Dear Members,

 

since i bought a new p3dV4 rig and monitor, i struggle with some settings. At dawn/ tusk, it seems like banding in the sky and cloud textures occures /increases. The problem is only with p3dv4.1 other games or content looks stunning.

Now looking at colorgradients in the sky looks awful

it seems like the outside textures reduces to a few shades of grey when it gets dark

I tried everything from switching between RGB to 4:4:4 to 4:4:2  8bpc 10bpc 12bpc Full and Limited. I can´t find a combination that looks like it looked in fsx on my old system. The VC is fine and i didn´t notice problems on the ground.

System is:

i7 8700k stock,1080ti stock, Win10 no HDR enabled, 4k LG B7Oled via HDMI.

Software: p3dV4.1, AS2016, ASCA, Orbx, TrackIR, PMDG, Fslabs, Majestic

HDR in P3D is off, DL on

 

Maybe someone of you had the same problem.

I don´t have pics available on any URL so can´t provide them right now. sorry, would be easier to figure out what i mean.

thanks for any hint.

Kai

 

43 minutes ago, KaitheFly said:

since i bought a new p3dV4 rig and monitor, i struggle with some settings. At dawn/ tusk, it seems like banding in the sky and cloud textures occures /increases. The problem is only with p3dv4.1 other games or content looks stunning.

Don't know about the cloud textures but the dawn/dusk sky banding has been around for years in fsx and now again for years in p3d.

Has anyone ever asked LM if they might fix this one day or are there any third-party fixes?

gb.

Kai,

Something is amiss because an OLED TV should give you far better graduations than you describe.

Find some colour calibration images and see what they look like. It would at least confirm if the problem is with the graphics card / display or just with P3D.

This site has some suitable test images. http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/

Afraid not guys.

Here is why.

I have an MVA 10 bit 32 inch 2K monitor.... not as good as an OLED, but perfectly adequate for displaying 10 bit colour.

10 bit colour is massively more detailed than 8 bit.... 1000s of times more colours.

Here's the rub: I think P3D v4 only displays 8 bit colour... but see below.

Moreover, even IF it does 'potentially' output 10 bit colour, you will only see the benefit if you have a Quadro GPU, as P3D uses a window... it is not an exclusively full screen application. Only full screen apps will display 10 bit colour on my 10 bit capable screen.

The fact that even people with AMD cards (which apparently DO support 10 bit colour for windowed apps) have the SAME problem, suggests that this is all moot, as P3D, like FSX before it, only produces 8 bit bitmaps.

So, unless, and until, LM rewrite the entire engine, Quadro cards, 10 bit monitors and OLED TVs, are all a waste of time... or at least they won't completely cure this age old problem. Better processing and contrast etc., may improve things, but will not eradicate poor quality source material, any more than a decent amp can make a poor low rez mp3 track sound like hi-rez 192 bit music,

It can, however, be done on a software level. Just look at how good Real Light is in the Tfdi and Milviz Otter... all the horrible mottling and banding in the VC at night - GONE ! So, they just need to sort out the way the skies and clouds are rendered.

My workaround for now, is to create a 'custom weather theme' in Active Sky, for dusk and dawn (and night in the Summer - as it never gets completely black), comprised of 3 or 4 layers of cirrus clouds at different levels. This tends to obfuscate most of the hideous banding.

 

Edited September 18, 20187 yr by Gabe777

Just found a more scientific explanation on Reddit:

=============================

tomatosalat • 1y

Its an limitation of the ESP engine. The engine renders in 24bit color depth internally - 8 bit per color channel and three color channels (RGB). Imaging drawing a color gradient from black (RGB: 0,0,0) to red (RGB: 255,0,0). As you can see, with 24bit color depth you have 256 different colors for this gradient. If you stretch this to 1920px, you will see this banding effect. Modern game engines are rendering with floating point color values internally, so they can render much smoother color transitions.

To reduce the banding effect, you should add some dithering. Example. It is not supported by the ESP engine, too - but as far as I can remember, there is a dithering option in ENB/SweetFx available. Unfortunately, you can only reduce and not eliminate the effect.

Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither#Digital_photography_and_image_processing

=============================

 

Now, as I understand it, moving to 10 bits per colour, changes the shades (like a colour swatch) of EACH colour from 256 to 16 million !!! Big difference. Lol !

Edited September 18, 20187 yr by Gabe777

Have you tried the NV control panel setting under UHD they have some settings for colour using the NV option for panels use the Nvidia colour settings then instead of RGB you have three settings for TV panels. 

Lol.... the above 2 posts were clearly a waste if time, huh ?!

On 6/26/2019 at 1:26 PM, Gabe777 said:

Lol.... the above 2 posts were clearly a waste if time, huh ?!

Nope I just learn why I see the banding in p3d. Thanks! 

@KaitheFly never responded to any of those offering help. Given it's 15 months since he posted I think it's fair to say he either fixed it and didn't bother replying or didn't fix it and still didn't bother replying. 🙄

Well I've just startedwith X plane and same issue for different reason.... it's full screen but only coded to render in 8 bits.... which is actually 16 million colours vs 10 bit which is a billion.

However there is a rumour going around that FS2020 may actually support 10 bit colour, in addition to HDR and 4K at 60fps.... if you have the HDMI 2.1(?) standard.

Finally I may get some value from my 500 quid 10 bit monitor, as it certainly doesn't do G sync or anything useful !

And apparently it is not going to improve in FS2020 as there appears to be no exclusive full screen mode so I hear.

Flightsim will always be the poor second cousin.

12 hours ago, True_Blade_1889 said:

And apparently it is not going to improve in FS2020 as there appears to be no exclusive full screen mode so I hear.

Flightsim will always be the poor second cousin.

Ridiculous post. MFS is still in Alpha. That means the design is not finalised.

Oh come on.

Basic engine parameters will not change.

Expecting it to, is ridiculous.

Did FS9 ever increase its CPU core usage above one ? P3D above 3 or 4 ?

No.

P3D is only coded for 8 bit colour apparently 

On 1/30/2020 at 10:44 PM, Ray Proudfoot said:

Ridiculous post. MFS is still in Alpha. That means the design is not finalised.

And now ? Is it (MSFS) outputting full 10 bit  on a non-HDR monitor ?

Still not convinced it's exclusive full screen, so with a GTX 10 series it cannot output 10 bit.

It does look a lot better than P3D. I suspect it uses "dithering."  Not tried it on my OLED yet, but a 2.1 HDMi cable apparently outputs full 10 bit HDR.

I remain to be convinced.

All a bit moot though. How many have fully switched ?