Blurry Ground Textures

[Guest wildfire563]

Regarding stutters, you may want to consider more cooling for your system. (I don't know if this will help blurries, maybe).I have a Dell Lattitude D800 laptop. I was getting ready to do a demonstration of FS. All week it was running great. All of a sudden, the night before I was to show, the system started stuttering all over the place. I spent hours doing all kinds of things trying to figure out what was going on (after having spent a month optimizing the system). Finally, something my partner said made me realize the only real change I had made was to put it in an open-ended box to protect it from the sun and some possible showers the next day (it was going to be outdoors), and that perhaps the heat in the system had increased. So I put a couple of ice packs under the system, and, a little while later, wah-la, stutters disappeared.Perhaps your system is seeing different amounts of heat on different days, hence, its Jekyll and Hyde characteristics.

[Guest Knikolaes]

Hmmm -- all i changed was the HD and memory, but that is still a logical observation. I was actually looking into liquid cooling meself.

[Guest JIMJAM]

I have a custom cooling system and on top of that use the old fashion way. One side cover is off and I have a small high powered fan! Works better than this fancy system we installed.Alot has too do with how much weather ASV is generating. Especially which plane. With most freewares,light GA planes, I load up the eye candy. With the PMDG,Concorde,DF 727,lEVEL D types, I need to lower the Autogen especailly since BEV was loaded.Just flew a wonderful flight in my new Coast Guard C-130 through some HEAVY weather off the keys staring right into a picture perfect sunset. Times like that make all this worthwhile!!!

[Guest Knikolaes]

I just went out on a wing (pardon the pun) and renamed my FS9 CFG and let it rebuild. A flight in the area with all default FS settings and nothing altered didnt change a thing so that ruled out my setting soemthing off LOL.For this entire thread I am using the same route, going from LSGS to LSPM in Switzerland. About halfway on that short hop the textures are so bad I can barely tell i am even in FS anymore. Also i am not even using weather. Using the default "Fair Weather". All tests are being done using the Captain Sim C-130 that was just released which has DXT3 textures and is not heavy at all on frames. I am about to make a run again with these default settings using the default Baron 58.Again I deleted the autogen file so there is no autogen except for special autogen related to metro skyscrapers and bridges.

[Guest JIMJAM]

OOOOOHHHHH. I also have been flying the c-130. I have not had the problem but I have read numerous people having missing or blurry terrain textures ONLY when flying the Herc. Too bad CS doesnt even have a forum. Dig around some of the post here but I do not recall a solution. One thing I have done is with rivatuner turn down my mip map bias to negative settings. Seems to clear up some blrries I get occasionaly at least on my setup.

[Guest Knikolaes]

Aye I just reconfirmed that too, as I just made the same flight witht he default Baron and not a single blurry, but then again with the Herc I fly at 280 KIAS and in the Baron over the swiss alps yer lucky to get 160 out of her. LOL. But still even with the default 737 I get blurries at about 250 KIAS on that same route so I am absolutely certain it is speed related.That was my entire reason for posting this thread was if the issue was speed related if there were settings to get the textures to pop faster so they would load at higher KIAS. THAT is my main mystery here.

[Guest JIMJAM]

Dunno- Got a SR-71, maybe I Will do mach 3 over New York and see what happens.Try increasing and decreasing the view distance settings and also, I think alt r to reload the textures.I have also had a simular experience where all the nearby ground textures went blurry. I would hit alt, exit the menu and they would re appear. Sometimes only to go blurry again. All I can say is just experiment with your cards settings. Change one thing at the time and try changing everything. Turn on/off mip optimizations, force bilinear,every setting the card offers, try changing it. I learned that sometimes those special settings that you would think make the card run faster and better grahics, cause problems. And last but not least, change video drivers. Some of the older ones work better.

[Guest Darren Howie]

Have you defragged recently.I had started to get blurries with my high end addons,C130,PMDG,LDS and the degragg solved all.Darren

[Guest Knikolaes]

I use O&O Defrag. Also as a religious rule I place all photo textures and scenery on it's own partition (The base FS has a partition all it's own, FS utilities go on their own partition and scenery add-ons go on their own partition,makign FS have 3 partitions. This actually improves performanc according to many articles i read and I have indeed noticed FS loaded 3 times faster at least when i do this).Also I just installed FS, this scenery and windows less than a week ago so not due for a defrag just yet. All is on a fresh install from using a new hard drive.I never knew about alt-R. I will try that next time.

