LOD_RADIUS

[Guest]

This may be an unexpected question from an FSX-oldie like me but I started flying low and slow again (after spending a lot of time high and dry) and I noticed (again) how the highest res ground textures won't get loaded until I am almost flying above them. I don't have 'the blurries' as such, but the highest textures simply load late. So I decided to have another look at LOD_RADIUS which I usually don't use and set it to 6.500000.

 

The odd thing is that with or without that 'tweak', I see the exact same thing happening... The ground textures still load when I am almost flying over them. I have a certain test flight for this and I can't see any differences at ALL with or without this tweak, which I think is a bit odd... (And yes, I know about the automatic reset of the tweak whenever you change a setting in the game itself, so I always check to make sure LOD_RADIUS is still at 6.50000.)

 

Am I mistaken that the tweak should change the behaviour of loading those highest res textures? Does it only/mainly load other textures further away from the plane...? What should I actually see happening?

[Mork 34]

The higher LOD_radius only will be effective if your textures can be loaded fast enough. With set to 4.5 you already experiencing late loading of sharper textures, so setting it higher could make that a little worse even (I don't know really, maybe it stays the same)

Do you use the FFTF-tweak? (Fiber_fame something)

Because when I set it very low (to about 0.1 or .15) I remember having this too. But there are so many factors... Could be the TextureMaxLoad=X also, whats your setting there? Default = 6 i believe, you might want to try it with a higher setting before changing anything else, and see if that works.

[Rocky_53 1,594]

Hi Jeroen, I may be mistaken, but does not the LOD directly affect the loading distance of autogen. Unsure whether it has a bearing on ground textures.

[Mork 34]

Hi Jeroen, I may be mistaken, but does not the LOD directly affect the loading distance of autogen. Unsure whether it has a bearing on ground textures.

It's the other way around! You can't change the loading distance of autogen unfortunately, only the detailed ground textures.

[JimmiG 244]

Set the LOD radius back to 4.5 and do a test flight. When things start looking blurry, pause the sim (P key) and wait a few minutes.

 

If the textures clear up and become sharper, textures aren't loading fast enough. Changing the LOD Radius will only make things worse. You'll have to look into why textures are loading so slow (overloaded system, incorrect frame limiter settings, incorrect FFTF, wonky affinity mask).

 

If the textures remain blurry, first check your aniso and LOD bias settings. If this doesn't help, it may be time to increase the LOD radius setting. I've found the default 4.5 works great however. Just keep visibility at a more reasonable 30-40 miles max instead of infinity, and everything fades naturally into the distance.

[RickB1293 9]

Hi Jeroen-

 

It's hard to point you in the right direction without knowing about your system. If you're up against a hardware limitation then none of the tweaks you'll find around these forums will have much of an effect. That being said, it sounds like you may have a bandwidth problem between your CPU and graphics card. Try adding these changes to your FSX.CFG file. Try them one at a time and backup your .CFG before you make any changes. You may want to start with a clean file and make progressive changes. It's time consuming but it might save you a lot of headaches. You'll find some good information here  .

 

[bUFFERPOOLS]
 UsePools=1
 PoolSize=100000000
 RejectThreshold=524288

 

You may also want to back down on you framerate setting. Try this:

 

[Display]
 TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=80
 UPPER_FRAMERATE_LIMIT=24
 WIDEVIEWASPECT=True
 TextureMaxLoad=6

 

These changes to your [GRAPHICS] settings can also effect throughput:

 

[GRAPHICS]
 TEXTURE_QUALITY=3
 IMAGE_QUALITY=1
 SHADER_CACHE_PRIMED=1693500672
 SHADER_CACHE_PRIMED_10=1693500672
 D3D10=0
 FORCEWINDOWEDVSYNC=1
 HIGHMEMFIX=1
 MULTISAMPLESPERPIXEL=8     // MUST HAVE FOR GOOD AA CAN BE 8
 MULTISAMPLEQUALITY=4         // CAN BE 4 FOR BETTER PERFORMANCE.
 TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD=2048     // HD textures can be limited to 1024 without impacting image quality
 ForceFullScreenVSync=1

 

I fly in windowed mode because I like having FSCommander and REX up on a second monitor. You can also try to back your in game scenery sliders down a little also. If you have a quad core CPU, Fiber_Frame_Time_Fraction won't have any effect on your system. This setting allowed single or dual core processors to balance the time allocated to running the sim and loading scenery. Since MS came out with SP2 or Acceleration, quad core processors don't use this setting. You can experiment with AffinityMask but Intel high end systems manage their resources pretty well on their own.

