Blurries & contention

[PhilTaylor 45]

If you run with no add-ons, and turn all settings left, do you then not fall behind?Does anyone have a category of blurries where the textures never catch up and you get a hang if you try to load new scenery ( eg change world location or terrain settings )? Yes, this would be a 3rd category of blurry. And yes, having multiple categories definitely makes it harder to tell what is happening "out there" as well as consider what a fix might be.

[Guest jcmckeown]

Phil, if only I knew what would have been useful at the beginning of the thread I would happily have provided the data then! Anyway, we're getting there and you guys are getting lots of data from various sources and this can only help.My blurries are definately of the catch up type. When I start from flight load all is well and then I catch up with the blurry areas in the distance that do not load up textures (or not fast enough).I would suspect that most people getting blurries with the photo scenery have the same but I'll let the others comment...

[Bert Pieke 7,584]

If I turn both mesh settings, and scenery complexity, and autogen hard left... yes, then the textures do not fall behind.However, I can fly with framerates nicely at 20 (capped at 20) and "normal" settings and I outfly the textures in certain places.This is repeatable.Normal for me:Mesh: 50%, 76m. Scenery: Normal, Autogen: Sparse.

[mattn 45]

Phil, Alot of users of the TileProxy utility are experiencing thisin SP1:During the initial load, TP feeds FSX tiles in the mid tohigh 100's of tiles per second (I've seen 850+ on my system).Once loaded, the scenery is crisp and clear, and after the firstminute or so of flying, even in a fps-friendly craft like the ultralite,the scenery tiles stop "snapping" to the clearest image, and scenery updating in the sim seems to stop permanently until ascenery refresh is manually triggered, then the process startsall over again. At that moment, TP is only reporting 20-30 tiles per second beingfed to FSX, and as I understand it, TP feeds FSX the tiles as itrequests them. I've even paused and walked away for 30 minutes andthe tiles never update. It's almost like FSX stops asking for tiles. To make sure this isn't something with TP itself, I've flown circlesaround an area (KORH) and after an hour, TP stopped downloading newtiles, so it has the whole area. I then turned off TP altogether andrestarted the sim, and the same exact problem happend.. tiles stoppedloading "crisp" and the blurries don't recover until a manual sceneryrefresh. So to answer, yes it is happening to photo scenery, and no, it doesnot seem to recover on its own, even when paused. When I downgrade to RTM, the problem goes away. I should mention, I've tried all the tweaks posted here and inyour blog, have FPS locked at 20 all the time and I stay there,hardly ever dropping below 20. I've even tried non-standard tweakslike setting the sim to 640x480 :) with no change.

[Cruachan 705]

Hi bwallis,"I really would like it for someone who says the have no blurries to post some shots though, so I can see for myself what these lucky folks are talking about. Come on folks I double dare you, make me envious."Okay, here's what I am seeing. I won't say I'm entirely blurry free, but pretty darn close. Where blurring occurs nearby it generally sharpens up quite quickly and certainly doesn't spoil the flight.http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/Cruachan47/K...kingForBlurriesThese windowed images were captured quickly using PSP with the sim paused. I know you have only my word for it, but there was little if any change noted by me between the moment of pausing and capturing. I have not compressed these images.Settings:LOD Radius = MediumMesh Complexity = 38mTexture Resolution = 1mWater Effects = Low 2xScenery Complexity = DenseAutogen Density = Normal (fsxbdgs.zip, treex_v2.1.zip)TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_TREES_PER_CELL=2500TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_BUILDINGS_PER_CELL=3000Global Texture Resolution = Very HighPoolsize=6000000Aviation traffic = 10%, 10% and MinimumLand and sea traffic = 10%, 10% and 15%X Graphics default textures installed.AA 6x, AF 16x, MipMapping Bias 4The more we discuss this problem the more it seems to me this has to be system dependent. Otherwise, why is my mid-range system apparently seeing better results than other more gutsy rigs? It can't be all down to in-sim settings nor, it seems to me, can the finger of blame be pointed exclusively at the SP1 update. If that were the case, wouldn't we all be experiencing problems with the degree of severity bearing a close relationship to each rig's capabilities? There again, perhaps this is being far too simplistic.As an aside, while I do have very few problems with photoreal scenery I do see a great deal of blurriness since SP1 while using TileProxy. However, the textures do sharpen up eventually and, for the moment, I am accepting that as the price to be paid for seeing, eventually, some remarkable results.MikeASRock 939Dual-SATA2, AMD Athlon 64X2 4800+ (2400MHz)(Toledo), 2GB Crucial PC3200 DDR400 Ram 3-3-3-8 (2T)(Dual Channel), (PCI-E)Sapphire ATI Radeon X1950 Pro 512MB (Catalyst 7.1 WHQL), Hyundai ImageQuest Q17 17" TFT LCD 20ms Digital Monitor (1280x1024x32), SB Audigy2 ZS Platinum (Drivers version 5.12.0001.1196 WHQL), WD Caviar SE16 250GB (WD2500KS) SATAII + Hitachi Deskstar T7K500 ATA133 UDMA-6 (320 GB), ASUS DRW-1608P2S Optical Drive, Antec P150 case with NeoHE 430W PSU, CH Products USB Yoke, Pedals and Fighterstick, Plantronics Headset and Mike combo, TrackIR Pro ver. 4.1 (build 29), Logitech MX1000 Laser Mouse, Windows XP Home Edition (SP2), DirectX 9.0c

[Guest Robin R.]

