As far as Negative LOD bias, I'm pretty sure this setting should always be "Clamp" when using any anisotropic filtering. I noticed you have it set to OFF (hence why you don't clamp). I'm curious why you have anisotropic filtering Off? I'm also puzzled as to why you aren't seeing any difference with that setting?

 

I have Ansiotropic off because that setting doesn't do anything for me. No change in IQ and no change in GPU workload regardless of NI setting. Are you sure you are? Clamp has been advertised as a fix for shimmering. I don't get any appreciable shimmering with AATSS at 8xSGSS, so i turned it off. No observable difference on or off, so it's off.

 

Lots of NVIDIA settings simply don't work for many games. Also, I noticed you have one driver release new that i have. Also, a higher end GPU and CPU. So many variables in this pursuit!! :-)

 

What does MipBias=10 do for you?

 

I had tested with 1/2 refresh rate in the past and it smoothed out wavy scenery on fast changes in direction, so I left it. I did not retest it today.

 

What does MipBias=10 do for you?

 

MipBias ... I'm taking some liberties here because there is no Direct3D setting called MipBias, so I'm assuming the Aces crew use the identifier MipBias to indicate MipMapLevelOfDetailBias which is typically a negative to a positive value but Aces appear to be using all positive values and I guess do some translation of those values into meaningful settings for MipMapLevelOfDetailBias??

 

I don't know your depth of knowledge, but in case you didn't already know, mipmaps are basically sets of images of reducing sizes which are then used as texture maps on a polygon.  As the polygon gets smaller (or larger) it'll use defferent image sizes that are part of the mipmap (purpose is to reduce memory usage and help with performance ... however with newer video cards with lots of VRAM this might be up for debate).  Typically the setting of MipMapLevelOfDetailBias will restrict the loading of lower mipmap levels and improve image clarity.  However, it can also introduce shimmering and/or speckles which is where the Clamp setting comes in.

 

MipBias is not a "standard" setting that can be made via the FSX UI, in fact, it'll get removed if you go into the Customer settings via FSX. 

 

Yes, there are MANY MANY factors at play, what works for you or I may not work for someone else.  Screen resolution will also impact end results where one setting may look great at 2560 x 1600, but look terrible at 1920 x 1080.

 

Anyway, that's my understanding, someone feel free to correct me as I certainly don't want to be accused of being an expert.

 

Cheers, Rob.

I use these settings

 

and

[GRAPHICS]

MultiSamplesPerPixel=8
MultiSampleQuality=8

[TERRAIN]

LOD_RADIUS=8.500000

 

Which are rather high but in return I see this

 

 

 

I tried all the posted settings and found my PC would handle these.

Using DX9 I run out of memory in less than five minutes, I am still waiting to run out using Dx10

 

Nick.

I really enjoyed those pictures Rob but didn't see any with the sun inside the VC (I'm looking to see if you have jagged edges) and I didn't see any white caps on the water and think the San Francisco Bay would have a lot of white caps.  Think the weather has to be turned on though.  Nick's photos above show some of the white caps in the water.  I think that's one of the great things about DX10 and that's the water white cap effect.  I have some issues with jagged edges inside the VC and I don't think it can be perfected.  I have my LOD_Radius set to 7.5 and the settings recommended by the MSE V2 folks. 

 

I want to emphasize though that I really thought your pictures looked great.

 

I tried all the posted settings and found my PC would handle these.

Using DX9 I run out of memory in less than five minutes, I am still waiting to run out using Dx10

 

Nick.

 

Nick, nice pictures too but I don't understand your NI settings for AF (Anisotropic or whatever).  You have Application Controlled then you have 16x's.  That means FSX AF setting is the only thing that's working.  It could care less about your 16x's.

 

Best regards,

Jim

 

Using DX9 I run out of memory in less than five minutes, I am still waiting to run out using Dx10
 
Nick.

 

Hi Nick, where did you get that Aircraft?  707 right?  I like A LOT!

I really enjoyed those pictures Rob but didn't see any with the sun inside the VC (I'm looking to see if you have jagged edges) and I didn't see any white caps on the water and think the San Francisco Bay would have a lot of white caps.

 

I'll try to post some pics with sun moving across VC later tonight ... I don't recall how I solved that problem of the poor quality edges of shadows in the VC ... I think I solved it with one of Steve's or Paul's or someone else files ... they are not completely eliminated, but were greatly reduced, so much so that it wasn't a distraction ... pretty sure it was NOT an NI settings that solved it.

 

The Bay doesn't usually have white caps unless it's very windy, have to get out past the Golden Gate into the Pacific before one gets to see bigger white caps.  But REX was "off" at the time I did those shots so no wave animations.

