photoscenery

[Twenty6 694]

Jim,

 

That is a good picture. Better than I'm getting, although right now I'm working on AA within P3D.

 

By chance do you have MSE Tennessee? If so, what color is the ground?

 

To me Tennessee has a distinct turquoise tint, most noticeable when crossing the state line into Kentucky (which is also MSE v2.) Kentucky is OK, Tennessee is just awlful.

--

20-6

[Clutch Cargo 387]

I was having the same issue with P3Dv2 and could not understand why P3Dv1.4 was so much clearer?  So I too that it was a P3D issue and not me (of course it can't be me... I AM the simmer... it's them, not me).  Even made a post in the LM forums saying it's them... not me.   I even create some .30cm photoscenery, created saved flights among the different sims to compare screenshot.  Yep there was a notable difference.  So I waited anxiously for the Patch.  And it came.  And guess what...

 

it's ME, not them!  What the?!?  Turns out I had turned during my many tests I musta turned down the Texture resolution.  Yep... that was it.  I now have the sharpest, clearest photoscenery I can remember.  Not saying it's the same issue as you guys but going through all my variables step-by-step discovered it was user error in my case.

[Jim Young 2,356]

 

 

By chance do you have MSE Tennessee? If so, what color is the ground?

 

I did not see any issues with Tennessee or Kentucky.  Here are some pictures of my flight out of Nashville up to Bowling Green.  I did not see any border and had to look at the FSX mag to see if I was still in Tennessee or Kentucky.  I did not see any "distinct turquoise tint" in Tenn.  Check out the photos!!

 

Just took off from Nashville International heading North

 

Enroute.  Still in Tennessee.

 

About 8000 ft here.  Nearing Tennessee.  Got a nice wispy cloud to fly through.

 

Ah!  I think this is Kentucky.  Do not see any border.  Nice plowed fields.

 

Going up the Interstate to Bowling Green.  Really liked this one!!

 

More plowed fields in Kentucky.  Beautiful State!

 

Nearing Bowling Green - Home of the Corvette!

 

Descending into Bowling Green - Yikes!

 

BTW, I own about all of the MSE V2 States.  Hope this gives you an idea of what I'm seeing vs what you are seeing.

 

Best regards,

[Jim Robinson 122]

Been fighting with some slow loading LODs on some of my own photoreals, tried everything but I think TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=35 is doing the trick for me, seems to sharpen things up quite a bit, if I go much higher than that the frames drop to 20-24ish and it gets a bit stuttery. AffinityMask=15 seems to work the best for me. This is patched v2.0 but I'd done a fresh install just a couple days prior and I removed the 4 program-generated folders prior to installing the patch.

FXAA: on
Anisotropic: 16x
MSAA: 4 Samples
Texture resolution: 4096
VSync: off
Frames locked at 33
LOD Radius: Max
Tesselletation: High
Mesh: 5m
Texture resolution: 7cm
Scenery complexity: Extremely dense
POP_FREE_AUTOGEN=0
AGN Vegetation: Very Dense
AGN building: Very Dense
Water: Ultra
HDR: off
Veh Int/Ext: cast/receive
Simobjects: cast
terrain: receive
vegetation shadows: off
Buildings: cast/receive

Using 332.21 WHQL and the Bioshock 2 Nvidia Inspector settings from this thread: http://forum.avsim.net/topic/429212-aa-workaround-for-nvidia-cards/

This is passing over some 60cm imagery with autogen partially finished at 500' AGL and 120 Kts or so in the Cutlass RG, had been flying around for an hour or so within a 30 nm radius when this was captured. I cropped a 1280x720 chunk right outta the middle of a 1920x1080 V key .bmp, no resizing, no sharpening, exactly what I'm seeing in the sim (click for full size):



I get the occasional stutter here and there but as long as they're not regular and really obnoxious I can live with a skipped frame or whatever every once in a while, it's quite fluid, although I still think FSX/DX10 is smoother. Getting pretty much 30-33 FPS everywhere in Orbx NRM, dropping to 22-24 as I roll out on final rwy 20 with my Bonners Ferry 65S airport filling most of the windshield. I had my doubts this time yesterday but this'll work for me for the type of flying I do.

