answered TrueEarth Florida HD/SD

[jonesm35205]

I have tried downloading both the HD and SD versions into my sim and I am getting extremely long load times of

15 to 20 minutes no matter which version is used.  I have all the other TrueEarth Products for X-Plane and they

have a little longer then normal load but nothing like this.   Can you tell me what my problem could be ?    Also I

have taken some screen shots of Disney's Magic Kingdom .  Is this what its suppose to look like ?  Not understanding

where all the parking lots and roads are.  the scenery looks like that in most places.   I have tried Default and Transparent

Textures and get the same.   Below shot (not sure why it shows it twice) is with Transparent Textures. Thank You so much

in advance..    Mark     

My Orbx order receipt 5e3c07193e54c

 

 

Log.txt

[Tony Wroblewski]

No, it looks like the sim is really struggling to load the scenery (hence the blurred scenery and long loading times)

 

What are you system specs and what is the drive you have this installed on, it seems to me like the drive is really struggling to catch up

 

 

[Meta]

I've noticed the same issue on my i9 16GB GTX1070 8GB machine.  My sim used to load ZL17 Ortho in the same area from the same drive in about 3-4 minutes.  Now it's taking about 10 or more from the same drive.  I have TE Washington and never noticed any issue for that.  It's really nice but, wow, that's a long time.

 

Gregg

[jonesm35205]

Hello Tony and thanks for responding. 

 

My CPU is a I7 9700K (clock boost to nearly 5.0)

Motherboard is a Z390 gAMING X-CF

GPU is a Titan Xp (12 Gb of VRAM) 

32 Gb of Ram. 

 

I have the product on a Western Digital External Drive.    My other TrueEarth Products are all on this same drive and are

automatically linked over to the XPlane 11 M.2 SSD Internal drive.  My load times for other TrueEarths are like 8 minutes total 

but this one one time took almost 30 minutes now.    Can you show me what this area of TrueEarth is suppose to look

like ?    Thank You..

[Meta]

I just loaded a flight as a test at KPIE St. Petersburg and it took 17 minutes.  By comparison, loading up at KSEA Seattle took 4 minutes.  

 

Gregg

[jonesm35205]

Hi Meta,

 

I have no idea what the issue is with this package.   it loads slowly and just doesn't look as well as all the other

X-plane 11 TrueEarth packages.   You saw my picture above,  can you load into KMCO and go over to the Magic

Kingdom to see if your scenery looks the same as mine ?   I would just like to know how many issues we are

dealing with here.   Is it just the long download or is their truly something wrong with the what it looks like also. 

If only loading then at least I know everyone else is seeing the same thing below their plane as I do .   Thanks 

for checking if you can and I look forward to seeing what you say.    By the way, I just actually moved my Florida

to another drive and it still takes a long while to load and it looks exactly the same.   

[Jon Clarke]

1 hour ago, jonesm35205 said:

Hi Meta,

 

I have no idea what the issue is with this package.   it loads slowly and just doesn't look as well as all the other

X-plane 11 TrueEarth packages.   You saw my picture above,  can you load into KMCO and go over to the Magic

Kingdom to see if your scenery looks the same as mine ?   I would just like to know how many issues we are

dealing with here.   Is it just the long download or is their truly something wrong with the what it looks like also. 

If only loading then at least I know everyone else is seeing the same thing below their plane as I do .   Thanks 

for checking if you can and I look forward to seeing what you say.    By the way, I just actually moved my Florida

to another drive and it still takes a long while to load and it looks exactly the same.   

I am going to load flights at both KMCO and KPIE. I have a reasonable PC spec rig, but I use the SD version of all the TE US series addons, as it allows me to have much higher graphics settings than I could have if I had the HD version installed. I would normally fly in 4K (3840x2160) as I have a 4K monitor, but choose to fly some areas like Miami, London, LA, Seattle in 2K because the performance I get is so much better and smoother at that resolution and high graphics settings than I get at lower graphics settings but in 4K.

