Jim,

 

With MSE specifially, there is a big difference between LOD RADIUS 4.5 and LOD RADIUS 7.5 or 8.0 on a visual level. With the higher LOD, the scenery renders sharper further out into the distance. The effect is a much more realistic experience. Yes this can create OOM problems, but usually this is RARE for MSE. Other scenery suffers from OOM on high LODs. Hence we do recommend a high LOD_RADIUS with MSE because of the noticeable visual benefit it gives when flying in our photoreal scenery areas.

I have had my LOD_Radius up to 9.5 and saw no really big deal. The pictures I have posted of my flights over Illinois were at the 4.5 LOD_Radius and with the Texture_Max_Load set at 4096. I don't think our computer systems are ready for 7.5 and above for any length of time. It does not hurt to try though. Other than autogen, the largest framerate killer is commercial weather with pumped settings up to 2046 or 4096 HD clouds. I realize we should have weather turned off when flying over the excellent MSE V2 scenery (so we can see our house :lol: ) but I don't think many do that, including me. Even Word Not Allowed in his Software and Hardware guide recommends nothing higher than 6.5 - "This setting should NOT be set over 6.5. This is a known source of OOM errors, and even 6.5 can cause it, if you are not careful."  He's one of the original recommenders of a LOD_Radius above 7.5 and has now changed that recommendation.  If you look up in the CTD forum that I monitor quite a bit, you'll see a lot of people who had their LOD_Radius setting set above the FSX max (4.5) and they are trying to find out why FSX crashed suddenly.  So I think everyone should be aware that if they do get a crash with this setting set above max, this is the first place they should look when it happens.  I like PCAviator's recommendation regarding the zoom for external views or wing views though (can't do it in the cockpit).  That makes the scenery really crisp and clear most of the time.

 

I appreciate PCAviator's recommendations for the MSE V2 product and I will certainly give them a try.

 

Best regards,

Jim

 

Jim,

 

You can set zoom factor in cockpit!

Normally I just click ont he screen to make it the "active" screen and use the +/- keys to zoom the view in/out.

Show me state out bought gotta wait 2 weeks to use it thou. For my computer to be repaired mobo was hot enough to cook eggs on.

 

You can set zoom factor in cockpit!

 

Thanks!  I knew that and always thought the panel and yoke were too far away and it did not look realistic but just tried it again and zooming out to .40 looks very realistic.  Sorry for any confusion. I did try your settings in Post #14 and I really like them.  I set LOD_Radius to 7.5.  Out of KDCA and over MSE Virginia and Maryland, I got very good fps in the 20's and they got better as I climbed (no real weather).  At FSDT KLAX, I got single digits on the runway but the fps began rising fast after takeoff over MS Scenery - SoCal.  Textures were mostly crisp and clear.  This setup is definitely a keeper!  Thanks.

 

For anyone interested, here are my NI settings....

 

 

Best regards,

Jim

Looks like, at least to some degree, I Solved one of the mysteries.  Looks like my FPS problem is fixed.  After alot of testing I was able to determine it was indeed CombatPilot causing it.  When I ran the exact same flight, same plane, same weather, same everything through regular FSX my FPS was reasonable and what I'd expect it to be.  Through Combat Pilot I was getting those strange FPS drop offs.  Some sort of memory leak I guess.

 

PCAviator & Jim,

 

Thanks for the tips and settings.  I'm actually already using most of those MSE tweaks (Except for the zoom...nothing but zoom of 1.0x works for me.  The cockpit, instruments, and proportions of the cockpit look just too far away for me).  I'm going to go back over my Nvidia Inspector settings tonight and compare them to the ones Jim posted (Thanks Jim!).

 

I tried the advice of dropping my lod_radius all the way down to 4.5 but, believe it or not, it actually made things alot worse...not better.  Go figure.  Things that weren't sharp weren't sharpening any faster at low lod_radius.  I think the reason it seemed worse was that the textures were "sharpening" at the same speed regardless of the lod_radius setting...however...with a high lod_radius setting its letting my system work "ahead" a little bit and thus many times the textures have already sharpened by the time I get to them.  Whereas, at lower lod_radius setings often times they don't sharpen until I'm already flying past them, or sometimes they simply don't sharpen at all.

 

Regardless of lod_radius setting, sometimes they just don't sharpen up all the way.  And sometimes they do.  Whatever the case, after many many hours of testing now I'm fairly convinced that lowering lod_radius doesn't seem to help them sharpen, and raising lod_radius doesn't help them sharpen faster but does allow me to have "more" sharp at a time and thus give the appearance that they are sharpening better.

 

with regards to OOM errors....I still haven't had one (Except for a brief time when I was testing ENB Series stuff which had me crashing left & right).

 

The other interesting thing is that, with regards to the 'speed' that textures sharpen...if I completely deactivated the MSE textures and relied only on my UTX/GEX combination, flying at 3000 feet or below many times even THOSE non-photoreal textures wouldn't sharpen all the way.  I could see that same effect with them sometimes beneath the autogen.  You'd be flying along and a cornfield or what not would look a bit blocky and blurry...but then as you are flying past it would suddenly 'sharpen up' and look much better.  Other times they were sharp by the time I got to them, other times they didn't sharpen at all.

