Do new repaints for FAIB and TFS models in dds format need mipmap processing? These are majority in my AI.

I would mip all AI.

 

Some, maybe all, of the FAIB textures are 2048x2048.

 

If they are DXT3 or DXT5 they are 4MB files, without mips.

 

Why load a 4MB file to texture a plane that might only be covering 10-20 pixels on your screen?

 

And people wonder why they get OOMs.

 

regards,

Joe

That would also mean that every single person who uses that plane would also get an OOM error and we all know that isn't true. Good try though!!

That's true Jim. I've been flying trans-Atlantic flights from KDFW to OMDB, using FSDT and FlyTampa's sceneries for departure and arrival, even Mega Scenery Dallas at the start an never had OOMs with the T7. In fact I've done all kinds of transcon and trans-Atlantic all using payware airports and never has an issue with memory errors in the T7.

So, I skipped reading through all the 8 pages but is there a real fix of any substance in this thread?

So, I skipped all the preparations and took off but is there a real fix for burning engines in this thread?

 

Fixed.  B) 

 

Don't skip the 8 pages manual.

Look at all the aircraft and scenery developers that pumped textures with no mip mapping. Do you think for a minute these developers are going waste any time in cleaning up the programming if they think they can get away with it?

I think there might be a different explanation for this, and some developers might have intentionally decided not to use Mip-maps, for reasons that might have some grounds, even if I personally don't agree with it.

 

If you make a texture without any mip-maps, it will always look "sharp", even if the user hasn't enabled the Anisotropic filtering, either in FSX or in the video card Control Panel. This will look a bit strange, because you'll have a "sharp" airport, surrounded by a blurred scenery. I would rather have *everything* blurred, rather than this, but apparently some developers don't agree with this, and want to be sure their scenery always looks the same, that's why they might not have used Mip-maps.

 

Unfortunately, such textures will also cause visual "moire" effects, because of the lack of mip-mapping, which will be worse if the user screen resolution is not high enough. So, for example, what might look acceptable on the developer's system at 2560x1600 resolution, will appear as a dance of flickering pixels at 1280x1024...

 

Using Mip-maps will prevent all of this, and it should ALWAYS used.

 

But the downside of it, is that here and then, we get the usual complain on our forums, asking why the "textures are blurred in your airport", and of course, the accompanying screenshot shows the unmistakable signs of lack of Anisotropic filtering enabled, which results in ALL the FSX scenery (not just the airport) being blurred.

 

So we have to reply with the usual "Be sure you enable Anisotropic filtering".

 

Some developers, apparently, don't want to deal with this, and just chose not to use Mip-maps.

So how can we use math to determine the size of a texture with mipmaps?

 

Our 1024x1024 texture has 9 mip levels, each one 1/4 the size of the level above it.

 

So we will have 1024x1024, 512x512, 256x256,... on down to 4x4.

 

Since we know that DXT5 compresses at 1 byte per pixel it is easy to figure out the file size.

 

I let Excel do the heavy lifting...

 

 

Don't let math get in the way!  I prefer to look at it as 65536 blocks in a 1024x1024 source image, each block compresses into 16 bytes. 

Get the same answer, though I think you forgot that there is a 124 byte header, if we are down at the single byte level of accuracy

 

scott s.

.

Fixed.  B) 

 

Don't skip the 8 pages manual.

 

Nice edit muwhahah!

Don't let math get in the way!  I prefer to look at it as 65536 blocks in a 1024x1024 source image, each block compresses into 16 bytes.

Well, that is what you end up with when you use DXT compression on a 1024x1024 texture.

 

...though I think you forgot that there is a 124 byte header, if we are down at the single byte level of accuracy

Didn't forget about it, just didn't want to confuse the issue............any more.

 

regards,

Joe

Lol i don't have OOM, and don't need all those so called tweaks lol but then again I know what I'm doing ;-)

 

Then why don't you share? Is it a secret?

The issue of activating/deactivating scenery while in flight and it's affect on VAS is not, IMO, a memory leak.

 

What I have seen while testing addon airport scenery is that often the AI will reload when you make a change in the Scenery Library without removing the original AI load.

 

This results in double the AI in the sim. Do this a couple times during a sim session and I will see multiple planes occupying the same parking spots.

 

I have never checked to see if this doubling of the AI happens at airports other than the one I was testing, I suspect it does.

 

If making a change to the Scenery Library causes FSX to load twice the AI it is not hard to see why the VAS takes a big hit.

 

regards,

Joe

 

I read about that as well. I believe there is a program called AIDupe which addresses this. Anybody use it?

Actually mip mapping doesn't reduce the size of the texture, but adds multiple sizes of the texture starting from very small to large, large being the size of original texture sheet.

 

Adding mips does two things.

 

1. It improves performance by give the GPU a smaller sized texture to render when the plane or object is far away. For example if the object your looking at is 2 miles away from your POV and the object only has a texture sheet of say 1024x1024 but no mips the GPU is going to try to render the full size image even the the object at 2 miles away is very small. At that distance you won't be able to see the detail of the whole texture sheet. If the said object has mip maps then the GPU will render the 64x64 sized sheet of that object and as you get closer the GPU will start rendering larger and larger texture sheets until your close enough for it to render the original 1024x1024. By giving the GPU multiple sizes of the same texture sheet it reduces the work load of the GPU and generally provides better performance.

 

2. The second reason to add mip maps besides improving performance as stated above, is to improve looks of either the AI or scenery object. For those of you who have been simming for a long time will probably remember back in the mid 2000's when some companies like Aerosoft would release sceneries and people would always complain about how the scenery would shimmer and sometimes have jagged lines. The reason behind this si that they would not mip map the textures and you would have to try to run ridiculous high AA setting to try to mitigate the shimmering. But the down fall was that running such high levels of AA would often decrease your performance so much that the airport would probably be almost unusable due to the thE FPS loss. Some people, including myself would then end up having to spend hours mip mapping the textures to get rid of the shimmering and improve performance.

