Higher res textures not loading in

[Guest cbuchner1]

Okay, I just did a re-install of FSX RTM on my Intel Core 2 Duo laptop. Following that I upgraded to FSX SP1 and I installed TileProxy. I upped some graphics settings and chose a flight in Telluride, Colorado with MSN Virtual Earth data in the Microlite.Some observations:I got unexpectedly GOOD performance from FSX SP1 concerning the terrain update during flight. Tileproxy was reporting up to 500 individual tile accesses per second while flying. I guess that is how it is supposed to be - and it's necessary to keep the terrain updated as you move along.I will take that fsx.cfg configuration file which appears to work well on the laptop and I am going to transplant it onto my Dual Athlon desktop machine which I know has had big problems with the FSX SP1 so far.If you guys notice only a few tile accesses per second, there is a problem, as it should be updating much faster.Christian

[Guest JohnEGPF]

I'm running an E6600 @.3.2 nvidia 7950 512 ram GPU and 2 gigs of fast Crucial ram,don't use Tileproxy to download as I fly as my connection is too slow (512k), I Load a VFR flight get the the bearing to airport then send it on its way via Slew mode at 30KTS:)After a LOT of these flights I got a lot of Scotland and other areas of the UK Cached and ready for use without any need for more downloads,For me this really worksUsing Sp1 It sadly becomes blurry very quickly after taking off, I have tried every possible tweak and then some with no change, without the patch I Can fly the default Learjet From Glasgow to Manchester,a large portion of the flight only has low res data but descending into the Manchester area at 220KTS the magic of 1m textures quickly come into view.Using FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION=0.70 VE as source and most important capping frame rate to 25 fps really lets the spare CPU/gpu resources work to keep the view tack sharp.john

[Guest cbuchner1]

Please use the attached fsx.cfg file as a baseline for testing the texture loading problems. It has brought the tile accesses per second to several hundred on two of my machines (including a stubborn box that previously would not load textures properly)This is for FSX SP1 - not RTM.While texture loading may not yet be fast enough for your personal taste, it definitely loads them with this cfg.file.All you need to change in this file is to replace the graphics card specific settings to match your machine specs.so this lineDISPLAY.Device.Mobile Intel® 945GM/GU Express Chipset Family.0has to be changed to match your grapics card and model - you can take this line from your existing fsx.cfgI benchmark this with Telluride, Colorado taking off with the Microlite and heading east after a 180 degree turn. It starts loading textures in the order of hundreds per second. I run FSX in windowed mode to observe the TileProxy terminal window.Good luck, maybe we can crack this "thread contention issue" or "the blurries" or whatever you may call it.

[Tabs 2,790]

Christian,I'll check out this cfg later tonight - thanks!Btw, to whoever it was talking about the nHancer stuff (that was my post), this is NOT the same type of blurries that solves. That was an LOD bias issue with anisotropic filtering, not the sim engine failing to load higher res textures, which is what this issue is...

[Tabs 2,790]

Christian,I tried your cfg and it was actually a lot worse than before. I'm not even seeing high-res period now with it. Everything's super-blurry and low res from the time it loads.The textures per second display in the TP console window are showing 0.0 most of the time and rarely getting up to like 0.8 or 0.9. So evidently, I'm not loading textures at all pretty much after the initial loading of the flight.

[Guest D17S]

