Hooray! Solution to mipbias reducing blurries but causing shimmers

[Guest weeniemcween]

Many of us have tried Gary Summons tip to add the line mipbias=6 to the fsx.cfg in order to reduce blurries - which it definitely did for me. The well known problem is that it also causes heavy shimmering, especially of fences and trees. Also, mipbias=4 isn't accepted by FSX, nor did it do anything to reduce blurries on my system. As someone suggested, one can force supersampling with nhancer (not sure of the ati method) as the nvidia control panel no longer includes it, except for transparency antialiasing. While this does counteract the shimmering somewhat, it is not - at least for me - all that effective and only makes shimmering truly unnoticeable at a very high 4x4 level. With this setting the performance hit due to the quadruple rendering is simply too much, particularly in low visibility weather and with lower-end cards and non-sli systems.Now to the point: keeping antialiasing on multisampling mode, in the optimizations section of nhancer (also in texture filtering for the standard control panel profile) I set "Negative LOD BIAS" to "Clamp" rather than "Allow". Guess what, the shimmers disappeared almost completely, but the blurries were still greatly reduced by the mipbias tweak! I recommend using nhancer to do this since the standard control panel - besides offering fewer 3d options in general - sometimes doesn't let the clamp stick when anisotropic filtering is application controlled. While you're at it, you might as well force an anisotropic level with nhancer since that's what I did. I hope this helps out those who were injured by blurries only to be insulted by shimmers.

[Guest unitedpilot36]

Thanks for the tip;) I already had the LOD BIAS clamped but I had supersampling enabled. I got unbearable shimmering with those settings so I guess I'll enable multisampling and see if I get as lucky as you.What kind of video card do you have btw?

[Guest weeniemcween]

I should add that setting a more conservative 4xS or 8xS supersampling will further improve image quality with little if any performance hit on more recent cards. Chris, 8800gtsI too got horrible shimmers.Again, I did force anisotropic filtering to 16x - I tried 8x too to make sure there was no shimmering there either - while leaving the setting ticked in fsx as well. And i'm using the 158.22 drivers. Also, make sure you download and use nhancer if you're not.

[jcboliveira 1]

The clamp did the trick.ThanksJos

[Guest weeniemcween]

Great, then it's not a fluke. To make things more conclusive, those for whom this trick works should also post, I think, whether the mipbias tweak continued to mitigate blurries. Edit: Chris, also make sure that negative lod bias is clamped in the individual "MS Flight Simulator X" profile and not merely the global settings (which I left alone).

[Guest unitedpilot36]

Alrighty, can't wait to try this when I get home. What does your fsx.cfg look like, fiber frame setting, multi-texture bandwidth etc...?

[Guest weeniemcween]

Single coreFramerate=unlimitedfiber = .34 (.50 did help with blurries a bit but at the cost of fps. Since mipbias helped much more, I reverted back to the old value). mult = 400 (for some this may cause stutters)PoolSize=5000000 (don't think this matters much anymore)TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_TREES_PER_CELL=2500TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_BUILDINGS_PER_CELL=3000Very Dense Complexityand Dense AutogenAntialiasing and anisotropic both checked in fsx but modes set with nhancer.Also, I play with a widescreen and WideViewAspect=True, which requires more resources but offers significantly greater visibility and of course makes it so the graphics aren't warped.

[Guest Irishman]

Not to be a pain, but can you notate which settings you made within nhancer? Every time I make an adjustment directly to the card (through the nvidia control panel or nhancer) I end up with pixel and shimmer soup. I think I just don't know which settings to adjust and at what levels to adjust them.

[Guest Irishman]

nm (double)

[Guest]

>Also, I play with a widescreen and WideViewAspect=True, which>requires more resources but offers significantly greater>visibility and of course makes it so the graphics aren't>warped. I tried this too (setting WideViewAspect=True) but I found it made no difference at all... Yes, the view was zoomed out a lot, but after zooming in it looks EXACTLY the same! I already have the option to choose 1680x1050 by default while having WideViewAspect=False. Maybe on some computers/screens you cannot choose 1680x1050 (or anything wide) without changing False to True...?

[Tabs 2,790]

Here's my exact nHancer settings for FSX, which work really well for me with no blurries. I'm running this on a 256MB 7800GTX with the 160.03 drivers (using a hacked inf to make them install on a non-8 series card)First off in the Global profile:On the Optimizations Tab:Texture filtering: High QualityNegative LOD Bias - ClampFSX Profile:AA: Combined 8xSGamma Correction checkedAF: 16XEverything else is left on the defaults.A few things:1. The clamped LOD bias should be on whenever you're using AF - which for me is every game I play, so I force it always on via the Global profile. What this does essentially is prevent the game from trying to move the mipmap transition zones further into the distance to keep textures sharp. This is totally unnecessary for the game to do this with AF on, since AF's entire purpose is to smooth out those transitions and sharpen textures that are viewed at a steep angle to the viewer.2. I don't turn on the transparency AA because the combined 8xS mode is already applying a supersampling AA algorithm to the whole scene, which includes transparent textures. This type of AA drastically improves the shimmering you see from stuff like trees, power poles and radio towers, which are composed of alpha textures.3. In the sim I leave the AA box off and the filtering pull-down on Anisotropic. I know Nvidia and MS recommend leaving the AA box checked and using the "Enhance the Application" mode in the driver, but I've always gotten better results to my eyes by doing it this way.

[Guest weeniemcween]

Ryan's settings are very good, I think. He's also absolutely right about clamping when using AF, which I myself got to after installing new drivers.I, however, always leave the boxes checked in fsx because when "enhanced in-game AA setting" is not checked it will override the program anyway. That way, if I feel like switching between the enhanced and non-enhanced modes I don't have to change anything from within fsx.Some people report greater stability with fsx when "enhanced" is chosen. Others report greater performance when it is not. I fall into the latter group, without falling into the former, so I don't usually check "enhance" unless I want to try coverage sampling for whatever reason.As for wideviewaspect, J van E, it does not just zoom out but actually fixes the screen aspect if you're running a widescreen monitor. You can tell because if you don't set this option to true and merely zoom out the gauges in the vc will remain distorted, oval instead of circular.

[Guest t-force1]

Thanks! That really helps! I have almost no blurry situations now.

[PhilTaylor 45]

Cool, I updated my blog with this and gave weenie props.note, I have seen people try values of 4-7 with varying success as well.

[AndrewB 7]

Is there a soultion for ATI card users?ThanksAndrew