Been using AutoOrtho for a while and enjoying it. However, during an approach into LOWI last night, it just made my sim stutter it seemed and I've experienced some milder versions of that, unfortunately one of the known side-effects with loading this stuff on the fly.

Figured I'd go back to default textures for a while and absolutely expected the performance to be on par or even better... but I noticed, my FPS is lower universally using default textures. In some areas, especially sitting at LOWI the FPS is almost halved going default.

Sitting in this scene and getting sub-30 is just weird. I was just wondering what on earth is going on, what happens when I change back to default that has such an impact on my performance? Has anyone experienced something similar?

Both are with X-World 3.0 + Global Forests V2 + 12.06b2

AutoOrtho - 52ish FPS

Default - 27ish FPS

yes.

because default ground textures have to compute what already exists exists in ortho.

Typical compute v hdd space trade off.

This is one of the areas multicore draw from the new nodegraph that just went into 12.06b1 should help a lot with. But I don't care personally a great deal about it, because ortho looks a lot better anyway.

Edited July 31, 20232 yr by mSparks

That orthos provide slightly better framerates than the default terrain is nothing new (experienced it in XP11). But I don't really know why as the terrain complexity (mesh) is about the same. It could be that XP's autogen placement system is more resource intensive than simply displaying thousands of objects at fixed locations. Buggy/broken batching maybe?

Edited July 31, 20232 yr by Bjoern

I'm getting double frame rates with default compared to Orbx UK for example. X-world also eats up the fps - your CPU in the second picture is very high. But odd if you're using X-World in both. What's the fps in default without X-World? I recommend 3j-fps for keeping the fps high in densely populated areas.

Edited July 31, 20232 yr by UKflyer

1 minute ago, Bjoern said:

But I don't really know why as the terrain complexity (mesh) is about the same.

2D autogen has a lot, lot more geometry to throw around a compute, that takes a lot of time.

Ortho does the same with just a large texture which just sits in VRAM and is read as needed, effectively not using any CPU or GPU time.

The "solution" is to compile the autogen into a texture in the background then send that over to the GPU as needed, but doing that requires a nodegraph (to decide what to compile to the texture) and the ability to replace terrain textures on the fly (which currently isn't possible, although autoortho has a nice workaround, it only applies to the first load)

Orthos can be much simpler to render than the default scenery textures as they're simply single images wrapped on a 3D model. However, the default scenery has different layers and blending to give the different terrain effects with various textures blended together, overlayed etc. so it actually can be more work than just using ZL16/17 orthos and thus what you may be experiencing.

 

On 7/31/2023 at 10:17 PM, tonywob said:

Orthos can be much simpler to render than the default scenery textures as they're simply single images wrapped on a 3D model. However, the default scenery has different layers and blending to give the different terrain effects with various textures blended together, overlayed etc. so it actually can be more work than just using ZL16/17 orthos and thus what you may be experiencing.

 

That makes sense. Thanks for the explanation.

Appreciate the replies. The explanations do seem reasonable but seeing my framerate almost halved in certain areas by going default terrain just seems crazy to me. As mentioned, possibly buggy / broken batching or something else? Who knows.

Only thing that really bothers me with ortho, as you can also see in the screenshot, a lot of the trees are shifting to spring / fall colours. Can you make that be based off dates alone, to avoid that?

43 minutes ago, Sethos said:

Only thing that really bothers me with ortho, as you can also see in the screenshot, a lot of the trees are shifting to spring / fall colours. Can you make that be based off dates alone, to avoid that?

Orthos generated by Ortho4XP 1.30 are lacking the seasonal information present in the mesh that the default tiles have, hence the default forests don't work correctly.

I wrote a command-line tool that patches these orthos so they work correctly and I keep meaning to post it up on X-Plane.org for others to run. I'll get round to doing it one day 

4 hours ago, tonywob said:

Orthos generated by Ortho4XP 1.30 are lacking the seasonal information present in the mesh that the default tiles have, hence the default forests don't work correctly.

I wrote a command-line tool that patches these orthos so they work correctly and I keep meaning to post it up on X-Plane.org for others to run. I'll get round to doing it one day 

Ah, I see. I'd really appreciate it if you'd consider uploading that in the near future, it's one of those pet peeves that I find really distracting 😅 Love all the work that you do for the community.