Hi guys, I know I have seen stuff about this before on the forum, but after a search I have to admit at being unable to find any answers. I have heard about mipmaps and how it's possible to change the files (?) and I have been told by Gary the developer of the airport (EGGD UKScenery2000) that it is a GPU problem. Now with the greatest respect, I cannot help but feel that what is displayed in the Video, is unacceptable. I do not have this probelm, to this degree, with any other airport except Bristol UK EGGD. I suspect if I had an ATI GPU then it may not be present, but I don't. So my question is.. can anyone offer a way for me to eradicate this more than annoying issue. BTW, I have tried every way known to man regarding AF and AA filtering, with zero success. I also need to add that the flickering in the video is not half as bad as it can sometimes be,cheers.

http://youtu.be/E32HayXjgf4

Switch back to the stock airport. If all settings stay the same and the vanilla airport does not have this issue, it would seem to me to be the addon airport itself.

Both the Bristol Extreme demo, the free version and the UK2000 Airfields Vol1 versions don't do this for me [this is with Horizon scenery], and I've seen them working perfectly with a GTX 560ti so can't imagine what issue there could be with your GPU Howard...The only thing I can suggest is trying a different mesh setting... with the photoscenery its sometimes good to have the airport higher in the scenery library, but I don't think that will be of relevence here.Have you posted this on the UK2000 forum?

I had this issue and ran all of the airport textures through CONVINX and saved them as dxt5. Below, I have copied the info that led me to that (and it seemed to solve the problem: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 dense FSX water effects: 2x Low About AF in Inspector I chose to let manage the application. Hope to be helpful for someone. Bye.Capt. RICCARDO RIGHETTI 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....co.uk/index.htm Hi Bob, so you need to convert textures of AI aircraft adding mipmaps, you will totally fix the problem. ;) 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. 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.Capt. RICCARDO RIGHETTI Proud customer of the PMDG 737NGX

I had this issue and ran all of the airport textures through CONVINX and saved them as dxt5. Below, I have copied the info that led me to that (and it seemed to solve the problem: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.Capt. RICCARDO RIGHETTIAny 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....co.uk/index.htm Hi Bob, so you need to convert textures of AI aircraft adding mipmaps, you will totally fix the problem. ;)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.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.Capt. RICCARDO RIGHETTIProud customer of the PMDG 737NGX

Now, that sounds very useful. Many thanks for the info...

Don't forget to backup the old textures in case you run into problems.

Howard, if you find a solution to that, I'd be very much interested. My whole Heathrow is doing that. And I asked Gary, he said it's unavoidable, due to some reasons... whatever... never seen any other airports do that.Apparently he's the only one not able to resolve it. A shame actually...http://www.uk2000sce...g46519#msg46519

Actually, I have experienced this before, with Orbx YMML 2.0... or at least a way developers fix this problem.YMML 2.0 runways are slightly raised above the originals surface, to prevent this texture 'fighting' that is seen as flickering, which means your wheels sink slightly into the surface, and you lose your AC's shadow.Maybe its a case of one issue being substituted for another... though why I don't see it with UK2000 I don't know, maybe its because I use photoscenery in the UK.No help I know, but I think this may be the explanation.EDIT: I managed to find my old Orbx thread, asking why I lose my wheels and shadows, with Martin Henare's answer, which seems to back-up what Gary states."This is because of the runway model needing to be placed a few centimeters above the ground to prevent the image from flickering. An unfortunate side effect which i hope to improve on with a patch at a later date.FTX is 100% FSX native which means we haven't used any FS2004 or FS2002 tech (which drain performance and cause some other issues) to achieve certain things."

I tested something just now, FT LOWW (non-flickering scenery):Sunny weather, no sinking, shadow visible, all great.Rainy weather, no sinking, shadow invisible, water effects visible.One could argue now the aircraft shadow disappears, but really... I'd rather have no shadow when raining than flickering all the time after take off.

I tested something just now, FT LOWW (non-flickering scenery):Sunny weather, no sinking, shadow visible, all great.Rainy weather, no sinking, shadow invisible, water effects visible.One could argue now the aircraft shadow disappears, but really... I'd rather have no shadow when raining than flickering all the time after take off.

What was your testing sir ?

Howard, if you find a solution to that, I'd be very much interested. My whole Heathrow is doing that. And I asked Gary, he said it's unavoidable, due to some reasons... whatever... never seen any other airports do that.Apparently he's the only one not able to resolve it. A shame actually...http://www.uk2000sce...g46519#msg46519

Hi Word Not Allowed, sure, I also emailed Gary about this problem and he basically gave me the same answer... and with the greatest respect to him, but IMHO that's a load of codswallop! If all other airports are OK and one single airport is an issue, then to say that it is somehow a problem of the GPU is not realisitic, as it would clearly replicate the problem elsewhere and it doesn't. So the issue is obviously individual sceneries and how they have been developed. I would add though, that I think his airports are superb and right up there with the best of them.

So, the final suggestion: use 2x or 4x SGSS

Riccardo,You are spot on with your results. I have had the shimmering issues and the SGSS seems to be the key. I have AA 8xS and combined this with 2xSGSS with the results of a marked decrease in shimmering with a moderate decrease in FPS (in heavy cloud cover). I found that when using 8xS in preference to 16x, the textures are much crisper in the VC.

I have tried every way known to man regarding AF and AA filtering, with zero success. I also need to add that the flickering in the video is not half as bad as it can sometimes be,cheers.

Howard give the SGSS a crack. Seems Riccardo is spot on with his findings!

Edited March 14, 201214 yr by Dicko

I had this issue and ran all of the airport textures through CONVINX and saved them as dxt5. Below, I have copied the info that led me to that (and it seemed to solve the problem: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.Capt. RICCARDO RIGHETTIAny 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....co.uk/index.htm Hi Bob, so you need to convert textures of AI aircraft adding mipmaps, you will totally fix the problem. ;)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.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.Capt. RICCARDO RIGHETTIProud customer of the PMDG 737NGX

Wow, this helped me a lot. I only tried new AA settings, and it gave me similar 8SQ quality, also boost my FPS. Thanks a lot.