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No really, I broke it, but it does work great now! Caveat: What I did is probably wholly useless for the high-flying commercial pilots - this is strictly a GA environment with Orbx terrain and textures. First, some background. I purchased P3D V2.4 for my Christmas gift and have been fighting it for the last three weeks to improve terrain textures. I fly strictly GA, maybe a bizjet or two, and find that ground textures, clarity, and crisp autogen are paramount to my flying experience. After all, if I were in a real GA airplane I would not be fiddling with the FMS or other distractions. Nope, I would be scanning the sky, but equally importantly, scanning the ground. I want to look down and see (in an ideal world) the guy mowing his lawn, the different neighborhoods, people playing on the beach, etc. While this level of detail is impossible outside of an Orbx airport, I really find it distracting to have blurred textures when I am flying. If they resolve themselves at LOD radius = 1 right under the plane, so be it - as long as they resolve! Jitters are another bugaboo, but not as bothersome as blurries to my eyes. Flying in a WACO, C337, or the A2A C182T does not usually pose a problem: they are slow enough that the terrain resolves itself. In fact, flying the C182T was the thing that really opened my eyes to how much detail I was missing in other, faster aircraft! The terrain clarity is stunning while flying that bird, a combination of a great model and relatively low speed. However, as the speeds ramped up, the terrain begins to blur. This is particularly true for the Legacy, which is a little hot-rod in a class of its own for combining sight-seeing visibility and effortless speed at tree-top levels. After trying a TON of different things, I accidentally introduced a combination of features that essentially "broke" the P3D V2.4 CPU consumption model, such that NO SINGLE CPU IS SATURATED and therefore presenting a bottleneck. Through a combination of enabling hyper-threading (which I always found to be a detriment in FSX and P3D V1.4), assigning affinity to system resources but having a mismatch on CPU affinity in Prepar3D.CFG, and really cranking up FFTF and SWT, I have a system that allows me to fly the Legacy over Portland, OR (Orbx PNW) at 200 knots and 2,500 feet with no blurries, very few jitters, smooth turns, and while FPS dips into the low 20's, everything is smooth. I have never been much of frame hound, as long as it is smooooooth. Here is how I did it. I recently picked up Process Lasso, a terrific little program that allows you to easily slice and dice CPU affinity and priorities. While my first efforts were rewarding (move everything that was not part of the flight sim ecosystem to CPU 0), I was still frustrated, as virtual core 0 for P3D was hammered and clearly representing a bottleneck. Remembering OZwhitey and his experiments with the 6-core 5280, I turned on hyper-threading and, using Process Lasso, assigned affinity for P3D to threads 2-7, leaving threads 1-2 to system activities and Opus ESI. Oh, and I also clicked the box that said "This is a game" based upon the described benefits. Yeah, I know - it hurts... ^_^ This worked great, and there was a massive improvement in smoothness and visual clarity. Wait a minute - I had failed to change the affinity mask in my Prepar3d.CFG file and it was left at Affinity=14, i.e., cores 1-3 in a non-hyper-threaded 4 core processor. I checked Task Manager, which I always leave running during testing to monitor CPU and VAS consumption, and to my utter surprise NONE of