Jim

[Jim Young 2,356]

Hi Jim,

 

Turn off FXAA.  Eliminates the jaggies but at the expense of blurriness (this will open up rendering).  When P3D is up and running, use your + and - keys to change the resolution.  Look in the upper right corner for resolution and keep it at 50 and below.  It is more realistic especially around 30-40.  In the VC I keep my resolution at 50 and sometimes go to 40 depending on the aircraft.  Lower Autogen to norm. The Orbx/FTX manual says you can have it set where you have it but I think that's too high.  Turn off shadows for everything except vehicle interior/exterior.  You can later play with the shadows.  Turn water down to medium. 

 

I'm not sure about your NI settings.  I saw that post and what works for others does not necessarily work for you.  I don't see that much difference between the FSX NI settings and the one your referred to.  I do get excited though when I see in the NI an AF setting of 16x's plus Application Controlled and then in the P3D settings, it is also set to 16X's.  NI should be left to just Application Controlled.  LM has made it better for us and has increased AF in the config.

 

I think you should be getting much higher fps with the 2600K (my previous CPU).  You should be seeing 40-50 fps easily; however, high fps (even when locked) does not necessarily equal faster rendering of textures.  This is why you have to let P3D "breathe" a little.  Get rid of the Affinity Mask (or at least comment it out to see the difference .  Texture_Bandwidth_Multi should be no lower than 40 for your system.  Orbx/FTX stuff is still not fully compatible with P3D so it might get better once they release the version for P3D.

 

Best regards,

[GaryGB 10]

It's those red numbers in the upper right corner of your screen when you hit the plus and minus keys.

 

 

Hi Jim:

 

Thanks for your reply to this post:

 

http://forum.avsim.net/topic/434896-photoscenery/#entry2927969

 

I believe what you are referring to above is "ZOOM" (...rather than "Resolution").

 

FYI: An interesting previous AVSIM discussion on this related sub-topic:

 

http://forum.avsim.net/topic/346340-what-zoom-level-in-the-vc/

 

This is of course to be distinguished from "CHASE DISTANCE":

 

http://forum.avsim.net/topic/247042-external-view-in-fsx/

 

BTW: One may need to RESET both the "ZOOM" and "CHASE DISTANCE" of custom camera views before adjusting one's view as discussed in the first linked thread above.

 

And of course, users of wide-format displays / monitors may find different settings are required in their views if they have set "WideViewAspect=True" in FSX.Cfg or P3D.Cfg as discussed (and illustrated) in these interesting threads:

 

http://forum.avsim.net/topic/292172-changing-fov-field-of-view/

 

http://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/showthread.php?251798-Screenshots-and-Affects-of-Changing-Wide-View-Aspect

 

 

Thanks again for pointing out this related info which merits consideration when configuring ones views in FSX / P3D  to maximize performance when displaying either photo-realistic or "standard-type" land class scenery ...with higher autogen object annotation densities.

 

GaryGB

[Clutch Cargo 387]

So Jim, couple of questions if you don't mind,

 

as you have all 50 states are you picking up the MSE hi-res scenery as well?  If so, impressions? Do they blend in pretty good? What are your favorite states as far as overall quality and/or just fun to fly over.  How about least favorite due to quality, color, water banding?

 

Happy with 3GB on your GPU?  Wish you had 4GB or even 6GB for loading photoreal?  Need to start loading up all mine and see how my 2GB 670 performs with the patch.

 

Thx,

 

Clutch

[Jim Young 2,356]

 

 

as you have all 50 states are you picking up the MSE hi-res scenery as well? If so, impressions? Do they blend in pretty good? What are your favorite states as far as overall quality and/or just fun to fly over. How about least favorite due to quality, color, water banding?

