Blurry and out of focus textures

[usaboy 100]

Good day All,

Firstly, I apologize for not including photos or a video to exhibit my issue (perhaps when I return to my flight deck desk (FDD)  I can capture this anomaly by way of SS or video)  . 

I'm reaching out to all for advice on the possible causes and effects to the ground texture blurries mainly over Europe (from higher elevations FL280-FL390). 

I'm running P3Dv3.4.9 on

• I-4790K with 4GHz was stock but overclocked to 4.4GHz,
• GPU MSI GTX 980Ti 6 GB,
• WDD Black 7200 RPM HDD with 4TB,
• 553 registered scenery including all popluar selection such as Orbx, Flytampa, Flightbeam, Drzewiecki, FSDT, Aerosoft, UK2000, and the list goes on.
• Aircraft again all pop...PMDG, AS, Majestic, QW Carendo etc
• GSX

Weather is handled by AS16 w REX4 soft clouds and ASCA (DXT).  Sky textures by ENVTEX

Presently, my P3D with all my addons consumes 680 GB. My in Sim setting are pretty high and closely matches that of Rob's Ainscough recommendations

Here's a typically scenario:

All starts well, as I'm loaded up at FT EHAM eroute from AS Rome LIRF.  After about 45 mins into the flight I notice the ground textures beneath me begin to take on an out of focus appearance.  I look ahead in the distance and I see that the textures are completely hazed out into seemingly one colour.  The only way I know how to resolve this at the moment is to play with the Mesh resolution within the Scenery setting of P3D.  By sliding either upwards to 7 or downward to 2 allows the textures to load back into the sim and sustains them with clarity over the remaining course of the flight.  Oddly enough, this only occurs within this region of Europe.  I have not experienced an occurrence of this nature throughout rest of the virtual world.  

I've therefore have speculated that it is either and Orbx/Vector/OPLC issue or it embedded within P3D.  My reasoning (wrong or right) for making this assumption is due to the fact I changed (upgraded) my CPU and GPU 4 times over the course of the past 3 years to no avail.

So....I'm hoping and coming to you all to shed some light and/or wisdom upon my situation so I may continue a jovial exploration over Europe.

 

Thanks in advance

 

 

[StewCal 12]

I had a similar issue when I started flying the PMDG 747v3.  In my case I was using the incorrect affinity mask.  For whatever reason the 747v3 didn't like affinity mask 84.  I changed it to 85 at the suggestion of someone in another forum and all was well.  If you do not use affinity mask or the PMDG 747v3,  I would suggest deleting your Prepar3d.cfg and let sim rebuild it.  That may do the trick.

[Bob Scott 7,720]

I had a similar issue a few months ago, and discovered that the WIndows Update service wuauserv (Win 7 at the time) was running in the background and eating up 25% of my CPU capacity.  It was enough to prevent my PC from keeping up on the texture loading, and I saw the blurries creep in over time.  MS made some changes in Oct 2016 that causes this...I've written elsewhere in the forums about this in more detail.  I ended up going into task scheduler and forcing the update service to only run when the computer is idle.

Regards

[sfgiants13 83]

4 hours ago, w6kd said:

I had a similar issue a few months ago, and discovered that the WIndows Update service wuauserv (Win 7 at the time) was running in the background and eating up 25% of my CPU capacity.  It was enough to prevent my PC from keeping up on the texture loading, and I saw the blurries creep in over time.  MS made some changes in Oct 2016 that causes this...I've written elsewhere in the forums about this in more detail.  I ended up going into task scheduler and forcing the update service to only run when the computer is idle.

Regards

Is this something with just Win 7?  I'm having similar issues and have been trying to fix it but I have Win 10.  

[Bob Scott 7,720]

31 minutes ago, sfgiants13 said:

Is this something with just Win 7?  I'm having similar issues and have been trying to fix it but I have Win 10.  

Similar issues as in blurries or as in Windows Update chugging in the background?

w/r/t Windows Update in the background, I can't say for sure if Win 10 has the problem.  Windows Update under Win 10 continues to be a pernicious pain in my butt, mostly due to forced and unwanted updates of dysfunctional nVidia video drivers, but I haven't seen the wuauserv problem crop up since I transitioned to Win 10.

Regards

[RichieFly 728]

I too have this problem. Usually when flying something fast--tube liner or corporate jet.

Very annoying and occurs maining in Europe (I have Orbx Europe LC installed along with Vector and World).

I've tweaked and tweaked and have come to think my hardware isn't up to snuff. I have a 4 core processor and often wonder if more cores or one with hyper threading would help.

Sympathy!

[sfgiants13 83]

1 hour ago, w6kd said:

Similar issues as in blurries or as in Windows Update chugging in the background?

w/r/t Windows Update in the background, I can't say for sure if Win 10 has the problem.  Windows Update under Win 10 continues to be a pernicious pain in my butt, mostly due to forced and unwanted updates of dysfunctional nVidia video drivers, but I haven't seen the wuauserv problem crop up since I transitioned to Win 10.

Regards

Similar issues with blurries.  I was wondering if the update issue is also a problem in Win 10 which would help explain.  I've tried to monitor the CPU useage during testing and sometimes it's high other times it drops.  When it gets to 100% is obviously when I get blurries.

