Slow Loading Terrain

[matthewdwight 0]

I know this is a well known issue for some but all the other solutions I could find have not worked for me at all. It doesn't take long for the terrain quality to diminish while flying even very short distances. I've tried using FFTF but setting it at .1 or .33 has no effect on it at all. Changing my scenery settings has helped a little bit but when flying in straight lines, the terrain doesn't load properly. I don't think my hardware is an issue whatsoever as I am running 2x GTX970s (disabled SLI for only P3D as a visual bug of flickering clouds gave me problems with the current drivers). My CPU is a 5820K overclocked to 4.5GHz with 16 gigabytes of DDR4 RAM. 

 

I use ORBX Pacific Northwest and T2G SeaTac for add on scenery. I also have AS16 and ENVTEX as my main add ons along with a bunch of different aircraft from PMDG, IRIS, and Captain Sim

 

These are my current settings. I don't know if I should be changing these or doing something else:

 

Graphics: http://imgur.com/a/3TKoM

 

Scenery: http://imgur.com/a/GYIrp

 

Here are before and after screenshots of what it looks like while flying by and what it looks like after giving it a few minutes to render out the terrain. It shouldn't be taking this long to load at all.

 

http://imgur.com/a/j5Mbs

 

Lastly, here is my entire P3D.cfg

 

http://pastebin.com/FFV9vh4u

 

Any help is greatly appriciated!  :smile:

[pmb 5,137]

Usually, such blurries are caused by a wrong/missing affinity mask setting (as I can confirm). Your CPU has 6 cores, which I don't have experience with. Anyway, the proper setting depends on if you have Hyperthreading on or off in the BIOS.

 

Here's a page giving some suggestions for adequate values:

 

http://www.codelegend.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=532

 

It suggests 30 or 60 for HT off, or 340 or 1360 for HT on. The setting from your prepar3d.cfg is 62 which is not among the suggestes ones.

 

In addition, I find it helpful to set Process Priority for prepar3d.exe to "High", either using the Task Manager, or a Batch. (I do it with SimStarter.)

 

Kind regards, Michael

[matthewdwight 0]

Interesting. I didn't think having HT on or off would make a difference for what affinity mask setting to use. Guess I was wrong there. I will try it.

 

I do use high priority in task manager but I sometimes forget as it needs to be set each time P3D is launch.

 

Thanks for a quick reply!

[matthewdwight 0]

Alright after some quick testing I have found that using 340 gives slightly better terrain loading although not as fast as I would like it its definitely an improvement. It seems to load the best when I have the sim paused but that doesn't help me much haha. I haven't tested with having HT on or off would be better but I will conduct further testing tomorrow as it is 2AM right now. 

[pmb 5,137]

I would suggest testing HT on or off. I have a 4 core CPU and while I didn't do much testing with the present one, I did with the predecessor which had 4 cores as well. The result was I ended up disabling HT (and getting rid of any AM at all). Enabling it gave comparable results, at best, or worse ones, depending on the AM.

 

From what I recall, you need an AM even if disabling HT, though, on a 6 core CPU, as Prepar3d is optimized to work with 4 cores, in a way.

 

However, these results may vary from system to system and you certainly need some own testing. In addition, I should mention that I offloaded quite some stuff to a networked machine and don't use any panel on display, only scenery (I have a hardware panel driven via the networked maching using SPAD.neXt.).

 

Concerning FFTF I got rid of the entry. I used a low value once, but it definitely contributed to blurries.

 

Kind regards, Michael,

[Michael Moe 494]

I could be wrong for sure but i have had some issues as well with P3D3.4.9.18400 and crispy textures . Maybe they changed the distance(LOD) to control some VAS?

 

I think i gained some of it back (at least underneeth the airplane)moving the Tesselation slider to ULTRA/HIGH .

 

I read somewhere that this slider moves workload from CPU to the GPU.

 

Again it might just be placebo but let me know ? (also have 2xGTX970 in SLI)

 

Thanks

 

Michael Moe

[ankh21 17]

After the last P3d client update, i had similar problems.

After a lot of testing the best way on MY system was to allow P3d using the first core (with HT on, 4 core CPU). Before, CPU 0 was reserved for ATC and weather addon. But for an unknown reason, my AM setting was not useful with the new client.

So i changes the AM to a setting, where P3d is allowed to use Core 0, and after that my terrain is fine and crisp again. The other addons are set to use Core 4 (LP 7+8) e.g. by creating a cmd program start.

But all in all very strange

 

Matthias

[Nemo 1,305]

I have tried with different AM (85, 84, 116) as well as HT off. Texture loading is slow and more or less only direct under the a/c. Foward view is a blurry mess. But maybe I am testing in the wrong area: Flying with A2A C172 towards PAVD (both SAK and PAVD from ORBX are active). Is anyone flying in this area with crisp distant texures?

