Slow loading ground textures :(

[Infinityplusone]

Well the 185 aside (I don't have it)  My results and tweaks so far are thus.

I changed the line RejectThreshold to the figure below, I have a 1GB card, the commented out number is for a half GB card I tried it as apparently this should be as low as possible, I don't know why, but I found the terrain textures loaded faster with the high number and no loss of FPS, the commented out numbers are for reference back and forth during the test: 

[BufferPools]
RejectThreshold=1048756 //524288   //1048756

Another tweak that had a major impact was the Lod radius, I changed this from 4.5 (default) to 6 (I tried 5.5 and 6.5) 6 was the best setting. What this setting does is determine how far out from your plane the high res texture will be loaded, it is therefore a very system specific setting and will require some experimenting, but having a higher number means that the lower res textures are now a good deal further out and so I don't see as much very blurry terrain as before and the whole thing looks a good deal better. It doesn't seem to load up any slower either, but at 6.5 it did start having a job to keep up and thus the effect was spoiled, so 6 was the highest I could get to.


[TERRAIN]
LOD_RADIUS=6.000000

I did not disable the external FPS limiter (this is really a pretty important part of getting a smooth look, reducing the stutters etc) and also to allow for better terrain tex loading.

So, now I can see decent res textures out to a good distance (about a mile) at that range the next lower res textures look very good and so on, it keeps up pretty well at around the 170 kias but struggles a little over that, but not so it is a constant struggle, just doesn't always catch up in time with every tile etc. But overall the performance and appearance have improved dramatically and I am happy with it now. My external FPS limiter is set to 20FPS, internal to no limit.

Kim, what do your system specs look like?

Im definently going to try the LOD_radius tweak you have here.  As I understand it, the RejectTheshold number is the highest amount of data (in bytes) you want of textures loaded from the pool before being loaded straight from the video card.  So in theory, if you have a fast card, the lower the number the better since your card will do most of the texture loading.  Im still going to play around with this a bit and see what happens.

Thanks for the update.

[spud]

Checked this thread earlier and modified my FSX.cfg file using some of the suggestions in the link posted by Tigerclaw.  Specifically:

[Bufferpools]
Poolsize=5000000

[Display]
TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULTI=400

[Main]
FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION=0.40

It made a lot of difference in curing the blurries with the C185 in fact could not really see anything to complain about considering my ancient Video cards

I do have other tweaks in the .cfg file from ORBX threads but did not change any of those.

I will try the the RejectThreshold=1048756 //524288   //1048756, and LOD_RADIUS=6.000000 tweaks and see how that goes will probably muck about with the numbers and see the results.

At least with what I have now the ground texture do not blur.  It is so noticeable because while the ground is blurry the trees and sharp as a tack so the blurries really stand out like hooker in the front pew!

This is what is so great about the site, good info, good company and great scenery.  Thanks to one and all!

And No Worries Rainer.
 

[Avian]

CPU intel 2 core duo E8400 @ 3GHz  (Pentium III Xeon)

GPU Nvidia GTX460 1GB

4GB Ram.

I don't know why, but I get a better result with the higher number on the rejectThreshold.

I left the external FPS limiter in place as although it seems it does have an impact, without it I seem to get much worse stutters, especially looking sideways out the plane, so it's a trade off really.

WRT the LOD radius, someone elsewhere explained the principle, (other places you will read, "if your system cannot sharpen the textures at 4.5 no way will it at 6.5!"  However, the LOD radius effects how many tiles around your plane are high res.

Imagine then you are in a dark room, you have a flashlight, it lights up a set area of wall, as you move the flashlight you light up new areas, if the beam is narrow (a smaller LOD radius) then you arm has to do a lot more work (GPU swapping textures in and out)  if the Beam is wider (larger LOD radius) you need to move your arm less to light up more wall (less swapping in the GPU)

Now logically this would suggest a very large setting might initially take time but would pay off in that as you advanced across the terrain the system would be loading the higher res textures well before you got to them, of course it doesn't work this way as the amount of work is too great, so you have to find the right balance between the load time and the overall appearance, but the default setting of 4.5 means that the third level mipmaps are really pretty close to the plane so you never see decent middle distance textures even when it is all running well. With a setting of 5.5 or 6 you do at least get a better looking overall terrain even if the highest level mipmaps are lagging a little.

That's how it seems to me anyway.