Seems there's a machine specific aspect too. At least for a moment, TP was crankin'. Here's the story: I'm running a cross country racetrack pattern in Yellowstone between the Canyon and Mammoth. I've run this 6 times now with VE. My thought was to have this totally cached so I can isolate the tile loading function. Remember, this is on a P4/HT'd/2.8, 2 gig-O-ram, 6600gt box. I have dual screens that I setup with FSX (in windowed mode) on one and the TP console and a resource monitor on the other. For the flight's initial load, I always get a 25-50 Tiles per second access rate (TPS) with CPU utilization showing at 15%. The initial load is about 25,000 tiles. The resolution immediately after the load (and a quick nap!) is spectacular at about 1500 feet AGL.I begin the north-west run from the Canyon to Mammoth. As I fly away, blurries start within 2 miles. In flight, the console is showing a load rate of about 20 TPS. I pause to let it catch up. This should be entirely pre-cached JPGs(?), but TP goes immediately into download mode from VE. Once the download just kept going. TP never shifted back to tile load mode. "Give it time," I thought and I went for a coke. I came back to a Windows "TP has stopped working" message. I left the sim running and just shut down TP with the utility. I then just re-started TP. It hooked right back up and began to load tiles. "Oh. Nice." I thought. The resolutions started poppin' in (sim was still paused). Resolution back to 100%, away I went. I flew out into the blurries again and and paused again. On pause, once again TP immediately shifted into download mode and never swapped back to tile loading mode. This should have been all pre-cached . . . or at least not another 20 minutes of non-stop downloads from VE. To the horizon, the far scenery was crisp. "What could I be downloading?" I posered to meself. Whatever it was, I was getting gigs of it! But only the near scenery needed a refresh. This was the 5-6th time I had run this route with the same source (VE). I was thinking that I didn't need anymore long-range scenery downloaded. I needed TP to shift to a close-in tile loading mode. Remembering that the last time I restarted TP, it started up in tile loading mode, I thought I'd try to force the issue. I shut down TP manually and restarted. But, when I ran the unload program against a still running TP (it was still downloading away, BTW), windows blue screen'd with "Pagefile in non-page area" fault. Ahhh, but there was a moment there, though . . . when TP was just cruzzzin'! Before the new .cfg, my CPU would run at 50% for the sim, and use only 10-15% of it's additional horsepower for tile loading in flight. It was easy to see in the performance monitor. With 10% CPU, I would get in flight load rates of about 20-40 TPS. But after the new .cfg file, there were a couple of miles there where TP was loading 200-400 TPS with near 100% CPU utilization . . . and keeping up pretty well! TP was staying in Tile loading mode and using all of my CPU's available horsepower. That Made the Magic Happen.I had never seen this before. It still couldn't quite keep up, but it was close. Twice, during a 10 second pause, TP stayed in tile loading mode and I had crisp scenery in those 10 seconds. "Yea," I as thinking. "That's the deal." Fully utilized, - with pre-cached scenery - that that little ol' HD'd P4 is almost enough. Who woulda thought? For me the issue seems to be scheduling between the download and tile-load modes . . . and then fully utilizing the HT'd CPU. I saw it happen right once (twice, actually), so I know it's in there, somewhere.

[Guest cbuchner1]

> But after the new .cfg file, there were a couple of miles there where > TP was loading 200-400 TPS with near 100% CPU utilization . . . and > keeping up pretty well!So now we have FPS and TPS to watch out for ;-) lolDon't forget to attach that new cover sheet on you TPS reports.Okay, you've got to know the movie "Office Space" to find thatfunny. BTW Where's my stapler?

[Guest Rob_man]

Absolutely CLASSIC movie! :-lol Rob

[Guest Tashunca-Uitco]

For me , for the flight's initial load, I always get a 25-50 Tiles per second access rate (TPS) .

[Guest cbuchner1]

Bramski is reporting that setting TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT back to 40 (default value), setting FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION back to 0.33 (default value) and locking his FPS to 30 allows him to zip at 160 knots over already pre-cached terrain in Gran Canaria.His posted DivX video proves that, so I am reproducing his settings here for you to try out. But Bramski seems to have a rather high-end machine.

[Guest Tashunca-Uitco]

I tried different settings . Finally , Fiber at 0.4 or 2.0 gived the same result : a lot of blurries , at low speed 80knts .Frequently , I had a very low TPS of 10~20 ; when I pause the simu, I ask for a refresh , and then , TPS grows immediatly to 120~140 .But blurries are still here .To cover with sharp textures the area , I had to pause FSX frequently .I was in Italian Alps , with VE .Perhaps it was sunday , and the connection was low ?I don't understand anything .

