Best settings for photoscenery loading

[markturner 0]

Hi, I am an old hand at the tweaking game, but am running into a bit of an annoying issue ( or maybe not..) trying to get my Megascenery2 to display at maximum crispness. I have a pretty quick machine ( I7 950 @3.8Ghz, 2 GTX 680 cards , FSX on an SSD, windows 7 on an SSD, scenery on separate dedicated drives and 6 GB ram. Using photoscenery, I don't have any autogen and I also all my traffic options at zero. So in theory, I should be able to get a pretty good result. When the flight first loads, its all great, but if I fly along, then after approx 20 or 30 seconds, the scenery below loses the last one or two zoom levels. its not terrible at all, but if I pause, after 10 seconds or so, I can see the tiles snap up a level and sometimes 2 . I figure that I should be able to maintain the max load under my jet really. I usually fly the superbug and at speeds approx 300kts. Its better in slower aircraft ( of course) but even so....

 

However, no matter what combination of settings I use ( and I have been reading the guide as well as drawing on the 4 plus years experience I have doing this) I just cant seem to get the photoscenery to display maximum crispness under my plane for very long. I want to approach the solution another way, so what are the settings that will directly affect the scenery loading the most? IE, I want to set my system up for the fastest possible scenery loading, and crispness at the expense of everything else - what would you set? 

 

What puzzles me is that changing the TBM value does not seem to have much effect, neither does any of the other tweaks, like buffer pools.  I can take settings in and out and none of it seems to make a huge difference, which I really cant understand, 

 

Is it good to use Nvidia inspector, or just the Nvidia control panel? And should I have "AntiAlias=1" in the config, or just Anisotropic? Currently I have both. And what is best for scenery loading? Frame rate set at 30? 

 

The final issue I have relates to Track ir. I use a profile that is silky smooth in all my other flight sims, so we can rule out profile settings etc as the cause, but using the same profile in FSX, I get jerky panning and nothing I do to change the settings in trackir software, or even using the new Opus for FSX track ir control makes any difference. it will be jerky even if my FPS is 90 -100, so its not just happening when the system is under load....

 

 

Thanks, Mark

[7neophyte7 30]

Mark what is your Lod Radius? I saw mine was 4.5 and I set it to 6.5. For me it was an immediately improvement.

[cianpars 1,165]

Hi Mark, I too found upping the LOD radius of help.  With the Justfilight UK scenery, I really need to use 8.5, but it does tax the system a bit when flying elsewhere.

 

Some of the Tileproxy tweaks also apply to photoscenery generally.  I think you can get some improvement by using a higher fiber rate time fraction setting from Tileproxy days, helped, but again at the expense of FPS performance.

 

I've played with using higher TBM settings on my current rig and got no mileage, but on previous systems, it did help improve photoscenery.

 

Another area to experiment with may be mipnmap settings and filtering via your videocard.

 

IAN

[JimmiG 244]

I use FFM 0.5 with the BlueSky CA scenery and 5.5 LOD radius. Also undo the affinitymask tweak since you want all cores to work at loading texture tiles.

However if Hyperthreading is enabled, you may want to use affinitymask 85, which is 01010101 (ie, only the "real", not the virtual cores will be enabled).


I posted some shots a while ago with my old AMD system
http://forum.avsim.net/topic/406406-malibu-jetprop-over-california/
I never paused the sim to take those shots, it was always sharp like that, though the JetProp only does about 230 kts cruise speed, not 300.

[SAAB340 28]

Hi Mark,

First of all, what separate disks do you have the photo scenery installed on?

 

Secondly, make sure to use hyperthreading. This exact scenario is where FSX can make good use of it. It doesn't matter if you have to back off the overclock a bit to have it activated. The extra threads will more than offset that when it comes to textureloading. Once it's on, set affinitymask=249.

 

Yes, you should have the FPS locked within FSX to get the best texture loading. The FiberFrameTimeFraction also has an impact. You can consider upping it to 0.67 if you want maximal texture loading all the time, but it can come at an expense of FPS.

 

I've looked in to this a lot myself.

You can read about it in this topic: http://forum.avsim.net/topic/377105-texture-loading-ssd-vs-hdd/

Links to the important pictures that are missing in the original post are found in a reply further down.

