P3D V2 - Stutters vs Blurries

[Howellerman 104]

I have recently converted to P3D V2.4 in a big way - the installation corrupted by P3D V1.4 - and I am committed moving forward. 'Tis the future, after all!

 

I am trying to tune this beastie, and have followed Rob A's threads and others with interest, but wanted to post something I have observed that perhaps others with greater insight/knowledge/understanding can decipher.

 

First, my rig: 3770K @ 4.2 Ghz, 8 GB Corsair Vengeance, EVGA GTX 780 AC (factory overclock), P3D installed on an SSD.

 

I am typically "immune" to stutters and the occasional screen tear, but blurries drive me nuts. In trying to find a happy medium, however, I have found that:

 

1 - When the scenery gets blurry and I hit PAUSE, it catches up. Sometimes it take a couple of seconds, sometime it takes 10. Whatever the reason, something is still running and playing catch-up, but it does catch up and the scenery becomes crisp.

2 - When everything is sharp as a tack and I un-pause, I get stutters, continuously, until the blurries again appear.

 

Damned if you do, damned if you don't!!!

 

I know there are dependencies/trade-offs, but I cannot seem to figure out what they are! I have tried and tweaked the TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT and FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION mods, have adjusted my sliders back to "truly average", all to no avail. I know that somewhere in there is a happy middle ground! I had P3D V1.4 pretty well sorted out, but do believe I (and for that matter, all of us) need to move forward to P3D V2 and beyond.

 

So, I am committed. Perhaps to an asylum, but committed!

 

Thanks for the help!

[klimpen 45]

There is only one solution for this in Prepar 3 D v2.4.

Turn of the tesselation factor .

I hope next version is better.

[Appliance 51]

 

 

Turn of the tesselation factor .

 

I presume Klimpen means turn off and Tessellation.

 

If you do that Howellerman (John) you are instead likely to suffer from the dreaded R2065 Runtime error bug.  I experienced it for the first time after turning off Tessellation in P3Dv2.4.

 

You rig has enough strength for you to experiment with DSR which nVidia introduced with drivers .65 and .75, adjustment via their Control Panel ie., from right-clicking on the desktop.  I found that to be beneficial however, as always, YMMV.

[Don Quixote 76]

Do you have your fps limiter set to "unlimited"? If yes, try to lock your framerate to 30 or thereabouts. With "unlimited" framerate I also get instant blurries all over. With the limiter set to 30 and the FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION=0.01 tweak I'm seeing no blurries and good performance even when flying at .8 Mach below 10'000 ft, and my system is considerably less powerful than yours...

[Howellerman 104]

Thanks for the replies, everyone.

 

Upon re-reading my original post, I realized I was missing "context".

 

Like Don Quixote, I like to fly fast jets (although quite a bit lower to the ground!), and I also like putting along in the Carenado C337 (the *best* sight-seeing aircraft evar!) and the A2A C182T. Neither of those presents a challenge to scenery texture or smoothness: the fast jet is so fast that your attention window is at least 2 miles out, so who cares what is off the wingtip, and the C337 and C182T are slow enough that the simulator has no problem keeping the scenery fresh and crisp. That is one of the things I first noticed about the flying C182T: how perfectly crisp (and smooth) everything looked.

 

The challenge I am addressing here is to get the 200-250 kts at 2500 feet or below aircraft, which is common ground for a lazy P-51 or PC-21 flight, but more importantly, the Legacy which can pull 200 kt cruise easily making it a great site seeing aircraft.

 

So, that is what I am trying to do: get everything working at a "medium" speed and low altitude, using Orbx PNW flying out of KTTD as a baseline. I am not sure it is possible, to tell you the truth. The area around KTTD is challenging: you have the suburban landscape of Vancouver to the west, urban Portland to the SW, and the Columbia Gorge to the east, each presenting its own challenge. If I may make a suggestion: take off from KTTD and head up the gorge at 400 ft above the river and see what your system does. It will be punishing!

 

Just for grins, I shelved my "tuned" CFG file and let P3D generate a stock file. Ewwww. Definitely going to stick with the tuned version!

 

Successes so far have been: 

Reducing Scenery Complexity to "normal". Anything below that starts removing bridges and whatnot, so that is low as I am willing to go. Fortunately, I can still set the vegetation and building sliders high (at least in Orbx) and get a decent landscape.

Autogen does not seem to influence anything terrain related.

Reducing textures to 1024x1024. I really like 2048x2048, but this seems to help. 

Tried the FFTF setting, but it does not work in my context. Also MULTI, TEXTUREMAXLOAD, etc. Setting them high, setting them low, nothing definitive. 

