resolved Blurry Road textures with Gold Coast Scenery

[LecLightning56]

Hello,

 

I am running Prepar3D v4.3 with Orbx Australia and Orbx Gold Coast and am seeing the attached blurry road textures (only the bridge on the right seems to be resolved correctly). I am using Orbx Vector for primary and secondary roads.

 

Is this normal, or should I be getting better resolution in road detail (I am amazed at  the level of detail in X-Plane comparatively) by simply using Orbx Gold Coast and the absence of Orbx Vector?

 

 

[Ridvan Celik]

I'm not 100% certain, but i do think it's a combination of limitations within the engine and your pc specs that affects the speed your pc can keep up with drawing the photoreal underlay. From what i have seen Xplane and Aerofly do this job much better. If you were to pause it there for a while you would slowly see it become higher resolution like the closer photoreal, something to do with LOD's from my understanding. 

[Nick Cooper]

Hello,

another helpful hint is to lock your frame rate at say 24.

This will release simulator resources from chasing framerates

and allow better focus more quickly.

[LecLightning56]

2 hours ago, Ridz2018 said:

I'm not 100% certain, but i do think it's a combination of limitations within the engine and your pc specs that affects the speed your pc can keep up with drawing the photoreal underlay. From what i have seen Xplane and Aerofly do this job much better. If you were to pause it there for a while you would slowly see it become higher resolution like the closer photoreal, something to do with LOD's from my understanding. 

 

The snapshot taken is actually frozen so I would expect that over a period of time the higher resolution detail would begin to materialize. This is not happening.

[Nick Cooper]

You are also zoomed in to 1.50x.

Most scenery, including photo inserts look better the further away from them that you are.

You could try 1x or even 0.7x but it will not suddenly look very much better than in your shot.

[LecLightning56]

I attach a copy from the Orbx website which shows The Gold Coast scenery. You can even make out chevron markings on the roads here, not the blurred mess I am seeing.

 

I am beginning to think that there is something wrong with how things are loading in my sim, not necessarily the hardware specs or how one chooses to view the scenery itself.

[Adam Banks]

8 hours ago, Nick Cooper said:

Hello,

another helpful hint is to lock your frame rate at say 24.

This will release simulator resources from chasing framerates

and allow better focus more quickly.

 

After many years' tweaking, I found the best solution was to do as Nick suggests (but lock it via NVI) AND set your "target" framerate in P3D to "unlimited". There's a common misconception that the P3D setting is a framerate limiter. IMHO, it is *not*: it's simply a target that P3D hopes to achieve - and it will implement a collection of measures to try to get there. My take on "unlimited" is that it's (in effect) an instruction to P3D to not do anything ie. not use any form of optimisation (I think that's what Nick may be referring to in his 2nd sentence). Of course, I could be wrong on that, LOL!

 

By this method, I have slightly slower loading (the odd micro-stutter) and slightly lower framerates all round, but I never lose textures over a period of time. Textures are just as detailed when I arrive at my destination as they were at my point of departure.

[LecLightning56]

At least X-Plane 11 (with the Orbx True Earth GB South) works straight out of the box. No unnecessary tweaking involved to achieve the required visual experience. I think that Prepar3d v4 has a long way to go and may need a complete overhaul of how it handles scenery and the loading of such data. More the pity that X-Plane is the "poor man" where the focus of development is concerned, but there are at least one or two excellent aircraft in recent years (e.g. FlightFactor A320) which are definitely up to the level of the FSL A320 in Prepar3d v4.

 

I have just loaded the A2A Cessna 172 in Prepar3D v4 and, surprisingly things look better. I can now see road detail such as chevron markings and the blurriness has largely gone. This warrants further investigation governing what is going on with the PMDG 777 compared with the A2A Cessna 172: the difference in frames is not that significant. I shall report back when I isolate the issue.

[Ridvan Celik]

2 hours ago, LecLightning56 said:

At least X-Plane 11 (with the Orbx True Earth GB South) works straight out of the box. No unnecessary tweaking involved to achieve the required visual experience. I think that Prepar3d v4 has a long way to go and may need a complete overhaul of how it handles scenery and the loading of such data. More the pity that X-Plane is the "poor man" where the focus of development is concerned, but there are at least one or two excellent aircraft in recent years (e.g. FlightFactor A320) which are definitely up to the level of the FSL A320 in Prepar3d v4.

 

I have just loaded the A2A Cessna 172 in Prepar3D v4 and, surprisingly things look better. I can now see road detail such as chevron markings and the blurriness has largely gone. This warrants further investigation governing what is going on with the PMDG 777 compared with the A2A Cessna 172: the difference in frames is not that significant. I shall report back when I isolate the issue.

