Photo Scenery in v4.4

[dave belsey 54]

I haven't yet seen any comments regarding the improvement in rendering Photo Scenery.

How do you select the higher resolutions, and has anybody tried it?

Dave.

 

 

 

 

[Nyxx 6,993]

In youtube copy this

Así luce Prepar3d V.4.4 Best Photoreal

Skip to 15 mins and then go OMG! like i did.

 

[jlund 380]

Yeah, I went OMG too, but that was a OMG it looks terrible. I hate XPlanes washed out colors, but this video is waaaayyyy to over saturated, Maybe the photoscenery looks great, but it's certaintly not showing in that video.

[JoeFackel 760]

7 minutes ago, jlund said:

Yeah, I went OMG too, but that was a OMG it looks terrible. I hate XPlanes washed out colors, but this video is waaaayyyy to over saturated, Maybe the photoscenery looks great, but it's certaintly not showing in that video.

Thats the Photoscenery itself, "Austrian Professional".

[Nyxx 6,993]

The OMG was more about how well it loaded and the LOD

The over saturated can just be his set up.

[ckyliu 1,749]

I may update my P3D client tonight, I run Horizon VFR X so I might do some comparison shots and see if I can spot much difference. I can't be bothered with a full reinstall so I should be able to give a reasonably fair comparison between v4.3 and v4.4.

Edited November 29, 2018 by ckyliu

[Christopher Low 5,332]

What exactly does this option do to photoscenery textures?

[newtie 533]

I'd like to know this as well. I have a buttload of PS that I shelved a while back when transitioning to ORBX.

Cheers,

Mark

[Nyxx 6,993]

Just did a flight around Simwings LEBL as it comes with a huge amount of PR area. I do been huge.

The PR looked fantastic and when right out as far as needed.

Look at this full screen and you can see even the far hills/mountains are all drawn in. This is a huge change from 4.3. Sharpe crisp textures and PR.

Sorry for the horrible screenshot but its shows what I mean.

[ckyliu 1,749]

Okay so out of the kindness of my soul I did some testing pre and post update. Took ages since loading photoscenery in P3Dv4 with the HIGH_RESOLUTION_TERRAIN_TEXTURES=1 option takes FOREVER (in 4.3 or 4.4, although the Create a Flight screen comes up much faster in the latter).
All I did was uninstall the client, delete the shaders folder and p3d.cfg, and then install the new client and copy across my slider settings in to the new P3D.cfg (you can find all my settings in my Avsim profile)

My two saved flights in Wales recorded 73-74 fps average, but very blurry textures in the distance. This was with Horizon VFR X Photographic and EarthSimulations Treescapes. Afterward updating I only got 58-62 FPS average but distance photo scenery textures are much sharper but my framerate dropped by 20%.

I also did a low level flight over England averaging around 47 fps. After updating the framerate was a little less stable but averaged out about the same. The improvement at low level was more subtle but still noticeable and without a framerate loss, look at the left wing tip in the screenshot.

I also did a night time stress test in awful weather out of UK2000 Xtreme Edinburgh in to Orbx Scotland (this isn't photo scenery) with REX4TD+SC and averaged 23 fps. Afterwards I got 24-25 fps, so a minor improvement. EDIT: Realised I forgot to enable moving road traffic, DOH!

Here are the screenshots, snaggy will have compressed them a bit but you get the idea:

EDIT: Realised I forgot to re-enable cloud shadows in the Welsh screenshots. They were re-enabled for the English and Scottish ones. And then Avsim doesn't want to embed them; once you open the links up in Snaggy you can click on them to enlarge

v43 welsh distant texture 73 fps

v44 welsh distant texture 62 fps


v43 welsh sunrise 74 fps


v44 welsh sunrise 58 fps

v43 low level 47 fps


v44 low level 48 fps

 

Edited November 29, 2018 by ckyliu

[Bert Pieke 7,584]

8 hours ago, dave belsey said:

I haven't yet seen any comments regarding the improvement in rendering Photo Scenery.

How do you select the higher resolutions, and has anybody tried it?

Dave.

 

 

 

 

In the User Interface, select the "Use High Resolution Terrain Textures" option.  Unlike V4.3. both regular landclass and photoscenery will now render at 512x512 resolution.

[F737MAX 5,534]

Colour me very impressed with v4.4!

I followed Rob's advice here:

Have a look at these 3 pictures showing the differences with photo scenery:

P3D v4.3 (limited to 256)


P3D v4.4 Texture_size_exp=9 (or 512)


P3D v4.4 Texture_size_exp=10 (or 1024)


I have highlighted the blurriness in the v4.3 picture at the top, though I did not notice any visual difference between exp=9 or exp=10 - see if you can find any differences.

Additionally, I slewed at 4000kts across some photo scenery for about 30 seconds. In v4.3, I would have had a blurry mess on the landscape and it would have taken about the same amount of time (30 secs) if not longer, to get crisp textures back.
In v4.4 at exp=10 (1024) I got those textures back in about 3 seconds without losing too much definition while slewing.

I did lose 3-4 FPS around Heathrow, but that could be due to other settings I have used in P3D.cfg - I will have to test further.

Otherwise, such an improvement!

[Rocky_53 1,566]

I too am seeing serious improvements in photoscenery loading. I saw a definite improvement without any change to the cfg, but after adding TEXTURE_SIZE_EXP=10 to the cfg it looks awesome. Although I think it more likely that only those of us who have a powerful enough GPU will be able to take advantage of this tweak.

[Nyxx 6,993]

31 minutes ago, Rockliffe said:

I too am seeing serious improvements in photoscenery loading. I saw a definite improvement without any change to the cfg, but after adding TEXTURE_SIZE_EXP=10 to the cfg it looks awesome. Although I think it more likely that only those of us who have a powerful enough GPU will be able to take advantage of this tweak.

You have to have a minimum of 8GB on your GPU to use 10 but I did try it and from all screenshots, I've seen once you have AS running the 9 is just as good and load time are short. But if you have a 10-12 GB card why not 🙂 

Like the screenshots above 9 works perfectly 🙂  Its better put like Bert said just tick the "Use High-Resolution Terrain Textures" option.

Edited November 30, 2018 by Nyxx

[Rocky_53 1,566]

25 minutes ago, Nyxx said:

You have to have a minimum of 8GB on your GPU to use 10 but I did try it and from all screenshots, I've seen once you have AS running the 9 is just as good and load time are short. But if you have a 10-12 GB card why not 🙂 

Like the screenshots above 9 works perfectly 🙂  Its better put like Bert said just tick the "Use High-Resolution Terrain Textures" option.

Hi Dave, I'm running a 1080ti, so I guess it's working well. I know it's early days, and I'm not sure whether I'm imagining things (more tests today) but I'd swear blind that the textures were not only sharper after loading TEXTURE_SIZE_EXP=10, which is what we'd expect, but they seem to be loading faster!