Any pic I show will be from above 1200ft because with the SD version and high graphics settings, I see hardly any difference than I would with the HD version and the HD version is more suited resolution wise to flying very low and slow. You will still have slightly blurred imagery even with HD at very low level.

SD loads in about 3 minutes on my PC with my settings, occupies only about 45Gb of disk space.

[Jon Clarke]

7 hours ago, jonesm35205 said:

Hello Tony and thanks for responding. 

 

My CPU is a I7 9700K (clock boost to nearly 5.0)

Motherboard is a Z390 gAMING X-CF

GPU is a Titan Xp (12 Gb of VRAM) 

32 Gb of Ram. 

 

I have the product on a Western Digital External Drive.    My other TrueEarth Products are all on this same drive and are

automatically linked over to the XPlane 11 M.2 SSD Internal drive.  My load times for other TrueEarths are like 8 minutes total 

but this one one time took almost 30 minutes now.    Can you show me what this area of TrueEarth is suppose to look

like ?    Thank You..

Your loading time is due to the read/write speed of the external disk and the amount of data it has to read. I  TE Florida is 130GB. I know this as a fact because I too have a Western Digital external drive. Mine is a 4TH USB3 drive. The read/write speed of that drive is about 120MB/s

I attach pics below of the read speeds of my Disks.  

The first is of the Western Digital external USB3.

 

The second is one of my SSDs

 

The third is of my NVME2

 

You can therefore clearly see that the load time for TE Florida on your external disk is a major factor along with your (unknown) graphics settings in XP. The higher for example your Texture Quality setting is in XP will affect also your loading time. You can test that by lowering all your settings to XP default and load a Florida flight. Then revert back to your normal settings and make a comparison.

[Jon Clarke]

Here are 3 pics. One from around KMCO and one from KPIA. I don't know where Magic Kingdom is in relation to KMCO but the pic is to show the image quality from 2 locations at around 1200 to 2000ft. with a pic of my XP settings for TE Florida SD.

KMCO at 1700ft

 

KPIE at 1200ft

 

My XP settings:

[jonesm35205]

Hi Jon,

 

I have my X-Plane 11 running on a M.2 SSD drive and for the heck of it I moved my TrueEarth Florida onto another SSD Drive instead

of a regular HDD Drive where all my other Orbx products are.  I wanted to see if there was a difference.  The load was better I guess

then 20 to 30 minutes but was still just a touch over 10 minutes.   And the scenery looked the same.   I have all other TrueEarth products

in SD format and I had Florida the same until I saw the scenery and thought maybe I need to see it in HD.   But it looks the same and not 

as good as my other TrueEarths for some reason.    I will put my Benchmarks in here as well.  Hopefully you can read them as I use 

ATTO Disk Benchmark and it puts my files in a .bmk format.  D drive is X-Plane 11 SDD M.2 and E SSD is where Florida is.  

Thank You. 

D (SDD) Drive Test.bmk E (SDD) Drive Test.bmk

[jonesm35205]

Forgot to put my X-Plane 11 settings in here. 

 

 

[Jon Clarke]

Agreed that the cold start load time is way higher than after you change location and XP has not been shut down. KMCO initially was about 5-6 minutes, change location to KPIE was under 3 minutes, but it must be noted that the TE Florida in my PC is on a very fast NVME2 disk and my settings are exactly like in Nicks pic.

9 minutes ago, jonesm35205 said:

Hi Jon,

 

I have my X-Plane 11 running on a M.2 SSD drive and for the heck of it I moved my TrueEarth Florida onto another SSD Drive instead

of a regular HDD Drive where all my other Orbx products are.  I wanted to see if there was a difference.  The load was better I guess

then 20 to 30 minutes but was still just a touch over 10 minutes.   And the scenery looked the same.   I have all other TrueEarth products

in SD format and I had Florida the same until I saw the scenery and thought maybe I need to see it in HD.   But it looks the same and not 

as good as my other TrueEarths for some reason.    I will put my Benchmarks in here as well.  Hopefully you can read them as I use 

ATTO Disk Benchmark and it puts my files in a .bmk format.  D drive is X-Plane 11 SDD M.2 and E SSD is where Florida is.  

