Indeed, upping the planet texture res could be an option here. But the other option Ben is hinting at is, to just load more DSFs (until now XP10 always loads 2x3 tiles surrounding you) when we are at 64bit one day. Because, with 64bit we won't have the hard RAM limits of the 32bit world any more (you all know the "bad alloc" crashes ... which are because of this limit) ... And even then, it will "help" to have at least 8 GByte physical RAM in your machine to back it up (and who knows what other parts of the 3D engine will say about the "extra" data :yahoo:) .

Surely I can't be suspected of being an FSX troll, but honestly I must say the hi-altitude rendition of FSX 3D engine, though maybe not perfect, is significantly better than X-Plane (and, for that matter, of any other flight sim I know of), since scenery mesh and textures are loaded much farther away, with more than acceptable performances in terms of loading times and FPS. I'd even go as far as to say this is the only big gap that the core X-Plane 3D engine still has, compared to FSX's one. Hoping the switch to 64 bit will see this issue significantly improved!

 

Marco

But the other option Ben is hinting at is, to just load more DSFs

 

Rather than just loading more dsf's, is it possible to apply LOD's to terrain mesh (amongst other tricks), so that you can have a progressively simpler mesh for more distant views? I'm guessing simply adding more dsf's without such conditioning can apply a heavy toll to cpu and gpu load. I don't know if LOD's are used in terrain right now, but it would make sense.

 

I seem to remember reading in Ben's blog that LOD's are of limited benefit to .obj files, because obj's live in VRAM. However I understand that terrain mesh lives in main memory. So I'm wandering if LODs applied to terrain mesh can give some performance improvements.

It would be nice if we could have in the rendering options a slider to adjust the maximum visibility setting for masking the ugly distant scenery rendering, I would set something like 25 or 30 nm max visibility until a final solution appear.