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Dx10 Eye Candy

Adam Banks

By Adam Banks
in Community Screenshots

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Adam Banks Life Member

Adam Banks

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Rather than clutter up maybe quite technical topics about DX10 Preview (and the new DX10 Scenery Fixer), I thought I'd kick off a topic for examples of what people have achieved with it. If we can keep it (more or less) to screenshots only, it will help to separate the technical from the eye-candy!

 

Free-for-all to add pics. I'll start the ball rolling!

 

dx10_02_613_1280.jpg

dx10_03_138_1280.jpg

No prizes for guessing where this is, BTW :lol:

Adam.

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Adam Banks Life Member

Adam Banks

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hm only different to dx9 is the water for me  ???

 

are there any other visuals advantages ?

Better cockpit shadows, aircraft lights fixes, better specular surfaces (on aircraft) ... but mainly, I find that FSX appears to be a lot smoother (even at high GFX settings) and no OOMs yet ... as I was just beginning to get them in DX9.

 

I always preferred DX10 water - so here are some seaplanes!

 

dx10_08_486_1280.jpg

dx10_11_701_1280.jpg

dx10_10_162_1280.jpg

BTW - the water setting for these is "High 2x" - one step back from the maximum (which I find way too "glassy"). In DX9 I had to take this back one more step to keep my framerates.

Adam.

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flyinion Senior Member

flyinion

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What water shader settings are you using?  Also did you install replacement water textures or animations from something like REX?  I've been noticing my water not ever looking like these screenshots and I think I have some corrupt water stuff somewhere.  I'm currently using REX water textures and animations with the FSWC Lite shader for DX10.  Also just out of curiosity due to a little forum post I picked up somewhere while trying to fix it, are you running anisotropic filtering in FSX or in Inspector? (or both?)


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Adam Banks Life Member

Adam Banks

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What water shader settings are you using?  Also did you install replacement water textures or animations from something like REX?  I've been noticing my water not ever looking like these screenshots and I think I have some corrupt water stuff somewhere.  I'm currently using REX water textures and animations with the FSWC Lite shader for DX10.  Also just out of curiosity due to a little forum post I picked up somewhere while trying to fix it, are you running anisotropic filtering in FSX or in Inspector? (or both?)

I run FEX for the clouds textures - and a pretty general/basic texture set for the water/waves, which I set once ages ago and have totally forgotten about (as with the clouds, really). I use anisotopic filtering in both (on in FSX then set to 16x in NVI).

 

Adam, I don't dare to add pics here.

Oh, go on ... please do! This isn't a competition ;)

Adam.

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flyinion Senior Member

flyinion

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I run FEX for the clouds textures - and a pretty general/basic texture set for the water/waves, which I set once ages ago and have totally forgotten about (as with the clouds, really). I use anisotopic filtering in both (on in FSX then set to 16x in NVI).

 

 

 

Thanks.  I'll have to turn on aniso in FSX as well and see if that has an effect.  I think read something to the effect of aniso in NI (and maybe just with certain drivers) was causing water problems.  Did you replace the default water shader with something from the fixer or FSWC Lite?

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Adam Banks Life Member

Adam Banks

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Ok. Nothing spectacular. I'm just so happy to have lights without squares :)

You're too modest! There's such a lot of atmosphere in that shot!

 

So happy with FTX AI traffic with NO white planes.

The runway looks slippery in Spokane tonight...

Yay! It fixed all my AI really well!

Have you tried that DawnTillDusk setting that someone mentioned here? I think affects runway gloss, one way or another.

Adam.

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Adam Banks Life Member

Adam Banks

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You asked for it!!!

pmdg_ngx_120_1280.jpg

pmdg_ngx_207_1280.jpg

My ORBX NZ world has never looked better - or performed so smoothly. Incredibly, I'm running the DX10 Fixer at 32x AA and at a LOD radius of 6.5 (over my usual 4.5). No way I'm going going back to DX9 now!

I'll put up all my settings in a separate topic somewhere.

Adam.

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Adam Banks Life Member

Adam Banks

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Looking forward to your settings - awesome shots

I've prepared an annotated fsx.cfg extract and some NVI screenshots.

 

Could an ORBX mod please tell me if it's OK to start a topic discussing DX10 Fixer settings here (in this forum, I mean)? If OK, where should it ideally go?

 

Adam.

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Frank Schnibben Life Member

Frank Schnibben

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If it shouldn't be possible/allowed to post your settings here, you could make them available via PM. Currently I'm mucking around with several DX10 settings to get crispier screenshots. The problem is, on a retina display nearly everthing looks crisp even with lower settings or screen resolutions. If I look at the same screenies on my working laptop, on which I'm typing this at the moment, they often appear somewhat blurred (while JV's retina shot's do not). With insane settings I'm getting an optically reasonable result when viewing them on this laptop but on the other hand there is of course a massive frame impact over there in the FSX Mac, which makes it difficult to adjust the scene for a shot. If you are able to fly smooth AND to get such screenshots, there must either be something wrong in my settings or my display is miscalibrated - or I'm simply too stupid to handle retina screenies :)
This is the crispiest what I'm currently able to get using Steve's tool:

 

Y4SKl.jpg

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flyinion Senior Member

flyinion

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Nice Adam.  I'd really like to know what shader you're using for the water (i.e. default, DX Fixer, DX Fixer with custom settings, or FSWC Lite's DX10 setting).  My water is weird looking and I'm pretty sure I have something actually corrupt because mine looks nothing like your shots no matter what and in DX9 or 10.  Now that I'm unfortunately not updating my hardware in the next few weeks (after the 1st of the year now at least) I'm thinking about wiping out and reinstalling FSX and all my addons from scratch since the last time I did that was 3 1/2 year ago and I suspect some tweaks done in that period are the cause.  I figure by the time I hit the activation server again after the beginning of the year I should be ok.  Worst case I'll deal with the phone activation lol.  I just want to make sure I've tried everything first to verify it's not a setting or shader choice :)


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Adam Banks Life Member

Adam Banks

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Nice Adam.  I'd really like to know what shader you're using for the water (i.e. default, DX Fixer, DX Fixer with custom settings, or FSWC Lite's DX10 setting).  My water is weird looking and I'm pretty sure I have something actually corrupt because mine looks nothing like your shots no matter what and in DX9 or 10.  Now that I'm unfortunately not updating my hardware in the next few weeks (after the 1st of the year now at least) I'm thinking about wiping out and reinstalling FSX and all my addons from scratch since the last time I did that was 3 1/2 year ago and I suspect some tweaks done in that period are the cause.

