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dukeav

VAS / OOM and Textures

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Just out of curiosity, is it illegal to run textures through this or any other converter for personal use? I ask because I tried to add mipmaps to a set of textures to a 3rdparty Aerosoft A319 American Airlines livery and I was treated like scum for trying to do so with the explicit permission of the author of the livery. All we are doing is adding mipmaps or reducing the file size. Something that has been done ad nauseum since the heydays of FSimming.


Regards,

Efrain Ruiz
LiveDISPATCH @ http://www.livedispatch.org (CLOSED) ☹️

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I that case I won't tell you guys what I converted using the outline provided by Duke, But I will tell you this the Airport had alot complaints about OOMS when it was released a few months ago and the scenery for an entire island nation was exposed as the worst this particular well known Scenery maker ever produces. I happen to agree with all of that.

 

I made a recoding of a flight in the excellent Milviz 407 over the airport and surrounding area for about 10 mins. I took the time to make sure all but the scenery I was using was inactive in the scenery library and in the proper priority. Also I cleared all weather and traffic so more or less only the 2 scenery packs where in play and I set textures to 1024.

 

With the rest of the settings in fact lower than I usually use around international airports beside a big city with weather and plenty of AI traffic I still got an OOM with this scenery.

 

First this test I just added FFTF=0.01 and that cured the OOM but not the ping of death. I got that 5m40s in. Next I converted the Airport textures using the method above. File size was 1.73GB and After conversion it was 1.18GB. Played the flight again still got the Ping off death but not until 7m50s in.

 

I then converted the whole county and I have to say that the vast majority of the lines in the log read "Error: Direct3D device faill
Error: DirectX D3DXERR_INVALIDDATA" but it nevertheless converted some files.

 

The size before was 3.4gb and after 3.24GB  Nothing much changes in the playback of the flight except there was an early random Ping of death and then another random one.

And then the first in stream of persistent pings of death but i haven't timed it to see if it came later than 7m50s in.

 

One other thing. I think I noticed a slight FPS increase. I will tabulate it later to see if I imagined it!

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On this graph you can see that FFTF=0.01 really shows its value by dogging the OMM. Altering the textures of the airport as per Dukes instructions does seem to delay the Ping of death even longer. And then altering the textures of the whole country does delay the persistent ping of death although as you can see in the graph there where a couple of isolated pings before the persistent pings started and then only for the last 30 seconds of the flight.

 

I sure would to try the DX11 compatible formats but I swimming in deep water here. Any suggestions much appreciated:-)

 

AlteredtexturesBenchmark.png

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Just out of curiosity, is it illegal to run textures through this or any other converter for personal use? I ask because I tried to add mipmaps to a set of textures to a 3rdparty Aerosoft A319 American Airlines livery and I was treated like scum for trying to do so with the explicit permission of the author of the livery. All we are doing is adding mipmaps or reducing the file size. Something that has been done ad nauseum since the heydays of FSimming.

I just searched and found plenty of threads on resizing. I don't see any issue...

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Pretty handy, thanks. Some of the aircraft that I have with 4096 textures are Dino C's planes, ORBX Vans RV4 and A2A planes like the C172 and Cherokee 180. Some Carenado planes like the Skylane 182 are also 4096. As others have said, setting the texture size to 4096 in P3d instead of 1024, makes very little difference in IQ to me, at least.


I just searched and found plenty of threads on resizing. I don't see any issue...

 

 

Well, yes and no. It isn't "illegal" unless you resize and then distribute the converted textures to other people. But if you resize your own textures and then ask the aircraft's author for support, well, good luck on that.

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On this graph you can see that FFTF=0.01 really shows its value by dogging the OMM. Altering the textures of the airport as per Dukes instructions does seem to delay the Ping of death even longer. And then altering the textures of the whole country does delay the persistent ping of death although as you can see in the graph there where a couple of isolated pings before the persistent pings started and then only for the last 30 seconds of the flight.

 

I sure would to try the DX11 compatible formats but I swimming in deep water here. Any suggestions much appreciated:-)

 

AlteredtexturesBenchmark.png

Well the results are encouraging.

 

I think one thing we need to check is if we really need mips in airplane textures, then we can reduce airplane textures load by another 30% by removing the mips.

 

For the scenery textures, did you see what were the original sizes? And it would be worthwhile to explore why many could not be converted in your case. Also I think using 512 textures for scenery would help a lot, but the visual quality aspect needs to be seen.

 

BC6H/BC7 question is beyond me also. There many aspects of textures like alpha, light maps, HDR, which we have consider before choosing a conversion format or even to decide if BC6/BC7 are even appropriate. I do not know much about these aspects.

