HDR- on or off?

[Sesquashtoo 2,846]

Mine's off, for bigger frames... Maybe if I ever get a better video card I'll use it on...

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J...night looks so good, soooooo gooood at my .org KFNT with it set to on. It sort of takes your breath away...and the way the surfaces look...the word: realistic/real world! I keep giving my head a shake, with each night-time taxi out to the active. Water landings, moon reflections, cloud reflections...XPX and HDR rocks!

[ohsirus 241]

HDR on at night only.

[ryanbatc 12,857]

FPS plummet with HDR on.... Not sure how you guys do it!

[Jessica Bannister-Pearce 120]

Off. Over three screens its a killer, and that's before cloud!

[scotchegg 4,186]

Is it simply a vram thing? I only have 1.5GB so I guess that's why I see such a big frames difference in on and off.

[HiFlyer 9,359]

Is it simply a vram thing? I only have 1.5GB so I guess that's why I see such a big frames difference in on and off.

I noticed that no matter what you do in xplane, if you get too close to the edge of your VRAM you WILL stutter.

 

Period.

[ryanbatc 12,857]

Interesting. My gtx570 only has 1.28GB. I wonder if that's what causes the stutters... Cause I get stutters and fps drop like crazy in big cities with HDR on.

[HiFlyer 9,359]

Interesting. My gtx570 only has 1.28GB. I wonder if that's what causes the stutters... Cause I get stutters and fps drop like crazy in big cities with HDR on.

You can push a whole lot of polygons in this sim as long as you keep an eye on the ram usage. At least that's how it seems to me so far. I've been experimenting a lot to find the best balance. (on my system)

[Macpah 46]

Who uses HDR on in XPX?

 

 

On, at night.

Looks simply to good, even on my rather low end PC.

 

 

 

 

[ryanbatc 12,857]

Yeah it's great below 3000 AGL, but the higher you get the roadway lighting disappears (at the edge of the scenery tile). This is a major annoyance IMHO.

 

Unless someone can tell me how to fix this.... Kills the realism

[Richard99_Photography 2]

Very interesting discussion.

I am also uncertain about HDR ON or OFF. I could not evaluate HDR ON effects, either during the day and the night, but what I am absolutely sure is that with HDR ON I get lot of shimmering and very low performance (around 20 fps). To get rid of shimmering I should rise the HDR AA filter to 8xSSAA + FXAA (or MSAA I don't remember), but frame rates sink around 15 in large cities (e.g. NYC) with huge autogen.

So, for me HDR ON is quite unusable, unless the shimmering will go away.

Bye.

[RWFeldman 159]

I can't say I really notice a difference in performance or AA quality with HDR on. Certainly adds much nicer visual effects though. Volumetric fog and shadow settings have a greater effect on performance. Been flying the last few days with Manfred Jahn's superb C47 with settings all on and fairly high and P3DV2 is smooth as glass.

[Ianrivaldosmith 5,317]

P3DV2?!

[ryanbatc 12,857]

I definitely get shimmering with FXAA in HDR.  Unfortunately I also get a large fps hit (2500K @ 4.2GHz GTX 570 8GB ram) with much higher than FXAA.

 

Still I prefer the HDR stuff and the red flashlight ability at night.  In the daytime HDR looks a little fuzzy.

[scotchegg 4,186]

Ryan you should think seriously about upgrading your videocard. I had a GTX580 1.5GB and had the same experience as you - frames crap above FXAA with HDR. I also have (an overclocked) 2500K which is working fine with my upgrade to a GTX770 4GB. You'll be glad you did:)