Countering the Shimmering

[lodestar 186]

54 minutes ago, Shomron said:

Multisampling in Nvidia is the equivalent of MSAA in game

SGSS (super grid sampling) in Nvidia is the equivalent of SSAA in game?

 

Thanks!

 

As far as I know, you shouldn't use Nvidia Inspector or CP if settings are available in P3D already. I belive this would be a waste of resources, and there would be a fps hit for that. Almost every time is better(for performance)to use "in game"settings rather then external. 

SSAA is a "Super sampling anti-aliasing", there's no SGSS in P3D. You can set it via Nvidia Inspector(set Antialiasing mode to "Enhance the application setting" first, otherwise it's not going to work)and will help a lot with shimmering, but there could be a big fps hit, depending on your hardware and screen resolution. I used SGSS with FSX, i'm not using with P3Dv4 becouse of performance

[lownslo 592]

1 hour ago, Shomron said:

SGSS (super grid sampling) in Nvidia is the equivalent of SSAA in game?

Indeed, the designations can be confusing.  They are not the same though.  More info here: http://www.overclock.net/forum/74-graphics-cards-general/1329979-anti-aliasing-basics.html

SGSS is covered in the section titled "Supersample anti-aliasing (SSAA)", while today's SSAA is covered under the section titled "Transparency anti-aliasing".  See, that's not confusing, eh?

Suffice to say that in P3D, SGSS (which can only be enabled in NVI) can bring an ugly performance hit.  Which may be why it's not offered in the sim?

HTH,

Greg

[lownslo 592]

1 hour ago, lodestar said:

As far as I know, you shouldn't use Nvidia Inspector or CP if settings are available in P3D already.

All any of these apps do (including the game/sim) is set a flag in the registry.  Doesn't matter how many times the flag is set... the risk is in setting different flags for the same setting (operator error).

Greg

[lodestar 186]

1 hour ago, lownslo said:

All any of these apps do (including the game/sim) is set a flag in the registry.  Doesn't matter how many times the flag is set... the risk is in setting different flags for the same setting (operator error).

Greg

It does matter, see the second post here, this guy is from NVIDIA BTW, so i belive him:

https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/534164/fxaa-control-panel-vs-ingame/

It really depends on game, but the general rule is to use in game settings for better performance. By using both, you are using in game settings + you are forcing external(driver)settings to override this - in game settings, it sounds like a problem to me

[bonchie 2,305]

After recently reinstalling P3D, I have no idea how people play at 30FPS and are happy with it.

I used to do the same thing, but maybe it's getting used to other games while not simming for a while, but the panning is just not smooth until I'm over 40FPS.

[strat919 12]

I guess everyone's setup is different. I have a 1080, running at 4.7 ghz on the processor. I'm running 30 htz on the monitor (samsung 55" TV) at 4096x2160. Honestly, it could not be any smoother. I run xplane 11 also, and I keep coming back to this because it is so smooth. In xplane I spend more time fiddling with settings than actual flying....lol.  For some reason when I locked at 31 fps, it was like butter. I would think it needs to be at 30 fps. I guess it's just the right setup for my TV. I can pan around fast as I want and it's totally smooth. If I see it drop below 30, I adjust a setting.

[Shomron 251]

I can confirm that at least 1 setting works best for me when set via the inspector which is the FPS limiting.

If I limit the FPS in-game performance and stutters are everywhere. For this reason I think I will explore more with the AA settings in the inspector.

[neumanix 113]

There IS another way to reduce the shimmering, and that is to add mipmaps to textures that don't have them as default. It works wonders with cockpit textures as well (panels, gauges), as you can see in this video I made a while back:

You must watch it full screen to really see the effect. The quality of the textures will be slightly degraded because they will be re-copmpressed, but that's well worth it in my oppinion.

Just remember to make backups of your textures before you start experimenting.

 

As you see you can have an almost shimmer free experience without any SGAA at all. You'll need dxtbmp (freeware) or Imagetool (comes with the SDK) to modify the textures.

And yes, a higher resolution monitor will help as well. I recently went from 1080p to 1440p and I would never go back.

Edited April 23, 2018 by neumanix