Author Topic: Slow loading ground textures :(  (Read 86540 times)

Infinityplusone

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Slow loading ground textures :(
« on: March 04, 2011, 12:20:35 PM »
I have been having this problem ever since I did Jesus's online fsx.cfg tweaking tool.  Textures load fine when im flying my cub since its a much slower aircraft.  However, when I switch to my 185 the ground texture have a hard time keeping up and quickly become "blurry".

I cant for the life of me figure out what the tweak did or is trying to do that is causing this.  The original file works fine, but gives a performance cut of at least half.  I have tried removing lines, tweaking numbers, etc.

Im planning on upgrading the cpu from the e6400 to the e7600 soon (last upgrade i can make on this mobo before replacing) and that should help, but is there anything in the meantime that I can do?

Avian

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Re: Slow loading ground textures :(
« Reply #1 on: March 04, 2011, 12:31:09 PM »
Exactly the same problem for me too, the ground textures load really slowly, have you tried asking Bojote himself?  (I am getting to the point of asking but haven't yet)

One-Eye

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Re: Slow loading ground textures :(
« Reply #2 on: March 04, 2011, 12:44:48 PM »
Hmmm... must be system specific - I got an improvement on scenery loads.Well, I usually only fly low and slow, so that is subjective I guess. I very rarely, if ever, fly a blowtorch simply because my system as such, is not powerful enough to reload scenery fast.

And if I do, I have to screw back on detail - and that is far more important than speed.

I will watch this with bated breath.
All the best,
Chris "One-Eye" Brisland aka EagleSkinner aka "Dances with paintbrushes"
Check out my msfs 2020 videos on YouTube (Christopher Brisland)

Tigerclaw

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Re: Slow loading ground textures :(
« Reply #3 on: March 04, 2011, 06:33:13 PM »
I had this very bad a while back. Just looking at my FSX.cfg file to see what I edited to correct it somewhat.

Okay I think it was the:
TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULTI=40 line that was causing me the issues.

Or it could have been:
FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION=0.33 line.

Either way pop along to HERE for explanations. Hopefully you will sort something out. Mine still gets very bad when I fly fast jets, but it's ok upto around 200 knots.
Tony

Windows XP Pro 32 bit - Core 2 Duo 1.87Ghz - 2 gig Ram - GeForce GT240 1 gig Ram - Audigy ZS 2 - FSX Gold. ORBX - REX 2.0 - TrackIR 5


Infinityplusone

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Re: Slow loading ground textures :(
« Reply #4 on: March 04, 2011, 11:11:20 PM »
Quick update after a day full of tedious trial and error.

I have managed to improve my situation concerning the slow loading textures.  A couple of things I did were:

1) Set my RejectThreshold to 250000 vs the 101xxx that it was at.
2) Stopped using the external FPS limiter and set FSX to a limit of 99 within the game.
     *This one seems counterintuitive to all the tweaks and fixes I have read, but around 170mph I get some decent loading of textures.  Above that is still a problem.

I did this testing at Friday Harbor which is within my Orbx Library territory, so tomorrow I will move outside of that and try again.

It did seem that not using the external fps limiter made a drastic improvement in texture loading.

Hope to have some more luck tomorrow.

spud

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Re: Slow loading ground textures :(
« Reply #5 on: March 05, 2011, 09:25:24 AM »
RE: Blurry ground textures.
I have not really tested this carefully yet but I have been flying in PNW scenery for a few days checking out Mike Mann's Tofino and Gold River Float bases on Vancouver Is.  I have been using both the default Beaver (Misty repaint) and the Carenado C185 float plane.
My normal ride is the Carenado C185 Tundra Tire for RTMM scenery but due to Mike Mann's scenery being water based I used the default Beaver and the C185 floatplane.   I have noticed that it "seemed" that with the C185 the ground texture would become blurry and stay that way quite quickly.  With the default Beaver although I do get a very slight pop-in of scenery loading ahead of the airplane for the most part the textures stay sharp and do not 'go blurry' in PNW.  As I mentioned this is mostly my perception and not really tested as yet but there is a difference in the two A/C and blurriness.
 8)
Later,

Spud

Infinityplusone

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Re: Slow loading ground textures :(
« Reply #6 on: March 05, 2011, 01:15:59 PM »
RE: Blurry ground textures.
I have not really tested this carefully yet but I have been flying in PNW scenery for a few days checking out Mike Mann's Tofino and Gold River Float bases on Vancouver Is.  I have been using both the default Beaver (Misty repaint) and the Carenado C185 float plane.
My normal ride is the Carenado C185 Tundra Tire for RTMM scenery but due to Mike Mann's scenery being water based I used the default Beaver and the C185 floatplane.   I have noticed that it "seemed" that with the C185 the ground texture would become blurry and stay that way quite quickly.  With the default Beaver although I do get a very slight pop-in of scenery loading ahead of the airplane for the most part the textures stay sharp and do not 'go blurry' in PNW.  As I mentioned this is mostly my perception and not really tested as yet but there is a difference in the two A/C and blurriness.
 8)

this is an interesting observation.  I will try to do some testing on this tonight.  Although, if it is the 185 causing it, im not quite sure how to fix that.


