Tweaks for distant terrain

[Pilot53 543]

Which p3d cfg tweaks in particular would help most with getting sharper distant textures and mesh?  I hate seeing blurry mountains in the distance and watching them "pop" into shape.

[shermank 166]

If you have an Nvidia card, their latest driver enhance distant terrain. Otherwise, extening LOD to 6.5 is a step in the right direction. Of course, all performance depends upon the power and capability of your hardware.

when you get to this page, just plug in your specs under Option One

 

https://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

 

Sherm

[newtie 533]

1 hour ago, shermank said:

If you have an Nvidia card, their latest driver enhance distant terrain.

How?

[JesC 88]

19 hours ago, Pilot53 said:

...mountains in the distance and watching them "pop" into shape.

 

Mike,

As far as the "popping" into shape, you may want to try raising the tessellation slider some. Just be careful because it can also have a performance penalty.

Hope that helps,

Jesse

[Pilot53 543]

3 minutes ago, JesC said:

 

Mike,

As far as the "popping" into shape, you may want to try raising the tessellation slider some. Just be careful because it can also have a performance penalty.

Hope that helps,

Jesse

I was thinking more in terms of cfg tweaks.  Tessellation and LOD are already maxed out.  

[Rogen 1,087]

I don't think you're going to be able to achieve much in reality.

I used to run FSX @ a lod of 7.5 to 9.5 which had a nice effect of clarity for distance, alas not so for P3D, 6.5 is max no matter what and it has it's problems with texture popping especially on hills/mountains.

The below are the major cfg options I run in v4.5.14, not all are for distance and I don't know if all are applicable to v5 but won't hurt to trial.

Just be sure to make a backup of the prepar3d.cfg prior to changing settings.

I also recommend being liberal with comments and perhaps dates.

Let us know how you get on.

Cheers R
 

Spoiler

[GRAPHICS]
// MAX_TEXTURE_REQUEST_DISTANCE There's no cap on this value itself because it's intended as a limit. If you want textures requesting aggressively, you can set it something very high like 1000000. Units are memory allocation units (not distance).
// There are two other checks that must pass before textures are requested:
// 1) Object is within the far clip distance. This varies by altitude.
// 2) Object pixel size at a given distance passes min radius check. This LM made configurable in 4.3 using RS_MIN_OBJECT_PIXEL_RADIUS. (default is 2.0px).
// default value = 1000.000000, 1000000.000000 is max
MAX_TEXTURE_REQUEST_DISTANCE=320000.000000

// improve cockpit shadows by doubling the values.
OPAQUE_SHADOW_TEXTURE_SIZE=4096
TRANSLUCENT_SHADOW_TEXTURE_SIZE=1024
OPAQUE_SHADOW_DRAW_DISTANCE=4000
TRANSLUCENT_SHADOW_DRAW_DISTANCE=4000

//ENABLE_MEMORY_OPTIMIZATION is either OFF (value = 0) or ON (value = 1) if you have VRAM to spare, there is no need to attempt any memory optimization so set the value to 0 (zero).
ENABLE_MEMORY_OPTIMIZATION=0

[SCENERY]
//MaxRegionsPurgePerFrame=16 - Default is 16 and relates to purging of scenery items from memory (not textures), was origionaly set to 4 by LM who then increased the value to 16 to cater for slower machines.
//The higher the value the more items purged and the lower the VAS but is more likely to be stuttery.
MaxRegionsPurgePerFrame=2

//AUTOGEN_BATCH_LOD=2 //Default is 2, setting to 1 will greatly increase the amount of autogen buildings, almost double in some instances, valid values are 1 to 9 with 1 the highest.
AUTOGEN_BATCH_LOD=1

//Tree LOD independent of the UI settings - Default 2500.000000 Max 8000.000000
AUTOGEN_TREE_MIN_DISTANCE_TO_LOD=8000.000000
//Max distance allowed 12000.000000 - Default 95000.000000
AUTOGEN_TREE_MAX_DRAW_DISTANCE=12000.000000

[TERRAIN]
UseGlobalTerrainView=False

// Uses a massive amount of VRam and kills the frame rate as a result when the VRam runs out and swaps to using system ram (which is much slower).
// You'll need 11 GB+ VRam to successfully use this setting with a value of 10+.
// Will improve the LOD radius (via increasing the texture resolution x4) for everything apart from PhotoReal according to LM on their forum.
// Supposedley they were looking into the poor LOD on photoreal, however that post was in 2017 and nothing has changed.
// LM recommend not using for Photoreal as all it does is increase the texture size and memory requirements considerably for no visible effect.
TEXTURE_SIZE_EXP=10

// Set the autogen to max per cell that can be displayed
TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_BUILDINGS_PER_CELL=6000
TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_VEGETATION_PER_CELL=6000

// Relates to vegetation and how it is placed along side rivers and roads. The default and minimum is 16 and can be set up to 2048 in double values i.e. 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048.
// The higher the number the more accurately a curved polygon will be rasterised. 16 equals placement accuracy of ~80 metres, 2048 equals placement accuracy of approx 0.5 metres. Higher values come with more performance costs.
// Result will be treelines that accurately follow the curves in roads and bends in rivers as opposed to the old straight lines and angles of before.
// Surprisingly setting the value to 2048 appeared to have little performance impact.
IMAGE_PIXELS_FOR_AUTOGEN_POLYGONS=2048

 

Edited September 22, 2020 by Rogen

[shermank 166]

On 9/21/2020 at 3:12 PM, newtie said:

How?

There is a setting in Nvidia Controller....it's fairly intuitive...just click to activate and leave at default setting ,or you can tweak at will. Read the Nvidia docs for specific info.

Sherm

[fakeflyer737 991]

45 minutes ago, shermank said:

There is a setting in Nvidia Controller....it's fairly intuitive...just click to activate and leave at default setting ,or you can tweak at will. Read the Nvidia docs for specific info.

Sherm

Umm no, that’s not how it works. 

[newtie 533]

That’s what I thought.

[G-RFRY 1,708]

Trying to render to far in the distance will come at a cost.

[BerndB 349]

On 9/21/2020 at 6:00 AM, Pilot53 said:

Which p3d cfg tweaks in particular would help most with getting sharper distant textures and mesh?  I hate seeing blurry mountains in the distance and watching them "pop" into shape.

Mike, may you take a look into this post. I´am using these settings and i´am fine with it. Nice visuals and no stutters.

 

[shermank 166]

On 9/23/2020 at 8:27 AM, fakeflyer737 said:

Umm no, that’s not how it works. 

uhmm...yes, it is

Sherm

[chapstick 2,757]

3 hours ago, shermank said:

uhmm...yes, it is

Sherm

You're making things up and not even telling people what setting they're supposed to change. This forum sometimes...

[kand 205]

I think he's referring to anisotropic filtering? 

[shermank 166]

Hi all, 

Sorry if there was some confusion.  I am not making up anything. To be specific, first, you must install the latest Nvidia driver or at least something very recent. The current driver is 456.38.

Secondly, in the Nvidia Control Panel, be sure you have set up the panel to recognize your P3D installation. Then open up the program settings.'

The Second line option is Image Sharpening. This is the key to the best distant look from most any altitude. The default setting is as follows

Sharpen 0.50

Ignore Film Grain 0.17

Those are the default settings and work fine for me. As we know one size does not fit all, so tweak away if that is to your liking.

As for the other settings, most are default as defined by Nvidia.

I hope this puts to rest any lingering questions about my post and my attempt to be helpful.

Sherm