Phil was suggesting "pure" state FSX with SP1 and nothing else -- even if a 3rd party product was causing SP1 to induce blurries I don't see how this could help Phil determine or isolate the issue? I mean what could the solution be -- don't install any 3rd party FSX add-ons? You see what I'm saying, where is Phil going with the isolation suggestion?Isolation is great for their own (Ace's) inhouse testing and for those that did some Beta testing of FSX, but will not do much in the real end user world. Correct me if I'm wrong, there was a "well control" Beta group of folks (some that posted here) that one hopes would have brought the blurries issues to Phil's attention?? No?If those Beta folks were told FSX SP1 only well that sorta limits the purpose of Beta testing. I'm not sure what is going on with the Beta group, nor Ace's in house testing but it's clear that their test environments aren't emulating the real world -- that real world includes 3rd party add-ons and a host of different hardware.Sorta like saying "our OS works great if you don't load any other applications/games on it". Combined with the fact that FSX does indeed have an SDK it would see odd to avoid testing 3rd party products or remove them from the equation.Anyway, I'm guessing this little issue is going to be deep if Ace's elect to deal with it and do an SP2. To debug threading problems (which is exactly what this sounds like) is NOT an easy task and I do feel sorry for Ace's if they have to try to duplicate and then resolve. But I'll stick to my suggestion, time to move on Phil and do a re-think. Start work on FSXI, make it 64bit, make it DX10, re-work the scenery engine and fix the threading problem and lets hope to see FSXI sometime 2008. I think continuing with FSX is really just kicking an already dead horse or just becoming too difficult to manage effectively.Also, I dare suggest Ace's rethink expanding their Beta testers.Robin.

[michal 44]

>Phil was suggesting "pure" state FSX with SP1 and nothing>else -- Again, I don't see anything of a kind in this particular thread. He was only saying that installation of SP1 should be done on a "pure" FSX. Later you can add whatever you want. Unless you refer perhaps to some other thread and some other "suggestions" I fail to see where it advices against 3-rd party scenery.And, btw, for collecting "pure" metrics as directed above it makes sense to have machine in its simplest state - with no add-ons. But don't confuse such metric collection/debugging with actually playing the sim. Michael J.http://img142.imageshack.us/img142/9320/apollo17vf7.jpg

[PhilTaylor 45]

So lets go thru the procedure I outlined in a previous post.Start with all left.Slowly start moving sliders to the right, find out where you cannot outfly the textures. That may be the limit for your machine.

[PhilTaylor 45]

That is good to know, that starts to eliminate locked threads as an issue.

[PhilTaylor 45]

Fill rate has nothing to do with this. So its not surprising that does nothing.What about sliders all to the left. Does TP keep up then?

[PhilTaylor 45]

I did advise for testing purposes to run first with no add-on scenery, and then add the add-ons, one at a time. I certainly didnt advise, in general, to run without add-ons.The value of isolation testing like this is that it shows what the specific problem is. Without that, we cannot tell what is causing the issue. And understanding what is causing the issue is the first step to diagnosing it. Which is the first step to solving it.The fact that not all 3rd party photo-scenery has the issue points means there is, potentially, a way to solve the problem short of an update from Aces. That doesnt mean thats the only solution, just one.

[Cruachan 705]

Hi Robin,"I think continuing with FSX is really just kicking an already dead horse or just becoming too difficult to manage effectively."As we Scots would say: "Auch, away you go. Dinnae let's hear such defeatist talk!"What ACES should be doing is identifying a representative sample of the community who are genuinely experiencing significant problems and, with their cooperation, embark on an intensive step-by step approach to resolving the cause/causes (there may be several) of this troublesome issue. Mike

[PhilTaylor 45]

My post #48 in this thread outlined just such a set of steps.JC is the only person to reply so far, and his reply identified certain photo-scenery as one root cause of the problem.

[mattn 45]

I just reran with the sliders to the left. I did test withtexture resolution set to 5m, fsx didnt seem to want to displayany tiles at 10m. FPS locked at 20 and I didn't drop belowit at all. I still had the same "never catching up blurries". I know my tests aren't as scientific as requested in post #48,but I don't have any issues with default scenery.. autogen"pops up" occasionally and default scenery tiles DO catch upwithin a few seconds of pausing. I am one of the lucky onesto really get about a 40% perf increase in SP1 with defaultscenery. I'm willing to take TP out of the picture and test. If someoneknows of a freeware photo scenery exhibiting the "never catch upblurries" in sp1, please let me know, I can test with that too.

[Guest cbuchner1]

I've posted a near virgin fsx.cfg file in the Tileproxy forum that allows me to load 500 tiles per second loaded during flight. In this case, that's fast enough to catch up with slower aircraft.The cool thing about Tileproxy Beta 4 is that it allows you to benchmark FSX's tile loading speed - at least concerning the FS9 code path that uses thousands of BMP files to cover the scenery.From my Tileproxy developer's point of view, FSX SP1 loads just too many tiles in the far distance - and while doing so it falls behind on the job of getting the nearby tiles updated. The RTM version seemed to have been more "economical" in that regard, by only loading far away tiles if you have actually moved your aircraft quite far.