Awful AA in P3D v3

[Jimmy RFR 406]

I'm currently running only the built-in AA at 4x on a 2560x1600 monitor and it looks more than acceptable.  A very tiny bit of shimmer is present, but nothing objectionable.  In fact, if I could get the same sort of AA performance from XP, I'd be a happy camper indeed.  :wink:

[Sesquashtoo 2,846]

Hi

 

I've been struggling with the Anti Aliasing for a very long time in P3D v3. Its very shimmery and the planes looks "liny" and ugly. First i thought it was my 130$ monitor so i bought a QHD 2560x1440p IPS but that didn't solve the problem at all.

 

Have you guys any suggestions on whats the problem? I currently run a GTX 970 with i7 4790k @4.4Ghz.

 

 

Good day

 

Jacob

I just uninstalled v3.0 for one of those reasons.  I found that in comparison to the visual output of v2.4...v3.0 was quite terrible.  I don't need any outside AA processing with v2.4...  I don't know what they did, but I was quite disappointed with that visual aspect of v3.0.  I'm now debating with myself, whether to seek a refund within the 60 day envelope, and just stay with/enjoy v2.4 as my last P3D 'update'.  Thinking about it, anyway. I'll see what feedback we all get with v3.1 before I seek a refund.

[vpwebsvc 0]

I'm curious if it's been confirmed that Prepar3D v.3.1 can effectively use the logical cores created by activating hyper-threading?  FSX does not use it and since this is a byproduct of FSX that obviously has been enhanced perhaps it can.  The Gatwick website regarding using the affinity mask indicates that Prepar3D version 2.x thru 3.x does use both the physical and logical cores but wondering if that is indeed fact. 

[Anxu00 176]

 

 

I just uninstalled v3.0 for one of those reasons.  I found that in comparison to the visual output of v2.4...v3.0 was quite terrible.  I don't need any outside AA processing with v2.4...  I don't know what they did, but I was quite disappointed with that visual aspect of v3.0.

You are lucky you still have 2.4.  I made the mistake of deleting v2.4 once 2.5 came out.  P3D2.5 suffers shimmering and AA issue.  V3.0 and V3.1 is better than 2.5 but AA is still not good compared to FSX-SE.  Plus I believe V3.x employing the technique of unloading/loading scenery to improve VAS suffers the same slight stutter/pause as FSDT with their use of similar technique.  It's there if you pay attention.

[Christopher Low 5,341]

That's a lot better than suffering an OOM error.

[Anxu00 176]

That's a lot better than suffering an OOM error.

Why can't we have both, stutter free, good visuals and VAS under control?  Ah, the trade-offs and the "techniques" around VAS limit <sighs>

[Mickeyj 35]

Why can't we have both, stutter free, good visuals and VAS under control?  Ah, the trade-offs and the "techniques" around VAS limit <sighs>

 

Cause we want a real flying environment with real clouds, rain, mist and fog. We want complex aircraft even that it is a simple Piper Cup with real flight dynamics and lastly we want to fly in and out mega hubs with real time traffic and real ATC. All these features turned up to the max on an old i7 2600 oc´ed 4.5 GHz with an GTX 580ti running the sim @ 60FPS.

 

If you do not want all these features i listed above then use the stock sim and you will be one happy camper seeing no OOM, no stutters and no FPS penalties. 

[TheBoom 31]

Has anyone tried running MFAA instead? Not sure if it even works with P3D and what the performance hit is but if it did work it would mean doubling the set MSAA at a much lower cost.

 

MFAA did wonders for me in one or two titles and nothing in many others.

[dgraham1284 92]

Would you call this terrible? 

[Anxu00 176]

 

 

Cause we want a real flying environment with real clouds, rain, mist and fog. We want complex aircraft even that it is a simple Piper Cup with real flight dynamics and lastly we want to fly in and out mega hubs with real time traffic and real ATC. All these features turned up to the max on an old i7 2600 oc´ed 4.5 GHz with an GTX 580ti running the sim @ 60FPS.
 
If you do not want all these features i listed above then use the stock sim and you will be one happy camper seeing no OOM, no stutters and no FPS penalties.

I am not sure I follow what you suggest.  I did say that there are trade-offs, I was wishing a sim where I can have it all, but there is no such thing.  Stutters are the number one killer factor for me. Luckily I found the settings in P3Dv3 that got rid of it:  no HDR, low traffic, no car traffics.

