Jarrad was right...for KSEZ, you need a LOD Radius of: 9.5 in FSX

[Orbx Flyer]

WOW...what a difference, in the peaks around the valley.  

 

I had used a LOD setting of 6.5, (default is 4.5 in FSX:MS) and the peaks, were all blunted with no form, and blurry textures. Upon his thread recommendation, I cranked the LOD up to 9.5 and started at Sedona.  WHAT A DIFFERENCE!

 

The peaks all had great form, good detail, crags in the faces...and they LOOKED like weather worn rock.

 

So...crank your LOD Radius setting to 9.5...and watch all the Sedona detail come right to life!

 

Thanks for the tip, Jarrad.  It worked like a charm.

 

 

[RobdeVries]

With a monster PC ...

[Orbx Flyer]

With a monster PC ...

Not really...I have a system over 5 years old...and can get 21-30 FPS as I fly around Sedona at a LOD of 9.5 in FSX:MS.  The detail though...geez....it was like I had smokey and dirty glasses on my face.  The detail hit me upside the head!  Try it out..and see exactly what you paid the money for....if you don't have it at 9.5....you AIN'T seeing Sedona....!!!!!

[moorpark]

Had to give up on 9.5, was great for sharper distant landscapes but found that a radius under the aircraft would be blurry which annoyed the life out of me. Think it's a know problem with increasing the LOD above 6.5

[Orbx Flyer]

Had to give up on 9.5, was great for sharper distant landscapes but found that a radius under the aircraft would be blurry which annoyed the life out of me. Think it's a know problem with increasing the LOD above 6.5

I wonder then, if a LOD of 8.5 or 7.5 would kick in the monument (Cathedral Rock) details...I'll have to have a play at that...and see if there is a diff. I do know that at least on my system, 6.5 wasn't cutting it on the monument rocks.

[Rob Newman]

9.5 will certainly give you a very nice visual experience as not only does it increase the radius at which the terrain is at its most detailed shape and sharpness, but it also increases the radius at which your autogen begins...

But like all this in Sim land, it comes with a cost. Even if your FPS remains good, you will be using significantly more memory. As hardware improves, FPS is no longer the choke point it used to be... Now the sims Achilles heal is memory use as users can now push more detail and higher settings.

As most of you will no doubt be aware (so forgive me if this is teaching you to suck eggs) but for those who are not, FSX and P3D are both 32-Bit programs... as such they can run within and use an absolute maximum of 4Gb of memory... often refered to as the "Virtual Address Space" or VAS... The higher your settings, the more of this memory is used to store the additional objects and larger areas of higher resolution textures.

The first issue that you could notice would be as mentioned above... blurriness of the ground texture. This happens simply because the sim is trying to keep up with increasing demands and has to sacrifice somewhere... so texture loading slows down and can "fall behind".

Once the sim gets to that 4GB limit, it doesn't just slow down... it will crash the program completely and give you a message advising you that available memory has been exhausted and to try again with lower settings. This is often known as an "OOM" (Out Of Memory) crash.

In fact the difference in memory use from a radius setting of 5.5 to 6.5 is considerably higher than from 4.5 to 5.5, so imagine just how much stress is put on a system increasing from 4.5 to 9.5.

Add a high stress aircraft to the mix (glass cockpit, high Def textures, complex systems) and you're asking for an OOM.

A common setting used by a lot of users is 6.5... this gives a good balance between performance, visuals and memory usage. However there will be situations where even this is too high... for example, flying a complex airliner out of a heavy urban major airport like Seattle or Portland in heavy rainy weather. This is why the default setting is 4.5.

so to make a long story short, be very careful with the LOD radius...it sure will help the visuals, and if your hardware is good enough, you may still get good performance, but the memory usage will invisibly increase and could lead to crashes and blurry textures, especially in high stress scenes and situations.

One thing I might suggest is using a freeware program called "Simstarter"... it allows you to create profiles that when used, will start the sim with specific settings... Lod Radius is one of the setting it can set. That way you can have a profile with high settings and lod radius for Sedona and similar "low stress" airports, and a profile with moderate settings and default lod radius for "high stress" areas. This is the method I personally use. Simstarter also let's you save specific scenery libraries to each profile so you can potentially not load scenery you don't need in memory (for example, if your flying a Q400, you won't be able to land at a large number of the smaller FTX payware airports, but they will be loaded into memory if you fly over them... a profile disabling those smaller airports and leaving only Q400 sized airports can be created). The latest version of Simstarter is compatible with all 3 major sim platforms.

[pmb]

Maybe this has changed, but as far as I know setting any LOD > 6.5 in Prepar3d2 doesn't have any effect at all. Did this change or is my knowledge simply wrong and you can go to, say, 9.5?

 

Kind regards, Michael

 

[Roger Dodger]

Nicely written explanation, advice and suggestions Rob.

Regards,

Roger

[Orbx Flyer]

Maybe this has changed, but as far as I know setting any LOD > 6.5 in Prepar3d2 doesn't have any effect at all. Did this change or is my knowledge simply wrong and you can go to, say, 9.5?