Avian

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Re: Slow loading ground textures :(
« Reply #7 on: March 05, 2011, 03:09:05 PM »
I don't have the 185 and don't see any difference between planes, however, I have also done the very same tweaks  (Bojote's and the external limiter)  Some research threw up an interesting aspect about rejectthreshold, and it's relationship to the card memory, Jesus' tweaker ahd set ming very low (like yours) I altered the value to 1048756 as I have a 1GB card, I did not disable the fps limiter but did briefly disable the pre render option and // the usepools=4000 line in the FSC cfg, I noticed a distinct improvement in the loading times, I am now about to re-enable the usepools line as I did notice a bit of stuttering and want to see if this smooths out, plus I also re-enalbed the prerender line in the fps limiter. Back later.

spud

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Re: Slow loading ground textures :(
« Reply #8 on: March 06, 2011, 06:44:41 PM »
Today I flew from Bowser Lake Fire Base to Stewart and while enroute switched back and forth between the TopCub Super Cub and the Carenado C185 several times in both wide river valley and narrow mountain valley textures and sorry to say but the C185 will cause blurry ground texture within 2 min. of a switch.  Go back to the TopCub and the textures will get sharp in less than 30 seconds and other than very minor blur, that last just a few seconds, will stay sharp and clear. 
My system is only low middle of the road for FSX, Dell XPS 600, 3.4GHz, 2MB memory and dual NVIDIA G-Force 7800 GTX video cards so that would make a difference I'm sure.
The main point being that the aircraft does make a difference on my system.  Now it it were aPDGM 767 et al I could understand that a frame rate intensive airplane like that would make a difference, but come on people a lowly C185.  Glad I did not spring for the more expensive C185 package if this is what to expect from the airplanes.
 8)
Later,

Spud

Infinityplusone

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Re: Slow loading ground textures :(
« Reply #9 on: March 06, 2011, 07:28:46 PM »
Well I am happy to report that I have gotten the textures loading at an acceptable rate even with the 185. For me it actually was a pretty simple fix. After corrupting my display drivers and having to redownload (don't ask :p ), I stumbled across these xg267.24 drivers from tweakforce.com. they, along with the rejectthreshold tweak I did above,  fixed most of the.loading problems I was experiencing.  The 185 is a little slow still, but not near as slow as before.

I have a gts250 graphics card.

Hopefully this helps y'all that are also having the same issues.

aeugli

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Re: Slow loading ground textures :(
« Reply #10 on: March 07, 2011, 12:19:21 AM »
Hi Spud,
the Carenado C185 is well known as FPS-hook!
Cheers Rainer
Rainer

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One-Eye

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Re: Slow loading ground textures :(
« Reply #11 on: March 07, 2011, 02:53:55 AM »
Ah... another reason not to get that plane ;)
All the best,
Chris "One-Eye" Brisland aka EagleSkinner aka "Dances with paintbrushes"
Check out my msfs 2020 videos on YouTube (Christopher Brisland)

spud

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Re: Slow loading ground textures :(
« Reply #12 on: March 07, 2011, 10:30:39 AM »
Hi Spud,
the Carenado C185 is well known as FPS-hook!
Cheers Rainer

Apparently I do not read the proper forums only visit 10 of them every day at least once and this is the first time I have heard that about the C185.  I do not read the AVSIM forums much so if it is there I would have missed it.  Seems like some of the other would have something like that.
 8)
Later,

Spud

Avian

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Re: Slow loading ground textures :(
« Reply #13 on: March 07, 2011, 11:21:36 AM »
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.


aeugli

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Re: Slow loading ground textures :(
« Reply #14 on: March 07, 2011, 12:17:37 PM »
Hi Spud!

After doing some actual research I have to admit that I´m at fault concerning the Carenado C185 :-\
Sorry for that!
Rainer
Rainer

i7-3770K@4.5G|Intel DZ77GA-70K PCIe 3.0|Noctua NH-D14|Mushkin Redline 8GB@2133 PC3-17000 CL9 |Gigabyte GTX 680 OC|301.42 WHQL|4xSamsung SSD 830 256GB|1x VelociRaptor 1TB|Asus Xonar 2DX|Teufel 5.1 Soundsystem|Seasonic Platinum 1000W|Lian Li PC-V212 | HP ZR2440|3xFujitsu P-23T 3D