Ok just to give everyone the rundown - I spent several hours on Bob's machine tonight with him and we think we've solved the issue.

 

Primary VAS driver:
Numerous active Megascenery Earth 2.0 photoscenery states

Most of the eastern US states were installed and active. VAS was at nearly 3.8GB already with the NGX just sitting at the gate at FlightBeam KIAD cold and dark. Turning the airplane on and beginning to program the FMC almost immediately crossed the 4GB VAS barrier and crashed the sim. Disabling the photoscenery using Scenery Config Editor freed up over 1GB of VAS sitting at the gate. FSX allocates VAS to scenery *even if it is not visible and you never fly over it or within visibility range of it.* This is completely counter-intuitive and I have no idea why MS did this, but it appears to be a major cause of the OOM problems. If you must use photoscenery like this with the NGX (and the 777 when it's out) I highly suggest only enabling the states you're going to be flying over and not everything - it will almost certainly OOM if you have everything active. I think this type of scenery is better suited to low and slow VFR flight in GA aircraft that don't have the kind of VAS overhead a complex airliner does.

Secondary VAS driver:
4096 REX textures

We reduced these to 2048 (and set the texture max load in the cfg to 2048) in an attempt to further reduce the VAS load. I personally don't see any visual difference vs. the 4096 ones, especially at 1920x1080/1200, so it makes sense to me to do what reduces the VAS load. Remember that because textures are measured as a square, doubling the resolution actually *quadruples* the total number of pixels. 2046x2046 = ~4 million pixels, but 4096x4096 = ~16 million pixels. That's pretty significant, especially for (to me at least) such a small visual change.

We also ran his fsx.cfg through ******* Altuve's tool and set Nvidia Inspector for 8xS + 2xSGSSAA + FXAA. I was actually incorrect earlier - video card settings do not appear to affect VAS, it all happens internally on the card and the extra memory used by higher AA levels does not appear in the fsx.exe process VAS. I tested this myself last night and the VAS never changed regardless of what settings I used on the card. So that's good at least.

All other addons were left active including the Orbx regions. The Orbx stuff does hit VAS but nowhere near as much as photoscenery because it isn't applying a totally unique texture to every single LOD cell in the region the way that photoscenery does. Textures get reused and that lowers the VAS usage comparatively by a lot.

============

To measure VAS, get Sysinternals' Process Explorer here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

Run it and right click in the area where the column names are. Go to the Process Memory tab and check "Virtual Size", which will give you a new column - this is a direct measure of VAS. (I move it over next to the CPU column - click it to sort the column by descending VAS) "Working Set" is the parameter most closely associated with the actual amount of physical RAM the process is using. Virtual Size is pretty much always going to be much bigger than Working Set. Watch the FSX.exe process as you do things in the sim and it will show you how those things affect VAS. If you can reliably finish flights without it going over 4GB, you're going to be stable and shouldn't ever see a crash from VAS exhaustion.

Great support  Ryan

FPS vs Smoothness

http://forum.avsim.net/topic/412527-fps-vs-smoothness/#entry2703640

 

FPS vs Smoothness

http://forum.avsim.net/topic/412527-fps-vs-smoothness/#entry2703640

The op  wasn't  complaining  about  fps or  smoothness he was  getting  ooms so cant  see where  you coming  from here unless I missed something, see that you posted  the same  clip on another  thread

Good to know other folks find 2048 good for VAS control and in case you don't know, you can use the FSDT menu configuration utility to permanently set 2048 max resolution in fsx.cfg, which will also set it immediately in-session, without having to restart FSX; and it will keep it at 2048.  All proper 4096 scenery with correct LOD layers will simply show only up to the 2048 LOD level without further edits to the textures themselves.

 

I just want to add that I had been experiencing or coming close to the 4GB VAS OOM limit recently as well.  I too run 2048 or lower textures but I also like my custom AIG AI collection running 100% along with my Scenery Complexity Slider at 100%.  In addition to not using and any Terrain LOD Radius tweaks above the default-max of 4.5 in the fsx.cfg, the number one VAS memory consumer in my case seemed to be the Autogen slider.  Granted, it's a balancing act to keep the settings as high as possible with your favorite scenery and aircraft, but since I reduced the Autogen from Dense back to Normal (middle on the slider-bar), I've not had a single OOM or FSUIPC "Low Memory" warning since.

