Photo or Default scenery? What is heavier on your fps?

[jcomm 5,938]

Guys,

 

I am still experimenting with the "ideal" settings to use XP10 with PSX.

 

Presently I use only OSM Europe ( OSM only ), and photoscenery for LISBON from SimHeaven. One thing I noticed was that apparently it takes more time for XP10 to load when the photoscenery is active, but once loaded the ride is smoother than with default scenery ?  Does this make sense?

 

 

The smoother the ride the better for me, because I'm injecting the 744 data into XP10, and getting terrain elevation from it into PSX - all thanks to that mighty XView plugin :-)

[alpilotx 505]

Presently I use only OSM Europe ( OSM only ), and photoscenery for LISBON from SimHeaven. One thing I noticed was that apparently it takes more time for XP10 to load when the photoscenery is active, but once loaded the ride is smoother than with default scenery ?  Does this make sense?

Yes it makes sense! I think I wrote about it at some time (but not lately) ...

 

The reason is, that the default scenery (or similarly HD Mesh Scenery v2 - they are close relatives) needs to draw much more triangles than a photoscenery (derived from the same base mesh!). The reason is simple: with the landclass / generic texture approach we need a lot of overlapping triangles (where different terrain types meet) to make smooth texture blending possible (which only works if you overlap different textures and tell the shaders how to - smoothly - transition from one to the other). But this cost a lot of extra triangles. Whereas a photoscenery has no such transition issues as it just plain - extremely simplified  of course - paints the phototextures "as is" (they don't need such transitions, as they are visually already "finished"). So, you pay with a lot longer loading times (loading all the textures) , but you don't need "waste" performance on triangle overdraw. ... So, there is always a trade-off  (there is no such thing as "free beer" here).

[tonywob 4,769]

Yes, the same here, and it makes sense. Andras Fabian explained it in another post, and it was due to the fact that X-Plane doesn't need to blend different textures together to form the landscape and already has the texture (i.e. Photo image) set.

 

Edit: Andras actually replied exactly the same time as me ;-)

[jcomm 5,938]

Hehe!  Two answers!!! Thank you guys :-)

 

I think I will probably invest on an SSD someday, and have the system and XP10.30 on it... 

 

Meanwhile I will probably go ahead and install a few more photosceneries for some of the airports around the World I visit more often with my 744 ;-)