FSX 16-bit Looking Night Textures

[qf11bd 6]

Hi,

 

 

I recently built my new PC (specs on my profile) and upgraded from FS9 to FSX. For some weeks now, I've just been putting up with the following issue:

 

 

Firstly, FSX is running in 32-bit colours, as is my GPU and Windows 7. Secondly, both FSX, Windows 7 and my GPU are running the same 1920x1080 resolution. I've gone through countless threads saying 'turn on 32-bit colours' and 'make sure your resolution is the same', but could not find anything helpful. The above picture is at ORBX YMML - and all the taxiways are ground textures. When at a normal addon airport (eg. FSDT KLAX), I still get colour banding around my lights. What I have gathered is that this is an FSX programming issue. Is there a fix to this? Something I missed? Because it feels as if the first few night flights I did, there were no issues. I don't remember how or when it started to look like this, or became more noticeable. I have rebuilt the FSX,cfg, rebuilt the shaders, and also fiddled with GPU settings. I've tried as much as I can without luck, and am hoping someone could shed some light onto the issue for me. 

 

Many thanks in advance!

 

 

Brendan

[Pe11e 812]

FSX generally displays badly landing lights, and they look like 16bit. I think most of landing lights textures are very low resolution (128x128, or 256x256), and they are displayed in-game over big area, so they look stretched and low quality.

[qf11bd 6]

Ah ok. Thanks for that, but I could swear that after installing my sim, that 16bit effect was hardly noticeable (if at all). 

[Pe11e 812]

It depends on airplane also, some models have good custom landing lights, and some uses pretty low quality. But again, I'm not 100% sure that landing lights are the culprit for 16bit like textures all over. You can see at 5000-6000ft that all ground textures look like 16bit, so I think it is a major flaw in FSX engine.

[AirborneZed 168]

I believe this is a problem with the ground textures to a particular airport. Some airport taxiways/runways have this effect with the light splash.

 

Addon scenery, of course

[qf11bd 6]

Thanks all for the help. What confuses me though is what changed that made this happen - not sure why I didn't notice it before. I'll have to live with it I guess - DX10 seems to clear up any sort of landing light colour banding. 

 

 

 

Regards

[Paul Golding 92]

I experienced something similar a while ago and was convinced (like you) that something had made things worse.  It turned out to be the drivers for my screen. 

 

I can't say I've ever installed any specific screen driver, always assumed they were plug and play.  Anyway, I downloaded specific drivers and the look of FSX at night improved a lot.  I just put the initial degradation down to something that must have changed during a Windows update.

[ryanbatc 12,833]

Hard to tell from your pic but with those special landing lights (called Lotus landing lights and then copied by many other developers) AND with some payware scenery you'll get odd colors. It's because of the ground textures interacting with the lights. Try going to a default airport and you shouldn't notice it as much.

[qf11bd 6]

Thanks Ryan, but it is equally as noticeable at default airports.

[ryanbatc 12,833]

You might get some but there should be a difference between textured airports and default airports...

[qf11bd 6]

Yeah it is interesting. It's just that it can be almost impossible to see the taxiways at Melbourne at night because of this issue. Oh well, may have to just cope.

 

Thanks Ryan