 

Ryan,

You mentioned a good-while ago that the max texture resolution setting in the fsx.cfg did not appear to apply to the user-aircraft textures, only scenery.  Did you ever follow-up with that and confirm it one way or the other?

Eye-opening. ORBX should actually enhance their FTX Central to reflect these findings ...

One question for the OP: do you run FSX in windowed or full-screen mode?

One question for the OP: do you run FSX in windowed or full-screen mode?

 

I don't know what he does normally but we were running in Windowed since TeamViewer has issues with fullscreen games.

 

Good to know other folks find 2048 good for VAS control and in case you don't know, you can use the FSDT menu configuration utility to permanently set 2048 max resolution in fsx.cfg, which will also set it immediately in-session, without having to restart FSX; and it will keep it at 2048.  All proper 4096 scenery with correct LOD layers will simply show only up to the 2048 LOD level without further edits to the textures themselves.

 

I just want to add that I had been experiencing or coming close to the 4GB VAS OOM limit recently as well.  I too run 2048 or lower textures but I also like my custom AIG AI collection running 100% along with my Scenery Complexity Slider at 100%.  In addition to not using and any Terrain LOD Radius tweaks above the default-max of 4.5 in the fsx.cfg, the number one VAS memory consumer in my case seemed to be the Autogen slider.  Granted, it's a balancing act to keep the settings as high as possible with your favorite scenery and aircraft, but since I reduced the Autogen from Dense back to Normal (middle on the slider-bar), I've not had a single OOM or FSUIPC "Low Memory" warning since.

 

Ryan,

You mentioned a good-while ago that the max texture resolution setting in the fsx.cfg did not appear to apply to the user-aircraft textures, only scenery.  Did you ever follow-up with that and confirm it one way or the other?

 

 

Al,

 

I'd have to test this to be sure but I think the VAS increase comes from just the pure file size of the textures, not from what FSX is displaying them at. A 4096 texture is going to have roughly 4 times the file size that a 2048 one does, and I think that's where the hit comes from. If the sim is downsampling a 4096 texture, it's still at the core dealing with a larger file.

 

Regarding the texture max load setting, yes it does not actually affect the aircraft. We tested that and removed the recommendation in the SP2 documentation. The aircraft itself will always display at whatever "native" resolution the textures are in provided you have the global texture resolution full right and the high resolution VC box is checked. I'm not even sure that setting affects airport sceneries - I think it may be solely the "environment" type stuff like clouds, water etc.

One question for the OP: do you run FSX in windowed or full-screen mode?

Yes, I always run the sim in windowed mode.  I have Flightsim Commander and Navigraph opened at the same time, and I continuously bring them up while I'm flying.

Also, I like to watch movies on Amazon Prime while I fly longer trips, since I'm using a 52" monitor and my Volair Sim cockpit is soooo comfortable. 

Right now, I'm flying again from KIAD to KLGA, but I have turned on AI traffic and the Megascenery v.2 states that I'm passing over.  My VAS is still under 3 Gigs and everything seems to be going well.

Enjoy it.  I'm jealous

Enjoy it.  I'm jealous

 

Ha, ha...I hate to get off of it.

 

Below is a screenshot of my NGX on approach at La Guardia with Aerosoft Manhattan, MegascenryEarthv.2, KLGA (by whoever makes it, I forgot), still under the 4GB memory ceiling and getting around 28 FPS.  Thank you so much, Ryan.  I have never had FSX working this good.

 

Back to FS9 for me.

Back to FS9 for me.

Oh no! :huh: If you are having problems with FSX, call Dr. Ryan. He makes house calls!

I'm fully ready now, for the PMDG 777. But PMDG needs to go ahead and release it before I mess things up again. :lol:

Woah, how did you get Aero to stay on with FSX?

Fantastic work by Ryan and great to know about the resolution. I'm left wondering if this VAS penalty caused by all addon scenery, or it's primarily a photoscenery issue? MSE has a usage tips page (http://www.megasceneryearth.com/store/cart.php?page=usage_tips) and they mentioned turning off superfetch. I followed NickN's setup guide which adjusts prefetch to only apply to boot files, it's a good thing to check out if you haven't done it.

 

I use REX 1024 clouds with 2xSGSS as I find anything higher and I get a frame hit in heavy clouds. The 1024 clouds still look very good.

 

Edit: I re-read Ryan's post and now I can see the VAS issue is mainly with photoscenery because of all the unique textures versus the reusable textures for landclass scenery like Orbx.