Sceneries' Shimmering object? Read here to fix

[Richard99_Photography 2]

Hello fellow simmers,this post is mainly for those of you are getting annoying and disturbing scenery shimmering problems. Someone will probably tell me that the Americas have been already discovered but I hope to be helpful for who is having this problem.First of all, I want to focus your attention to the precise problem. I mean shimmering (or flickering) of thin scenery objects like fences, apron light lamps, taxiway plot lights and so on.About textures shimmering I must say that it is mainly due to textures lacking of mipmaps. So you should convert textures into DXT5 format adding mipmaps.I have followed some thoughts written down by PMDG team about nVidia Inspector settings: see here.Unfortunately, using either 8xS + 4x supersampling or 8xSQ + 2x supersampling I got lot of shimmering objects in almost every scenery I have.Well, after dozens of test I reached an important conclusion: the key feature to use is the SGSS (Sparse Grid Supersampling), which is a filter for transparency more powerful than Multisampling or Supersampling. It has obviously a performance hit but if you use 2x SGSS or 4x SGSS almost every shimmering problem can be fixed.Ok, saying that, you should consider to downgrade the AA filter from 8xS or 8xSQ (as suggested in the post above) to a less one. Don't worried about that, because results are pretty good and differences in terms of image quality are not visible (IMHO) at human eye.This afternoon I tried for example these two filters: 16x CSAA (with 4x SGSS) and 16xQ CSAA (with 2x SGSS). Well, I must say that these settings fixed shimmering problems and gave me a very good image quality (absolutely compable to a higher filtering like 8xS filtering), while performance hit is very little.Furthermore, a great surprise came to me when I see that this hit (measured in about 3-5 fps) is mainly over sea and not with heavy large clouds, where fps stays very high!So, the final suggestion: use 2x or 4x SGSS, then choose 16xQ CSAA or 16x CSAA from Inspector or a better one if your hardware configuration allows you. Doing this you will get rid of shimmering paying a very small price in terms of fps.Last notes about my most important settings:REX with 4096 pixel textures;ASE with 10 cloud layers;ASE surface & upper altitude visibility set to 50nm;FSX cloud visibility set to 60nm;FSX autogen: dense;FSX scenery objects: very denseFSX water effects: 2x LowAbout AF in Inspector I chose to let manage the application. Hope to be helpful for someone. Bye.

[Johan_Dees 84]

Any idea on how to bulk/mass convert the textures to DXT5 with mips please ?

[N1G 88]

Hello fellow simmers,this post is mainly for those of you are getting annoying and disturbing scenery shimmering problems. Someone will probably tell me that the Americas have been already discovered but I hope to be helpful for who is having this problem.First of all, I want to focus your attention to the precise problem. I mean shimmering (or flickering) of thin scenery objects like fences, apron light lamps, taxiway plot lights and so on.About textures shimmering I must say that it is mainly due to textures lacking of mipmaps. So you should convert textures into DXT5 format adding mipmaps.I have followed some thoughts written down by PMDG team about nVidia Inspector settings: see here.Unfortunately, using either 8xS + 4x supersampling or 8xSQ + 2x supersampling I got lot of shimmering objects in almost every scenery I have.Well, after dozens of test I reached an important conclusion: the key feature to use is the SGSS (Sparse Grid Supersampling), which is a filter for transparency more powerful than Multisampling or Supersampling. It has obviously a performance hit but if you use 2x SGSS or 4x SGSS almost every shimmering problem can be fixed.Ok, saying that, you should consider to downgrade the AA filter from 8xS or 8xSQ (as suggested in the post above) to a less one. Don't worried about that, because results are pretty good and differences in terms of image quality are not visible (IMHO) at human eye.This afternoon I tried for example these two filters: 16x CSAA (with 4x SGSS) and 16xQ CSAA (with 2x SGSS). Well, I must say that these settings fixed shimmering problems and gave me a very good image quality (absolutely compable to a higher filtering like 8xS filtering), while performance hit is very little.Furthermore, a great surprise came to me when I see that this hit (measured in about 3-5 fps) is mainly over sea and not with heavy large clouds, where fps stays very high!So, the final suggestion: use 2x or 4x SGSS, then choose 16xQ CSAA or 16x CSAA from Inspector or a better one if your hardware configuration allows you. Doing this you will get rid of shimmering paying a very small price in terms of fps.Last notes about my most important settings:REX with 4096 pixel textures;ASE with 10 cloud layers;ASE surface & upper altitude visibility set to 50nm;FSX cloud visibility set to 60nm;FSX autogen: dense;FSX scenery objects: very denseFSX water effects: 2x LowAbout AF in Inspector I chose to let manage the application.Hope to be helpful for someone. Bye.

Thanks Riccardo, I will give this a try. My shimmering (just a little) is only with the aircraft (UT2) when flying near larger airports.Bob

[Richard99_Photography 2]

Any idea on how to bulk/mass convert the textures to DXT5 with mips please ?

Hello, there is a tool called CONVINX. It converts multiple textures in various formats and with a batch procedure: http://www.mnwright.btinternet.co.uk/index.htm

Thanks Riccardo, I will give this a try. My shimmering (just a little) is only with the aircraft (UT2) when flying near larger airports.Bob

Hi Bob, so you need to convert textures of AI aircraft adding mipmaps, you will totally fix the problem. ;)

[cmpbellsjc 2,960]

About textures shimmering I must say that it is mainly due to textures lacking of mipmaps. So you should convert textures into DXT5 format adding mipmaps.

With all due respect, you need to be careful handing out advice that you should convert your textures to DXT5 without first checking to see what compression the texture is prior to converting it. For example, you wouldn't want to take a bunch of texture files from an FSDT scenery that are purposely DXT1 and convert them to DXT5.Anyone who is going to work with textures really needs to understand what they are doing before they mindlessly go converting textures.The only sound advice is that a lot of times a gain can be made from converting 32bit to DXT5 with mips of course, however there are instances that some textures for light objects particularly that really need to stay in 32bit format.The best thing to do before messing with textures is to sort all the textures your going to mip into different folders as DXT1 and DXT3/5 then add mips to them retaining the same compression.Im some cases performance gains can be made from converting DXT3/5 textures that have no alpha channel into DXT1 w/mips. Care needs to be taken when converting textures that alpha channels are preserved as well.Bye.

[Richard99_Photography 2]

With all due respect, you need to be careful handing out advice that you should convert your textures to DXT5 without first checking to see what compression the texture is prior to converting it. For example, you wouldn't want to take a bunch of texture files from an FSDT scenery that are purposely DXT1 and convert them to DXT5.Anyone who is going to work with textures really needs to understand what they are doing before they mindlessly go converting textures.The only sound advice is that a lot of times a gain can be made from converting 32bit to DXT5 with mips of course, however there are instances that some textures for light objects particularly that really need to stay in 32bit format.The best thing to do before messing with textures is to sort all the textures your going to mip into different folders as DXT1 and DXT3/5 then add mips to them retaining the same compression.Im some cases performance gains can be made from converting DXT3/5 textures that have no alpha channel into DXT1 w/mips.Care needs to be taken when converting textures that alpha channels are preserved as well.Bye.

Ok, good post from you. I was not intended to focus my attention to the shimmering of textures, so I briefly described how to do in case of it, after reading post here. Anyway, thanks for your more detailed explanation. Bye.

[cmpbellsjc 2,960]

No problem Rick.Bye.