 

I have picked up some of the MSE Hi-Res but not all (Miami was released today and will hold off on that one for a while as I have no flight plans down that way).  Baltimore-Washington, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Houston are installed right now.  They do not blend in well with MSE V2 for the areas.  They must have used different times for the data.  It's sometimes hard to see it though unless you are looking for it.  Since I live in the Baltimore-Washington area, the Hi-Res stuff goes to almost to AVSIM Headquarters in Charlottesville, VA which is a huge chunk.  Flying over my house with the Hi-Res is no better than MSE V2.  It may be a little clearer.  It costs me $14.96 to upgrade to the Hi-Res stuff so it is not hurting me financially.  I probably will not get every hi-res area.  I just have too many excellent flight plans for what I have now. 

 

I have been a big fan of MegaScenery since the first developments.  The only difference now is that I have a system that can run photoscenery efficiently and w/o being a slide show (which always takes the fun out of FS).  I usually fly the heavies and like flying over realistic scenery so I'm happy the systems and the scenery has finally arrived.  I sometimes fly the Duke B-60 over California and that's a real treat too.

 

My favorite States are Illinois, Virginia, California, Oregon, Washington State, and Texas.  I think the worst states I've seen so far are Arizona and Nevada.  So dark, so ugly in so many places.  There is basically no water-masking except in large bodies of water.  The water textures in the Washington DC area around KDCA are absolutely horrible.  I have to close my eyes real tight when I fly into/out of Reagan National. :lol:

 

 

 

Happy with 3GB on your GPU? Wish you had 4GB or even 6GB for loading photoreal?

 

I have that much memory on my GTX 780?  :Shocked:   B)  I suspect it makes my P3D/FSX run better.  At least NickN thinks so.  He has exactly the same system as mine (but I bought mine first) so I feel good that I made some good choices when I recently built my system.  I really think P3D handles photoreal scenery much better than FSX when configured properly.  I'm going to try and install MyTrafficX some time soon (maybe even today) and that is bound to have an effect on performance.  We'll see.

 

Best regards,

Jim

 

 

 

Thanks again for pointing out this related info which merits consideration when configuring ones views in FSX / P3D to maximize performance when displaying either photo-realistic or "standard-type" land class scenery ...with higher autogen object annotation densities.

 

Thanks Gary for your excellent summary and pointing out my wrong definition of using the plus and the minus keys.  I still like "resolution" though even if wrong.  Perhaps Microsoft and LM will change the definition/description of those keys in a future version.....  :drinks:

 

Best regards,

[Jim Robinson 122]

Hi Jim,

 

Turn off FXAA.  Eliminates the jaggies but at the expense of blurriness (this will open up rendering).

 

But the problem I was having is not an FXAA induced blurriness, it was a problem with the highest LOD levels of the photoreal not loading. If textures are sharpening up when you pause and wait it's a clear indication of LODs not loading quickly enough and the FXAA setting has nothing to do with that, TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT does however, which was the point of my post. I did try FXAA off in one of my tests, I wasn't happy with the shimmering and the blurry photoreal did not improve so I turned it back on. I'd be interested in seeing a cropped (not resized) comparison shot of the MSE photoreal from 500' above the ground and a zoom factor of .30, I think you'll see that the screen I posted is actually quite crisp & sharp by comparison.

 

RE: frame rates, note that I have my frames locked at 33, the machine can do more, that was a residual setting from a vsync experiment where Beau Hollis recommended the setting of 33 for 1/2 refresh rate. It's very smooth at that setting so I left it alone. In one of my tests I did try unlimited frame rates, I was seeing 80s and 90s but the LOD loading problem was much worse and the overall smoothness was decreased, there's much more to it than just a high frame count.

 

Jim

[Jim Young 2,356]

I made my recommendations. It's sad they do not work for you.  Nothing else you can do.

 

Best regards,

[Jim Robinson 122]

I'm not sure where you get the idea that I'm not happy or asking for recommendations with my settings Jim, I posted in this thread because I found that "TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=35" was giving me some results with sharpening up my photoreals, and since the topic was related to blurry photoreal I thought I'd post what worked for me.

 

From the original post:

If I hit pause, the scenery only comes back into focus after about 10 - 15 seconds. It didn't do this in 2.0.

[Jim Young 2,356]

I have a communications problem.  Sorry!

 

Best regards,