Thank You. 

D (SDD) Drive Test.bmk 3.98 kB · 0 downloads E (SDD) Drive Test.bmk 3.94 kB · 0 downloads

Are my pics any better or the same as what you are seeing?

What is your screen res?

[Jon Clarke]

6 minutes ago, jonesm35205 said:

Forgot to put my X-Plane 11 settings in here. 

 

 

Try moving your texture quality setting up one notch. Remember for the change to take effect you need to exit and restart XP. 

[jonesm35205]

What you are showing me kinda looks the same in certain areas.   Would love to know what your view is over where I was at Magic Kingdom.  That would 

tell me the downloaded scenery is good to go.   So sorry for this, I just have not had any issues with anything else and since I have all other TrueEarths 

I obviously love the products and how they look.    I have a 34 inch Ultra Wide with 2560 x 1080.

[jonesm35205]

Moved up Texture slider one notch and will report back download time and results.   Just sits at Reading new scenery files.  grr. 

talk to ya in a bit.

[jonesm35205]

Hi Jon,

 

Now I am baffled.   Download was like 3 to 4 minutes and my scenery looks fine.   I will show you the Magic Kingdom shot and look at

the first picture of this post.   They look totally different.   Weird.  

[Jon Clarke]

I found Magic Kingdom. My pic shows a lot more detail than the pic you first posted. Your initial pic showed a lot of missing autogen/objects etc from the overlay and Custon files.

Glad yours is looking OK now.

My pic is at 2050ft, SD version with the XP settings I posted previously

 

 

[jonesm35205]

Very nice.   I think I am gonna uninstall HD and bring in SD like all my others.   I love saving the download space and I cannot really see much difference

to them.    I sure wish their was a easier and quicker way to switch between them.   Uninstalling and reinstalling takes a lot of time.   Thank you very

much for coming on here and going through this with me Jon.    Very much appreciated. 

[Jon Clarke]

You are welcome. Unless you want to fly around at under 2000ft in a chopper or aerolite I find the SD versions have advantages in performance and load times plus of course disk space.

[Nick Cooper]

@Meta

Hello Gregg,

 

if it's any help:

Environment: 7200 HDD, Florida HD, loading for the first time after PC cold start, loading at KPIE:

17 minutes.

 

However: 

Environment: 7200 HDD, Florida HD, second time of loading at KPIE after restarting X Plane 11 only:

3 minutes

 

and

Environment: 7200 HDD, Washington HD, loading for the first time after PC cold start, loading at KSEA:

10 minutes

 

Environment: 7200 HDD, Washington HD, second time of loading at KSEA after restarting X Plane 11 only:

3 minutes

 

Also relevant:

 

Please ensure that your comparisons are in the same environments as each other or they are not valid.

 

I do find that just like P3D, if I have vast areas of photo scenery active in its "scenery library", the more there is, the

longer X plane 11 takes to load it.

 

However again:

I took out all other photo scenery and loaded at KPIE from cold and it still took 17  minutes, so I think that you have

indeed identified a problem or perhaps it's just the complexity of the area.

 

 

[Tony Wroblewski]

One of the reasons for the longer loading times is the large amount of small files needed for the tree/roof colour matching. All those files have to be loaded from disk, and if it's on a mechanical disk then it's going to take longer (especially if the disk is fragmented). SSD drives will fair much better, but I realise this isn't practical for many. I have 3-4 minutes loading times on an SSD disk.

 

I've had a discussion about this with Laminar Research about possible ways to improve loading times in TE regions, i.e. Using single archives instead of thousands of files. Hopefully it's something they'll look in to after the vulkan update is out.

 

[Jon Clarke]

9 hours ago, Meta said:

I've noticed the same issue on my i9 16GB GTX1070 8GB machine.  My sim used to load ZL17 Ortho in the same area from the same drive in about 3-4 minutes.  Now it's taking about 10 or more from the same drive.  I have TE Washington and never noticed any issue for that.  It's really nice but, wow, that's a long time.