 

I never use any of the mods - shader, ENB or whatever (don't get me started!). My water textures were initially created (a LONG time ago) by FEX. These were just a "general purpose" set - much like my cloud set (also created via FEX). Once set, I never touch them. I just let Live Weather (OPUS these days) do its stuff. It's always different!

 

I'd say a fresh install will cure many evils of the past! Good luck!

 

Nice shots Adam! Can u tell if there is any fps improvement from all this?

 

Unbelievably, YES. Without changing any autogen or global FSX scenery/GFX settings, I went instantly from a TBM of 2048 to 4096 and a LOD radius of 4.5 to 6.5. Frame rates definitely went up too. Better still, the whole sim is much smoother, with far fewer micro-pauses and flashing textures. My OOMs have gone too.

 

Naturally, DX10 has involved a fair few of changes to my FSX.CFG and NVI settings - any one of which could have helped, but I'd really jumped through the hoops with all the tweaks on my DX9 setup and wasn't getting anywhere different.

 

Apparently, the reason why there's a performance increase is because:

 

1) A lot of work is (finally) being directed away from our overloaded CPUs to our hugely over-powered/under-used GFX cards.

2) Cloud textures are optimised (and not anti-aliased unnecessarily).

3) One of the aircraft shaders is superfluous (I think).

 

Sadly - as with so many FSX related issues - there seems to be a lot of confusion out there. You have to trawl through it all and work out if it works (and why!). I'm not entirely sure how it works, but I assure you - it IS better than my DX9 configuration - on my system at least. Even allowing for the "placebo" effect, FSX is throwing some quite incredible screens at me.

 

Adam.

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Adam Banks Life Member

Adam Banks

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Thanks Adam, your word is enough for me to try it then, esp with all your settings posted to save us time tweaking. I was hoping that dx10 shifted some of the work to the gpu, great news.

Best of luck!

 

One word of advice though (gleaned from the manual and other sources) - make sure you get DX10 running reasonably properly *before* you try DX10 Fixer - particularly if you're running other shader-related mods. As I never use them, I've not really followed the compatibility topics on those.

 

Adam.

 

Adam.

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Adam Banks Life Member

Adam Banks

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Adam, is that a Stearman in the first shot? If so, which addon is that? Is it any good (i.e., how doe it fare compare to an A2A plane?)

You'd be forgiven in thinking it was a Stearman ... but it's actually the Alabeo WACO - a beautiful aircraft inside and out and very "sporty". A great add-on.

 

Wonderful as it is, it takes an awful lot to displace any A2A aircraft from my hangar! Particular if you look at this new topic here: http://www.orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/65300-it-had-to-happen/#entry596645

 

 

Adam.

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Dooga Senior Member

Dooga

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You'd be forgiven in thinking it was a Stearman ... but it's actually the Alabeo WACO - a beautiful aircraft inside and out and very "sporty". A great add-on.

 

Wonderful as it is, it takes an awful lot to displace any A2A aircraft from my hangar! Particular if you look at this new topic here: http://www.orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/65300-it-had-to-happen/#entry596645

 

Thanks for the heads up - I have to admit I thought it didn't quite look like one... but it was the nearest I could think of. That is a very nice looking plane! I assume though that it's got the same problem as every other taildragger I've flown in FSX so far - i.e. on the ground it doesn't behave like a taildragger at all but more like a tricycle plane on rails? If there was a realistically handling FSX taildragger out there, that'd be something. But even the A2A Cub doesn't even begin to try to get close, and if A2A can't do it then who would...

The other one is that excellent freeware Tiger Moth, am I right?

 

I'll probably get that DX10 tweaking tool before the week is out ;-)

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Breeze Life Member

Breeze

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My water textures were initially created (a LONG time ago) by FEX. These were just a "general purpose" set - much like my cloud set (also created via FEX). Once set, I never touch them. I just let Live Weather (OPUS these days) do its stuff. It's always different!

 

Adam.

 

When I tried DX10 before, I could never get the water to look right so I haven't purchased this fixer yet.  I just checked my harddrive and found I purchased FEX quite some time ago.  Adam, do you by chance, know what your water settings in FEX are?  Your water looks really good.

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Adam Banks Life Member

Adam Banks

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When I tried DX10 before, I could never get the water to look right so I haven't purchased this fixer yet.  I just checked my harddrive and found I purchased FEX quite some time ago.  Adam, do you by chance, know what your water settings in FEX are?  Your water looks really good.

I initially bought DX10Fixer because I thought it may just help with my lately-acquired OOMs (it did) .. but also, like you, I always thought DX10 did water better (I think it does!). That DX10+DX10Fixer would give me such a performance boost was a total shock.

 

I'll PM you my FEX settings when I can dig them out. Though I still use REX (for sun, runway and other odd textures) I mainly use FEX now - and feel a bit awkward discussing a rival product here on ORBX's forums.

 

Adam.

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