 

When it comes to upping the LOD it helps in the way that you initially when loading the flight or when you pause the flight in game, get the highest resolution textures further away from your plane and thus gives you a larger 'buffer' of high resolution textures around you. But it doesn't speed up how fast textures are loaded.

[SAAB340 28]

These are the factors that matters for photoscenery texture loading.

 

Number of cores and threads available with a correct affinitymask setting.

Clockspeed and IPC of the processor.

Responstime of the storage the scenery is on.

BP=0

FPS lock set within FSX and nothing other than your CPUs performance causing your FPS to drop below the locked value you've set. (Example; external FPS limiter, using too high AA settings for your GPU, v-sync.)

The FFTF value.

[cianpars 1,165]

Yep BP=0 definitely if your videocard can handle it.

 

IAN

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[RickB1293 9]

Have tried DX10? All of my photo scenery (MCE v2.0 CO, MN and WI plus all of the Hawaiian Islands except the Big Island) displays well at LOD_Radius at 6.5. The FiberFrame setting doesn't have any effect in FSX, it's not supported.

 

What elevation and speed are you flying the bug at? Anything below 3,000 AGL will pretty much dissolve and 300kt ground speed just flat blows through the scenery. Have you overflown any of the addon airport packages like FSDreamteam? They aren't photoreal but are quite complex and hardware intensive. I haven't flown the Bug in awhile so I think I'll give it a try. Of course that kind of flying IRL will look pretty blurry too.

 

One other thing that might help is to turn off prefetch in Windows. This will prevent the operating system from loading it's files into your drive cache and make room for your scenery. Have tried moving the scenery to an SSD? I don't think you'll see much change because the scenery files are relatively small but if you have the hardware, it might be worth a try.

[RickB1293 9]

I just remebered that VRS  doesn't support DX10 with their TacPac which probably means that the Bug won't work either. Sorry for the misinformation.

[markturner 0]

Hi guys, apologies for my late reply, I have been spending some time testing and tweaking. Some answers first to queries and  questions you posed:

 

Scenery is on a 300GB velociraptor while FSX and windows are both on separate SSD's. Running LOD radius 9.5. No traffic, no autogen. Photoscenery only. 

 

Lars, I read your article with great interest and was very impressed with your work and interesting findings. i have been after the holy grail of settings to display my photoscenery properly for some time, especially while I was using tileproxy - have you tried this or looked into how it works BTW? Extremely interesting..

 

The upshot of all  my efforts is that no matter what combination of settings I try, I cant find one, that gives me fully loaded textures the whole time....My test criteria was somewhat less scientific than yours, I just saved a flight at 300 kts, in the Superbug at 300 feet over Phoenix Arizona, using the new Megascenery2 Arizona scenery. ( Lots of houses and roads that really show if the scenery is not crisp) I then flew the same flight and then paused when I noticed the textures getting less sharp and then counted how long it took for them to snap into hi res while in the same fixed external view.  I can get it to run nice and smooth at 30 FPS, with the highest res textures snapping in at under 10 seconds, but no matter what I do, I cant get them to stay sharp ...Which is a bit frustrating, as whats the point of having 50cm scenery if you cant get it to display? I can pause every minute or so, to let it catch up, but that's not ideal. 

 

I was using FFTF =.67, AF=249, BP=0, frames @30 and Vsync locked @half refresh rate, disable preload, highmemfix=1

 

Lars , I also wanted to see what you thought about the use of the TBM setting? You dont mention this and I find it is also vital to how well textures load. I use 400...your comments on this would be appreciated. 

 

Would be really interesting if anyone can try and find a combination of settings that allow that. I wonder if it exists? 

[Jim Young 2,356]

 

 

I was using FFTF =.67, AF=249, BP=0, frames @30 and Vsync locked @half refresh rate, disable preload

 

Some of this has been discussed above but here are some of my thoughts/recommendations:

 

In regards to FFTF, the tweak is useless with your quad-core 950 - http://www.simforums.com/forums/topic27540_post170479.html#170479 (as verified by NickN and Phil Taylor, lead developer for FSX).   I know that some of the experts, like Word Not Allowed's Tweaking Guide, recommend FFTF, but the information is wrong.  Get rid of it (unless you have an old single core cpu).

