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Cygnus_X1

P3D v2.5 Blurry Terrain Textures above approx. 7000 ft AGL.

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Hello all,

I made the jump from FSX Classic to P3D v2.5 about 2 months ago and I haven't looked back. The stability and visual gains on my system make FSX classic obsolete for me. I have had an issue, however, that I can't quite pinpoint the source of. 

I've seen many other posts regarding blurry terrain textures but I haven't found a solution that works for me. For flight simulation, I fly mostly airliners, but occasionally I'll fly VFR single-engine training flights. For this test, I focused on my most used aircraft, the PMDG 737 NGX.

I find that at low altitudes and relatively low speeds (V2 to flaps up speed), texture loading seems to keep up well, and terrain textures remain fairly sharp at most practical distances. However, as I climb higher and start to increase speed, the texture loading seems to turn to rubbish. Textures around my aircraft are blurry and seem to reload constantly and slowly. In a turn, looking out the side windows reveal blurry ground textures, and looking at terrain not too far in front of the aircraft out the front windshield shows the same. I have pictures and a video to demonstrate. 

Here is everything used in the test:
P3D v2.5 Academic
PMDG 737 NGX
Active Sky Next
FTX Global
REX Soft Clouds

Settings are shown in the video. My PC specs can be found on my profile.

A link to my .cfg: https://www.dropbox.com/s/hl4a0vr51mw6sg8/Prepar3D.cfg?dl=0

 

The test was a departure off of Runway 35R at Calgary, CYYC. Please disregard the hastily setup aircraft and flying, it was by no means done by the book as the purpose of this flight was to demonstrate the terrain.

This shot was taken after departure, around 2000 feet AGL. The view out the side is fine, textures are sharp. Perhaps getting a little blurry in the distance, but nothing too noticeable. 
image.png

 

This shot is of the city of Airdrie, directly ahead at roughly the same altitude. For the most part, the textures are relatively sharp but beginning to blur slightly. 

image.png
 

Zooming in, the textures seem to blur.

image.png

 

Turning right, a little bit higher, the view out the side is excellent, the ground is very sharp. 

image.png

 

This didn't last long, however. Climbing through to around 10 000 feet MSL (roughly 6500 feet AGL in the area), the aircraft sped up past 250 kts, and the textures became blurry when looking out the windows. I started recording the video at this point. You'll notice that looking out the sides, the textures become very blurry, and anything in the distance is very low-res. I have to pan outside of the cockpit and look directly below the aircraft to see sharp textures. It seems that there is a certain small radius below the aircraft that has sharp textures. Changing the LOD radius (as seen in the video) doesn't affect this. Anything in the distance from the normal field of view of the cockpit is blurry. At high altitudes, this exists, but isn't quite as noticeable. During departure and arrival, it is quite noticeable and takes away from the immersion. I didn't notice this as much in FSX classic, but I certainly do in P3D v2.5.

The video is shown here. At the time of posting, it's still uploading and being published by YouTube. It should be up by 2035 zulu today. 

http://youtu.be/EdrlMBW6Lxk

 

Here's a top-down view of the ground from the aircraft, zoomed in. You can see that there is a point at which the textures go from sharp to blurry. This point is not very far from the aircraft at all. Looking outside the window is past this point. 

image.png

 

I have tried some tweaks, namely Fiber Frame time Fraction, which I set to 0.01 as recommended. It helps a bit, but it still produces this issue. I have tried affinity mask, but I find that this decreases my performance and induces stutters, and doesn't seem to help with blurry textures, so I have removed it completely. I set the program affinity in the task manager, assigning all cores. I also run with HT on.

 

Well, that was a longer post than I expected.  :P Any and all help is greatly appreciated. 

 

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Yeah - Super frustrating

Wish we had way to fix it

 

So this is a common problem, then? I wasn't sure if it was just my system or not, because I've seen others' setups that seem to work a lot better.

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It's same here too. i7 3770k and GTX660. Tried different FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION with no good result.

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blurry ground textures and missing autogen are potentially a side effect of a too-low FFTF and an AM that isn't getting the most out of your threads. Have you tried running without a FFTF and affinity mast setting in the cfg (i.e. the default)?

With your hardware, two other cfg settings you can try changing are:
TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=80 (default is 30)
TextureMaxLoad=15

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Hi, I share your pain - same story here, migrated over 3 months ago and never looked back and except for this extremely irritating "Feature" I am very pleased.

 

Before you waste loads of time tweaking, be aware that although there are many adjustments you can make to ensure textures nearby load quickly, the ones in the distance are stuck like that because......

 

Some forum sleuthing will turn up the fact that apparently, LM have "locked" the LOD radius setting at 6.5. I have a dual install of P3d and FSX steam edition on my PC, on the FSXSE install, I can run LOD_radius at 12 and the scenery looks perfect all the way out, not so on P3d. It really ticks me off, when you have some majestic mountains in the distance that are just a blurry mess. 

 

I have posted along with others and asked for a why over at the P3d forums, but no one from LM has ever explained. 

It's strange, as everything else is adjustable ( albeit, they are pretty reticent about the details of how they all work together) in the cfg file, bar this and its the single biggest moan most people have, apart from the OOMs.

 

It's a shame we dont have the freedom to tweak it, as I am sure people with uber computers could well benefit.

 

I hope that LM will look at this when they can or at least explain the rationale behind it, 

 

Cheers, Mark

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It's a total bummer when beautiful mountains look like melting snow cones from afar.

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Also have this issue. Apparently, it was introduced in the 2.4 (or was it the 2.5?) version. 

 

It is a common problem and can only be fixed by LM.


38.jpg

Brynjar Mauseth 

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This is the same for me. Below 5000 the textures seem to load fine but as soon as I climb higher, everything around the aircraft turns into a blurry mess.

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same here.I've this problem for a while now and thought it was just down to my computer setup.I don't use NI so figured it was that.

couple of strange things going on at the moment which i'm trying to solve.

one of them is when flying low the river banks are very slow loading and only take shape when i'm right over them.

i use ORBX regions and the A2A cherokee,so probably pushing things a bit hard.

4.6ghz and a 980 seems to be not enough these days :smile:

 

   steve

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Same here, been messing around with sliders for two weeks, however yesterday decided to untick 'Tessellation' and to my surprise got a lot less blurries. The slight downside is I noticed the Water Slider was greyed out, but had better water texture and more like the texture I had in dx10 for my ORBX KHQM airport estuary.

if you could try this and see if it works on different hardware and setups.

bob

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I'll try this bob and get back to you.tessellation as i understand takes scenery and other stuff from your cpu and shifts it to your gpu to do the work.

i'll have a look.

 

 steve

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This is correct Steve, tessellation makes terrain to looks more natural and more specific it adds more polygons so that means extra gpu work. Also keep in mind that Tessellation is another weak spot of P3D. With it turned off you will prob. get Runtime error and CTD after 1:30 or so of flying.

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yes  i tried it..water looks better or should i say waves are more pronounced.it's the terrain that suffers.to me it looks very bleached and even more blurry than before.so i'll leave tessellation on i think.i think brynjar is right.don't remember seeing this in earlier versions of p3d .maybe something was changed in the way scenery is loaded when you climb higher

 

  steve

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It was worth the try, maybe it's the hardware or settings that's different, I have a 2560 X 1440 monitor. I did have a bit or graphics coruption at first so I moved all the sliders to the left, increased the lod first followed by the others . After a reboot it was ok.

tested this morning for 45mins still ok.

bob.

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