 

Gregg

 

Just to add to Tony's comments above and specifically to the loading time of your previous ZL17 Orth4xp/Forkboy Ortho:

 

TE Florida is far more detailed than any Forkboy or Ortho4xp with overlay. Ortho/Forkboy overlays are extremely basic, and not anywhere near the file size of TE. TE Florida Overlay is 10.5GB and the Custom folder is almost 2.5GB. Compare the ortho4xp overlay file size and you will see clearly that TE Florida is much greater in detail.

Also note that long loading times and detail problems with the other customer on this topic @jonesm35205 have improved.

[Meta]

2 hours ago, Tony Wroblewski said:

One of the reasons for the longer loading times is the large amount of small files needed for the tree/roof colour matching. All those files have to be loaded from disk, and if it's on a mechanical disk then it's going to take longer (especially if the disk is fragmented). SSD drives will fair much better, but I realise this isn't practical for many. I have 3-4 minutes loading times on an SSD disk.

 

I've had a discussion about this with Laminar Research about possible ways to improve loading times in TE regions, i.e. Using single archives instead of thousands of files. Hopefully it's something they'll look in to after the vulkan update is out.

 

Okay so, first off, red faced, a mea culpa...I'd forgotten that for my KSEA load time that my Washington is the SD version.  So, that probably explains the reason it loads way faster.  I also wondered about all the textures and all new those objects that TE has added.  A LOT of objects.  It would, obviously, be very cool if X-Plane could improve load performance.  I have no complaints about performance once loaded.  The libraries seem very efficient in that regard.

 

 

4 hours ago, Jon Clarke said:

Here are 3 pics. One from around KMCO and one from KPIA. I don't know where Magic Kingdom is in relation to KMCO but the pic is to show the image quality from 2 locations at around 1200 to 2000ft. with a pic of my XP settings for TE Florida SD.

KMCO at 1700ft

 

KPIE at 1200ft

 

My XP settings:

 

Hmmm.  What you're saying in this and your other posts makes sense.  I have to ask.  Is the HD version that much better than SD?  The pictures you posted here look fairly similar to what I'm seeing in HD, I think.  I fly about 50% of my time in and around Florida or most of my long cross-countries start or end there so I really like having good scenery there.  On the other hand, if it's not worth it that's another matter.  On my Florida I'd had ZL17 and mixed in some ZL19 in some rare places near some airports and some places I have a personal attachment to, like the park on the water near downtown St. Pete.  (On a completely separate note, it could be nice to see a hybrid approach to some of these areas...a mix of SD and HD which a fair number of people do.)  

 

Visually, do you see much difference between HD and SD?  Visually, I think the HD hits it's sweet spot, where it looks really HD at about 7000 ft.  How much better, in terms of frames, is your performance when you compare the two?  Have you any kind of stats on that?  I may move my installation to SSD but, for performance, I might downgrade my installation to SD.

 

BTW, in terms of other photoreal in the area, I've done my best to eliminate any overlapping Ortho but it's possible that I might have a bit on the north and east side of the state since I can't tell precisely where your tiles end and where I need to pick up for my Bahamas and Georgia Ortho, both of which are set to be under Florida HD.  This, obviously, won't be a problem once you get those areas finished....   (Go ahead, slide right up the coast if you want.)

 

Thanks to both of you for your time and help!

 

Gregg

[Meta]

One other thing.  I've noticed twice, once flying south from Jacksonville and again flying north from KEYW, a long area of scenery that stretches across the state, that doesn't load right away.  The scenery around it looks fine, even the scenery beyond it looks fine...but that one gigantic rectangle takes a long, long time to load.  I took a screenshot the last time it happened and I'll see if I can upload it.  My system had 1.5 GB of VRAM free when it happened.

