How to increase details in the distance?

[Boeing_Driver 76]

I've always had an issue with trying to get better details out of scenery in the distance. Take the picture below for instance;

 

 

 

Is there a setting that I can adjust to prevent the blurring of the mountain textures? These are nearby Jackson Hole (Orbx scenery) and its my understanding that they're photorealistic but one would never know from looking at my sim. (

 

Here are the settings from my sim that may be relevant;

 

[Griphos 138]

You've got the LOD as large as possible in the in-sim settings. The only way to increase the LOD is by editing the config file. You can open fsx.cfg and look for the following line in the [TERRAIN] section:

 

LOD_RADIUS=4.500000

 

That's what it will say when you have the setting you have in the sim (LOD=large). You can increase this, but doing so will slow things down and use more memory, I believe (possibly contributing to OOM errors). Some people go as high as 8.5, but I've settled on somewhere between 5.5 and 6.5 for optimum performance and increased detail.

[jjjallen 37]

I'm using LOD - 7.5. Seems to improve distance textures best but be on guard for OOM's Cheers jja

[LHookins 3,102]

You're going to get that effect to some extent no matter what settings you use.

 

This is not the answer you're looking for, but setting your visibility to something less than unlimited will solve a lot of problems. I personally find unlimited visibility to look unnatural. Also, limiting visibility to 50 miles or less will hide a variety of problems that crop up at the limits of the game's ability to render terrain... flashing mountain textures in the distance as they come into view, for example.

 

Hook

[Rations 102]

Increasing LOD will generally enhance the clarity of distant scenery, but may cause over-sharpness depending on your zoom level. However, texturing steep mountains sharply is difficult, particularly when using real imagery, so the blurriness in those screen shots could very well be a fault of the scenery.

[meshman 109]

Going to 1920x1080x32 will enhance your viewing pleasure more than extending out the viewing radius, IMO. Your video card may be fairly recent, but it is not a high(er) performance model. Trying to load it past it's limits with more scenery to render will be counter-productive, again, IMO.

 

There is no reference for what your system setup entails, other than the video card. Bringing more into the rendering process is a nice way to bring up those nasty Out of Memory crashes that so many love about FSX.

[scott967 62]

Mounains (any terrain with vertical component) will never look great. The textures are square and are placed based not on linear distance, but angular (lat/long) distance. ACES divided the world up on a rectangle, not a square. As a result, the texture can only be drawn without stretching or shrinking in one dimension at approximately 42 deg north or south lat. Then you have the problem of vertical surface. The surface area covered by the textured mesh is greater than flat surface, so the texture must be stretched in either dimension as needed to cover the entire surface area.

 

scott s.

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[John_Cillis 2,406]

Also, setting your AA as high as possible, along with having your anisotropic filtering set at 16, will help. My AA is set at 32x although my video card is slightly better than yours. I get very good detail in mountain scenery, even if the mountains are at some distance from the aircraft.

 

Regards,

 

John

[mslim 12]

FWIW just remember that in the RW flying the distant details are muted and softened to varying degrees by the ambient atmosphere .

 

Slim

[Boeing_Driver 76]

Also, setting your AA as high as possible, along with having your anisotropic filtering set at 16, will help. My AA is set at 32x although my video card is slightly better than yours. I get very good detail in mountain scenery, even if the mountains are at some distance from the aircraft.

 

Regards,

 

John

 

John, where do you go to adjust the anisotropic filtering? I didn't see anything under the Nvidia card settings or in the FSX cfg file.

 

You're going to get that effect to some extent no matter what settings you use.

 

This is not the answer you're looking for, but setting your visibility to something less than unlimited will solve a lot of problems. I personally find unlimited visibility to look unnatural. Also, limiting visibility to 50 miles or less will hide a variety of problems that crop up at the limits of the game's ability to render terrain... flashing mountain textures in the distance as they come into view, for example.

 

Hook

 

Larry, that makes sense to me as well. So far as I know, the only place you can limit the visibility is under the weather settings. Is that correct?

[John_Cillis 2,406]

John, where do you go to adjust the anisotropic filtering? I didn't see anything under the Nvidia card settings or in the FSX cfg file.

 

 

 

Larry, that makes sense to me as well. So far as I know, the only place you can limit the visibility is under the weather settings. Is that correct?

 

I adjust the filtering in Nvidia Control Panel. I've attached a screenshot.

 

John

 

[Boeing_Driver 76]

Thanks John,,

 

I just checked mine and I have the anisotropic already set to 16x.

 

Do you think any of these other settings might make the difference?

 

 

 

I also tried changing my LOD to 6.50 but to be honest, I'm not seeing any difference....And the mountains in the back ground are problably no more than 3 miles away anyway...I wouldn't think the LOD would be the right way to address that.

[LHookins 3,102]

So far as I know, the only place you can limit the visibility is under the weather settings. Is that correct?

 

Yes, it's under the weather settings.

 

I learned more than I ever wanted to know about the subject when I was working with another game. The various visibility settings were quite messed up, and I set about fixing them. There are a lot of interrelated variables involved. For example, if the mist effect that removes detail in the distance isn't balanced with the visibility range, you get things like very light colored mountain silhouettes in the distance that show up against a darker sky. I see that in FSX occasionally. Conversely, I saw what happened when distance visibility was set to literally unlimited. It's... ugly.

 

I can see from a close inspection of your screen shot that the mountains on the left don't have very good texture, so I understand your question.

 

Hook

[Boeing or not going 578]

use fiber frame fraction setting to 0.20 to help load textures around you, combine that with a radius of 5.5 or 6.5

[John_Cillis 2,406]

Thanks John,,

 

I just checked mine and I have the anisotropic already set to 16x.

 

Do you think any of these other settings might make the difference?

 

 

 

I also tried changing my LOD to 6.50 but to be honest, I'm not seeing any difference....And the mountains in the back ground are problably no more than 3 miles away anyway...I wouldn't think the LOD would be the right way to address that.

 

My LOD radius is set to 4.5, it's always worked for me. In fact, when I run with unlimited visibility and the default textures at their highest resolution, they stay sharp all the way into the distance. My settings exactly as displayed yield very sharp mountain textures. The screenshots in the link were taken with my old video card--only difference in settings between the old and new was AA was set at 4X with the old video card.

 

http://forum.avsim.net/topic/396771-just-flights-duchess-over-colorados-san-juan-mountains/

 

John