, Win98, 256 MB Ram, Leadtek GF3 Ti500 with 22.80 or 40.72 drivers. That video card just died with a cooling fan failure, and has been replaced by a Verto GF4 Ti4600 running the OEM drivers. Both cards are displaying the same problem, as outlined below.The problems is that blurry textures continue. At best the computer will render medium quality textures when 4,000-6,000 feet AGL. Cities remain the site of the worst offenders, while the desert mountains of Arizona and MT Rainier itself are rendered pretty well. At 4,000-6,000 feet the textures within a 3-5 mile radius of the aircraft are sharp as a tack, then degrade pretty quickly. At pattern altitude the textures are a mess. The textures were all fine until a week ago.I'm at my wits end trying to figure this one out.I have always maxed or enabled all Scenery settings except: Terrain Mesh 65; Autogen Off; Scenery Dense; Max Vis in scenery section 60, reduced to 30 by FSUIPC; Cloud Density 50; AI Traffic 40%. Resolution is 1024x768x32. All Aircraft and Hardware settings have always been maxed or enabled.On the GF3 Ti500 I was using the 22.80 drivers, and tweaking them with NVmax. After the fan died I was only able to load the 40.72 drivers. I then used ATuner to set LOD Bias.I cannot find a setting in FS2002 to resolve the problem. Airport scenery is just fine, as are the aircraft. Clouds render very well indeed. Frame rate remains the same as before, and is locked at 12. -I have tweaked every selection in Options->Settings->Display-I have removed any and all Lanclass and Terrain Mesh files loaded around the subject period. No change. Obviously, there can still be a file somewhere that is adversely affecting texture rendering.-I've allowed the Scenery.DAT file to rewrite itself several times, no change.-I have repeatedly edited the TERRAIN section of the FS2002.CFG file, from a start of:[TERRAIN]TERRAIN_ERROR_FACTOR=7.650000TERRAIN_MAX_VERTEX_LEVEL=19TERRAIN_TEXTURE_SIZE_EXP=8TERRAIN_AUTOGEN_DENSITY=0TERRAIN_USE_GRADIENT_MAP=1TERRAIN_EXTENDED_TEXTURES=1TERRAIN_DEFAULT_RADIUS=2.500000TERRAIN_EXTENDED_RADIUS=4.000000TERRAIN_EXTENDED_LEVELS=1To:[TERRAIN]TERRAIN_ERROR_FACTOR=7.650000TERRAIN_MAX_VERTEX_LEVEL=19TERRAIN_TEXTURE_SIZE_EXP=8TERRAIN_AUTOGEN_DENSITY=0TERRAIN_USE_GRADIENT_MAP=1TERRAIN_EXTENDED_TEXTURES=1TERRAIN_DEFAULT_RADIUS=9.900000TERRAIN_EXTENDED_RADIUS=9.900000TERRAIN_EXTENDED_LEVELS=4I documented all of the settings in the GRAPHICS section of the CFG file so that I understood what they were there for.Is it related to the computers processor itself? The clocking utility I have on the computer shows that it is still running at 451 MHz. DirectX is 8.2 and has been since 8.2 was released, and AGP is enabled as it makes no difference on my computer, on or off.Where can I go from here? I love the Ti4600. It installed first try and works very nicely. But it is very underemployed. By the way, I will soon be upgrading this computer, so the Ti4600 will have a suitable place to work. The processor I now have will soon support a second monitor.Help! Thanks, Rick

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Guest Stratus_Fractus

Could you please post a screenie? I'd like to see what people classify as blurries. Also, your CPU is a HUGE bottleneck in your system.

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Guest

I must agree with it being the CPU. My previous system had a PIII 667MHz overclocked to 700MHz with 512mb PC133 etc... and no matter what I did I couldn't get rid of the blurries. Last week I built a new P4 2.8GHz system and blurries are no more. I now always have sharp clear textures out to the horizon. My only problem is my GF2 MX400 64Mb vid card being a bit of a bottleneck. Cest la vie and I intend to replace it with a Radeon 9500Pro ASAP. I know all this sounds easier said than done (to most financially), and it is a far from cheap prospect if you're on a limited budget, but I think if you've tried all the other tricks you might just have to push forward an upgrade, or begrudgingly tolerate it.Matt

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Thanks to all who have replied so far, but here is my point.Up until the early part of last week, I did not have the blurring problem that I am having now. Something within Flight Sim or my system itself has changed, causing the blurring that I am currently experiencing. The tweaking outlined in my original post was provided by a host of people each offering a sugestion to restore my system to its previous performance. Until last week I did not have to change the values in the TERRAIN section in order to get great looking, very sharp day and night textures out to a distance you would normally expect to see in actual flight.Now, for some reason, that has changed.If anyone has any ideas, with the exception of the processor, on what I can do to reverse the problem that I am now experiencing, I will greatly appreciate the assistance.Rick

