Blurries & contention

[Guest cwright]

If you never see the blurries then you're very lucky!There's a simple way to produce the blurries. At a fairly low altitude, switch to slew mode and slew at high speed for a few seconds. You should see that the textures very quickly become completely blurred. Stop slewing and watch the textures. Over a period of seconds the textures will return to normal as FSX catches up. The speed at which the textures return to normal is probably a good indication of the severity of the problem. For me it takes well over thirty seconds.Best regards, Chris

[Guest xminator1]

After installing SP1 I had zero problems with blurries, where before SP1 I could fly at more then 80 before the plane started to go ahead of the textures. The change is most likely because FSX now uses all 4 cores in my system. With SP1 I can go at 800+ without suffering from blurries.After installing ASX, I started getting blurries again. I havent looked into how much system resources ASX uses, but I have a feeling it competes with the core that get the load of texture loading. With ASX I have to fly slower for the textures to keep up. Autogen no problem, framerate about the same, but the ground textures cant keep up.My rig have 2 dual core athlons (socket 340)2 GB RAM ATI x1950pro agp versionI dont think its about memory bandwidth, or available memory in the system or on the gfx card. Its the way FSX allocates cpu time for texture loading. Or at least thats what my gut feeling says...

[bic 44]

I asked in the hardware forum and didn't get a response. So I'll try here.Are there any utilities to help us debug this problem that show us what is going on the system such as gpu percent usage, graphics memory usage, more detailed information about cpu / thread usage (perhaps to show what FSX might be doing)? I think this would help us show if our fsx.cfgs are tuned properly and help us set them properly. I've tried all sorts of combinations and permutations and just haven't been able to get rid of the blurries. I know Microsoft has a lot of great IIS debug tools that I've used extensively. Is there anything similar?

[urthgental 181]

Hi,unfortunately i suffer from the blurries as well. I really would not name this a 'mystery'. It is really an 'unsolved issue'.It is pretty easy to qualify that the texture loading does not work correctly:Just slew to a remote spot in the distance. For me it takes up to 10 minutes until I get a more or less sharp resolution in front, sometimes it never get's really crispy.@Phil: How long should it take to build the textures from the lowest level of detail? I think everybody can check this easily.In general I hope that Aces will permanently fixes bugs, looks for improvements and delivers patches. Especially as a platform provider with 3rd party developers building on top!Bugs are not a problem, every software has them. It is just the fear of some simmers (including me) that there are not fixes planned until the new expansion set.Regards,Heiko

[dokelly07 0]

I posted, but my post was deleted for some odd reason.I had zero (ZERO) blurries in the RTM, just had to turn off most autogen to get playable FPS. It was running fine with traffic very low. I did a CLEAN install of FSX, ran FSX one time to build a config, installed service pack 1, ran FSX again, moved slliders to SAME postitions prior to service pack 1. This way at the least I would get the same performance, not worse. I was wrong. It was worse.Stuttering I had never seen beforeBlurries beyond descriptionAutogen Pop - to see how bad this really is, go back to RTM for 5 minutes and watch them fade in.Also, the amount of autogen has been cut drastically. On sparse RTM there are tons more trees than sparse SP1. I have not made and error on my part, have a clean and lean system, fully updated drivers across the board. I even reverted drivers to see if they were the problem. It is NOT my computer, going back to the RTM fixes EVERYTHING so this shows it is/has to be a service pack problem.If it is a problem with certain types of hardware, where does that lead us? We cannot expect the patch to work with some hardware and not with others, what good would that kind of a patch be???Help!Danon O.

[Guest jcmckeown]

I honestly don't doubt Phil's good faith when he says that the blurries weren't noticed/encountered during beta. Maybe they were there for 1 or 2 people but not noticed. Maybe they weren't there at all. Who knows.As with all software releases, the majority of bugs get discovered during beta but others don't.Many of us have this issue that is a significant regression from RTM and makes it impossible to use SP1 especially with photo scenery although the blurries are also present with default textures.I'd be willing to participate in a diagnostics program to help ACES figure out what is happening and so would many others on this forum. ACES need to instigate this in order to have a serious approach to gathering exactly the data they need to fix this issue.JCMK

[Guest jcmckeown]

Can only agree with you. I'm going to try and post some videos taken with FRAPS to illustrate just how bad it is.

