active GEN/GES display ground "blurries"

[Johannes Butz]

Hi,

I bought GEN and GES on first of October and installed it into my simulator of choice (P3Dv4), but both regions started to display ground "blurries" on my system. I tweaked all possible settings (except the .cfg) within the simulator and FTX Central. I seem to not be able to get my P3D to display proper ground graphics with even the lowest settings in the "World" section of P3D and everything turned off in the regions' configurators.

 

Before I purchased the regions I used FTX Global, Vector, OpenLC EU and a third party mesh product in that area. With those add-ons I never encountered any texture or "blurring" problems, in fact I've been usually flying at around 50FPS with high settings in performance hungry aircraft (FSL A320X/PMDG 747) and had no problems.

 

My system consists of an Intel Core i5 7600K overclocked to 4.5Ghz, 16GB 3200Mhz Ram, a GTX 970 that is factory overclocked and a SATA III 6GB/s SSD that has nothing but the simulator and it's add-ons (except those that write into the Documents folder) on it. My SSD is definitely fast enough for loading the ground graphics into the simulator.

I did not tweak my .cfg, as this caused "blurries" in my P3Dv3. All other textures around the globe (FTX Global & OpenLC EU/NA) display normally. I completely reinstalled P3D v4 with new files from the 4.1 release and additionally made sure to delete all LM folders in AppData Roaming/Local and ProgramData directories before the new installation to achieve a completely "clean" install.

 

For add-on aircraft my range goes from the performance friendliest, the A2A Comanche 250 to the FSLabs A320. In all aircraft I encountered the textures being "blurred" while this effect was most noticeably in performance hungry aircraft. I also use Active Sky ASP4 with ASCA (512DXT textures) with live weather - wich was excellent the last couple days, there were no clouds or significant winds but this has no impact on the "blurries".

GEN/GES is uninstalled at the moment because there was no setting other than the uninstallation to recover sharp rendered ground textures. With that I changed back to my "normal" settings for complex aircraft wich display the ground very nicely, I see no difference whatsoever when setting LOD, Autogen draw distance or texture resolution within the regions. Outside of the regions my performance gets a little better (2-5fps).

 

Am I setting something incorrectly? My PC should be capable of loading the required data but somehow it does not do it correctly...

 

Regards,

Johannes Butz

[Doug Sawatzky]

Hi Johannes

 

The first thing I would do is turn your cloud coverage density and also turn your shadow settings waaaay down....it looks to me like you are asking your PC to draw massive amounts of high quality cloud shadows among other shadows for thousands of miles away, which will usually bring most PC's to thier knees. 

 

Cheers

 

Doug

[Nick Cooper]

A fellow customer with the same problem found that setting the frame rate

to 24 from unlimited solved the problem in one step.

 

[Johannes Butz]

Alright, first off thanks for your suggestions! I installed GES again and tested all settings (again), including those suggested by you guys.

 

7 hours ago, Doug Sawatzky said:

cloud coverage density

is dynamically changed by ASP4. In all tests before I had the best weather I could get with 0-15kts constant winds and no clouds or participation, basically ASP4 just reduced the visibility in the test scenarios before. I tested again without weather.

7 hours ago, Doug Sawatzky said:

turn your shadow settings waaaay down

seems to not make any difference, I guess due to LM "outsourcing" shadows to the GPU there's enough headroom, but I included it in my testing.

 

In further testing I've gone as low as P3D lets me with CPU/loading related tasks in my settings: This is not visually pleasing and I would not set my sim up like this, but it is a good demonstration.

 

Also I did not use any weather whatsoever to reduce the load. Fixing FPS at 20, 24, 30 and letting them go "unlimited" yielded the same results overall, as did the shadows even when compared to completely turned off!

 

The in-test results looked like this:

Here's GES with settings as above in the PMDG 747-400 at FL200 and 300kts: You can see that the edges are not rendered sharply and everything is sort of "washed" into each other, wich extends further when up at FL340.

