Sparse/slow autogen loading in P3Dv4

[Senchai 24]

On 12/5/2018 at 3:25 PM, jabloomf1230 said:

I was only pointing out that LM either ignores or locks posts when they are redundant versions of previous posts in which the user was told to remove all add-ons and lower their settings. I wasn't responding to your specific issues.

 

Because it is true in 98% of cases. People dont understand that P3D is NOT a static thing like games or XP. The terrain here gets calculated to some extent and if you set your settings too high this formula will brake. You have to set your settings LOWER to achieve more in this case. This can mean that blurries get crisp suddenly by LOWERING certain settings. Because only now the system is able to load all that it get fed with.

And it can also mean that LOWERING autogen settings can actually increase the amount and range. If your sim is overloaded you can set high as you want and it will never look better. If this is understood one can try to find his setting, starting from the lowest point upwards.

And never forget that there are uncountable cases where LM cannot do anything about it when ppl have so many background tasks running that the CPU simply has no place to do P3D anymore or they dont care about their pc anything, never update windows and then rant about how bad things run. This is sadly the fact and in most cases its this people who have "blurries".

Im in no way saying that anyone in this topic is like that, i didnt read it. Alone the comment made me say this.

Then, in some pics up there is far more amiss as just slow autogen loading. There is some autogen behind the missing part, something that usually would not really happen if its not higher prio autogen like some buildings in bigger cities. Sure that there are no tweaks done, like FFTF or autogenbatchlod or something.

Then as someone else said, locking fps helps a lot for this. Also it helps (for whatever reason) if you let the plane fly in outside cam (p3d, not chaseplane, to be sure), zoomed out.

Every pc will get problems with autogen loading if he has an overloaded sim, running unlocked fps, flying in a jet or slewing around the scenery. Remember last thing please, never slew when testing this.

Try lowering the settings, all of them, lock fps, and fly with around 300 ktn in outside cam and see if it stops loading autogen. Especially when the system is on the lower minimum required specs. Dont forget that even ppl with highend systems cannot raise all those settings so if you are on the low end you will need every trick out there. You cannot let the sim run open and wonder why it wont work.

 

I think its understandable that LM tries to collect those things in one topic. Usually its most often the same problems.

There was one time a problem with GSX lv2 that causes major blurries and if you have scenery with problems/corruption or the corruptions in the scenery library then the same things can happen. 

If the Sim and system is perfectly installed and the system high enough for P3D with set settings it WILL have autogen, even after a 20h flight. I do that all day with mine and its not a highendsystem. I cannot remember ever seeing no autogen on an arrival after even 14h. And thats not only me, i see many sims in our community and usually this things can always be fixed to have the same outcome.

Edited December 10, 2018 by SaenchaySor

[Bernie 0]

On 12/7/2018 at 5:59 AM, killthespam said:

Hi,

This is a video capturing the issue, please note on the left side of the window how ground initially has empty blocks (squares) of autogen textures missing and after a while they fill in.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/5pqsob31q2s1n3u/Lockheed Martin® Prepar3D® v4 12_6_2018 2_18_58 PM_Trim.mp4?dl=0

Any thoughts on this?

 

Hi,

The thing that does not make sense here in the video is that the Autogen has no trouble appearing in the distance first before appearing closer. So the distance factor does not come into it as far as I can see. The autogen starts far away and then draws closer until the area has filled. There must be other factors that are contributing.

 

Kind Regards

 

Bernie.

Edited January 7, 2019 by Bernie

[kityatyi 78]

I have started to notice this issue and it's very annoying I encountered it in 4.4 and even now in 4.5 it's still very much alive and kicking.

[LRBS 943]

1 hour ago, kityatyi said:

I have started to notice this issue and it's very annoying I encountered it in 4.4 and even now in 4.5 it's still very much alive and kicking.

Unfortunately, you are 100% correct. This issue is going on for a very long time and for some unknown reason is not getting fixed. 

The problem I see here is that at the end of the load radius where autogen stops rendering (buildings and trees) is completely abrupt, there is no smooth transition it's like somebody cut the scenery. There you have autogen and suddenly nothing, very bad visual at the end of the transition.  I would like to bring in here XP11 where the load radius is smaller but the transition at the end is so smooth and pleasant to the eye while we suffer from this unrealistic problem.

It's undeniable that with this V4.5 is an improvement with autogen loading but that's not the problem related to the above issue that is actually going on since version 4.0 (long time by now).  I know that there are people advocating creating a haze layer (about 30 NM visibility) that will hide this problem or claiming that always is hazy outside, which by the way many days we have unlimited visibility for miles to no end.