Hi Nick, where did you get that Aircraft?  707 right?  I like A LOT!

 

It's the Captain Sim Boeing 707, probably one of the best FSX airliners available.

They do a demo here

http://captainsim.com/products/x707/demo.html

and from time to time they have offers, usually around Christmas but I mistimed and paid the full price.

Still worth every penny.

 

Jim, I have tried every which way with the anisotropic settings and I can only conclude that the FSX setting simply enables/disables it and the remaining NI settings still apply.

The effect is the same whether it is set in NI to application controlled or user defined/off but the photoscenery is horribly blurred if

I set anisotropic to off in FSX.

 

Regards,

Nick.

Rob ae these settings with your new titan and what do you think of it ? been a pain to tweak for some reason.

Thanks Rob.

 

Best regards,

Jim

 

Rob ae these settings with your new titan and what do you think of it ?

 

No, Titan is still sitting in a box, haven't installed it yet ... will report on when I do ... I have other software in this PC that has issues with the Titan so I need to figure that out first before I install it (work related and I can't break any work stuff so the 680GTX 4GB says in it for now).

 

I think you mean my pictures Paul?  But yes, banding is from conversion from original 1.5MB PNG to 400-500KB JPG ... not present in the PNG.

Rob

 

Yes, but I was agreeing with Richard, that the pics were excellent. This is about what I experience, too. My settings are similar, except I don't use MipBias, preferring to let SGSS take care of shimmering. 

It suprises me to see people using DX10 preview say that they need to have the NI "Antialiasing - Setting" set to a particular value to get AA to look good.  The only AA settings that matter in DX10 preview is checking the in-game AA check box and these settings in the fsx.cfg:

 

[GRAPHICS]
MultiSamplesPerPixel=4     // Must have for good AA  Can be 8
MultiSampleQuality=16     //  Can be 4 or 8 for better performance.

 

Just as a experiment, try setting the above values as 2 and 2 in your fsx.cfg and run FSX.  Regardless of any NI "Antialiasing - Setting" you have set, your VC will now have very noticable jagged edges. BTW, the max values for these settings are 8 and 32.  Try setting these max values too, and watch your performance suffer for very little improvement over the above settings.

 

Fortunately for us, the NI "Antiliasing - Transparency Supersample" setting does work and cleans up jagged edges when it is set to at least 4xGSAA.  This NI setting, along with the above shown fsx.cfg settings makes for a really nice VC experience.  BTW, this info is covered in PaulJ's excellent DX10 guide.

How are you guys running   so  high LOD when that is a recipe for OOM failures. NGX + FSDT with 4096 textures is sure to be a disaster even though it looks fantastic. 

Just wanted to say A BIG THANKS TO ALL because with this post I finally stumbled upon the magic combination (Eddie's N.I. settings) that took care of the Preview Window jaggies and incredibly fluid flight at a steady 30 fps, except when I am over an Aerosoft U.S. City, then it drops to the low 20's, but I'll take it!

 

My system consists of an Antec 300-2 Case, Intel Z77GAL-70K Mobo, Intel i7-3770K Proc @ 4.2, Water cooled with Thermaltake "Performer", matched 8GB pair PNY memory @ 1600, EVGA NV660 GTX 2G run at performance level "0" which is max clock and memory speeds with fan set to run @ 62%, Seagate Barracuda 2TB HD with 64MB cache, 7200 RPM.

 

I am using some of Bojote's mods, like AM 84, but not BP=0, rather a PoolSize=2500000000, UsePools=1, RejectThreshold=524288, TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=80, FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION=0.20.

 

What a great Forum, what a great Hobby!

 

Thanks to all!

 

 

How are you guys running   so  high LOD when that is a recipe for OOM failures. NGX + FSDT with 4096 textures is sure to be a disaster even though it looks fantastic. 

We can run these settings because we use DX10, Dave. There are a number of articles published around the net which give outlines or overviews of the differences between DX9 and DX10. and here is one by Phil Taylor, written just after SP2 was released. The effect that our config parameters affect the sim differently, and once tweaked, it is able to continuously hold a high frame rate, while appearing to be very, very, smooth.

 

In preventing OOM's, I have a couple of personal rules:

 

1). Put a custom 3gig max/min swap file on a different drive than C, with a 100 MB max/min on C.

2). Check and modify the DeskTop Heap Limitation settings, per the doc included in the above link.

 

.. and then running FSX in DX10 mode, which frees up more system memory, on top of which are the benefits gained from a 64-bit version of W7, using 8 gig of ram. 

 

That combination will work fine for years, Dave. I cannot remember when the last OOM was - I think actually it was when using the Core2Duo e6600 a number of years back.

 

All the Best,