Shadow issues

[AnkH 2,264]

Hi all,

 

Did a flight out of Taupo this weekend using the new C-47 to do some scenic flights around Tongariro National Park where I observed the following:

 

- using very high settings, those forests in the ORBX NZ scenery look phenomenal.

 

However, you can clearly see a boarder around your plane where the shadow on the trees is drawn or not. This is rather ugly. Furthermore, this shadow drawing costs about 50% (!!!) of performance on my rig, ridiculous. The culprit here is the option "vegetation casts shadows" along with "vegetation receives shadows". While having both those options on, the forest looks like on a photograph, the loss in performance and the ugly boarder is remarkable. This effect is extremely prominent in the ORBX NZ scenery, as I never have anything comparable regarding vegetation density anywhere in the world. Now, turning off "vegetation casts shadows" instantly gives you a tremendous FPS boost, but the forests look again like FS forests. Bummer. And: while I could easily abandon shadows from trees inside huge forests, it really is sad that also those shadows from single trees in a field or from a row of trees in along a street are gone.

 

This is a classical thread-off. Either I have those two shadow options activated and live with the ridiculous performance above big forests in the ORBX NZ scenery, or I turn of either "receive" or "cast" shadows and live with either ugly looking forests or forests not receiving the cloud shadows.

 

I will put some screenshots to illustrate what I am talking about as soon as possible.

[Guest]

And the question is...?

I also use those shadows and love them. Turning them off however doesn't make a 50% difference on my PC. It hardly makes a difference. My PC is two years old. I don't use Extremely dense autogen though: I did so in the past but it simply is too much. Maybe turning autogen down a notch will help you? I know, things looks a bit less awesome but you will get used to it. After not flying for a few weeks I started P3D and had a good time flying low and slow GA again. I used my GA preset instead of my airliner preset and the only difference in autogen: airline is normal, GA is extreme. Only after a few days I discovered I had changed the preset to Very dense in the past so I wasn't looking at extreme at all and still thought it looked awesome.

 

BTW The circle around you where the shadows are drawn is the way it is. Nothing you can do about that. I hope someday LM will let that circle fade in and out somehow.

[AnkH 2,264]

You are right about those settings. The thing is, I only see such a frame rate impact on ORBX NZ scenery and also the visible circle is only remarkable in such high density forests as they are in NZ. No issues or at least no remarkable impact anywhere else, for example in North America (also using ORBX sceneries there). I guess, the only way to go is using another preset in my P3D graphics options, currently I have a "IFR medium" preset with most settings on "medium" to allow OOM-free IFR flights and a "VFR high" preset with basically all maxed out. Seems that I have to add another one, "VFR high no shadow on vegetation" or something like that.

[Guest]

Do you use Trees HD from Orbx? If not, you might give that a try. Maybe the trees in NZ are different from other Orbx-addons. Trees HD will use the same kind of trees all over the world (well, various kinds, of course, but technically the same), also within regions. Maybe that makes a difference. Looks a lot better too without an fps impact.

[AnkH 2,264]

Yes, I use Trees HD by ORBX. And I really love them.