 

Fiber_Time does seem to make a huge difference though.  Drop it to .20 and the textures never sharpen at all...ever.  Raise it to .99 and they "Seem" to sharpen up better, and more frequently, but the FPS takes a huge hit...especially on the ground.  I've got it set at .49 right now.

 

Maybe thats just how it is and I can't make it any better.  I still haven't overclocked my system, so there is a good chance I think that would help.  I overclocked one system once before...my last system, and it was very time consuming and alot of work.  There was alot to learn.  However, I only built this current one in September and just haven't had the time to re-learn to do it on an Ivy Bridge and with this motherboard, or had the time to leave my PC running for the stress testing.  Maybe its time that I finally bite the bullet and do it...and perhaps the AVSIM hardware guide would be a good place to start learning again.  I noticed there were some 'overclocking' links in the document.

 

Another thing I'll say regarding my testing is that I also did some testing at 18,000 feet.  I've got a theory that alot of users are NOT getting "sharpened" textures and just don't know it.  At FL018 the textures look very nice and if I wasn't paying attention, I probably wouldn't notice when they didn't sharpen all the way.  They might just have a very slightly blurry or hazy look....but then if I really watch...sometimes I can catch them in the act of sharpening up and then it went from looking "pretty good" to looking even better.

 

Nothing fancy as far as the flight goes.  I say just  start around the military base down there and head to the tip of Key West....  don't need to go fast as I am not looking for blurrries.  Tell me what you see as far as ground color, ground sharpness, masking... things like that.    I'll mess it with it too this weekend - take a few screenies. 

 

Also, check from a top-down view if you see the whole state of Florida to see if any parts are missing.  I am missing a huge swath from coast to coast south of Orlando, about mid state.  I installed with the disks.  Did you d/l yours or were they disks too.

 

Clutch,

 

This weekend I did exactly as you asked.  Started from the military base down there and headed to the tip of key west.  I flew at between 5000-10000, and was at around 250 Knots.  I'm not a very good reviewer as I've never been to Key West, much less seen it from the air, so take what I say with a grain of salt.  The ground color looked good to me.  The sharpness I can't say...I had my lod_radius set at 4.5 for my tests and so things were sometimes just not sharpening up as they should.  Often times it looked pretty bad and blurry to me.  Sometimes it would magically "sharpen" as I flew over it, others it would stay blurry.  I haven't tested with lod_radius at 8.5 though or at higher altitudes.  When the textures DID sharpen, they looked very good.  When they did NOT sharpen...if they were beach or wilderness they looked nice but if they were urban they looked horrible.

 

I'm not 100% sure how to judge "masking problems" or what masking problems look like...but I THINK I saw some.  There were islands there that appeared to have bodies of water in the center, or rivers/streams but the lake/river/stream wasn't water textured...it was pure white...as if it were made of snow.  It was really bizarre looking.  There were a few of the areas I saw this going from the tip of the keys back up to the mainland.

 

Bear in mind that I'm still checking and will run another flight, but so far, I haven't noticed any large swaths of land missing from coast to coast mid-state.

Reading through this forum thread, I noticed that no one has mentioned one of the most important tweaks one can do to get MegaSceneryEarth 2.0 to reduce or eliminate the Blurries.

 

Turn off Superfetch Service!

 

How to turn off Superfetch.  This only applies to Vista, Win7 and Win8.  Superfetch works in the background automatically pre-loading what it thinks you want to use based on monitoring your activity over time.  It interferes with loading MegaSceneryEarth scenery textures.  I have noticed an incredible improvement in how fast the scenery snaps up into resolution since I disabled Superfetch.  It's like magic.

 

To turn off Superfetch, type "services.msc" in the start menu, press enter and un-check Superfetch Service from the list.

 

I have been experimenting with MegasceneryEarth 2.0 since it first came out and have every state available.   I have noticed that adding RAM and increasing processor speed (over-clocking) made the biggest improvement in how fast the tiles load, but kept running into some sort of bottleneck after a while.  It seemed as if the scenery would load in giant chunks and then stop and after a while would load up another giant chunk, usually behind my aircraft.  I find that cruising at around 150 to 170 kts between 4000 and 8000 ft gives good results, but I am still experimenting.

 

I leave my LOD at 4.5, it didn't make any difference increasing the number, I still ran into the same blurries bottleneck.  I also noticed that the mesh complexity number makes a difference.  I lowered it to "30", which seems to be the best balance.

 

I am using a 2 TB mechanical hard drive dedicated to FSX and use Ultimate Defrag4 regularly to keep the data to the outer edge of of the platter. Until I fully understand the blurries issues, I am not convinced that using a SSD would fix it.  They are too small and expensive right now, anyways.

 

I have Southern California, California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Utah, Colorado and Hawaii as well as several city packs such as Las Vegas, Reno, Boise, and area 51.   I have most of the ORBX titles on there, too, but rarely use them.

 

One of the benefits of aggressively tweaking MegaSceneryEarth 2.0 is that version 1 scenery (California, etc) runs blazingly fast ... it's fantastic.