 

Kind regards, Michael

Michael, I was referring to that setting in use, with FSX.  I have also read that the max for LOD in P3D.x is 6.5. 

 

At 6.5, I had blurred and blunted momument tops at KSEZ using FSX:MS. I went to 9.5..and had eye-popping detail.

Nicely written explanation, advice and suggestions Rob.

Regards,

Roger

Yes, I appreciated the time it took for him to compose that, as I read the post.

[Rob Newman]

Maybe this has changed, but as far as I know setting any LOD > 6.5 in Prepar3d2 doesn't have any effect at all. Did this change or is my knowledge simply wrong and you can go to, say, 9.5?

Kind regards, Michael

That is correct for P3D.

It has been hard coded into the sim itself. I might also be seeing things (it wouldn't be the first time ) but the radius in P3D is noticeably less than FSX... so using 6.5 in both sims will appear that FSX is at a greater radius.

That might be an optical illusion though...

[RJ]

9.5 will certainly give you a very nice visual experience as not only does it increase the radius at which the terrain is at its most detailed shape and sharpness, but it also increases the radius at which your autogen begins...

But like all this in Sim land, it comes with a cost. Even if your FPS remains good, you will be using significantly more memory. As hardware improves, FPS is no longer the choke point it used to be... Now the sims Achilles heal is memory use as users can now push more detail and higher settings.

As most of you will no doubt be aware (so forgive me if this is teaching you to suck eggs) but for those who are not, FSX and P3D are both 32-Bit programs... as such they can run within and use an absolute maximum of 4Gb of memory... often refered to as the "Virtual Address Space" or VAS... The higher your settings, the more of this memory is used to store the additional objects and larger areas of higher resolution textures.

The first issue that you could notice would be as mentioned above... blurriness of the ground texture. This happens simply because the sim is trying to keep up with increasing demands and has to sacrifice somewhere... so texture loading slows down and can "fall behind".

Once the sim gets to that 4GB limit, it doesn't just slow down... it will crash the program completely and give you a message advising you that available memory has been exhausted and to try again with lower settings. This is often known as an "OOM" (Out Of Memory) crash.

In fact the difference in memory use from a radius setting of 5.5 to 6.5 is considerably higher than from 4.5 to 5.5, so imagine just how much stress is put on a system increasing from 4.5 to 9.5.

Add a high stress aircraft to the mix (glass cockpit, high Def textures, complex systems) and you're asking for an OOM.

A common setting used by a lot of users is 6.5... this gives a good balance between performance, visuals and memory usage. However there will be situations where even this is too high... for example, flying a complex airliner out of a heavy urban major airport like Seattle or Portland in heavy rainy weather. This is why the default setting is 4.5.

so to make a long story short, be very careful with the LOD radius...it sure will help the visuals, and if your hardware is good enough, you may still get good performance, but the memory usage will invisibly increase and could lead to crashes and blurry textures, especially in high stress scenes and situations.

One thing I might suggest is using a freeware program called "Simstarter"... it allows you to create profiles that when used, will start the sim with specific settings... Lod Radius is one of the setting it can set. That way you can have a profile with high settings and lod radius for Sedona and similar "low stress" airports, and a profile with moderate settings and default lod radius for "high stress" areas. This is the method I personally use. Simstarter also let's you save specific scenery libraries to each profile so you can potentially not load scenery you don't need in memory (for example, if your flying a Q400, you won't be able to land at a large number of the smaller FTX payware airports, but they will be loaded into memory if you fly over them... a profile disabling those smaller airports and leaving only Q400 sized airports can be created). The latest version of Simstarter is compatible with all 3 major sim platforms.

Great debate and absolutely great explanation RB gave.

[Anthin Delahunt]

I tried 9.5 and my sim crashed every time I tried to load it.

 

Anthin.

[ChaoticBeauty]

I'm hoping Prepar3D 3.0 will allow us to crank up the LOD radius again. The 6.5 limit is horrible. Since my flights are quick and with simple aircraft, I could take the VAS hit.

[Eric Bakker]

But like all this in Sim land, it comes with a cost. Even if your FPS remains good, you will be using significantly more memory. As hardware improves, FPS is no longer the choke point it used to be... Now the sims Achilles heal is memory use as users can now push more detail and higher settings.

 

Thanks, Rob, for this very clear written and helpful explanation.

You are a great teacher. 

[shermank]

On a somewhat humorous note, I read the suggestion  about setting LOD as high as 8.5 or 9.5 to improve long distant mountain textures around Sedona. That sounded good to me, so I adjusted to an LOD of 8.5. Each time after that, when I booted FSX I got an "out of memory" box and the sim would not load.

OK. I figured there was a problem in fsx.cfg and I was going to swtich back to LOD=6.5.  Interesting, because when I took a look at my fsx.cfg,I saw that my LOD was not 8.5. It was 8500000. I guess that explains the out of memory issue... )

 

Sherm
 

[ojiito]

64-bit should handle that just fine.