[ankh21 17]

Sorry Harry, for me it was only in a Captain Sim 737 (perhaps less demanding than your A2A Cessna), but with ORBX Global, Vector and GermanyNorth.

 

Matthias

[Howellerman 104]

I am going to be the odd-duck here, but using my 3770K @ 4.2 and a lowly GTX 780 I *rarely* have terrain blurring. This is good because while I can handle an occasional stutter (weather reloads, AI propagation, et al), I cannot stand blurries.

 

I run HT on, no AM, but use Process Lasso to move everything off CPU 0/1. This leaves 0/1 for just running the P3D 3.4 "aircraft". Using ProcExp I see that I have six terrain "engines" (threads) and the main P3D on CPU 0/1 during flight. That is part of my reasoning for having HT on: otherwise, I would only have three terrain engines available to process my Orbx terrain. I am an Orbx fan-boi and have pretty much every product they offer, well except for the newer European airports.

 

I have FFTF set to 0.45. This recognizes, in my mind, that there is a certain amount of processing that is needed per frame for terrain processing and that is what I give it. 

 

I use Nvidia Inspector to crank down my screen refresh rate to 29. Yes, this is not 30, but I found that the GTX 780 could not run my ASUS 2550/1440 display at 60 fps. Instead, it would run at 59 fps, so I "halved" that value.

 

Finally, I use the builtin P3D frame limiter and spin it down to 24 FPS. I have tried using external limiters but they stuttered like mad, at least on my rig. And if 24 fps was good enough for Cecil B Demille, it is good enough for P3D!  

 

Again, my reasoning is that there is a certain amount of work that needs to be done in every frame, so I give the maximum amount of time per frame to get it done!

 

What this gives me, a GA flyer only, is smooth flying at pretty much any altitude. I don't have the big airport models from Aerosoft and the like, so cannot comment on what they would do to my settings. However, I can immediately tell the difference between a good and bad aircraft model (i.e., RealAir or A2A versus early Carenado) as it will overload the P3D engine, independent of the terrain. And like I said, I get an occasional stutter from AI or weather loading but otherwise panning about the cockpit or externally using locked spot view is nice and smooth given a well-coded aircraft. Nothing will fix a bad aircraft model! In very dense sceneries (I find that KTTD is a good punishing test) my frame rate may drop down into the high teens, but it remains blurry free and unless I obsess about looking out the side I rarely notice the occasional stutter.

 

Like I said, pretty contrary to "typical" settings (particularly that FFTF=0.01 madness), but it works for me. Good luck, and try not to get too frustrated!

[GSalden 4,655]

My setup :

 

5820K at 4.3 Ghz

HT on

AM=340 --> best there is ( tested with Steve W )

 

Photoscenery only + custom AG

[matthewdwight 0]

Thank you all for your responses. I will try using different AM and HT settings once I get home later today.

 

Howlerman, I have tried using Nvidia Inspector before and halving the FPS of my monitor that I use but I have a 144 Hz refresh rate monitor and my average FPS in P3D hovers around 30. Maybe 50 while at cruise. When trying to halve the refresh rate, I get some very interesting monitor flickering but that could be from G-Sync. I could use ULMB as a test for it but I don't think it sould solve much. And it also seems that whenever I use a frame limiter outside of the sim, it never works.

[matthewdwight 0]

Thank you all for my help with my issues. I think I have found my sweet spot after hours of testing. I went ahead and disabled Hyper Threading which right off the bat gave a performance boost as well as a decrease in the time it took for the terrain to load while flying over. I decided that with HT off, it wouldn't be beneficial to use AM so I deleted that code from my cfg even after testing 30 or 60 for a 6 core HT disabled CPU. I also changed my FFTF from .33 to .45 which helped some as well. In my Nvidia control panel and in Nvidia Inspector, I enabled adaptive V-Sync which helped with less stuttering.

 

Once again, thank you all for your help!!  :smile:  :smile:

[spearmint_flyer 579]

My setup :

 

5820K at 4.3 Ghz

HT on

AM=340 --> best there is ( tested with Steve W )

 

Photoscenery only + custom AG

340? Thats interesting, is that with 8 cores?

[angeli662 43]

I could be wrong for sure but i have had some issues as well with P3D3.4.9.18400 and crispy textures . Maybe they changed the distance(LOD) to control some VAS?

 

 

I have a filling you're right.  I did a comparison with FSX-SE and come to a conclusion that P3D LOD  is set to 4.5 or less automatically, I even try to set @ 7.5  but seems it didn't do anything to improve  it.