Thanks for the explanation.  Does this relate only to plane textures or other textures as well, such as ground and building textures?

Thanks for the explanation.  Does this relate only to plane textures or other textures as well, such as ground and building textures?

 

Mainly just planes. You could play with scenery textures but unless it's a big payware airport I don't think many use 4096 textures (I'm just guessing, I fly GA so I don't own any big airports).. But playing with texture and doing repaints has been a sick hobby of mine for years so I tend to end up all around an FS folders  

Mainly just planes. You could play with scenery textures but unless it's a big payware airport I don't think many use 4096 textures (I'm just guessing, I fly GA so I don't own any big airports).. But playing with texture and doing repaints has been a sick hobby of mine for years so I tend to end up all around an FS folders  

 

 

That was true until FSDT and Flightbeam.

 

The default Flightbeam KIAD install is 783 MB.

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Bill.. Thank you kind sir.. I understand you can lock it at any time.

As you can see, instead of locking the thread, I've simply moved it back into the general P3D discussion forum.

 

Later I'll make a copy/paste of your original post back to the "Tips and Tricks" sub-forum and lock that sucker!

 

 

Also, never ever ever ever use DXTBMP to convert anything.

 

Interesting! Why not? I usually use DXTBMP to change the windows in addon airplanes (making them (more) transparent).

Interesting! Why not? I usually use DXTBMP to change the windows in addon airplanes (making them (more) transparent).

 

 

DXTBMP has/had it's purpose, but, in all honesty it has some of the worst compression quality of any tool you could pick, and even more importantly it does not handle alpha channels very well depending on content. I sometimes think DXTBMP might be singly responsible for most people's aversion to DXT1 textures  :lol:

 

Use imagetool for conversions and your editing tools of choice for making changes.

How does the TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD=xxxx setting in the Prepar3d.cfg fit into this discussion? If this is set to 2048 or 1024, will this accomplish the same thing, and if not, why not?

 

Thanks,

Robert

 

TML1024 will indeed reduce the displayed resolution, but does nothing to actually reduce the size of the texture itself.

I always use 1024 in the sim so I might resize my textures but I really do wonder if it will make any noticable difference in performance or to avoid OOM.

Brian, so are you saying that it is the size of the texture file itself that is added to the VAS and not the size chosen for display?

 

Robert

I always use 1024 in the sim so I might resize my textures but I really do wonder if it will make any noticable difference in performance or to avoid OOM.

 

It certainly depends on the situation, but every little bit helps. 

 

One small example, from my own experience, is with the PMDG T7. A single livery untouched after install weighs in over 100MB IIRC. Reducing to 1024 takes that down to ~8MB. Now, without a doubt, detail is lost, and if the fine details matter to you, then this wouldn't be an option.

 

 

Looks good enough to me, but I am far less concerned than others might be with rivet counting.

 

There are a few situations where a 4096 resolution can make some sense, over simply just using 4 1024 textures, but that's not what we see typically nowadays. Most of the time it's 4096 just for the sake of being 4096.

Brian, so are you saying that it is the size of the texture file itself that is added to the VAS and not the size chosen for display?

 

Robert

 

Yep, the texture still has to be loaded by the sim, and is then scaled for display. It's similar to mipmapping in a sense, which certainly is a requirement in many things, but actually increases memory usage, even though display resolution can scale.

Any bit helps...   I also never use imagetool or DXTBmp unless for that rare bird that still uses extended BMP's...   There are a few I ran across but just end up converting the entire plane to DDS..  DTXBmp is awful. Having to export/import the alpha channel separately is one of the silliest things I've ever seen in an art app. 

Martin hasn't updated his DXTBMP.exe utility for several years now. It is woefully out of date with regards to better compression algorithms that have been developed since his last update.

Well maybe this explains something that's been furrowing my brow for a few days.......

 

Reading The P3D forums and hearing all the recommendations for 4gb graphics cards and descriptions of huge amounts of Vram being sucked up by the sim, I've been wondering what the flying heck was eating all o' the memory!!!

 

Maybe this helps explain it a bit, since I cant really see why P3d would just inherently eat that much more ram than FSX.......  :unsure:

 

Well...... besides tessellation, which can eat ram and FPS for dinner.......