I refuse to believe that the beta testers are unfamiliar with this issue and they didn't complain about it, most likely seems to be a LM (P3D) developers oversight or unwillingness  to fix something so obvious, especially when so many people complain about it even on their forum (and they don't answer to this kind of problem) or some other forums.

Unfortunately, even there is such a large number of people bothered by this issue still will not get together in the LM forum and ask the developer to fix this obvious problem that is carried on for such a long time.   

[kityatyi 78]

56 minutes ago, killthespam said:

Unfortunately, you are 100% correct. This issue is going on for a very long time and for some unknown reason is not getting fixed. 

The problem I see here is that at the end of the load radius where autogen stops rendering (buildings and trees) is completely abrupt, there is no smooth transition it's like somebody cut the scenery. There you have autogen and suddenly nothing, very bad visual at the end of the transition.  I would like to bring in here XP11 where the load radius is smaller but the transition at the end is so smooth and pleasant to the eye while we suffer from this unrealistic problem.

It's undeniable that with this V4.5 is an improvement with autogen loading but that's not the problem related to the above issue that is actually going on since version 4.0 (long time by now).  I know that there are people advocating creating a haze layer (about 30 NM visibility) that will hide this problem or claiming that always is hazy outside, which by the way many days we have unlimited visibility for miles to no end.

I refuse to believe that the beta testers are unfamiliar with this issue and they didn't complain about it, most likely seems to be a LM (P3D) developers oversight or unwillingness  to fix something so obvious, especially when so many people complain about it even on their forum (and they don't answer to this kind of problem) or some other forums.

Unfortunately, even there is such a large number of people bothered by this issue still will not get together in the LM forum and ask the developer to fix this obvious problem that is carried on for such a long time.   

Exactly. 

I have also posted this on the LM / P3D official forums because it's in the numbers. The more reports, the sooner it will be fixed. At least, this would be the logical course of events in a perfect world.

Reducing the visibility to as low as 30 NM is not realistic. I am not saying that 200 NM is the way to go but if you set your max visibility slider in Active SKy to 199, the weather engine will determine what visibility to render. If it has to render - based on METAR - a low vis, then it will. But I don't want to forcibly get IFR conditions because as you said, there are times we can see far, far away. Reducing vis like crazy is not a fix, it's like putting our heads in the sand (at least this is what we say in Hungary). We need a proper fix for this.

[pmb 5,137]

We can only go to the Lockheed Martin forum and bother them again (say, after the 4.5 dust settled, otherwise no one will care). I'll certainly chime in once more on my favorite enemy feature.

Kind regards, Michael

[LRBS 943]

Hi Michael,

Is anyway that we can create some sort of contact list with people willing to get involved in this issue and at the end post a request from everybody on LM forum?

You know, wishful thinking but I hope for a beneficial solution for everybody, win-win situation?

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

I saw that this thread was still active and I just want to repeat what I said before, that settings in the plain vanilla P3d 4.5  can be selected where the problem never shows up, just like previous versions. I just proved this to myself again. I just purchased a new Cyberpower Tracer laptop and I moved one of my P3d installations to it (mostly to use Sim Director). At a screen resolution of 1080 60p (which is all the laptop supports outputting to the built-in monitor), at the default UI settings, P3d 4.5 never shows this issue. But I can cause the problem to become visible, just by cranking up all the IQ settings, not even to the max. This laptop has an nVidia 1050 ti GPU, 12 GB RAM and an Intel i7-8750H CPU. It's neither a high end beast nor a legacy slouch. I can also cause the autogen issue to happen at lower IQ settings by either flying low and fast or by activating the 3D vegetation option.

So what's LM supposed to do? I can run P3d 4.5 perfectly fine on this laptop. Or I can chose settings that drag it down and cause issues. This has pretty much been the story with all flightsims and the remedy (new hardware) is eventually cancelled out by the disease (more features and add-ons). Although many people don't believe me when I say this, but my XP11 installation on my primary PC can be dragged to its knees also. LR's solution is to limit the sim to a usable 20 fps as a sign from the heavens (so to speak) to the user to stop trying to assault the hardware with unreasonable settings. This never happened to me with XP11 until I added  a weather add-on, an environmental add-on, an AI traffic add-on, an ATC add-on, complex airports and complex aircraft. FSX was notorious for its infamous "blurries" issue which was also caused by having unreasonable IQ settings for a given hardware configuration. Maybe LM should do the same thing that LR does. Once the sim can't keep up, it should revert to a slideshow mode, rather than trying to keep flying "normally" with blurry ground textures and popping autogen.

