Autogen

[fs4fun 366]

Regarding autogen, first of all I'd like to give kudos to DTG for implementing alpha-fade, and they did a pretty good job with it too. Popping is far less noticeable. I'd love it if there were some settings to tweak such as distances where fade in begins and ends. Alpha-fade is something simmers have been asking about for years so it's nice to see it implemented.

On the other hand, I notice autogen shimmering when flying in tree-heavy areas (and by the say this was around KISB which IRL is not tree-heavy at all, landclass is totally wrong LOL).

I compared to FSX in which I use DX10 with Steve's fixer and the following settings:

• AA: 8xCSAA
• Transparency supersampling: 4xSGSS
• Autogen Density = 5

I don't have any shimmering or artifacts, it looks fantastic and I get 50-60 FPS.

By comparison FSW with the same settings and location I get around 20 FPS, some shimmering and also artifacts at the horizon line. If I switch to game-controlled AA and 8xSGSS the shimmering and artifacts are eliminated but FPS drops to slide show levels.

I'm just wondering if these autogen alpha fade enhancements have resulted in these problems or if there's some other root cause related to mipmapping of autogen textures.

The only acceptable mitigation I've found is to delete my NVI profile for FSW and reduce autogen density to 3.

[fs4fun 366]

I think I fixed it. FSW uses DXT5 for tree textures, while FSX uses DXT1. I copied the FSX textures over and I don't see the tree shimmer.

[SamYeager 244]

1 hour ago, fshobby said:

I think I fixed it. FSW uses DXT5 for tree textures, while FSX uses DXT1. I copied the FSX textures over and I don't see the tree shimmer.

 

Purely out of interest what do the highlighted items mean?

[fs4fun 366]

37 minutes ago, SamYeager said:

Purely out of interest what do the highlighted items mean?

They are different compression methods.

DXT1 is good for 1-bit alpha because a pixel can either have a color value, or it is completely transparent. DXT5 is good for when you need a range of alpha values. DXT5 has different alpha palette representations, one stores a max and min alpha and interpolates the other values between max and min, the other option is to have fully transparent and fully opaque and then interpolated in between.

Generally speaking the vegetation textures use 1-bit alpha, so DXT1 is the better compression method, however DXT1 is also a more lossy in that the alpha channel uses a slot in the color palette rather than using a separate alpha palette, but I think for autogen textures this is not much of a problem.

As to why using DXT5 instead of DXT1 causes shimmering, I don't fully understand. Shimmering is usually associated with problems doing anti-aliasing. Often this is caused by lack of mipmaps, but both FSX and FSW textures are mipmapped. Having the excess alpha bits by using DXT5 also seems to mess up the AA and that leads to shimmering.

[torium 207]

I experience the same thing - so I hope this shimmering can be fixed.

[sightseer 895]

Have you guys tried not using nhancer and just using DSR with higher smoothing? (like 50%).

[fs4fun 366]

Thanks for the suggestion, I'm using a GTX 870M, DSR is not supported

 

[TheFamilyMan 279]

I've tried to enforce GSSSAA in FSW by building a custom profile for it in NI and it seems it has no effect.  Any suggestions on getting GSSSAA enabled for FSW via NI?  The VC has some nasty jaggies that I'm hoping to smooth down using GSSSAA...or maybe their VC rendering is impervious to GSSSAA :(.

I too run FSX with the DX10 fixer.  Visually it's a dreamland in terms of zero jaggies/shimmers using a 2556x1440 monitor, with 16xCSAA, 16xAF and 4xGSSSAA.  I was hoping to get this level of quality in FSW.  Maybe this is a pre-release "feature".

[fs4fun 366]

I loaded FSW up on my desktop system which is i7 2600K OC'ed to 4.5GHz, 16GB DDR, and GTX 970.

Autogen performance is a disaster. I made the following table of FPS measurements and stutter observations with the same saved flight situation along the California coast near Oxnard (ie North of LA area) in the Cherokee. For each row I only changed AUTOGEN_DENSITY in the FSW.cfg:

Autogen
Density   Avg FPS  Note
--------- -------- --------
0         38       FPS steady - variance + or - 2 FPS
1         32       FPS steady - variance + or - 3 FPS
2         27       Occasional stutters down to 15 FPS
3         22       Frequent stutters to 11-16 FPS
4         11       Frequent stutters to 5-8 FPS
5         10       Stutters as low as 4 FPS
 

This is not even a really hard-hitting scenery area. I don't find that FSX has these problems with autogen.

I've just turned autogen off. I lowered my resolution setting to 1680x1050x32 and enabled 4xSGSS (Transparency anti aliasing) in NVI. I've not found any other NVI settings to be helpful.

It actually looks OK with no autogen. I set LOD_RADIUS to 7.5 and can otherwise have high display settings and still good frame rates. At least the game is playable like this.

For laughs I tried the NYC area with AUTOGEN_DENSITY set to 5. Average FPS is around 6.

1 hour ago, TheFamilyMan said:

I too run FSX with the DX10 fixer.  Visually it's a dreamland in terms of zero jaggies/shimmers using a 2556x1440 monitor, with 16xCSAA, 16xAF and 4xGSSSAA.  I was hoping to get this level of quality in FSW.  Maybe this is a pre-release "feature".

For me at least it is specifically autogen that is the culprit. If they can do some focused optimization and fix that problem then we'll be in much better shape.