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Lancair Shimmering Instrument Panel


rockliffe

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I have just purchased the Lancair aircraft and also installed the latest patch. What a difference to my 185 Cessna!!! :o I have noticed, that there's rather an irritating shimmer around some of the instruments that becomes worse when zooming in or out, it looks like some AA issue. I have Nvidia inspector applied with the recommended settings. Is this something that other Lancair owners have and are aware of, or is it something I can eradicate with a bit of tweaking, and if so, any advice would be gratefully received...

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I'd say that shimmering of any kind is more graphic card (and driver) related than to something from the model itself.

If you enable e. g. transparency antialiasing with sparse grid, all shimmering will be gone but your card will have a huge workload to fulfill.

Seems like the enhancements Nvidia made with the 2xx drivers causes some more shimmering on all 3D gauges while the 2D stuff still remains somehow smoother. I experience those shimmering gauges on some other 3D gauge planes too and, as said, the only way to get rid of them is to look for some transparency antialiasing.

So I doubt that a patch of any kind can help here  :( as this is no model caused error but a setup related one in my eyes.

It has something to do with how the normal antialiasing works. It can't catch up on some types of texture and you won't see an improvement there, because even if you run 32x, those special textures aren't anti-aliased at all (or only at there invisible edges, not on those you see shimmering) .

Only transparency antialiasing can help you here, it detects the visible edges of e. g. a pointer on a gauge and then smooths it. The trees in FSX are another example, their edges shimmer without at least a supersampling AA component being activated.

Another solution would be a real full scene antialiasing (so the whole screen is covered, with no exceptions) and you can enable this somehow proprietary approach but you won't get a performance out of it that fits to flight sim needs. That's one of the reasons why Nvidia and AMD went for the somehow focused modes, enabling a high performance way of smoothing some lines on your screen.

The current Morphological AA from AMD is one of those full screen approaches, usually described as "post-processing" because it gets applied after all rendering stages while the normal way of AA is build in those steps (for e. g. performance reasons).

The overhead on the post-processing way is huge, so your fps take a severe hit.

Try to enable transparency AA like "4x supersampling" and check the gauges and trees again. This setting will help and should work on lower cards without losing too much fps.

Sadly, heavy clouds scenes will have a bigger impact now.

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The shimmering is mostly caused by the resolution of the instruments and the way that we force them to be rendered without Mip switching. Unfortunatley FSX will not render normal HD textures without Using the TML tweak. It automaticaly switches to the 1024 Mip. To prevent this we saved all the textures without mips which forces the card to render at the maximum resolution in this case 2048.

The problem with doing this is that the card can't switch below the 1024 mip like it would normaly to prevent shimmering as the zoom is reduced. This can be minimised in the card settings but it can also come at a performance hit.

We could have of course Simply saved them normaly but then every time a change is made in the UI the fsx.cfg would have to be re-edited to include the TML tweak. A solution that IMHO simply isn't good enough!

So for now it is on the list of things that we will explore further but currently don't have a solid fix for.

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Jared

It may not be your problem at all.  I was told that nVidia did something to the AA/AF in the new 259x/260x drivers to improve the overall IQ of the 4xx series cards. 

As one poster says above it can be "cured" using at least 4x Sparse grid SS in nVidia Inspector (I have to use 8 x SGSS for some planes).  I have seen similar "swimming gauges" in the A2A Cub, Quest Kodiak and the Flight 1 Conquest and SGSS fixes them.

The caveat with Sparse Grid SS is that is very hard on frame rates. ;)

Regards

PeterH

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I always had the annoying shimmering in the Lancair. Will have to follow these notes and see if I can get riod of it.

Do it - you will be quite pleased when you figure it out.  Experiment but AA=8s Combined should do it.  Try the SS settings but 4X seems to work best in clouds. Also one thing that is annoying is that each nVidia driver seems to need a different 'override' or 'enhance' game setting. Always use Ansio and AA=on in FSX.

Good luck

jja

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I will try this... as a matter of interset guys, I have only had my GTX470 for about two weeks and Nvidia inspector for a week. Can I ask a silly question, but do I need to input Inspector every time I start FSX? The reason I ask, is that although I have Vsync enabled, it seems to have stopped working for some reason  ???

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I will try this... as a matter of interset guys, I have only had my GTX470 for about two weeks and Nvidia inspector for a week. Can I ask a silly question, but do I need to input Inspector every time I start FSX? The reason I ask, is that although I have Vsync enabled, it seems to have stopped working for some reason  ???

No - the settings are in the registry and get wiped out if you select 'clean install' when installing a new nVidia Driver.

Force vSync on in nVidia Inspector or use an FSX.cfg setting

jja

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nVidia Inspector 1.94 AA=8x  Combined SS with  SS set to 4x Sparse Grid.  This will fix the prob IMO.

jja

Worked like a charm. Now it looks way better, no more shimmering. Thanks.

Should work in most planes.  have a good flight.

jja

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The real improvement will come with that sparse grid transparency AA setting mentioned by jjjallen.

If you run relatively low resolutions like 1280x1024 this shouldn't kill your performance even on older cards. Just stick to a normal (non supersampled) AA mode when going with supersampling on the transparency stuff to avoid too high loads on older cards.

You could even, for testing purposes, disable all normal AA and enable the transparency stuff to see how it improves the gauges on planes like the Lancair. Really a neat feature for image quality but one has to be careful in combining it with the other settings, otherwise even GTX 580 cards will struggle at cloudy skies.

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