Do I want LM to make P3d more efficient? Of course I do. But some of the inefficiency is built into the OS, DirectX and video drivers. And some is built in to the user's seeing that a setting says either "16x", "100 miles", "extremely dense" or "ultra" and then the user is enticed into seeing what happens when selecting such settings.

[Afterburner 374]

2 hours ago, kityatyi said:

Reducing the visibility to as low as 30 NM is not realistic. I am not saying that 200 NM is the way to go but if you set your max visibility slider in Active SKy to 199, the weather engine will determine what visibility to render. If it has to render - based on METAR - a low vis, then it will. But I don't want to forcibly get IFR conditions because as you said, there are times we can see far, far away. Reducing vis like crazy is not a fix, it's like putting our heads in the sand (at least this is what we say in Hungary). We need a proper fix for this.

Attention: By reducing visibility to 30NM I mean the surface visibility (there is a separate slider in Active Sky for that), not the upper visibility (for which I use 200NM). That way, I have a realistic visibility at low altitudes (in case the METAR reports 9999), while the visibility from high altitudes is quite distant (much more than 30NM). It in no way forces you into IFR conditions, it just creates a realistic haze that is almost always visible in the real world.

Again, it doesn't fix the problem of delayed autogen, but having an unlimited visibility not only looks artificial and unrealistic, but it makes the delayed loading too visible. Limiting the surface visibility provides a greater realism and obscures the problem somewhat IMO.

[LRBS 943]

11 hours ago, jabloomf1230 said:

I saw that this thread was still active and I just want to repeat what I said before, that settings in the plain vanilla P3d 4.5  can be selected where the problem never shows up, just like previous versions. I just proved this to myself again. I just purchased a new Cyberpower Tracer laptop and I moved one of my P3d installations to it (mostly to use Sim Director). At a screen resolution of 1080 60p (which is all the laptop supports outputting to the built-in monitor), at the default UI settings, P3d 4.5 never shows this issue. But I can cause the problem to become visible, just by cranking up all the IQ settings, not even to the max. This laptop has an nVidia 1050 ti GPU, 12 GB RAM and an Intel i7-8750H CPU. It's neither a high end beast nor a legacy slouch. I can also cause the autogen issue to happen at lower IQ settings by either flying low and fast or by activating the 3D vegetation option.

So what's LM supposed to do? I can run P3d 4.5 perfectly fine on this laptop. Or I can chose settings that drag it down and cause issues. This has pretty much been the story with all flightsims and the remedy (new hardware) is eventually cancelled out by the disease (more features and add-ons). Although many people don't believe me when I say this, but my XP11 installation on my primary PC can be dragged to its knees also. LR's solution is to limit the sim to a usable 20 fps as a sign from the heavens (so to speak) to the user to stop trying to assault the hardware with unreasonable settings. This never happened to me with XP11 until I added  a weather add-on, an environmental add-on, an AI traffic add-on, an ATC add-on, complex airports and complex aircraft. FSX was notorious for its infamous "blurries" issue which was also caused by having unreasonable IQ settings for a given hardware configuration. Maybe LM should do the same thing that LR does. Once the sim can't keep up, it should revert to a slideshow mode, rather than trying to keep flying "normally" with blurry ground textures and popping autogen.

Do I want LM to make P3d more efficient? Of course I do. But some of the inefficiency is built into the OS, DirectX and video drivers. And some is built in to the user's seeing that a setting says either "16x", "100 miles", "extremely dense" or "ultra" and then the user is enticed into seeing what happens when selecting such settings.

Jay,

First we are happy for you that you can run "P3d 4.5 perfectly fine on this laptop".

Next I'm not looking for a confrontational discussion, it appears that you completely missing the point that a large number of customers  have issues and unfortunately you make assumptions that people have settings that drag the system down. While that might be the case in certain situations, unfortunately there are some visible issues not related to the "sliders". On the other hand those "settings in the plain vanilla" are not realistic at all and adjusting the sliders to certain values are necessary to resemble a realistic outside view. 

When you say "So what's LM supposed to do?" it's expected from them to fix the software to be more efficient. I would like to disagree with you about " But some of the inefficiency is built into the OS, DirectX and video drivers", actually there are some flight simulators where those "inefficiencies" are not present.

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

1 minute ago, killthespam said:

Jay,

First we are happy for you that you can run "P3d 4.5 perfectly fine on this laptop".