I've slewed the aircraft into that position, then applied the settings to reload all textures (this displays the best quality textures on my system), then unpaused the sim for around 15 seconds to take the screenshot.

 

Here's a similar scenario at FlightBeam's KDEN: The ground edges are not blurred, they loose in quality further back in the fog (PTA).

I slewed the plane to the altitude and let it reduce the overspeed from slewing, then took the shot without reloading!

[Johannes Butz]

sorry, the images don't show up, here's them again. I noticed that in FSL's A320 in areas like Drzewiecki's NYC I get about 20fps and blurries when my fps are locked, when unlocked I'm getting 30-35fps without blurries...

 

Settings:

 

GES:

 

OLC NA:

 

[Johannes Butz]

It's not that I generally have blurries, I'm just getting them in GEN/GES regions... I did test my PC's performance further (with Fraps and HWMonitor) whilst flying the FSL A320 in hold 5000ft above New York with all Drzewiecki products they offer for the area. My CPU is at around 65-70% and my GPU ran up to 100% with the first settings I had posted. I've eased the GPU load which is now around 90-99% in this test, but still I'm getting blurries in GES/GEN. I achieve around 30-40FPS in the New York area (without blurries even though it has photo realistic ground textures) depending on the weather. I've also reduced my cloud texture size to 512px DXT within ASCA as well as setting my lower visibility to 20 miles in ASP4 to further enhance performance.

 

I don't own any other ORBX regions to test this with, but somehow I'm getting sharp ground textures everywhere else in the world, except in GES/GEN regions, no matter if I'm using very high or low settings... I would have expected about a 7FPS drop from "normal" OpenLC EU with Vector and Global but not blurries tbh

[Johannes Butz]

Update:

I upgraded my graphics card to a 1080 Ti (for dynamic lights) and further overclocked my CPU, I'm still not seeing a change regarding the blurries, even though my settings have not changed at all except for the dynamic lighting option. I've been testing again since first of november...

[Richard Lincoln]

Hi,

 

    More to your ticket, are you moving at 300Knts?  This converted to GS is very fast indeed, please try this scenario at say 3000ft at 160Knts. Should fix those blurries up.

[Johannes Butz]

Hi Richard,

 

I can't really remember what I did exactly, so I did some more tests with my current hardware setup and the 737NGX, 747v3, FSL A320 in managed speed scenarios; i.e. climbing at a maximum of 250kts up to FL100 and descending at 240kts. Also I've noticed the blurries would sometimes just pop away all at once when passing FL050 in the descent when I've had my CPU overclocked to 4.6GHz, but that led to instabilities in long haul flights.

 

As described above, I've got myself a 1080Ti and also a 1440p monitor; additionally I've changed my settings to have some headroom in both CPU and GPU left in day & night operations in dense areas like London or New York with around 30+FPS even in bad weather. In OpenLC regions the monitor helps to reduce the jaggered lines around textures at 1m texture resolution while it has seemingly no effect on the blurries, they seem to scale with the flight level.

This is how I first noticed that I had blurries in these regions, as I flew into GEN/GES from other countries covered within OpenLC. At FL350 the blurries look pretty much the same in their displayed size as they do when descending down to FL100, as if they would scale up & down dynamically with altitude.

In P3Dv3 I've had some blurries from time to time that were not noticeable from FL350, as they did not scale but stayed the same size, so they looked sharp from high altitudes.

 

Now - of course when flying managed, the 747 likes to fly at around Mach 0.8 and the A320 at Mach 0.77, which translates to around 450kts GS depending on the wind but up at cruise level I'm usually having maximums of 50% GPU and 40% CPU load with Core 1 at 80-90%, so theoretically there should be enough headroom to render the GEN/GES ground.

 

Specifically to your suggestion - I'm usually approaching via ILS, so from 4000-5000ft downwards my speeds are between 180kts-140kts, reducing with altitude with I would say VRef's between 136-158kts. On takeoff I'm mostly occupied with flying/configuring the aircraft and working the checklists instead of looking out of the window, so I wouldn't mind blurries in these scenarios.