 

Gregg

[Jon Clarke]

The main difference between SD and HD is seen best at below 2000-2500ft where the fidelity and resolution of the ground textures are a bit sharper. What i find by using  SD is that I can have my graphics settings higher and much better fps and smoothness in flight in nearly all areas regardless of autogen density. You have to cut your cloth accordingly with HD. If I use my native resolution of 3840x2160 I don't need max AA settings so 2xFXAA/SSAA is fine. I do need to turn down a notch my Texture Quality and HDR.

With SD I use a 2560x1440 resolution and the XP settings are maxed as shown in my Settings pic. I also use the Nvidia Sharpening option and X-Vision and UWXP which all help enhance the visuals. The result is that at 2000ft and above I see hardly any difference in image quality, personally. I have old eyes so much younger folk may disagree, but I have shown you pics of what my results are with SD installed. The TE series are loaded with objects etc as mentioned by Tony and therefore are particularly demanding. I don't know if you have TE Washington, but there is an Enhancement Pack offered and it is advised that it's maximum option settings would require ate least 11GB of VRAM in the GPU. TE Florida includes a CityScape version of Miami which would fall  under a fairly similar GPU requirement IMHO if you wanting to go with max XP settings. Hence some people are saying their fps drops around Miami. With my screen res and XP settings my fps drops but to around 28. I imagine in my full 4K settings I would be around high teens.

[Meta]

1 hour ago, Jon Clarke said:

I don't know if you have TE Washington, but there is an Enhancement Pack offered and it is advised that it's maximum option settings would require ate least 11GB of VRAM in the GPU. TE Florida includes a CityScape version of Miami which would fall  under a fairly similar GPU requirement IMHO if you wanting to go with max XP settings.

 

I think I saw the extension...4K textures on the buildings or something? I only have 8GB VRAM so I guess it wouldn't make much sense to get it...a lot of folks only have that much or less.   Perhaps X-Plane can come up with some ways to make those kinds of add ons more practical for more people. 

 

I'm building a new machine so going to download the SD version of FL and see what I think.  I might put that on my SSD since I fly it so often.  I use 4K for some other reasons so I'm not going to try to change my resolution.  

 

EDIT:  I got the screen capture.  You can see by my MFD that I'm about 50 miles south of Orlando International at 29,000 feet.  Yesterday I was flying south of Daytona Beach and saw the same thing.  That time, it eventually loaded.  This time X-Plane ran out of memory and crashed about 3-4 minutes after taking this capture.  I still had 1.5GB of VRAM.  Log attached.

Log.txt

[Meta]

Just to close the circle on this.  I built out a new machine and installed Florida SD on this one (on an SSD).  All is working well.  It takes about 3-4 minutes to load at KPIE.  Performance is good but I can't say how much of it is due to the SD version and how much is due to a faster video card.  Looking down, it looks pretty amazing.

[Jon Clarke]

41 minutes ago, Meta said:

Just to close the circle on this.  I built out a new machine and installed Florida SD on this one (on an SSD).  All is working well.  It takes about 3-4 minutes to load at KPIE.  Performance is good but I can't say how much of it is due to the SD version and how much is due to a faster video card.  Looking down, it looks pretty amazing.

All 3 have a major impact. SD Version, SSD drive and a faster GPU. Glad it's all working now.

[Orbx Flyer]

On 2/8/2020 at 2:46 AM, jonesm35205 said:

What you are showing me kinda looks the same in certain areas.   Would love to know what your view is over where I was at Magic Kingdom.  That would 

tell me the downloaded scenery is good to go.   So sorry for this, I just have not had any issues with anything else and since I have all other TrueEarths 

I obviously love the products and how they look.    I have a 34 inch Ultra Wide with 2560 x 1080.

I might offer a suggestion.  Try (if your BIOS allows for it)  overclocking BOTH your CPU and System RAM.  I have both overclocked on an 8 year old system, driving a GTX 1070,  and after the usual load in times of around 12-15 minutes for the HD version,  I have clear, crisp scenery driven at about 30-36 FPS.   Try that, and see if that helps your situation.