 

I leave my frame-limiter at unlimited as it doesn't seem to make any difference in how fast the tiles rez up.  I see framerates from 20 to 100+ FPS depending on what's being rendered. My old processor is a bottleneck when it comes to lot's of buildings, but I will fix that when I build my next computer. First I wanted to fix the the blurries as I don't believe that is a CPU or GPU problem.

 

Here is the best guide I have found for tweaking MegaSceneryEarth 2.0

 

 

http://www.megasceneryearth.com/store/cart.php?page=usage_tips

 

System Specs

 

Win7 Ulitimate

Q6600 quad over-clocked to 3.2 mHz

8 GBs DDR3 RAM

WD Caviar Black 1 TB, Seagate Barracuda 2 TB, WD Caviar Green 2TB (for BU Storage)

MSI Nvidia 580GTX OC

Hi I can"t resist  to say that TILEPROXY  is free and it gets updated   looks exacly the same has Mega scenery  or even better ... but  the tweaks that you mentioned  works also with  TIleproxy 

TileProxy certainly looks interesting but how are the framerates?   I have been reading through the very old postings about this program going back to 2008 and people seem very happy with 20 FPS.  How are things with TileProxy in 2013? Have the FPS and texture loading improved since then?

 

I use trackIR and enjoy the silky smooth graphics I have achieved with my scenery addons.  Anything less than 60 FPS is not silky smooth, especially when panning quickly.

 

I might install TileProxy on another computer just to try it out for fun. 

TileProxy certainly looks interesting but how are the framerates?   I have been reading through the very old postings about this program going back to 2008 and people seem very happy with 20 FPS.  How are things with TileProxy in 2013? Have the FPS and texture loading improved since then?

 

I use trackIR and enjoy the silky smooth graphics I have achieved with my scenery addons.  Anything less than 60 FPS is not silky smooth, especially when panning quickly.

 

I might install TileProxy on another computer just to try it out for fun. 

Tileproxy  fps are not a concerned  disable autogene  and your in the 100 , I can assure you with a good fsx cfg, and descent mesh  ,track ir  it can t be better then this  for vfr . megascenery doesn't come close to the realism of tileproxy , try it at Seattle  go visite Mont St Helene   your gone fall off your chair   (SERVICE 1...)

I am starting to explore TileProxy.  It looks really good, I have watched some recent high definition videos and it seems to run just fine as far as framerates although the vids were shot from ultralights going really slow.  The panning was smooth.  I look forward to experimenting with it.

Tileproxy  fps are not a concerned  disable autogene  and your in the 100 , I can assure you with a good fsx cfg, and descent mesh  ,track ir  it can t be better then this  for vfr . megascenery doesn't come close to the realism of tileproxy , try it at Seattle  go visite Mont St Helene   your gone fall off your chair   (SERVICE 1...)

 

 

I have been exploring Tile Proxy for a couple of weeks and it does look really good.  It depends on the maps that are loaded when flying. There can be  inconsistencies between areas but when it's good quality, it is great. I found an .ini file that keeps the maps downloading. I like that I can fly anywhere in the world and get satellite imagery.

 

I installed FSX with TileProxy on another computer with the same stats as an experiment control .  The same issues come up with blurries and I am playing around with that and have made improvements, it really runs well. The image quality is excellent.  

 

Frame-rates are the same with either MegasceneryEarth or TileProxy.

 

In one experiment,  I attempted to use TileProxy with the MegasceneryEarth layered over it,  so that TileProxy fills in missing regions that were formerly displaying default land-class scenery but I saw severe blurries after a few minutes so until I find a solution, I must run either one or the other.  I will fix it, so I can have the best of both, I am sure it's just a matter of tweaking things. 

 

MegasceneryEarth Southern California and California State run better than the TileProxy versions.  The tiles load faster ... much, faster ... but if I didn't already have the scenery installed and working so well, I would use TileProxy.

 

Over-all, I still find that MegasceneryEarth tiles load faster and are more consistent than the TileProxy ones I have seen so far.  But I extremely impressed with TileProxy as it works really well and I recommend it highly.  It loads up a flight a lot faster than when using scenery from the library and saves hard drive space.

 

Mount Saint Helens in MegaSceneryEarth and TileProxy look about the same, honestly, but are from different seasons.  Both are crisp enough to see every tree and boulder.  The TileProxy Tiles are better colour, but with atmospheric haze and clouds, they look very similar.

 

I use 30 cm resolution on both.

Hi   for me , when im using tileproxy s cache ,it load much faster then  Mega ,

depends on computer spec  I guess ,but  I love that its free and that you download has you fly ...

cheers ...

Maybe thats just how it is and I can't make it any better.  I still haven't overclocked my system, so there is a good chance I think that would help.

 

I just discovered this thread. Have you got it sorted yet?

Not sure if you did try it but yes, overclocking helps with this.

 

What also helps is more threads. Make sure you have HyperTreading activated and set affinitymask=249. What affinitymask have you been using previously?

 

Combine both and you'll get a healthy boost to how fast the textures sharpens.