Next I'm not looking for a confrontational discussion, it appears that you completely missing the point that a large number of customers  have issues and unfortunately you make assumptions that people have settings that drag the system down. While that might be the case in certain situations, unfortunately there are some visible issues not related to the "sliders". On the other hand those "settings in the plain vanilla" are not realistic at all and adjusting the sliders to certain values are necessary to resemble a realistic outside view. 

When you say "So what's LM supposed to do?" it's expected from them to fix the software to be more efficient. I would like to disagree with you about " But some of the inefficiency is built into the OS, DirectX and video drivers", actually there are some flight simulators where those "inefficiencies" are not present.

Name one. 

[LRBS 943]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaMBmQxzzPQ&list=RDQMf9K3rqB0G20&start_radio=1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pm-BlDgC2wI

 

[kityatyi 78]

15 hours ago, Afterburner said:

Attention: By reducing visibility to 30NM I mean the surface visibility (there is a separate slider in Active Sky for that), not the upper visibility (for which I use 200NM). That way, I have a realistic visibility at low altitudes (in case the METAR reports 9999), while the visibility from high altitudes is quite distant (much more than 30NM). It in no way forces you into IFR conditions, it just creates a realistic haze that is almost always visible in the real world.

Again, it doesn't fix the problem of delayed autogen, but having an unlimited visibility not only looks artificial and unrealistic, but it makes the delayed loading too visible. Limiting the surface visibility provides a greater realism and obscures the problem somewhat IMO.

Fair enough. Surface vis is set to only 25 NM on my AS, since it hardly goes above that. The default 75 is unrealistic indeed.

[Mace 1,902]

9 hours ago, killthespam said:

Jay,

First we are happy for you that you can run "P3d 4.5 perfectly fine on this laptop".

Next I'm not looking for a confrontational discussion, it appears that you completely missing the point that a large number of customers  have issues and unfortunately you make assumptions that people have settings that drag the system down. While that might be the case in certain situations, unfortunately there are some visible issues not related to the "sliders". On the other hand those "settings in the plain vanilla" are not realistic at all and adjusting the sliders to certain values are necessary to resemble a realistic outside view. 

I don't like controversy, and I am not being confrontational here, but I must report what I see in P3D 4.4. 

I for one cannot remember the last time I saw popping autogen in P3D.

I mean, sure, if I crank my autogen draw radius slider all the way, and crank veg and buildings to max, YES then I will get popping and batch drawing.

But with my normal (visually, quite good) settings I do not have any pop in 4.4.

Someone can correct me if I missed it, but throughout this thread I didn't notice any of the people experiencing popping post up their Core0 (main thread) cpu usage when they are experiencing popping.  You can bet it is at or near 100% saturation.  When the main thread hits 100%, the sim starts dropping textures and autogen....hence the popping and batch drawing.   Any of us can get that if we overcook our sliders vs. our hardware.

[pmb 5,137]

I have been experiencing autogen popping under some situations during several P3D versions now. I even made two videos on it more than a year ago,

https://www.prepar3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=127236&start=15

You can try to verify/falsify them. It appears just at the transition between Medium and High for the Autogen and Scenery slider. No other even performance-relevant slider does affect this, and I made a quite comprehensive study at that time, always in this same scenario. This doesn't look like a performance issue but a feature purposely built in at just this transition, otherwise lowering other sliders would at least move the popping transition point from Medium to, say, High. 

Of course, I couldn't try any combination of settings,so maybe some critical combination just escaped me. In this case I will gladly adopt it if anyone can reproduce one of the flights with a distance slider higher than Medium, the horizon in sight and autogen continually fading in. I usually have my monitor set to 30 Hz, frames set to unlimited, Vsync and TP on. I have been told locking frames internally would help and tried this, but it didn't make any difference.

I agree insofar as this has different implications in different sceneries. My prominent example is in the videos above, ORBX NCA flying into the Silicon Valley from KSFO at 3000' where you see a sea of autogen buildings towards Palo Alto and beyond. I would be surprised if anyone doesn't see a strict line between autogen and no autogen, which extends in a sudden patch during approach, as long as the distance slider is above Medium and the horizon is not masked. On the other hand, setting the distance slider to Medium or lower autogen indeed fades in continually. Now, there are sure weather conditions where this doesn't hurt, but others where it does.

On the other hand, ORBX TE GB South, e.g., acts differently. Here, I can set distance higher than Medium and, while the autogen/no autogen line as such is still there, it seems to be farther out and in any case is less annoying than in the former case indeed - why ever. 

Kind regards, Michael