To Bloom or Not to Bloom

[Tony P 160]

Am I the only person who noticed the frame rate effect with the Light Bloom setting on ? It cuts my FPS is half when in use. I kinda like the "eye candy" this setting gives but not for the price I pay with FPS.Thoughts ??Tony

[Guest steve43]

Afraid so Tony, bloom is great if you have the power to use it but probably for a lot of us its a frame-drain. The GPU has to render the screen twice when bloom is on which cuts your frame-rate dramatically. At least that is what I think happens, someone more technical may be able to help.Steve

[Guest]

Yes, that's what happens. I think most people have bloom off. I rather have water at 2x than bloom. It's one or the other, really, even with my 8800GTX. (Water at 2x also requires an extra 'renderinground'.) And btw I do not notice too much of that bloom effect: if I'm not mistaken you see NOTHING bloom as long as you stay in the VC. And since I rarely go outside my plane while flying (who does IRL...?) I do not miss bloom that much. As said, I rather spend the extra GPU-cycle to water at 2x high, which REALLY makes a difference! I just LOVE to see those Norwegian mountains reflected in the water!

[Guest jshyluk]

Bloom is a frame rate killer for me. The most dramatic bloom effect, to my mind, are lighted runway lights, although there seem to be bits and pieces of bloom effect everywhere in FSX, even in VC mode. I am of the opinion that the FSX palette of colours is optimized with bloom on, but that's just my view. Jeff ShylukAvsim Product Reviewer

[ryanbatc 12,846]

I run it off, and have 2x water low. Although, 2x water low doesn't hurt my FPS as nearly as bad as light bloom.

[Guest Irishman]

After SP1, I used Bloom most of the time. However, since installing ASX/GEX, I haven't needed Bloom at all. Their default lighting looks like Bloom anyway.

[Guest DK8290]

I have bloom off. It's just another thing to look forward to in years on a more powerful system than my current ;-)

[Guest]

Bloom is incredibly lame for what it does in FSX... the fps cost/benefit ratio just sucks.

[DadJokeCinema 145]

>I run it off, and have 2x water low. Although, 2x water low>doesn't hurt my FPS as nearly as bad as light bloom.>>If I recall correctly, 2.x low doesn't render reflections in the water, so it cuts out those additional passes.

[Guest Bottle]

I've not understood the inclusion of bloom in FSX at all. Considering how realistically the sun, and 'sun-dazzle' is portrayed in something like the IL2:Forgotten Battles series, with no FPS impact, I just don't see why ACES implemented bloom. (I suspect this is how ASX/GEX does the sun as well).While I'm on this subject, why does the rendering of water in the IL2:Forgotten Battles series look 10X better than in FSX, and yet it has had no/little FPS impact on that game since series 7 NVidia cards were released?

[JimmiG 244]

Because the FSX engine simply isn't very efficent or well written. When was the last time someone complained about blurries in IL2?