the six active threads hosting P3D was hammered! Whoa! They weren't even, with maybe the highest at 60-percent and the lowest at 30-percent, but again, none of them was completely saturated. Conducting a short test by commenting out my affinity mask setting in my CFG file showed that P3D behavior reverted back to normal, i.e., virtual CPU 0 was hammered again. Crossing my fingers, I reinstated the affinity mask and we were back to all six threads active, but none of them hammered. Magic or voodoo, not sure which, but it works! I think part of it is the Process Lasso "game" setting, but have yet to test what happens when I turn it off. This opened the skies (pardon the pun)! I now had sufficient CPU cycles to improve terrain texture behavior, and through a bit of reading and trial and error bucket tests (use a small bucket - see what happens - use a big bucket - see what happens, retry until the optimal bucket size is reached, i.e., a binary sort) I arrived at FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION=0.50 and SWAP_WAIT_TIMEOUT=50. Now, I know there has been some chatter on AVSIM about setting FFTF=0.01 and people reporting good frame rates, but that, at least to me, was voodoo. I have riding fast motorcycles long enough to know that "more" is better than "less" (smoothness not withstanding), and you don't get to go fast unless you add more. After all, the purpose of FFTF is to provide enough CPU cycles to process the terrain textures. The other variable is SWT. My understanding is that this is the amount of time the sim will wait, after which it assumes that terrain processing has been completed. Together, they seem to represent the primary "knobs" for tuning terrain processing. After putting this combination in place (and yes, there was a LOT of serendipity involved in the whole process), I have a sim that allows me to fly the Legacy over heavily populated Vancouver, WA or Portland, OR at 2,500 feet at 200 knots and have fully resolved terrain under me. Sometime it resolves late, sometimes early, but it is never falls behind and turns into a blurry mess. Even flying into Orbx KTVL, which was just brutal on my P3D V1.4 installation, is smooth and unblurred. Just for grins, I decreased altitude to 1,500 feet above Portland @ 200 knots, and while the terrain was fully resolved I was getting a wee bit too many jitters, suggesting that some other P3D process was being starved for resources. There is still some tuning to go, that's for sure, but I feel much better having a "broken" foundation under my wings that responds, in a deterministic manner, to input! Oh, and trying different affinity masks in the CFG file? Ain't gonna happen... Fourteen is just fine. Finally, just to show you how weird things can get, I had micro-stutters after my "fix" that were just distracting. Turns out the combination of my GTX 780 and 2560 x 1440 ASUS monitor is incapable of holding down 60 hertz, but was only producing 59. Using NI I changed to match and viola, no more micro stutters. Isn't tweaking fun?!?!?! Here are my CFG settings if anybody wants to comment/copy. I put all the "tweaks" up top so they are easily accessible, and this is not the entire CFG file. Note that there are still some compromises - my LOD radius is down from 6.5 to 5.5, and scenery complexity is "normal". However, Orbx building and tree density seems to be uncoupled from general scenery complexity, so I can keep those high. Love my vegetation! // // CFG file constructed on 2015-01-19 // Variables that determine performance are set up front // [JOBSCHEDULER] AffinityMask=14 [BUFFERPOOLS] Bufferpools=0 USEPOOLS=0 