 

These terrain settings may or may not help. I use a lot of photorealistic scenery and they are optimized for that. The new offerings have native mesh support and you might have conflicts with autogen packages such as UTC or GEX.

 

[TERRAIN]
 LOD_RADIUS=4.500000    // Photorealistic scenery doesn't "build" the environment, 4.5000 eases the load on the GPU
 MESH_COMPLEXITY=100
 MESH_RESOLUTION=25
 TEXTURE_RESOLUTION=29
 AUTOGEN_DENSITY=5
 DETAIL_TEXTURE=1
 WATER_EFFECTS=7
 TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_TREES_PER_CELL=4000
 TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_BUILDINGS_PER_CELL=4000
 SWAP_WAIT_TIMEOUT=10

 

Take a look at for a more comprehensive list of subjects.

 

Good luck,

Rick Bertz

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the replies, suggestions, help, etc. I have a i5 2500K @ 4.5 GHz and a GTX580. Things don't get blurry, not at all. I don't have to pause the sim to get things looking sharp again. It's just that the highest res textures ALWAYS seem to be loaded near my plane. And I was wondering if this is normal or not. Does this happen on every PC or not? Maybe it's simply a limitation of FSX! And it also doesn't matter what tweaks I use: it happens with and without Bufferpools and whatever possible tweak. I know all possible tweaks and I've use them all in the past. But since even LOD_RADIUS doesn't change this behaviour I was wondering if it's normal or not. Do you guys NEVER EVER see textures loading near the plane? (Maybe if you were here with me and I would show you what I meant, you would say 'Ooooo, that! That's normal!' ). And what exactly happens on your PC when you use a higher LOD_RADIUS? Do you notice textures being loaded later?

[virtualstuff 770]

Thanks for the replies, suggestions, help, etc. I have a i5 2500K @ 4.5 GHz and a GTX580. Things don't get blurry, not at all. I don't have to pause the sim to get things looking sharp again. It's just that the highest res textures ALWAYS seem to be loaded near my plane. And I was wondering if this is normal or not. Does this happen on every PC or not? Maybe it's simply a limitation of FSX! And it also doesn't matter what tweaks I use: it happens with and without Bufferpools and whatever possible tweak. I know all possible tweaks and I've use them all in the past. But since even LOD_RADIUS doesn't change this behaviour I was wondering if it's normal or not. Do you guys NEVER EVER see textures loading near the plane? (Maybe if you were here with me and I would show you what I meant, you would say 'Ooooo, that! That's normal!' ). And what exactly happens on your PC when you use a higher LOD_RADIUS? Do you notice textures being loaded later?

 

That's by design Jeroen...

 

Increasing Lod radius will increase the area around the user aircraft which will give earlier rendered sharper textures ;-)

Dis-advantage is that you will have an increase in memory load due to textures and autogen which can invoke OOM etc...

[Guest]

 

 

That's by design Jeroen...

 

Ok, clear. Pity they didn't somehow implement an option to load high res textures in a larger circle. You don't really notice textures being loaded further away, but when textures get loaded right in front of the plant, you see it all the time. I am sure I will get used to it again...

[Bert Pieke 7,591]

Welcome back to FSX, Jeroen.. the big hope is that P3D will improve on this,

at some future time  B)

 

In the meantime, keep flying in beautiful Orbx land (SAK is pretty nice!) and

try LOD 5.5 for a while.. it adds a bit of distant detail without slowing down the

computer too much, I find..

[Jim Young 2,356]

I saw some slow rendering a little with my i7 2600K with the GTX 580 too. The system was overclocked to 4.4GHz.  I had my LOD_Radius set to 6.5 and my Texture_Max_Load set to 2048 (HD) (LOD_Radius provides for sharper textures in the distance).  I used the default FSX settings and DX10.  I think that if you have too many tweaks they slow down the rendering.  Bufferpools doesn't work for every system.  If you use Autogen, make sure the Autogen "tweak" is in the Terrain section (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555739):

 

Terrain_Max_Autogen_Trees=1000

Terrain_Max_Autogen_Buildings=800

 

Then you can push your autogen to the max if you want.  I don't use Autogen as I fly almost exclusively in MSE V2 photoscenery.  I sometimes fly in Orbx/FTX stuff and use Autogen (Normal) then.  Autogen is a memory hog.  I know you have been around for a long time in the flight sim community and so I don't think I need to be telling you any of this but just in case. 

