Sudden blurries at high altitudes.

[Bobsk8 12,724]

The last couple of days flying my Airbus around FL340-370, I noticed when I looked at an external view I had terrible blurries. Some times they would clear up after 10-20 seconds.  I had never had this before, so this was a surprise, and I was trying to figure out what had caused this. At first I increased the FFTF from .01 up to 1.5, but this seemed to have no effect. I still don't understand if FFTF does anything with a multicorp processor like I have anyway.  Then I remembered that last week I was playing around with the frame rate setting in P3D and when I switched from 30FPS where I had it locked since day 1, to unlimited, I noticed I gained a few FPS at the ramp where I was parked, so I left it at unlimited. Seemed Ok for a couple of days, and then the blurries started. Today I switched the FPS back to 30 limited and the blurries disappeared. I noticed that when it was set at unlimited the FPS was quickly dancing all over the place from 30 to maybe 55 fps at times at high altitudes. I guess that these faster FPS was not giving the scenery time to load properly. 

[Nyxx 6,993]

I could explain put you know why and fixed it     (its explained in my 777/NG link in sig)

 

I guess that these faster FPS was not giving the scenery time to load properly.

Correct  :smile:

 

This can help also

[TERRAIN]

SWAP_WAIT_TIMEOUT=30

 

What that is doing is drawing 30 Frames before swapping out...sort of explains it self really 

 

We all never stop learning Bob  :smile:

[Bobsk8 12,724]

 

I could explain put you know why and fixed it     (its explained in my 777/NG link in sig)

 

Correct  :smile:

 

This can help also

[TERRAIN]

SWAP_WAIT_TIMEOUT=30

 

What that is doing is drawing 30 Frames before swapping out...sort of explains it self really 

 

We all never stop learning Bob  :smile:

 

 

Very true, that is why I like flight sims so much, never boring. Where does this Terrain addition go in the P3D.cfg, and if so, any particular location? 

[out 769]

Try zooming out when you get ground blurries in the spot view.

[Nyxx 6,993]

 

 

Where does this Terrain addition go in the P3D.cfg, and if so, any particular location? 

Just enter under the 

[TERRAIN]

[Bobsk8 12,724]

Just enter under the 

[TERRAIN]

 

Thanks

[Bobsk8 12,724]

I was flying again today, and when I got up to altitude, and looked down, everything was blurry.  It took maybe 30 or more seconds for it to snap back into focus.  Looked like this from 35,000 feet over south Florida.   

 

 

 

Once it cleared up it looked like this which was normal  . 

 

 

Now prior to this blurry photo, I had minimized P3D, and was looking up something using Chrome, that took quite awhile, while I was flying. The rest of the flight after the blurriness went away  was perfectly normal. Now here is my question, if P3D is minimized, I am thinking that maybe it is not loading the scenery anymore as I fly along, so when I place the focus back on P3d, I am seeing it take awhile to load up all the scenery textures that it had stopped loading when it was minimized. I see the the CPU usage goes way down when P3D is minimized, so that is what why I am thinking that texture loading has stopped when minimized.   Does this sound like a reasonable explanation?  

[Guest]

Wow that's blurry ...

 

Have you tried using (per SDK):

 

[TERRAIN] UseGlobalTerrainView=True

By default, every camera has its own terrain view which requests texture and dem tiles near the camera to ensure that all cameras get a quality view of terrain. When tessellation is enabled, it is possible for cameras to share data and avoid the extra work required to manage multiple terrain views. For multi-view scenarios in which all views are near each other, it may be desirable to have views simply render the terrain tiles loaded by the default view. Setting this option to True will prevent all camera from creating a terrain view except for the default 3d view. This can help avoid texture flashing and terrain spikes that occur on some systems with multiple views and/or multiple video cards. This value can be overridden by the UseGlobalTerrainView entry in a given CameraDefinition allowing each camera to determine whether or not to create a terrain view. This setting will be engorged if Tessellation is not enabled.

 

How much VRAM does your video card have?

 

Another source of blurries is a very large scenery library that contains a lot of photo scenery that is "enabled" ... but your pic looks like no photo scenery active so that's probably not the issue.

 

But to be honest I've never tested minimizing P3D while flying.

 

Cheers, Rob.

[Bobsk8 12,724]

Wow that's blurry ...

 

Have you tried using (per SDK):

 

[TERRAIN] UseGlobalTerrainView=True

By default, every camera has its own terrain view which requests texture and dem tiles near the camera to ensure that all cameras get a quality view of terrain. When tessellation is enabled, it is possible for cameras to share data and avoid the extra work required to manage multiple terrain views. For multi-view scenarios in which all views are near each other, it may be desirable to have views simply render the terrain tiles loaded by the default view. Setting this option to True will prevent all camera from creating a terrain view except for the default 3d view. This can help avoid texture flashing and terrain spikes that occur on some systems with multiple views and/or multiple video cards. This value can be overridden by the UseGlobalTerrainView entry in a given CameraDefinition allowing each camera to determine whether or not to create a terrain view. This setting will be engorged if Tessellation is not enabled.