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Are you sure how that app works? I ended up with mipmapped files with a lot of different sized maps, when the original only had 4096. Of course, I did two passes. Here's a jpg showing a converted 4096 file:

 

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5379637/Mipmaps.jpg

 

I'd say one pass is enough. That should give you 2048, 1024, 512 and 256, or something like that.

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Are you sure how that app works? I ended up with mipmapped files with a lot of different sized maps, when the original only had 4096. Of course, I did two passes. Here's a jpg showing a converted 4096 file:

 

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5379637/Mipmaps.jpg

 

I'd say one pass is enough. That should give you 2048, 1024, 512 and 256, or something like that.

 

That's looks to be a correct mip-mapped image. The left most square should be 2048*2048. What do you think is wrong? You did not want mips?

 

 

Edit: The final reduction size would be determined by choice in the tool. So if you selected to re-size textures more than 1k then the lower sized textures (512, 256) should remain unchanged in size, with only mips added.

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I've been doing this since back in 2008 when I first started using FSX having come from FS9.

 

I didn't know a thing about texture sizes or mips until I started working with the late Michael Greenblatt and he explained how large texture sizes and mip maps effect performance.

 

Since then, the first thing I do when I purchase a scenery and install it is to go right to the texture folder and check not only the size of the texture sheets, but also the compression, ie. DXT or 32bit.

 

Anything larger than the standard 1024 gets resized back to 1024 and put it DXT format if it wasn't already and mip maps added. Although I never had an automated tool to do it and have always done it manually using a variety of tools to make sure I didn't screw up the alpha channels if they were included.

 

I do the same for planes exterior textures, make sure to mip all AI, and don't use cloud or water textures over 1024 size sheets.

 

Having said this, I used to run FSX for years on Win XP 32bit, and even running the NGX into complex airports with AI, never suffered and OOM. These days I run Win7 64, and still follow the same protocol and have never suffered an OOM in 6 years.

 

I agree that while 2048 or larger textures in airports do look a touch crisper and clearer, the amount of extra memory consumed and associated problems that can arise aren't worth the hassle. I don't find that 1024 sized textures look that much different and give me piece of mind knowing that I won't OOM on approach after a long flight.

 

I will note however that in some cases developers use 4096 or 2048 sized textures sheets on purpose to cram more textures into one sheet to reduce draw calls. In this case I leave them alone since they make sense. An example is FSDTs KLAX where they do this and use just a few 4096 texture sheets rather than many 1024 sheets to reduce draw calls and memory usage. Other devs will purposely use a large amount of 4096 sheets just to make it look better but will OOM you before you can blink. Anyone using some of the older ORBX large airports in Australia will remember this.


Avsim Board of Directors | Avsim Forums Moderator

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That's looks to be a correct mip-mapped image. The left most square should be 2048*2048. What do you think is wrong?

One pass is enough. The image that I linked previously was from two successive passes, The largest resulting image was 1024. One pass on a non-mipmapped image at 4096 yields 2048 plus all the smaller images.

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I had a go at it, but it didnt work out so well, I'm afraid.

I tried to do the texture and scenery folders, but doing either of those two made P3D CTD and of course I tried the aircraft folder, but the prop textures got messed up, so I returned everything to it's original state.


Cheers!

Maarten

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I had a go at it, but it didnt work out so well, I'm afraid.

I tried to do the texture and scenery folders, but doing either of those two made P3D CTD and of course I tried the aircraft folder, but the prop textures got messed up, so I returned everything to it's original state.

 

Well maybe doing the main P3D scenery folder is bad idea then.

 

Which aircraft did not work? It will help other if you can post. The five commercial one I have did work for me.

 

 

I've been doing this since back in 2008 when I first started using FSX having come from FS9.

 

I didn't know a thing about texture sizes or mips until I started working with the late Michael Greenblatt and he explained how large texture sizes and mip maps effect performance.

 

Thanks for sharing your experience. Do you have any links on this? Would be good to read.

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I checked this with a couple heavy Airports.

 

Aerosoft Heathrow

 

Well, the tool fails to convert most of the texture file. Not sure why, but something to be checked.

So no go for now.

 

 

DD's UUEE

 

The tool worked wonders for this.

 

Before I had 2333 / 2000 as VAS / GPU memory and after conversion 1781 / 1770. A massive saving of 552 MB for VAS, 230 MB for GPU. I need to do a landing here, I am sure the experience will be much better with reduced usage.

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It were Carenado aircraft. I got those square propeller textures.


Cheers!

Maarten

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One thing that I noticed is that the app will convert BMP textures to DDS and with a few aircraft this can mess up the panel displays.

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