fsx-se Scenery textures not remaining within scenery radius of aircraft

[Star1 0]

Hi to all AVSIM members. I'm still relatively new to flight-sim software and despite having dabbled in the differing versions of FSX over the years, I'm still very much a novice. Therefore please bare with me when trying to obtain guidance and advice.  Now that I have a computer with slightly better specs than my previous PC's, I feel a bit more inspired to get into FSX and although my current computer is by no means anywhere near what would be required to run FSX properly, it does appear to run FSX much better than past rigs I've owned to a level I can enjoy except for an unusual issue.

My Issue:-
I've noticed there's much mention in numerous forums and websites regarding performance tweaks in relation to the unwanted blurry textures problem. However my current experience with this issue unless mistaken, has a slight alternate spin on it. Whereas the main and most common problem some users experience is blurry textures in the distant or onward areas past a certain radius point threshold around the aircraft, my issue is proving slightly more problematic and strange in that my starting point is always good and all looks very acceptable even impressive. But then when flying off in any direction, the texture and Scenery appear to remain impressive from the starting point area but soon after a short distance the rendering engine does not appear to want to follow the aircraft's scenery rendering radius - in other words the scenery starts looking dreadful immediately around and right below the aircraft itself. I tested this further by switching aircraft to another like the F-35B Lightening II for VTOL to enable a 'hover' directly above the ground, this was done for purpose of giving time to see if the scenery & textures catch-up from the render engine by hovering above the terrain, however surprisingly the scenery texture detail still does not catch-up regardless of how much time is given.

The only thing that immediately produces amazingly detailed textures once more, is forcing a Scenery redraw/refresh by means of a Scenery reload within the menu (just clicking OK in Scenery Library without making any changes does a refresh & reload), or loading a flight, changing plane/location/time of day which trigger a reload etc.

As mentioned, my computer system does not have the best specs, but it's quad core i7, dual GTX 970 in SLI and dual mSATA SSD's configured in RAID stripped which shouldn't be that bad in contributing towards semi-decent loading/rendering of Scenery - the frame rates certainly appear acceptable to good with most settings on high even Ultra, albeit with the usual fps killers set to off such as light bloom, ground shadows, etc and traffic not to high on medium.

I am at a loss. When I do get good textures from when the flight first starts, or doing a Scenery redraw, the system doesn't appear to struggle whatsoever as the scenery and textures are well detailed within the LOD Radius (which is at 4.5000 and unedited). The 'Empty scenery cache on exit' option is selected/ticked, however I have tried it unticked as well to no effect or change with the issue at hand.

[Denco 48]

That is what blurry textures mean. The engine can't keep up with rendering of the textures while you're flying. It usually appears with HD detail terrain textures such as ORBX. To make this matter more strange, at least for my case, I can put the autogen and scenery slider all the way to the left and it still happens. I don't know of anyone who managed to fix this issue, but the best way to lessen them is to limit your frames to 30 fps.

[Star1 0]

That is what blurry textures mean.

Many pages on the internet pointed out the issue with further away textures being bluring but not immediately below the aircraft, although admittedly I didn't research this deep enough.

 

So maybe it could be fair to assume there are two types or versions of this problem? i.e. 1. the version with the greater radius texture issue where the user at least still enjoys textures within the 'inner radius' of the texture engine that thankfully does follow the aircraft for constant good detail below and close to the aircraft... and then 2. the more drastic version of this problem where any kind of texture within the whole (LOD_RADIUS) radius does not follow the aricraft at all on its travelling direction and therefore very soon becomes blurry even immediately below the aircraft.

The engine can't keep up with rendering of the textures while you're flying.

I see... yet I don't understand how flying in a direction to soon reveal the bluury texture immediately below and then using an F-35B Lightening II to 'hover' directly above the ground for a few minutes (even several minutes) shows that the render engine doesn't even attempt to try to catch-up over a considereble time. This gives rise to the thought that the texture render engine appears to stop completely and gives up, as if a bug in the processing routine. Surely the travelling and therefore changing coordinates of the moving aircraft in FSX being fedback to the texture rendering engine would enable the engine to buffer, catch up and empty previous old/past area catch for new area to fill? Interesting!

 

I don't know of anyone who managed to fix this issue, but the best way to lessen them is to limit your frames to 30 fps.

That is worrying to know, although there does appear to be many example and YouTube video's where the texture rendering radius distance is impressive to say the least. No doub't probably using overclocked Intel Extreme CPU's in 6 or 8 core configurations (being that FSX is more CPU intensive than GPU), or maybe not and it's some other workaround.

 

I tried setting frame rate limit within FSX setting pane, however it seems to perform better when Unlimited is selected and that confused me further because normally if I set some games I own to a limited frame rate that mathes the display, the games then perform better than they do with unlinited selected - this is the exact oppisit to what I'm experiencing with FSX frame rate adjustment.

 

Your probably right though and some system performace hog needs to be tweaked in order to improve the situation. But I can't help feel and think that hovering an f-35B Lightening II above some terrain for several test minutes would've given the texture rendering engine ample time to catchup, even on a slow low spec PC - would this not be reminicant of a potential bug issue in the render process? Possibly the texture render engine needs the raw overclocked power of very high end CPU's to maintain a live render output without the slightest dip in CPU performance that could break the apparent brittle/fragile render stream continuity from slightly lower spec'd CPU power from which the texture render engine could be unable to recover from and never will from lack of further development and thus developer updated coding. Mmmm....

[Denco 48]

Well I've tried many tweaks to elevate this issue but without success. I've seen people who used heavy modded game with scenery and airports but very little case of blurrier. But for me no matter what setting, tweak, upgrade I tried the problem was/is still there. I even reinstalled my game to a fast Samsung SSD hoping it will fix it but sadly its still here. And extreme 6 to 8 cores don't matter much in FSX. What you need is a high overclock on a single core. The game is multi threaded but as far as I know it only uses max 4 cores.

 

So my conclusion in the end was that the game is racist. Today I don't bother with it anymore and just enjoy the flying. 

 

You are correct about not using any frame lock and leave it to unlimited. When it comes to performance the sim performs best when frames are uncapped.

[Star1 0]

Strange.. Installing FTXGB appears to have cured it in the area I'm flying.