Blurries & contention

[Guest Robin R.]

I know -- good luck with it -- I believe some here feel this isn't a problem and Phil seems to believe he needs more evidence before he'll commit a resource to look into this.My point being, doing away with limited LOD distance would solve this problem -- to do that you'll need a 64bit address space.

[Guest Alphahawk3]

I agree with you. I have owned each version of FS since the inception. While huge advances have been made through the years one would expect to run the sim....according to the specs of a particular machine....without the blurries. No matter where I put my settings or what CFG I use it is the same....with the blurries. I have tried TileProxy and it is the same. What amazes me is how FSX and the last few versions of the sim ran different on machines with the same specs. I am also amazed at people who have low end machines and say they have no problems and folks that have high end machines can hardly get it to work at all. FSX certainly has many idiosyncrasy's...works great on one machine and has differnt issues on another persons machine with the same specs. I will keep the program on my machine and watch...with great interest....how it develops.....and I certainly hope and think it will develop into a very good program.

[1st fltsimguy 466]

I was unfortunately away in an isolated area of British Columbia so had not abiltity to check emails.Now having done so, I took a look at your shots. OK, this appears to be slightly better than what I am getting but you know they still appear to me to be not as sharp as they should be.I will compare your settings to mine and see what I get.I am still very interested in seeing some more screenshots, perhaps I will check the screenshots forum and I might find what I am looking for over there.Meanwhile I would have to agree with other FSX users, it is not acceptable that I game has to be tweaked so much to deal with these sorts of issues.

[maxymaxy 0]

Hi Ray Keattch,I went home this afternoon to test if a new fsx.cfg could fix the blurries ... and at this stage I am pretty much convinced that it does.Last night I set up my FSXPilot autopilot to control a Robinson R22 to fly around my home town at 2000ft / 40knots. In the background I had TileProxy downloading photoscenery from floogle. After a short time I had blurries big time but I let the 'robot R22' do its course flying for over 2 hours filling up my scenery files.This afternoon after reading through this thread I thought I would give Ray Keattch's suggestion a whirl.About an hour ago I renamed my fsx.cfg to fsx.cfg_current and then started up FSX. Off we went again flying the same course as last night but this time with the tiles 'preloaded'. After flying @ 110 knots for more than 20 mins @ 2000ft not one blurry. I could see FSX swapping the lower res tiles about 2 miles out in front with higher res ones. Out in the distance everything looked great.So if others would like to do this simple test, it is quite easy. You never know it could simply be a setting in the cfg file?(By the way I did re-install FSX a few days ago with no SP1 because Christian's TileProxy beta 4 is the most important add-on I have ;)

[Guest cbuchner1]

Some insights I gained during Tileproxy development:SP1 loads textures in a different way. Instead of loading the entire BMP texture, it just loads the header section, and then skips forward to the mipmap that it is actually interested in.FS9 and FSX RTM always loaded the entire file into a buffer and then extracted whatever it found necessary.With 680 kb BMP files in 1024x1024 pixel resolution the new loading strategy definitely makes a difference (i.e. SP1 is more economical and this saves a lot of I/O activity)The increased number of file accesses you see is because FSX SP1 now performs three individual reads per tile. That makes your log files appear longer. The total number of tiles opened should have stayed the same however.BTW if you fly at dawn or dusk (or near the poles, e.g. Friday Harbour), FSX will always load light map files as well, which about doubles the texture loading activity. So the blurries WILL be more pronounced if light maps are loaded as well.

[Guest vfr]