Poolsize=0 // // [Display] TEXTURE_FILTERING=16 MSAA=8 SSAA=0 VSYNC=1 FXAA=0 TRIPLE_BUFFER=1 SKINNED_ANIMATIONS=1 TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=40 UPPER_FRAMERATE_LIMIT=30 TEXTUREMAXLOAD=27 WideViewAspect=True FullScreen=True FullScreenExclusive=True FullScreenAutoFill=True ChangeTime=4.000000 TransitionTime=4.000000 ActiveWindowTitleTextColor=255,255,255 ActiveWindowTitleBackGroundColor=0,28,140,64 NonActiveWindowTitleTextColor=255,255,255 NonActiveWindowTitleBackGroundColor=24,33,87,64 InfoUpperRightTextColor=255,0,0 InfoUpperRightBackGroundColor=0,0,0,0 InfoLowerLeftTextColor=255,255,255 InfoLowerLeftBackGroundColor=255,0,0,128 InfoLowerRightTextColor=255,255,255 InfoLowerRightBackGroundColor=255,0,0,128 InfoBrakesEnable=True InfoParkingBrakesEnable=True InfoPauseEnable=True InfoSlewEnable=True InfoStallEnable=True InfoOverspeedEnable=True InfoWeaponSystemEnable=True InfoCountermeasureEnable=True // // [SCENERY] POP_FREE_AUTOGEN=1 AUTOGEN_BATCH_LOD=2 AUTOGEN_TREE_MAX_DRAW_DISTANCE=11000.000000 // // from 9500, max 12000 AUTOGEN_TREE_MIN_DISTANCE_TO_LOD=5500.000000 // // from 2500, max 6500 IMAGE_COMPLEXITY=2 // // [TERRAIN] SWAP_WAIT_TIMEOUT=50 // from 30 LOD_RADIUS=5.500000 TESSELLATION_FACTOR=90 MESH_RESOLUTION=23 TEXTURE_RESOLUTION=28 AUTOGEN_VEGETATION_DENSITY=4 AUTOGEN_BUILDING_DENSITY=4 DETAIL_TEXTURE=1 WATER_REFLECT_CLOUDS=0 WATER_REFLECT_USERAIRCRAFT=0 WATER_REFLECT_SIMOBJECTS=0 WATER_REFLECT_TERRAIN=1 WATER_REFLECT_AUTOGEN_VEGETATION=0 WATER_REFLECT_AUTOGEN_BUILDINGS=1 WATER_REFRACT_CLOUDS=0 WATER_REFRACT_USERAIRCRAFT=0 WATER_REFRACT_SIMOBJECTS=0 WATER_REFRACT_TERRAIN=0 WATER_REFRACT_AUTOGEN_VEGETATION=0 WATER_REFRACT_AUTOGEN_BUILDINGS=0 ENABLE_BATHYMETRY=0 WATER_CLARITY=30 WATER_DETAIL=3 // // [DISPLAY.Device.NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780.0.0] Mode=2560x1440x32 Anisotropic=1 // // [Main] AlwaysFullLoad=1 FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION=0.50 // from 0.33 User Objects=Airplane, Helicopter, Submersible, ExternalSim SimObjectPaths.0=SimObjects\Airplanes SimObjectPaths.1=SimObjects\Rotorcraft SimObjectPaths.2=SimObjects\GroundVehicles SimObjectPaths.3=SimObjects\Boats SimObjectPaths.4=SimObjects\Animals SimObjectPaths.5=SimObjects\Misc SimObjectPaths.6=SimObjects\Submersible SimObjectPaths.7=SimObjects\Weapons SimObjectPaths.8=SimObjects\Countermeasures LabelsSupported=Airplane, Helicopter LocationFullScreen=-201,0,2359,1440,\\.\DISPLAY1 Maximized=1 HideMenuNormal=0 HideMenuFullscreen=1 // // [GRAPHICS] SHADER_CACHE_VERSION=1 MIPMAP_VC_PANELS=1 TESSELLATION=1 TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD=1024 NUM_LIGHTS=4 COCKPIT_HIGH_LOD=1 AIRCRAFT_REFLECTIONS=1 LANDING_LIGHTS=1 DAWN_DUSK_SMOOTHING=1 LENSFLARE=0 HDR=0 BLOOM_LEVEL=2 SHADOW_QUALITY=2 TERRAIN_SHADOW_CAST_DISTANCE=0 CLOUD_SHADOW_CAST_DISTANCE=3 OBJECT_SHADOW_CAST_DISTANCE=1 CONTENT_NO_SHADOW=0 INTERIOR_SHADOWS_CAST=0 EXTERIOR_SHADOWS_CAST=1 SIMOBJECT_SHADOWS_CAST=0 TERRAIN_SHADOWS_CAST=0 VEGETATION_SHADOWS_CAST=0 BUILDING_SHADOWS_CAST=0 CLOUD_SHADOWS_CAST=1 INTERIOR_SHADOWS_RECEIVE=1 EXTERIOR_SHADOWS_RECEIVE=1 SIMOBJECT_SHADOWS_RECEIVE=0 TERRAIN_SHADOWS_RECEIVE=1 VEGETATION_SHADOWS_RECEIVE=0 BUILDING_SHADOWS_RECEIVE=0 SHADOW_NUM_CASCADES_LOW=4 SHADOW_NUM_CASCADES_MID=5 SHADOW_NUM_CASCADES_HIGH=7 SHADOW_NUM_CASCADES_ULTRA=12 GROUND_SHADOW_TEXTURE_SIZE=2048 CLOUD_SHADOW_TEXTURE_SIZE=512 SHADOW_LOG_PARTITION_LOW=0.850000 SHADOW_LOG_PARTITION_MID=0.850000 SHADOW_LOG_PARTITION_HIGH=0.850000 SHADOW_LOG_PARTITION_ULTRA=0.850000 EFFECTS_QUALITY=2 EFFECTS_DISTANCE=2 TEXTURE_QUALITY=3 IMAGE_QUALITY=1 See_Self=1 Text_Scroll=1