 

How much VRAM does your video card have?

 

Another source of blurries is a very large scenery library that contains a lot of photo scenery that is "enabled" ... but your pic looks like no photo scenery active so that's probably not the issue.

 

But to be honest I've never tested minimizing P3D while flying.

 

Cheers, Rob.

 

I have a GTX 750 TI card  with 2 gigs, and I checked the memory usage on the card it was about 1/2 that. No photo scenery just UTX USA and Europe. I did a flight earlier in the day and had no problem, and I wasn't running P3D minimized. I think that may be the problem, so I am going to start with not running it minimized and see what happens. I will report back,  and if I still have a problem, then I will try your suggestion. This just started happening, and I think it may be that I have gotten into the habit lately of browsing the web, while on long flights...

[Bobsk8 12,724]

The blurries that I was getting were definetly caused by minimizing P3D while I was flying. I flew two flights this morning over the exact same terrain I flew over yesterday, and did not minimize P3D and not one blurry. Apparently, as I stated in a post above, when P3D is minimized the CPU  activity drops way down, and this probably is caused by the fact that textures are not being loaded at that time. So when I go back to full screen, it has to catch up with the  texture loading, and that is why for sometimes for as long as 30 seconds it is blurry until it finally loads the textures completely and the terrain snaps back  into focus. Had me worried for awhile. 

[Guest]

 

 

So when I go back to full screen, it has to catch up with the  texture loading, and that is why for sometimes for as long as 30 seconds it is blurry until it finally loads the textures completely and the terrain snaps back  into focus. Had me worried for awhile.

 

That's actually a good thing ... didn't know P3D did that ... makes sense there would be no need to render high quality texture details while P3D is minimized since they aren't being viewed.  Anyway, learnt something new ... thanks for sharing.

 

Cheers, Rob.

[Bobsk8 12,724]

I guess I spoke too soon. My third flight today of about 500 miles into Oakland Airport, about 30 miles out, the blurries started again at about 10,000 feet.   

 

 

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This time the blurries would not clear up, and as I was on short final, I could see the airport and everything on the airport grounds was as clear as a bell, but not the scenery surrounding the airport. After landing, I decided to slew back up to around 8,000 feet to see what it looked like, and then everything was totally clear. 

 

Now I am really starting to get discouraged over this, since it was these kind   of problems that drove me away from FSX years ago and I quit flying, and it seems like I am running into another brick wall with P3D. I have no idea to try and figure out what is wrong at this point, short of a total reinstall of P3D, and I am not even sure that will accomplish anything. 

 

 

I have read something about deleting "shaders cache". Might that help with this kind of problem? Anyway, I decided to delete the shaders cache , and set Global terrain view to "on". The thing that bothers me is this just started about a week ago, and I had added nothing to P3D in the way of scenery or add ons of any kind. 

[Bobsk8 12,724]

I made the two tweaks I mentioned above and took another 1 hour flight tonight. Everything fine until I started the approach phase about 50 minutes into the flight  and here we go again.....

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is no longer fun anymore.  I think I have a couple of options at this point, neither one I am happy about. Option one, quit flying sims again his time for good, or  option two get X plane.  Neither one is appealing to me, but this situation I am in now is nothing but aggravating.  

[mr340 56]

Hey Bob you are not alone. I was getting the same problem you are having. When coming in for landing below 10,000 feet blurry textures same as your screenshot, but mines cleared up about 2 out of 3 seconds. These blurry textures reminds me when FSX was about to OOM. My setting are similar to yours the only difference is i have FFTF to default .

[Bobsk8 12,724]

Hey Bob you are not alone. I was getting the same problem you are having. When coming in for landing below 10,000 feet blurry textures same as your screenshot, but mines cleared up about 2 out of 3 seconds. These blurry textures reminds me when FSX was about to OOM. My setting are similar to yours the only difference is i have FFTF to default .

 

What bothers me is that this started about a week ago, and I have flown about 400 hours since getting P3D several months ago, with not one problem. When it goes bad it looks like the old FS9 which would do that whenever it felt like it. Tonight I changed FFTF to .33, and will try that setting tomorrow. First thing i did when I got P3D back in May was to set FFTF to .01 and never had a problem with scenery loading. I think I will just suffer with this and wait for 3.0 which will require a complete reinstall anyway. if it still does it then, I think I will find another hobby  :wink: