Orbx not good enough: blurry texture

[Christopher Low 5,341]

 

I also bought Ireland, and the harbor at Howth (Dublin)  is just like a piece of white paper sticking out into the oceanThe coast lines are undefined and flat, they just look like a line dividing water and land.

 

Get yourself a copy of PlayHorizon VFR GenX Ireland East photoscenery. It may not have autogen, but the definition and quality of the coastline is light years beyond the ORBx FTX product. Final approach to runway 28 at EIDW Dublin is wonderful with this photoscenery (particularly if you also have Aerosoft's Dublin airport package).

[Anxu00 176]

ORBX really does some fantastic stuff.  The real problem is that both FSX and P3D are based on a very outdated software and therefore the scope for add-on developers is limited.  That said, with ORBX you can really get fantastic results and I've put a few screens below.  I have had my fair share of blurries and issues, but its all down to getting the right compromises for what you want your flight sim to do.

 

I do hope you are able to get it working.

 

Matt

 

A fly-past of Vesuvius (lucky for those passengers seated on the right side of the plane!)

 

 

Leaving the southern coast of the UK - it may not be precisely the right streetmap and building techniques but I'm flight simming not road map simming!

 

 

Night flight over the mid-US!

 

 

The Alps off to the left - I think we're off to Rome!

 

 

The return flight.

 

 

And this is one were my computer screams out in pain - 27R approach to London Heathrow - texture loading is usually okay bit autogen lags way behind and in the VC I'm lucky to make 10fps (its so hard to turn those settings down!)

 

 

Computer specs:

Intel core i7 5960X o/c'd to 4.4GHz (never lucky in the silicon lottery...)

3xnVidia Titan Blacks in SLI (give eBay a chance!)

http://www.overclock.net/lists/display/view/id/6173465

 

Addons:

ORBX: FTX Global BASE, VECTOR, OpenLC EU

FSGlobal 2010 mesh

Aerosoft Airbuses

Majestic Q400

With that beefy machine and you got 10 FPS approaching Heathrow?  In addition you only use OpenLC, not even Orbx England?  I have no hopes for my much less beefy machine.  Orbx looks good, but performance is desirable.  To the OP, take a look at the Ultimate Terrain products from ScenerySolution (at Flight 1) it looks pretty good as ORBX but much better performance.  I have no beef against ORBX, but I consider them artists, their sceneries are work of art, but the demand on your system is on the high side.  The main reason all of my ORBX airports are sitting not installed yet.  

[AnkH 2,233]

You can drastically increase performance in any big city in the combination with FTX Vector by simply disabling tertiary and secondary roads as well as railways. I personally use FTX Vector mainly for more or less correct highways and of course for the nicely redone coastlines, lakes and rivers. Secondary roads and tertiary roads simply kill the performance besides increasing the VAS dramatically, so I disabled them. I anyway do VFR flying only in ORBX full flat regions or Switzerland Professional X, so I do actually not care about secondary and tertiary roads anywhere else when flying tubeliners.

[Cloudrider 4]

Remember with GTX cards the middle digit is most significant and indicates its place in the range...the x50 is low end.

See http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=GeForce+GTX+950 

The leading digit indicates generation and a several year old 770 beats a new 960, let alone a 950.

OTOH its not a HUGE difference - so this level of disatisfaction is probably more than just the card being overloaded...

Looking at the 260 at the same site indicates very budget performance....

 

To really bring a card to its knees and get the BEST state-of-the-art FSX scenery requires full detail ESI scenery - see the current ESI tribute thread.

 

Cheers

Keith

 

Keith,

Very interesting. I didn't know any of this. Thanks.

Any chance you have a link to that ESI Tribute trhread you mention please?

 

Nige

[Christopher Low 5,341]

He probably means this one, started by little old me :smile:

 

http://www.avsim.com/topic/479512-earth-simulations-a-tribute/

[MatthewLee 1]

With that beefy machine and you got 10 FPS approaching Heathrow?  In addition you only use OpenLC, not even Orbx England?  I have no hopes for my much less beefy machine.

I probably should mention that I had ludicrously high settings, with AI on and Aerosoft Mega Airport Heathrow.  I don't think FPS is particularly affected whether its England or LC EU, more I've noticed increased VAS (that screen is from FTX England).  I think I have some optimising to do too so take my FPS of 10 with a pinch of salt.  I had to do a bit of tinkering to get my sim running as I wanted it and I'm sure the OP can do that too.

 

You can drastically increase performance in any big city in the combination with FTX Vector by simply disabling tertiary and secondary roads as well as railways. I personally use FTX Vector mainly for more or less correct highways and of course for the nicely redone coastlines, lakes and rivers. Secondary roads and tertiary roads simply kill the performance besides increasing the VAS dramatically, so I disabled them. I anyway do VFR flying only in ORBX full flat regions or Switzerland Professional X, so I do actually not care about secondary and tertiary roads anywhere else when flying tubeliners.

Yes, its something I've been meaning to try.  The roads are eye candy in Vector, the water features are the real seller as they make a great difference to how the sim looks - but its does eat away at the VAS.  I really need to try the Heathrow 27 approach with reduced settings and see what happens.

 

My main point wasd to show the OP that ORBX scenery can really look amazing but it requires tweaking a few settings here and there and compromising a bit.  I hope he can ge something from Orbx scenery so he doesn't feel he wasted his cash.

 

Matt

[FS++ 707]

I bought several Orbx regions for P3D and I'm disappointed because everyone was raving about it being the best.  However it is not very realistic at all.    The textures are not sharp when you go down low even though I have a powerful machine (6 core Haswell Xeon overclocked to 4.5, 32GB RAM, GTX950).  When your flying into a region, like approaching Ireland, the textures and mountains all look like soft mush until you get very close.  I have most of the sliders on high or max.  I bought Central Rockies, and from Jackson airport, the Tetons are all rounded and soft, they look like default mountains!!! What is the issue here?  It looks terrible unless you are on top of the mountains.

For example, I bought Northern California and I went down low around 200 feet or so  around the Coast Range near Sausalito, and the textures turned to mush at a low altitude and the city of San Francisco looks like a model rather than a real city with a few skyscrapers in a sea of mushy textures!.  I also bought Ireland, and the harbor at Howth (Dublin)  is just like a piece of white paper sticking out into the oceanThe coast lines are undefined and flat, they just look like a line dividing water and land. bought England, and the fields are all flickering in to focus over time, and it looks so unrealistic!  Also, the cities look nothing like English cities.  They don't have English row houses!!!

What gives?  What is better scenery?  I can't believe in 2015 there isn't a more realistic looking scenery for flight sim like in the professional simulators, it's ridiculous.  Isn't there something that looks more like real life out there in this day and age?  I tried the photo scenery and that is hardly realistic on take off or landing. 

 

Just curious...

 

What aircraft are you using?

 

Is it using hi-def textures.?

[StewartH 66]

With that beefy machine and you got 10 FPS approaching Heathrow?  In addition you only use OpenLC, not even Orbx England?  I have no hopes for my much less beefy machine.  Orbx looks good, but performance is desirable.  To the OP, take a look at the Ultimate Terrain products from ScenerySolution (at Flight 1) it looks pretty good as ORBX but much better performance.  I have no beef against ORBX, but I consider them artists, their sceneries are work of art, but the demand on your system is on the high side.  The main reason all of my ORBX airports are sitting not installed yet.  

Too bad you wasted your money.  Everyone who buys and installs ORBX scenery makes adjustments to their system specs and scenery settings in order to accommodate the scenery to their system. 

[Anxu00 176]

Too bad you wasted your money.  Everyone who buys and installs ORBX scenery makes adjustments to their system specs and scenery settings in order to accommodate the scenery to their system. 

You got that right.  I wasted my money alright, and I hev not bought more either.  However, it's also a duty of the developer of scenery as well.  If Developers such as FlightBeam, FSDreamteam and FlyTampa can do it, so could ORBX.  I recently came across a number of screenshots from user of ORBX KBVS and he was raving about the scenery where the screenshots was showing he has 13 FPS with GA plane!  If I want to walk around and visit the airport virtually, sure, but the main purpose is to fly and at that framerate you can't do much.   Trust me, I have done alot of tweaking to get a balance but none has delivered yet.   I recently moved to P3Dv3 and so far the region and only the region ORBX seems performing well.  However, the verdict is still out.

[StewartH 66]

I don't know about your particular system, and I don't know about the system of the person you mention.  What exactly is the "duty of the developer" that you mention.  And I'm not quite sure what you mean by "if FlightBeam, FSDreamteam, etc., can do it, so could Orbx" .  The products are quite different in most cases.   However--and I don't pay much attention to fps--but I do routinely get ~30 fps flying GA aircraft in most Orbx scenery.  There are the occasional rough spots, KSFO and KSEA to mention two off-hand, but everyone has trouble with those two.  Flying jetliners into those two airports requires special care.  If you fly only jetliners, then probably Orbx regions specifically are not for you, much less the small regional airports which Orbx specializes in.

 

Stew

[ErichB 3,638]

Hi,

 

If you want lifelike, the only way is photoscenery!

 

Phil

 

Most photosceneries are washed out and bland.  I haven't yet been impressed by any photoscenery packages.

[Christopher Low 5,341]

I haven't been impressed by too many landclass scenery packages :wink:

[ErichB 3,638]

I haven't been impressed by too many landclass scenery packages :wink:

 

Do you mean the way landclass arranges the textures?  For the most part i find it quite plausible 

[Heathrow to Dublin 1]

I bought a photoscenery of Ireland and, although it's accurate and good from high up, the flatness ruins it for me on approach and take-off.  The houses and buildings all look flat from a decent altitude as well. 

 

That said, Orbx doesn't exactly satisfy me either.   You need photo scenery with Autogen.

[Christopher Low 5,341]

 

Do you mean the way landclass arranges the textures?  For the most part i find it quite plausible

 

"Quite plausible" isn't good enough for me these days. To be honest, landclass textures have never floated my boat (I actually preferred the vector graphics look of FS4 to those hideous, shimmering, low resolution textures that Microsoft crowbarred into the awful FS5). ORBx is easily the best of its class, and the autogen can look very good. Unfortunately, my brain all too easily detects the repetitive nature of the textures (particularly in urban areas), and coastlines end up looking like the product of a cardboard cutout class at Kindergarten. Of course, photoscenery is not perfect. Far from it. There are areas of England and Wales in my VFR GenX photoscenery with far too much colour saturation (which ends up making the textures look even lower resolution than the 1.2 metres per pixel that they are supposed to be). VFR GenX Scotland fares better in this department, but it suffers from a few areas of rather low contrast (Glasgow being a prime example).

 

Nevertheless, with ES Treescapes installed, I get a decent 3D effect most of the time. There may well be a lack of autogen buildings across most of the UK landscape on my PC, but to be honest I would rather not have any buildings at all than randomly scattered boxes (which is what the default autogen looks like to me).

 

As for the comment above about Ireland photoscenery, I replaced FTX Republic of Ireland with PlayHorizon VFR GenX photoscenery, and I was so glad that I did. It may not have the mass of autogen buildings and trees that the FTX product has, but performance is a lot better, and it actually looks more realistic! That's because the flat photo textures are a representation of the real landscape, not some automatically generated (and rather rough) approximation of it. If I see a golf course below me, then I know that it's a real golf course, not one of those generic ORBx golf courses that all look the same. As for the coastlines......I dare anyone to suggest that the approach to runway 28 at EIDW Dublin International using FTX Ireland is more realistic than the superb sight I am greeted with when using PlayHorizon VFR GenX Ireland East. The coastline detail, watermasking and realism of the photoscenery product is light years beyond anything that a landclass package has to offer.