 

Have found quote a few good sites in my research. Arwen (a regular on the AVSIM forums) as a page on P3D settings, which is promising if only because we have the same GTX 780 AC card. There is a gentleman (Tom Tsui) that has an extensive blog dating back to FSX and now into P3D. 

 

Now I am off to Word Not Allowed's site to see what he has done. Anyway, thanks for the help - still working it, still fighting it!

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

To be honest with you, after reading the exact context in your last post, I don't think that any of those websites will help you. You seem to already have a good grip on the problem and unfortunately, no amount of tweaking is going to change the fact that at 250 kts and 2500 FT AGL, your hardware just can't keep up with loading ground textures. The 'blurries" as people call them, is more of a feature than a bug. It was ACES's way of allowing one to continue flying even though the hardware setup can't cope with the IQ settings being imposed in FSX (and now P3d). The virtual cockpit and controls all are always given the highest priority. The first thing to "go" is that the higher resolution ground textures just aren't loaded at all. The ground seems blurry, but that's just because one is only seeing low resolution textures.The next thing to "go" is autogen. It's pretty much a triage philosophy of sorts.

 

The one thing that I would do is to see if CPU core 0 is at 100%. If it is and the other CPU cores are also being loaded relatively more heavily than your obviously capable GTX 780, I would focus on the settings that are influenced more by the CPU than GPU (autogen, road traffic, AI air traffic). You also didn't say whether you were OCing your 3770, so that might also be an option. You might want to consider dialing down texture size (the setting in cm) and see how that goes. As you point out FFTF will just make things worse in this context and the whole TBM/TextureMaxLoad discussion has really not produced anything useful so far in P3d 2.4. Reducing textures to 1024 does help a bit and you didn't say what weather engine (if any) is being used. 

 

In real estate circles, they always say "location, location, location". As Nick N's "bible" points out, for FSX (and P3d too) it's "hardware, hardware, hardware". Unfortunately, that's probably the only real solution to your context.

[Howellerman 104]

Heya JA (if I may), 

 

I am coming around to agreeing with you - there are just not enough cycles to keep things (all things) going full-chat, and as you pointed out, the triage mode created by ACE's is the only way to accommodate both hot-rods and sedans. I got things tuned such that I was only missing one texture load (versus the two or three I had earlier) when I hit PAUSE, so it was definitely an improvement, but I am out of gas. 

 

But, on the bright side I just took my first night flight in P3D v2. I was tired of fighting, so kicked back, set the sim to real time, took off from KTTD and turned back over Vancouver, and oh my, it was glorious (Arwen's site had some interesting recommendations on extending the LOD radius on trees/lights). Also took a flight in the Carenado Baron from my home base of KRHV to KMRY, and that less demanding aircraft, with its lower speed, yielded a really nice flight. Only ran into the blurries when the mountains of the Coastal Range came up to meet me. Other than that, Mister Marshall's masterpiece was great on arrival.

 

So, there are knobs and sliders in the sim, and there are also knobs and sliders inside our heads. I think I am going to dial mine back from "eleven" and start enjoying the ride. I have found that I *love* tessellation (purchased the GTX 780 six months before P3D V2), shadows, and lack of auto-gen pop-ups, so I think I am just going to tune a nice compromise between blurries and judders and enjoy the ride. Fire up the P-51 and raise some hell...   

 

Thanks! Oh, an yes: I have my MSI Overclock Genie enabled, and Core 1 (with AF = 14) is flattened, so yeah, that's about as good as it is going to get. At least until I save enough nickels and dimes for my next flight sim system!

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

I assume that you are flying the A2A P51. You should be aware that VRS is about to release TacPack for P3d which gives selected aircraft working weapons and the capability to damage both ground and air targets. The A2A bird is not yet TacPack capable, but a user over at the VRS forums has done the mod to give it working guns. I don't know if you are into that kind of thing, but you might want to take a look at TacPack if you are.

 

Also, have you tried running P3d without an affinity mask? It might help to have that extra core loading textures.

[Howellerman 104]

Heya JA, 

 

Yes, I ran without the affinity mask and performance was pretty bad, up to and including stutters in level flight which I rarely otherwise get. I have been watching the 5280 thread, however, to see how that six-core beastie works out.

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

I assume that you have checked to see what else is running besides P3d. On my setup, I have GTN 750 Lite Simulator (needed for the GTN gauges) TrackIR, Duke's Traffic Optimizer and ANS running. But all extraneous apps and services are paused or closed, including antivirus. Usually, the OS does a much better job of scheduling tasks to cores than a user can do manually with affinity masks. Obviously, one's mileage will vary.