[Guest lalo lolo1]

I have about the same system you have except that my RAM is 1.5 G (Wow, I thought I had plenty and you have 4). I have a bit of blurries with UT + BEV, but nothing that looks not even close to the ugly pic you show, lol.Anyway, you have a decent system, what it cannot called a low end. Other than the processor, you are pretty updated in terms of everything. Of course a 7800 would help, but a 6800 is really good, in fact one the best VC available, until the 7800 was released.If you are going for an upgrade, you have to get a new processor and forget about Pentium. AMD FX55 is what I would buy if I had $800 to spare. If you have them, don't hesitate (although I would follow news for future AMD releases). Of course a 7800 (or a coupled if you really have a lot of money to spare) will do even better, but my guess is that if you get a FX55 + its MOBO, you'll have the problem solved.Meanwhile I would reduce FPS to a max of 22, lower down every slider a bit (a bit can make a big difference in FS), except the water detail or the clouds, that need to be at their max. Don't use shadows for ground objects (this helps a lot too). Mesh should be at 80%, Autogen off. and get rid of photorealistic textures as much as possible. You are asking your FS9 to work as what we expect FS10 will be, and for that you really need a very high end system.It is impossible you get that textures problem (that much at least) with the system you have, unless you are trying to get too much juice out of a system taht won't be able to do it.Lero

[ahinterl 1]

Set all sliders to maximum (esp. MIP level, texture size to massive etc.) and edit fs9.cfg:TERRAIN_ERROR_FACTOR=100TERRAIN_MIN_DEM_AREA=10.000000TERRAIN_MAX_DEM_AREA=100.000000TERRAIN_MAX_VERTEX_LEVEL=21 // maximum LOD level to useTERRAIN_TEXTURE_SIZE_EXP=8 // is set with a slider in FS, move it to maxTERRAIN_USE_GRADIENT_MAP=1TERRAIN_EXTENDED_TEXTURES=1 // mandatory to get good terrain texturingTERRAIN_DEFAULT_RADIUS=10.0 // radius of the default ringTERRAIN_EXTENDED_RADIUS=10.0 // radius of extended ringTERRAIN_EXTENDED_LEVELS=8 // MIP level of extended ringAnd make sure RENDER_TO_TEXTURE=1 is in FS9.cfg.This should give you all FS9 can handle (apart from graphics adapter settinds which you need to define separately, make sure the MIPMAP detail level and texture size is set to max. quality in the driver).Hope this helps.Andreas

[Hornit 3]

I'd have one caution about the mip levels inside the sim. Anything above 5 causes some fairly ugly "shimmering" on my X800XL here. If I keep it below 5 it is almsot totally shimmer free.Hornit

[John_Cillis 2,406]

"TERRAIN_DEFAULT_RADIUS=10.0 // radius of the default ringTERRAIN_EXTENDED_RADIUS=10.0 // radius of extended ring"I have often wondered what these values really mean. The postings in the forums always indicate the values imply the ring radius, but you can have zero in those values, and as long as TERRAIN_EXTENDED_TEXTURES=1, extended textures go out for 50-60 miles. Microsoft has never documented these values, but I do know (like everyone else, I've played with them) that the higher they are, the more memory MSFS uses. Visually the effects can be very subtle indeed although generally they do seem to sharpen textures. Believe it or not, I've been able to slide by with these settings:TERRAIN_DEFAULT_RADIUS=0.0 // radius of the default ringTERRAIN_EXTENDED_RADIUS=0.0 // radius of extended ringTERRAIN_EXTENDED_LEVELS=1 // MIP level of extended ringIt has a huge impact on reducing memory usage.Here's a link to the results:http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...&mesg_id=219199Are they crystal clear to the horizon? Nope, but looks pretty real to me compared to real flights.-John

[Guest Shalomar]

Donny AKA ShalomarFly 2 ROCKS!!!At the extremes, my Pentium III 550 MGH LOOKS better at 9.9 than a Dell capable of 30 FPS locked at 15...Where can I get the unmentionable service?Best Regards, Donny:-wave

[Guest Knikolaes]

Thanks, Lero. Will keep that in mind. I was an AMD user for a while, but I think I chose the wrong chip as it was very unstable and the mobo crashed like crazy. I hear AMD has changed a lot recently though and has come out with some pretty decent stuff. I'll have to see what financial aid brings me next semester . . .