[Guest cbuchner1]

How powerful is your PC? What processor? I believe you may have a single core machine that is not very fast.Christian

[Guest D17S]

Using the .cfg downloaded from this post, I can keep up pretty well with pre-cache at 40 kts . . . that is, under 2 conditions. 1) TP stays in Tile Access Mode (TAM).TP seems to have a real desire to shift to its online download mode and not let loose. Poor ol' Tile Access Mode can't get a tile in edgewise! It'll manage to interrupt all that downloading to pop in a ".6 TPS access" once in a while. However otherwise, it will just keep downloading forever if I let it. Once TP shifts into the download mode (and stays there), the blurries are on me in in moments. This is on my test flight racetrack that I have flown a dozen times now. It should be a thoroughly cashed route.2) My CPU resources are more fully utilized while TP is in Tile Access Mode.For instance: Without TP running, FSX uses 50% of my hyperthread P4's horsepower. It just sits at 50%. When I pause FSX to use another application, the CPU will pop up to 60%, or whatever it needs. With 2 gigs of ram, changing applications with FSX running is very fluid. I have CPU horsepower and extra ram completely available for another application to use. TP acts exactly like 'just another application' with FSX running. When TP is in Tile Access Mode, there have been times when I see it really "kick in." My CPU utilization goes from %50 to 90-95%. Tiles begin loading at 200-400 TPS. At 40 knots (FPS locked at 15), I can keep sharp scenery.However it doesn't happen this way often. Most of the time while TP is in TAM, I see my CPU utilization only go to 60% and the tiles load at 20-40 TPS. When I see this occur, I know the blurries are just a mile on down the road. 20-40 TPS load rates are not fast enough, even at 40 knots.It might be an interesting experiment for we test pilots to: 1) Leave the TP dos window (console) open and watch TP shift between download and tile load modes. Then watch your tile load rates. 2) Leave task manager's CPU Resource Monitor graphing scale open and watch CPU utilization. My HT'd P4 might be acting like your modern dualies. I expect you will see a direct correlation between tile load rates and CPU utilizations. I really don't have to even look at FSX running anymore. I can see the blurries coming by just watching the resource monitor.And how about all that downloading over pre-cashed areas? It's still chewing on it, but my Duplicate File Finder has 60,000 dup entries in my cashe.service1 folder found already . . . and still counting. The folder is currently 4 gigs big and fluffed with 280,000 files. This is gonna have to run all night. My P4's really gettin' a work out. That little guy's PumPed and feeling gOod! It appears to me that within a tweak of two, a P4 at 2.8ghz can provide crisp scenery (with pre-cashe) at 40 knots. That's not bad, not bad at all.(BTW . . . I have my favorite Sadde6 approach to LAX cached with VE in FS9. LA is looking pretty good out of the cockpit window of that favorite 744 of mine. It would be very helpful to duplicate this in FSX, but I need an FMC'd airplane. If someone would like to send me a beta, I'll bet I could give it a good test flight.)

[Guest cbuchner1]

> TP seems to have a real desire to shift to its online download mode and not let loose. I have identified a problem that leads to downloading of "high res" strips of 15 tiles in areas "far out". Sometimes you even see strips of high res data on the birds-eye view (F12) when zooming out.You can get rid of this behaviour by setting preload to 0 in the INI file. This problem could be the cause for excessive networking activity. Unfortunately with preload=0 the performance will generally be a bit lower with the filesystem filter.I am testing if my fix works and if so, this goes into Beta 5. Unfortunately I plan a lot of new stuff with Beta 5 and i have less time to dedicate to Tileproxy, so expect a new release around end of June.Regarding CPU usage:During tile downloading, the CPU is used also for JPEG decoding, concatenating, scaling, color correction, DXT1 encoding and other tricks. It's NOT just a simple download.

[Guest cbuchner1]

I am attaching a copy of a proxyUser.exe file (zipped) that can be operated with preload=15.And it won't load many more "strips" of high res data in regions further from the plane. Turns out that there was a bug in the code that decides on the resolution of tiles to preload. I fixed the bug and as a result, there should be less network activity.This fix only applies to FSX SP1 users and only if preload is set in the INI file to values larger than 0.