[TheBoom 31]

I just did a test with 4 MSAA into MFAA and 4xSGSS.

 

Loaded up the 737 NGX at Flytampa LOWW and set thunderstorms.

 

GPU usage was around 70-80% most of the time and peaked once or twice at 99% when I looked at the clouds above. No stutters inside and outside and also did not notice any shimmering however I did not fly the plane above the clouds to test.

 

Seems promising.

 

Shanan

 

GTX 970 overclocked to 1350 core and 7500 mem

[Guest]

I case you weren't aware, there is a bug with V3.1 DR (Dynamic Reflections) anything above "Low" setting will cause some AA issues ... this has been fixed for the next release.

 

Cheers, Rob.

[Slayer 190]

HDR can make ORBX scenery(they are not the only ones but a good example) and some aircraft full of white sparkles, it takes a lot of AA (thus low FPS) to get rid of (or just toggle off HDR in P3D). Some people blissfully ignore all the sparkles but it drives me nuts.

 

I suspect it is because of an improper way of texturing as default assets in P3D don't exhibit this BUT they don't have higher detail objects like handrails or radio antennas. I've seen complaints of this in other games too and it's almost always due to the texturing methods. (not sure if it's a bad normal map or lack of mipmap or the P3D engine itself)

 

The lazy repose is always the same from airport devs, it's your graphics driver or turn up AA or other nonsense...

 

LM will say it's a scenery dev issue and the addon devs will say it's a driver issue and everyone will just wash their hands of it as always.

[Mickeyj 35]

HDR can make ORBX scenery(they are not the only ones but a good example) and some aircraft full of white sparkles, it takes a lot of AA (thus low FPS) to get rid of (or just toggle off HDR in P3D). Some people blissfully ignore all the sparkles but it drives me nuts.

 

I suspect it is because of an improper way of texturing as default assets in P3D don't exhibit this BUT they don't have higher detail objects like handrails or radio antennas. I've seen complaints of this in other games too and it's almost always due to the texturing methods. (not sure if it's a bad normal map or lack of mipmap or the P3D engine itself)

 

The lazy repose is always the same from airport devs, it's your graphics driver or turn up AA or other nonsense...

 

LM will say it's a scenery dev issue and the addon devs will say it's a driver issue and everyone will just wash their hands of it as always.

 

Hi Steve,

 

could you give an example airport or post a screenie? I always fly with HDR enable and had never have problems in ORBX country or other add ons -freeware nor payware.

[SteveW 1,792]

I'm curious if it's been confirmed that Prepar3D v.3.1 can effectively use the logical cores created by activating hyper-threading?  FSX does not use it and since this is a byproduct of FSX that obviously has been enhanced perhaps it can.  The Gatwick website regarding using the affinity mask indicates that Prepar3D version 2.x thru 3.x does use both the physical and logical cores but wondering if that is indeed fact.

P3D and FSX work slightly differently, but both utilise "Logical Processors" (LPs) in the same way, and can be thought of as working in the same manner with respect to CPU cores. They each count the number of Logical Processors available through the mask, and split into that many jobs. As the Logical Processor count reduces below four, these jobs combine in a particular way, otherwise they split into repeating jobs. Currently the sweet-spot is four jobs on the typical 4GHz CPU we have today, featuring four or more cores. Enabling "HyperThreading" (HT) improves the switching speed of the cores, but to do this the CPU presents each core as two Logical Processors (LPs) instead of one LP.

 

Trouble is, the sim does not understand that two LPs may reside on a single core with HT enabled, that is why we often see an "Affinity Mask" (AM) with only one LP unmasked per core. With HT=On we are presenting two LPs but we want the sim to only count one job per core.

 

The reason for that is, that if we start two identical maximum throughput jobs on one HT core, each will get 50% of the available throughput. When we organise an AM for the sim, we want to ensure we give a full core, or 100% throughput, where it is needed.

 

A typical AM for a 6 core would be 1360=(01,01,01,01,00,00), showing the first pair of LPs, of core zero, on the right. Be aware that enabling 5 or 6 LPs in this way will actually reduce background task performance in the sim and increase VAS use unnecessarily.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Regarding the AA, generally setting 4xMSAA in the P3D display settings is good with aircraft such as the B58. But other aircraft models like the A36 may not look properly anti-aliased with only this setting, especially when zooming out the view. In this case the infamous SGSSAA with NI can be added (in the same multiple as MSAA) to good effect but practically halving the fps on some GPUs.