Hi PhilI suspect there are several factors at play here. Two that appear significant are:1. The priority that SP1 is placing on far v near textures2. Disk accesses of "out of area" photoscenery as per DD's postI've scanned around for more on (2) and snipped out a few relevant/confirmatory quotes below:http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...e=&topic_page=6"As I reported earlier, when starting a flight on the other side of the world (in my case, Japan) FSX insists on accessing all the UK VFR files, creating a pause at 5% for about two minutes.I have now found that FSX continues to access the VFR files during the Japan flight. Each burst of VFR access comes at regular intervals, on one occasion every 10 minutes, regular as clockwork. On another flight it occurred every 3 minutes, so the period is not fixed. But for a given flight the VFR accesses occur with quite a consistent period. During each cycle of VFR accesses the frame rate dips erratically, sometimes going from 20 FPS to 4 or 6!Yesterday I installed the new Mega Scenery Hawaii 1m photo real scenery. You probably guessed it: during a Japan flight FSX also accesses the Hawaii scenery in exactly the same way. This strongly suggests that the problem is not specific to the Horizon scenery, but that it is specific to photo real scenery.Actually, I think FSX tends to access *all* unrelated scenery files during a flight, but of course these photo real files tend to be very large. I should add that, although I see the frame rate readout fluctuating wildly during these VFR accesses, my system only shows moderate stuttering."http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...77060&mode=full "I've also found interesting things with FileMon. These are related to the installation of the England & Wales VFR (photo-real, 1 meter) scenery. We had recently established that when FSX is loading the first flight, it spends several minutes solidly accessing *all* the VFR bgl files - even if the flight is in Japan! During this time the progress bar is stuck on 5%I have now found that actually during the flight FSX also accesses the VFR files, in this case the flight was in Africa. Worse, during these VFR accesses the frame rates fell sharply, from above 16 FPS to 8 FPS, and sometimes to 4 or 6 FPS. I simply can't see why FSX should insist on accessing bgl files from half way around the world.It looks like there are major problems in FSX that are almost guaranteed to produce lower frame rates and stutters. It may be that the installation of many large VFR bgl files makes this situation worse. Adam Szofran was taking part in the thread and came up with a very useful cfg mod that stops FSX from preloading the default flight. But since we posted these findings Adam hasn't replied. I'm just going to add a post to that thread about my latest finding. I really hope Adam will respond, as I'm sure he could throw a lot of light on this puzzle"Additional from the Horizon forum: http://forum.horizonsimulation.com/viewtop...=asc&highlight="At first glance it looks as though this issue (FSX accessing GenX files when flying at the other side of the world) is indeed bizarre behaviour, but i've been thinking about it for a while and it may actually not be. It may be by design, but that's not to say it isn't causing problems.Since FSX now models the earth as a WGS84 ellipsoid, the calculations required for it to achieve this may in fact result in all files being accessed from around the globe, at least periodically, in order for it to be modelled 'properly'. Again that's not so say that this type of behaviour couldn't be changed or fine tuned by Microsoft but it may very well be the case.For example, if you are flying anywhere on the globe, FSX will need to at some point, and probably periodically, check the aircraft's location and then check in the scenery library for scenery which might need to be loaded to render the scene out to the edges of the LOD radius. Whether you're flying in the UK over GenX or flying in Japan might be irrelevant - FSX will need to at some points check where you are in order to load the correct scenery. If this didn't happen at all, you'd start a flight from a location and eventually 'fly out of scenery'"and more from the same thread:"I wondered also if FSX was checking files for geographical extents as you fly along. To test this, I ran a one hour Japan flight with the aircraft parked on the ground, so there was no movement. It made no difference. In this case it accessed all the VFR files every three minutes (when this occurs the frame rate drops and there is some stuttering).Also, as I believe George pointed out, FSX maintains a scenery index which is updated whenever *any* file is added or changed. Because of this FSX should not be repeatedly checking unrelated files - that's the whole point of the index. If it is checking files for geographical extents then it's almost certainly due to an error"I'm not technical, but this seems very odd, and consistent across various threads. Perhaps this warrants more intense investigation?We really appreciate all the support and engagement from Phil and the ACES team in these forums ;-)HTHAndy

[Guest Robin R.]

Good work Andy!I've ran into exactly the same problem with Horizon VFR England Vol1 thru Vol3. Some of the problems VFR has introduced are:1. Stutters when flying in the VFR scenery zone2. Reseting of Flight plans3. No autogen scenery4. No AI aircraft will fly5. Resetting every few seconds of IFR requested departsThese problems don't exist when using standard FSX scenery (say in US CA). It would appear that 3rd party add-ons -- just about all of them from MyTrafficX to Horizon to MegaScenery all have introduced problems under FSX-SP1. It's hard to say who is at fault, but obviously something not right is happening.As far as the blurries, I don't think there will be a solution for that any time soon. But you maybe onto something about just why the blurries are worse than pre-SP1.Rob.