The pmdg aircraft will be using much more resources. 

[Scott Harmes]

18 hours ago, LecLightning56 said:

I attach a copy from the Orbx website which shows The Gold Coast scenery. You can even make out chevron markings on the roads here, not the blurred mess I am seeing.

 

I am beginning to think that there is something wrong with how things are loading in my sim, not necessarily the hardware specs or how one chooses to view the scenery itself.

 

 

 

This is not a good comparison to make.  I can guarantee that whoever took this screenshot did not do so while flying a PMDG 777.  This is a complex aircraft which uses a lot of PC resources while flying it as it is drawing all the hi def modelling and making thousands of calculations as it replicates all the systems that are modelled.

 

If you were in the situation you were in the first screenshot, and you paused the sim, the textures around your aircraft would eventually sharpen up.  It may take some time, even a matter of minutes, as your PC needs to catch up to everything that is being rendered.  If you are flying a smaller, less complex aircraft, slower, then your PC has more resources to allocate to drawing the surrounding scenery.

 

To be honest, the first picture doesn't look too blurry to me, at least not close to the aircraft.  At a distance you can see a point where the textures become blurry, but I suspect that is due to a smaller LOD radius in your settings.  Increasing that will draw sharper textures further out, but it will also use more PC resources.

 

Cheers,

[Nick Cooper]

Hello again,

I don't think that the frame rate is as good an indicator of how hard the simulator is working

as is the V number.

You can see it if you add AverageFramerate= to your Prepar3D.cfg file.

 

Quote

[TextInfo.2]
FrameRate=1,1
LockedFrameRate=1,2
AverageFrameRate=1,3
FuelPercentage=1,5
[TextInfo.3]
Latitude=1,1
Longitude=1,2
Altitude=1,3
Heading=1,4
AirSpeed=1,5
WindDirectionAndSpeed=1,6
FrameRate=2,1
LockedFrameRate=2,2
AverageFramerate=2,3
FuelPercentage=2,4

 

 

Whether one sets a frame rate limit inside or outside the simulator (), the V number is always

lower with an achievable limit than without one.

The target is 0% which shows that the simulator is in control of its task.

 

                                                                                                  Lowest    Average   Highest    %variation                     

                                                                                                        v         v         v               v

 

Here you can see exactly the same view but the frame rate range is very large and the % variation much higher.

 

To me, this is an indication that the PC is having to work much harder

My theory is that the less resources that the simulator needs to throw towards the frame rate counter, the more it has available to

produce the best picture quality that it can.

In this specific case, the photo scenery should stay in focus for much longer and focus should be regained more quickly

with the frame rate limited to something achievable than without.

There is also the possibility that with a very resource hungry aircraft, the achievable frame rate would be too low to be acceptable.

This should then be an indication that the combination is not ideal and another should be a better choice.

 

[LecLightning56]

Just to be report that the problems associated with my original posting have now been resolved thanks to the installation of Prepar3D v4.4 today. The blurriness and rather messy appearance of the Orbx scenery has now transformed into something much more appealing and realistic (I can actually see detail in the ground textures and the roads are now well-defined). I think this demonstrates that, even on my modest system with a pretty ancient and now rather underpowered Intel processor comparitively, that improvements can be forthcoming in the simulator platform that may make even rather dated hardware work much better.

 

Saves splashing out a small fortune (£3000 - £4000+?) on a much higher spec computer! This gives me faith in the future of flight simulation that provided that the development team are willing to move towards more efficient rendering and optimisation in the code, that you do not have to spend vast sums on the computing equipment. I believe that I am correct in saying that X-Plane may hopefully be moving towards a better-performing engine which again should keep older PCs in good for years to come if the performance benefits are realised.

[Adam Banks]

I'm intrigued by this. You're saying that the upgrade from P3Dv4.3 to P3Dv4.4 had a marked [positive] effect? I hope so!

 

Have you checked that all your settings are the same as they were?

 

I upgraded from 4.3 to 4.4 yesterday but didn't manually delete my Prepar3D.cfg file beforehand, thinking that a client update might to it anyway. So ... it appears all my config settings remained intact - and I haven't noticed any difference in performance. That said - I've not experienced any issues either - other than the reintroduction of the dreaded "blobby" clouds, as I can't yet use PTA or TomatoShade (both of which have a clouds tweak that helps reduce that cheesy effect).

 

Of course, even a 1fps improvement would be welcome! I also have a very modest tired/old system.

 

Adam.