 

Now, for the real reason I posted a response, I just upgraded to the Haswell 4770K and now have a GTX 780 with 3GB's of memory and still use the same LOD_Radius 6.5 and TML of 2048.  With my photoscenery I saw no rendering as you go of any textures or mesh.  Everything was instantaneous. Even in the Orbx/FTX areas - instant gratification....  I haven't overclocked yet as I've been too busy moderating and reinstalling Windows 7 and FSX/Acceleration and all my addons.  I am slowly getting disappointed though as the more addons, the slower FSX seems to be running.  I started out with just FSX/Acceleration and had fps easily running at a minimum of 150 fps and as high as 275 and maybe 290 (no overclock).  Most of my addons are now installed and things are getting back to reality with some fps as low as in the teens and rarely above 60 fps (and that would be at FL240 in the PMDG 737 wing view over MSE V2 Illinois).  But, the photoscenery is still rendering instantly both with MSE V2 stuff and with Orbx/FTX.  So I'm not too unhappy.  I just had to do a lot of things to continue to get instant rendering and that was disabling all of my addon scenery except for the areas in my flightplan.  I use the Scenery Config Editor utility to enable/disable scenery.  If you ever run Process Monitor, it's unbelievable what's running in the background and what continues to load if you have all scenery loaded.  This takes up an inordinate amount of resources running in the background.  I ran this configuration with default fsx.cfg (except for LOD and TML) and default display driver settings for fsx. 

 

Another method to increasing resolution is to use the zoom setting in all of your views.  In the PMDG 737 I’ll hit the minus key two times to zoom things out a little and on the spot and wing views I’ll hit the minus key about 4 times to widen the view aspect to about 0.5 or 0.6.  It will make your textures render faster and give your textures a look of high resolution.

 

As I stated, I kept my fsx/display driver settings close to the default, but recently I read a post by NickN and decided to implement his settings - http://www.simforums.com/forums/gtx-780-settings-discussion-haswell-revealed_topic46112_page1.html.  He believes in fewer tweaks too in the FSX config and has one or two including my LOD and TML settings.  He drastically changed the display driver (NI) settings though.  I had a test situation where I was sitting at MSE V2 State of Virginia, FlightBeam KIAD, with real world weather at 6 pm, and in the PMDG737NGX VC.  Without Nick's settings, I was getting 12-15 fps sitting on R/W 1L.  I am now getting an additional 5 or 6 fps increase with his FSX and NI settings.  I’m probably going back to my default settings as I covered above as it is not a whooping increase in frames and I do not like the Bufferpool setting whatsoever. Maybe for older systems… I found my largest bottleneck was the PMDG737 VC and I proved it this morning when I tested the default Boeing 737 instead.  The fps jumped from 15-20 with the PMDG to 45 and sometimes higher with the default.  I’m still testing but I'd rather be flying rather than testing....  It’s going to end soon.

 

Hope this helps somewhat in resolving your question(s).

[Guest]

Thanks for the advice! I've been thinking about getting the Haswell and a GTX780 too but I was afraid the difference with my current PC was too little... Another thing why I hesitated is P3D: maybe the new version of that one will or run great on my current system and if not, it may run great on the Haswell/GTX780 but I'd rather be sure about that.

 

About that autogen tweak: if I use a high autogen setting, I want to see a lot of autogen so limiting the autogen only so I can pull that slider right but end up with less autogen because of the tweak, isn't exactly what I'd call a great tweak LOL

 

BTW I did give the DX10 option a try last week (before I reinstalled my entire PC) but I didn't get any benefit from it. On the contrary, I'd say. I did hear someone say though that a new version of that DX10 setup is coming within a few weeks that might work even better. We'll see. I'm still hoping P3D 2.0 will be THE answer... but until then I'll stay with good old FSX in DX9. Today I gave the camera part of OpusFSX another try (new version) and it seems to work better with TrackIR now which is nice because all that head movement is keeping me from watching at textures too closely LOL