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Bump. Problem still exists. Had great textures til a week ago. Need to find them if I can.Rick

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Guest bjornkeizers

Rick, You wouldn't happen to be the proud owner of a Combat Flight Sim 3 copy by any chance, would you? I have the exact same thing; my aircraft textures are blurred from certain angles, and my land textures are crisp within a couple miles from 5k to 10k, but beyond that.. messy. Water textures behind the aircraft started flickering as well.I noticed the blurry textures about a day after I installed CFS2 and CFS3; (I wanted to compare) I heard about many bugs with CFS3 and 2 never gave me any problems. I haven't touched the settings in ages, nor did I install any scenery or touch cfg's. I tried uninstall/reinstall, didn't work. I even rolled back my system (XP) to a week before the blurred textures appeared. I got rid of the flickering textures, but the blurring remains. I can definately tell you: it isn't my processor; look at my specs: Laptop, packard bell easy one silver1.2 ghz processor (think it's an AMD)256 mb ram20 gb hard drive, of which 7 gig freerunning standard windows XP homeVid card: SiS 630/730 (according to System) 16 mb of ram. It's gotta be the card.. but it never gave my problems before.. allways crisp and nice textures.

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bjornkeizers:I do not have CFS3 or any other form of simulator or gaming software installed on the computer. In my case the aircraft textures are crisp and clear. On the ground the ramps and structures at the airport are clear.On take-off, after passing through about 2,000 feel AGL the textures are a medium. Above about 5,000 feet AGL the textures within a 3 mile radius are of the highest quality. There is an expanding footprint under the aircraft that has resisted all of my attempts to expand it. Above 5,000 feet AGL the textures blend from highest quality in that small radius to medium out toward the visibility limit. During an approach, the ground textures again degrade to the lowest possible. I set Autogen and Scenery complexity at their maximums, figuring that would overload the textures. The system slowed from a frames locked of 12 to 7 during the approach, but the autogen kept pace, and the buildings and trees looked sharp.Even though I have a slower processor, a PIII 450 running at 467 MHz according to ATuner, it has produced sharp textures out toward the visible horizon until last week. I have removed all of the Win98 systems tweaks that I made to the System.ini file in addition to undoing the tweaks in the FS2002.CFG file. Again last night I deleted the FS2002.CFG file and allowed the program to write a new one, then replaced all of my joystick and display settings by hand. The problem remains.It's the texture rendering that is the apparent problem. Everything else is working as advertised.I'm still searching for a solution. Rick

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Guest

Your processor needs an upgrade. However, I have a 1 ghz Athlon and a Geforce2 Ultra 64 and get the blurries bad with the new 40.72 drivers. My recommendation is to DUMP them NOW! Go back to the 30.82. Visit www.guru3d.com forums for information on the best driver. NOBODY and I mean NOBODY who owns a copy of FS2002 will have sharp textures 100% of the time. The blurries or texture redraw lag is hardcoded into the program for better performance and to eliminate the dreaded stutter that was present in FS2000. That is why you have blurries in CFS3. It's designed to decrease ground texture sharpness for increaded FPS and performance. If you do NOT believe my statement on the blurries to be true, maybe I will come and visit you in fantasy land when I want to take a break from reality! :)Hope this helps!Jason

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Guest

The blurring of textures within 12-15 miles of the current aircraft position in flight at altitudes above 4000 feet has just occurred within the past week. It is not a result of the processor.This occured while I was still using a GF3 Ti500 with the 22.80 drivers. That card subsequently failed, prompting me to replace it with a Verto GF4 Ti4600 which came with the OEM 28.32 drivers. The exact same blurring occured after the GF4 was installed. I upgraded to the 40.72 drivers from NVidia's web site, the set patched after 11 November. The card is extremely stable with these new drivers, and the drivers have enhanced the control panel features allowing for the proper setting of 8 level Anistropy and 4s Anti-aliasing. By maxing all of the GF4's features the blurring has been reduced, but not to the point where the quality of the textures has returned to the level they were at 1 week ago.Rick

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Guest Stamatis

Everyone else who reported this strange problem (seeing blurries all of a sudden, while things looked very nice up to then), solved it by re-installing FS2002 from scratch.It is not as dramatic as it sounds, and you will not believe what problems it may "magically" cure.Stamatis

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Stamatis:Thanks for the reply!Last week, after three days of tweaking and examining every aspect of my systems set-up and performance that I am aware of, I completely uninstalled and then reinstalled the program. The same problem re-occured. At the time I was using the same GF3Ti500 and 22.80 drivers that I have had such great success for months with. After that cards cooling fan was discovered inop, and the card reporting that it was running at 100 mhz, I replaced it with a GF4 Ti4600.Now, with the exception of ATC not wanting to talk to me after I leave the tower freq, the program runs well except for the textures. They remain extremely blurry when viewed up close, and only gradually get better with altitude, and then not completely.Rick

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