[Guest jcmckeown]

So to finish up on my previous mail I have the following question for Phil/ACES. What can we do to constructively help you fix this issue? If you need data on our systems can you post a template or something that we can all adhere to? Realizing that disorganized system specs posted at the bottom of a forum post probably aren't much help is there something else we can do? Would it not be opportune to release a beta 5 that people getting blurries can test with?Just a few suggestions/speculations only Phil can tell us what would be helpful for ACES to fix this.JCMK

[Guest jcmckeown]

Phil,I don't mean this to be offensive in any way: What if your team could take a little of their precious time to have a closer look and then maybe a pattern would emerge...Agree that at the moment there's no real pattern but it is affecting many of us so maybe it's not config related and there's just a nasty or difficult to detect timing/contention bug that only appears under certain circumstances. Who knows?The thing I find scary is that unless the issue is nailed down now, what guaruntees it won't occur in the DX10 patch scheduled later? I would hate to miss out on that also.JC

[virtualstuff 750]

>So what is causing the contention? I and all others concerned>by the SP1 blurries would like to know so that we can fix it.>Any ideas?>>Edit: BTW the mipbias tweak has nothing to do with this issue.>The textures are not getting loaded, period. This is not a>filtering or AA issue.I've seen many screen shots with slider settings out of this world and expecting no blurries...Many should first look to there sliders in the first place because mesh settings greater as 78 (default FS9) expecting no blurries then your out of this world ;-) that simple...For the fun of it what are your FSX settings and hardware and software specifications...Let's take an example and see how far we can get with your system...This one is a beast to configure with many settings and far more data as FS9 ever had ;-)So give some details instead of vague comment ;-)Andr

[Guest steve43]

>I've seen many screen shots with slider settings out of this world and expecting no blurries...Although you may have a good point the frustration is that before SP1 we didn't have these problems, at least as bad as it is now. Granted the FPS are better generally and maybe it's just that something has to give? That being said, there are those who have had their sliders all the way to the left and still getting blurries so there is something wrong somewhere.Steve

[virtualstuff 750]

>>I've seen many screen shots with slider settings out of this>world and expecting no blurries...>>Although you may have a good point the frustration is that>before SP1 we didn't have these problems, at least as bad as>it is now. Granted the FPS are better generally and maybe it's>just that something has to give? That being said, there are>those who have had their sliders all the way to the left and>still getting blurries so there is something wrong somewhere.>>SteveSteve my point is let's take one system as an example and see how far we can get...Maybe we find along the way the problem too ;-)To getter we are far more experienced as one user at his desktop ;-)So share your details as it's done with proper trouble shooting...Only shouting what they are going to do on the blurries don't help a bit...It's sometimes so simple in life ;-)So give your:- OS- Software installed- processes running- Hardware config- Drivers- 3d party stuff- FSX settings...- etc...If there is a problem with particular combinations of hardware we should see the common factor...So you want to help your self share your settings ;-)Cheers Andr

[bic 44]

I found some tools:look for performance block on this one:http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...&displaylang=enhttp://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...&DisplayLang=enAlso, windbg is an option.I am at work so if someone else who has all ready started the weekend, please test and report back!Perhaps even filemon will help.edit add:http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/deb...ng/default.mspx

[Guest jcmckeown]

I'll second that steve.JC

[Guest YEGspotter]

>phil, I think there IS a pattern with nvidia, amd dual core>users.>>there is the classic surge that some claim to be nvidia>>and then there is the stutter (not fps) but scenery just>doesnt flow by smooth at various points. >>I know this must be a burden on you answering all these>forums, and like many others, I commend you for your>professionalism.>> Is there some organized way we could set something up in>order to help you and the aces?>>Im thinking like a poll or something? Maybe Rig setup and>problems one user gets?I experienced blurries with a Sapphire Radeon X1950 XTX (512mb) and a single core Athalon 64 3800. I've rolled back many of my settings, and I'm now only experiencing moderate blurries, here and there (generally in the busier, urban areas like SeaTac). I don't think this is exclusive to Nvidia and multi-core users...cheers