[Jonathan93102 3]

12 hours ago, w6kd said:

I had a similar issue a few months ago, and discovered that the WIndows Update service wuauserv (Win 7 at the time) was running in the background and eating up 25% of my CPU capacity.  It was enough to prevent my PC from keeping up on the texture loading, and I saw the blurries creep in over time.  MS made some changes in Oct 2016 that causes this...I've written elsewhere in the forums about this in more detail.  I ended up going into task scheduler and forcing the update service to only run when the computer is idle.

Regards

Hello all, 

I'm really interested by this thread as I have a high end system and have also noticed blurries. I notice you mention you forced the Task Manager to only run the update when at Idle. Would you be able to explain how to do this? 

 

Thanks for your tIme, 

 

Jonathan 

[Bob Scott 7,720]

On 2/25/2017 at 7:52 PM, Jonathan93102 said:

I notice you mention you forced the Task Manager to only run the update when at Idle. Would you be able to explain how to do this? 

No, not task manager.  Task SCHEDULER.  It's found in Control Panel -> Administrative Tools.  Go into Task Scheduler Library -> Microsoft -> Windows -> Windows Update, select the conditions tab, and check "Start the task only if the computer is idle for:" (I use 30 min here) and also the "Stop if the computer ceases to be idle" checkboxes.  Close and reboot.

Regards

[jimcarrel 688]

I thought I might add to w6kd's advice, once you've got thru Microsoft ->Windows -> Windows Update and click on the conditions tab, you may have to go up into top box and right click on

Automatic App Update (choose properties) then make his suggested adjustments in the properties box, otherwise the options you see are grayed out and appear unchangeable.

[Jonathan93102 3]

On ‎27‎/‎02‎/‎2017 at 3:37 PM, w6kd said:

No, not task manager.  Task SCHEDULER.  It's found in Control Panel -> Administrative Tools.  Go into Task Scheduler Library -> Microsoft -> Windows -> Windows Update, select the conditions tab, and check "Start the task only if the computer is idle for:" (I use 30 min here) and also the "Stop if the computer ceases to be idle" checkboxes.  Close and reboot.

Regards

 

23 hours ago, jimcarrel said:

I thought I might add to w6kd's advice, once you've got thru Microsoft ->Windows -> Windows Update and click on the conditions tab, you may have to go up into top box and right click on

Automatic App Update (choose properties) then make his suggested adjustments in the properties box, otherwise the options you see are grayed out and appear unchangeable.

Thanks for the assistance guys, I'm going to try this out.

Thanks for your time,

Jonathan.

[GSalden 4,656]

On ‎27‎-‎2‎-‎2017 at 4:37 PM, w6kd said:

No, not task manager.  Task SCHEDULER.  It's found in Control Panel -> Administrative Tools.  Go into Task Scheduler Library -> Microsoft -> Windows -> Windows Update, select the conditions tab, and check "Start the task only if the computer is idle for:" (I use 30 min here) and also the "Stop if the computer ceases to be idle" checkboxes.  Close and reboot.

Regards

Bob, what about the second setting below "Start the task only ....for"   where it says "Wait till the computer is not idle for ..."  On my pc it says 1 h.

Does that mean that first the pc has to be idle for 1h and then also 10 min extra before starting the Windows Update task ?

Thanks,

[MarkDH 234]

For what it may be worth, I found something that fixed this for me in FSX. It may be worth trying in P3D too.

Progressively blurry textures are due to something having upset the balance of scheduling - your PC is no longer keeping up with loading the scenery textures when it needs to. I fixed this on my own setup by changing the AffinityMask. BUT setting the AM blindly according to what worked for someone else is pointless - we all know it doesn't work. So if you're going to play with the AM you need to do it with a bit of method.

In my experiments I found the 'performance' tab in Windows Task Manager that shows the usage of each CPU core separately. The only thing I saw at first was that when FSX is running all the cores are running at 100% all the time. But then I noticed that when I hit ESC, which puts up the 'End Flight/Continue Flight' dialog, three of the cores went to sleep but one continued to show a high usage. For some reason this was core 2 (the third of four). Who knows what this means, but one thing it seems to say is that even with FSX asleep my core 2 is consistently pretty busy.

With this in mind I tried setting the AffinityMask to prevent FSX from scheduling anything on this core, since it would evidently encounter a lot of competition if it did so. To this end I tried adding the AffinityMask=11 parameter. That's 1011 in binary, which as I understand it is telling FSX to steer clear of core 2. And what do you know, suddenly I could fly all the same scenarios without any blurred textures. That included weather, and even with the autogen bumped up to maximum. It seemed like a robust solution and I could turn the blurries on and off by removing and re-adding that AM setting.

So perhaps you can identify a 'busy' core in your own setup and try keeping P3D away from it.

[Bob Scott 7,720]

4 hours ago, GSalden said:

Bob, what about the second setting below "Start the task only ....for"   where it says "Wait till the computer is not idle for ..."  On my pc it says 1 h.

Does that mean that first the pc has to be idle for 1h and then also 10 min extra before starting the Windows Update task ?

IIRC, that's the longest the PC will wait in the current session for the computer to become idle.  So if you have "Start the task only if the computer is idle for 10 min" set, and "Wait for idle for 1 hour", then the PC will check every minute for an hour to see if the 10 min idle time criteria has been met, and if so, it will start the task.  If an hour elapses without the task start condition being met, then the task is unscheduled and will not run until after a reboot and the timers are reinitialized (or it's run manually).

Regards

[GSalden 4,656]

Thanks for the explenation !

Up to now I am updating mamually and this might be easier in usage.