 

Most good scenery developers mip map their sceneries by default now because they understand the benefits. If you open the texture folders of any FSDT, Flightbeam or FlyTampa airports you will be able to tell by the file sizes that the textures already include mips.

 

The same goes for AI. If you don't have mips for the AI textures the aircraft will tend to shimmer and you will most likely get worse performance when there are a lot of AI in the scene.

 

Why most AI packs don't come with mipped textures is beyond me, the only reason I can think of is because of the increased file size of the download or they don't want to take the time to mip map the textures themselves.

 

So a good rule of thumb that I have followed for 7 years now is to always mip map any AI that I add to FSX and always check scenery that you install to make sure the textures are mipped. Doing so you will improve the looks of your sceneries and AI and allow you to run lower levels of AI without having jagged lines and shimmering of which both the lower levels of AA and mip mapped textures will improve performance.

 

Unfortunately a lot of users new to the hobby don't know this and some that do won't do these things because they are not difficult, but can be time consuming and would rather try to find other magic tweaks to improve performance or just live will what they have.

 

As usual, make sure to back up textures before working with them in case you make mistakes or something goes wrong, especially when doing batch mip mapping.

 

Thanks for the great info. Is mip mapping something for experienced folks only? Or can we all attempt it with care? I would like to do anything logical that would help me get better performance out of my setup. Is there a mipmap 101 somewhere? Thanks.

In all this topic what intrigues me is that "14+ hour flight".  Wow, how exhausted it is  to be on a real-life 14 hours flight. Now imagine sitting on a chair for 14 hours looking at a computer monitor of a flight simulation. Yikes ! Needs a lot of courage. (or other reasons)

 

I find it comical when I read people go "Oh we finally have a long haul airliner for those long haul flights." Honestly, I have never flown my PMDG 777 more than 2 hours. In fact,  I can take my  Cessna add-on and fly it for 20 hours +-  no difference!. Anyway, the point is the pointless reason of such looooong hours  looking at a computer monitor- useless.

In you have Photoshop then you can load the NVIDIA Mipmap plug-in. As long a you keep backups of your orginal files it's safe.

So, if you make a change to your scenery library after loading a flight, it doesn't leak memory?? 

here's what i did to make the VAS slower. lets say your route OMDB - VHHH then you need to disable the default stuff on the scenery library like north america, africa etc.. the result is good. i have 2fps increase and the VAS is much slower. 

 

 

sorry for the bad english but you'll get what i mean.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this thread.  I've always mipped my AI aircraft textures as this is a more efficient way to render them and doesn't unnecessarily waste resources.

 

I didn't know about the AI program AIdupe and AIcull which I fully intend to take advantage of.  Thanks for informing everyone of these applications.

 

As far as the original point of this post is concerned, having all the sceneries enabled all the time in the library has no effect on the amount of resources used by the simulator.  The sim only loads and renders the scenery within some radius of the aircraft's current location, so if the plane is flying in Nebraska it makes no difference to the sim if scenery for the UK is enabled or not. The same is true of the weather and AI traffic, by the way.  The sim only loads weather and AI traffic within 128nm(I think this number is correct) of the aircraft's location.

 

Some have mentioned that photoscenery doesn't work this way which may be true.  I don't know because I don't use photoscenery.

 

Dave

In all this topic what intrigues me is that "14+ hour flight".  Wow, how exhausted it is  to be on a real-life 14 hours flight. Now imagine sitting on a chair for 14 hours looking at a computer monitor of a flight simulation. Yikes ! Needs a lot of courage. (or other reasons)

 

I find it comical when I read people go "Oh we finally have a long haul airliner for those long haul flights." Honestly, I have never flown my PMDG 777 more than 2 hours. In fact,  I can take my  Cessna add-on and fly it for 20 hours +-  no difference!. Anyway, the point is the pointless reason of such looooong hours  looking at a computer monitor- useless.

That's all well and good for you, but many others like to do those long flights. And no, we all don't sit there the entire time. If OOMs have been decreased for some then that is a good thing.

 

I find it comical that you should even care about what is useless or not for me.

So, I skipped reading through all the 8 pages but is there a real fix of any substance in this thread?

So you probably didn't have the chance to read the article at Simmershome

http://simmershome.de/out-of-memory-im-fsx-und-p3d-ausschliessen/

 

To summarize it, the author compares Windows 7 and Windows 8 using a resource monitor and found a difference in how windows reserves a block of memory when a new scenery "comes into sight". He found that Win 7 reserves to much space for memory compared to what is really needed to work with that special scenery. Win 8 does it different using “Memory Combining”. He states that especially older programs run better with it because this technique eliminates all of the multiple copies of dlls that are using up memory space because of Multi Tasking.

 

Because of that Win 8 reserve only a bit more of space for the scenery than Win 7 that reserve as he wrotes 25% more.

 

In Win 7 he had this steps, the first one being the most important one:

 

Setting AF to 4x

then if necessary reducing "LOD-Radius auf 4,5"

if still in need than reducing scenery details and or AI traffic

 

Same computer but Win 8 he uses no such settings because he doesn't have that problem at all. The text ends with an outlook to more upcoming writings about solving typical Win 8 problems.

 

Concerning photoscenery activation I see on my computer in top down view and zoomed out every scenery worldwilde when it is activated, no matter where I fly, which I used for some space flight movies some time ago.

 

I hope I could help with that very short summary of the german article.

 

Many greetings from Germany,

 

Manfred