 

AF=249.  This setting is truly puzzling to me.  As Word Not Allowed stated in his tweaking guide, AF for a quad core with HT off should be 14; with HT on, 84.  And, in NickN's Setting up FSX and Tuning It Guide - http://www.simforums.com/forums/setting-up-fsx-and-how-to-tune-it_topic29041.html he has several other recommendations and thoughts about AF.  In any case, 249 is way too high.  Based on NickN's comments, I have removed this "tweak". 

 

I went with the recommendations of PC Aviator in regards to LOD_Radius and have set mine to 6.5.  This gives my CPU/GPU some space to render the textures faster.  I have had mine as high as 9.5 too and it worked well for a while but I saw a lot of strain on my system at certain times.  I also have DX10 enabled and my NI settings for my GTX580 are the default set by the Nvidia techs for FSX.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Best regards,

Jim

[markturner 0]

Hi Jim, my take on this having read Lars extensive post regarding this ( referenced above, post number 5 ), NickN's guides and also the Avsim tweak guide, is that settings that in general relate to standard FSX scenery do not apply when using Photoscenery. That's why for example, if you use tileproxy, you will notice the TBM multiplyer is set at 400 etc in the .cfg file. Tileproxy is after all, streaming photoscenery with no autogen and no landclass. So what works for "normal" FSX scenery like orbx etc, does not for photoscenery, hence the different settings. You will absolutely notice a big difference in the snap in time of crisp textures using pure photoscenery by increasing this above 120 value. Do you use photoscenery at all? If so, what results do you get? Your system is basically very similar to mine so would be good to compare notes....

 

The affinity mask settings are explained quite well by lars in his post, they were also new to me. I have not however noticed much of an increase in performance by using this, but he did and his tests were more accurate than my "By eye " method. 

 

The FFTF entry. On my system, everything else being equal, I can get this to affect performance negatively, by putting it higher than the .67 Lars recommended. At the setting of 1.33 that Tileproxy sets in your .cfg file, it halves my frame rates. Correspondingly, I  notice not much difference if I include it , or not....its difficult to measure, so whatever effect, it must be small.

 

Bottom line is I think I am almost there in terms of getting as much as I can out my system - at LOD radius 9.5, that is one heck of a lot of high res textures to load, and I can run at a pretty decent , smooth 30 FPS with that and just the occasional pause to catch up. My video card is only 1.5GB memory, so perhaps my next upgrade will help. But I find using lower radius makes the scenery look too crap too near..

 

With regard to DX10, I should revisit my attempt to get that working as there is certainly scope for some improvements there. Lars, what you found trying DX10 in your testing? 

 

One thing I notice is that there are several conflicting strands of thought on FSX performance - and one thing is also for sure, there are so many variables, that it is almost impossible to test the various permutations of settings of them all........

 

You will notice here, in a thread I had going with NickN a year or so ago, he talks a lot about using the FFTF setting: http://www.simforums.com/forums/topic41980_post246524.html#246524  in direct contradiction to the thread you linked...no wonder its confusing....in the same quote, he recommends not using BP=0, yet Lars and Ian both recommend this.....

[Jim Young 2,356]

I think a lot of the confusion can be attributed to new technology that wasn't there in 2006 and 2007.  What worked great back in 2007 does not necessarily work well today with the latest and greatest technology.  All I can say is that I get crisp clear textures with no blurring w/o FFTF, 6.5 LOD_Radius, 2048 Texture_Max_Load and no Affinity Mask tweak.  My TBM is set at 80.  FPS are locked at 40 and, at cruising altitude I'm getting a solid 40.  Our systems are not that far apart.  Hope you find that holy grail of settings everyone is looking for! 

 

Best regards,

Jim

[markturner 0]

Hi Jim, can you please confirm the rest of your settings, perhaps post your .cfg file. I am keen to try as an exact match to your settings as I can, to see what happens on my system. Please let me know what your nvidia control panel or inspector settings are as well. Also, have you followed any of the recommendations on the PCaviator site as well, such as turning of superfetch? Do you have hyperthreading enabled as well? 

 

rgds, Mark