Why Does Scenery Blink?

On Sun, 8 Oct 2006 08:25:33 +1000, DRS wrote:


How many console games are moddable? How many console game engines can be
reused to make new games? In this case, CFS3 suffered bad press when it was
first released because it was so resource hungry (like FS it has a dynamic
flight model engine that is leagues ahead of the arcade style flight games),
but since then hardware has improved and it has a dedicated modding
community that has extended the late-war European theatre original to
include the Battle of France, Battle of Britain, Korea, WWI and the new
Mediterranean theatre mod is within weeks of release. Can you say that of
any console game?

No, but the masses don't want to go through all those hassles for games. I
have CFS3 and am using it with the WWI OFF mod. Many people didn't it like
for other reasons besides performance issues though.

"Mr.E Solved!" wrote in message
...
As someone who was involved with the actual development of FS9, waaay
back in 2002, I can tell you; you are correct. There are numerous
textural errors in the scenery and terrain. The very best IQ solution,
as discussed and put in to practice by many enthusiasts, was to replace
said offensive textures with some of the fine after market offerings. I
personally use FSGenesis' land class terrain replacements and AVSim.com
has some wonderful foliage and structural replacements, I picked on that
has seasonal variety, lovely.
The upshot is, all of these replacements, due to attention to textural
detail, do not suffer from texture aliasing. Making for a more immersive
experience.

Which replacement trees and buildings for FS2004 do you like? Any
specific names?


Is it possible for nVidia to add a feature to their driver that would
limit
the number of mipmaps the application uses? I know in the older FS2004
there was a setting in the game to specify the number of mipmaps, and
the
general belief in the flightsim community was to never have the mipmaps
above 4 to 5. In the new FSX, they have removed that in game option.
Is
it possible to have the driver enforce this or is it too specific to the
application?

This is accomplished by the LOD value. As discussed, a mipmap consists
of several duplicate textures, each one a smaller size than the one
before it, think of a nautilus shell, or russian nesting dolls.
...
By adjusting LOD Bias, you also can prevent some mipmap textures from
ever being used. Say you have 5 levels of mipmap textures, if you
increase the LOD Bias to +1.00, you effectively push that last, smallest
texture off the map, never to be used! This "mipmap level" setting is
not a standard setting, the proper setting is LOD BIAS, and while it's
an ugly name, it's been in place for a while and more accurate and useful.

Bottom line: Clamp LOD BIAS (Keeps it at 0.00) and apply anisotropic
filtering for the best IQ in MSFT's flight sims (no matter if you use
stock, or replacement textures)

With nVidia is there a way to push the LOD BIAS to a positive number?

I am noticing one other anomoly that maybe you can explain. Even at 20 to
30 fps, the frames are "jumping". This is worst during playback, when a
background mountain with scenery on it (mostly trees) can stagger or jump
back and forth, and you lose the sense of a smooth animation. It looks
like the rendering cannot keep up with the frame rate and so you see the
frames jump slightly rather than move smoothly. What's worse, if in 10
frames some location should be moving from location A1, to A2, etc to A10,
what is actually shown is A1, then A4, then A2, then A6, then A2, then A3,
etc.

What causes that kind of effect, and what would be a cure?

--
Will

Will wrote:


Which replacement trees and buildings for FS2004 do you like? Any
specific names?

That would be a help, but I tried looking in the avsim.com library,
FS2004 - scenery replacement section, no joy. The best I can say is that
it had 'seasonal' in the title or description, meaning based on what
month you set your flight, it set the season and used the snowy texture
or green textures...



With nVidia is there a way to push the LOD BIAS to a positive number?

I believe by forcing "performance high/performance" textures, in the
nvidia control panel, it increases LOD as part of that process. With
other 3rd party programs (riva tuner, power strip, nhancer) you can
adjust it directly. Otherwise, I do not recall any direct LOD adjustment
with the classic nvnida control panel, I'm checking the advanced panel
now...nope, only clamp.



I am noticing one other anomoly that maybe you can explain. Even at 20 to
30 fps, the frames are "jumping". This is worst during playback, when a
background mountain with scenery on it (mostly trees) can stagger or jump
back and forth, and you lose the sense of a smooth animation. It looks
like the rendering cannot keep up with the frame rate and so you see the
frames jump slightly rather than move smoothly. What's worse, if in 10
frames some location should be moving from location A1, to A2, etc to A10,
what is actually shown is A1, then A4, then A2, then A6, then A2, then A3,
etc.

What causes that kind of effect, and what would be a cure?

I've seen that problem before, and the standard issues such as texture
loading bottlenecks due to background processes, background processes
themselves, real-time weather being an example. It was mostly a problem
on AGP based systems as it pertained to textures being loaded. You might
want to pay very close attention to the status of your HDD while this
occurs. Any activity indicates something is being read/written, when in
straight and level flight over already loaded textures, you shouldn't
have to load anything. This includes AI air traffic, ATC audio, all
those things can trigger I/O as well, making the stuttering noticeable.

If it's strictly on replay, it could be just a lack of data i/o, your pc
might be not quite up to snuff to handle all that data. Of course, any
decent pc made after the game was released shouldn't have these issues,
but they do. Creative sound cards have also been known to hog the pci
bus during flight sims, and the extra milliseconds they do, causes
frames to skip.

Not very helpful, I'm sure, but there are so many variables to consider,
you'll have to focus on the area you think is likely to be the problem,
video? Audio? I/O?

As an aside, setting the FPS to Unlimited can cause this issue as well,
sometimes limiting FPS to a reasonable number (make it a multiple of 12
for best results) can improve the entire experience!

Does you know of a way to tell how much of the VRAM on a video card FSX is
using (for textures or anything else)?

There is a great feature in X-Plane where it tells you how much VRAM it
needs to render a particular dimension display at a particular quality
setting. To my amazement, 1920x1080 with texture set to the highest
setting required 470MB of VRAM!!!

The equally interesting discovery I made with X-Plane was that when you
require more VRAM than the card has, your performance is MORE THAN HALVED!
This is because the textures must be drawn in system memory, and it's far
too slow for the GPU to use such memory.

With FSX and FS2004, I am flying blind, and one possibility seems to be that
I may be maxing out the VRAM on the video card.

--
Will

"Mr.E Solved!" wrote in message
. ..
but they do. Creative sound cards have also been known to hog the pci
bus during flight sims, and the extra milliseconds they do, causes
frames to skip.

The Creative X-Fi is PCI, and the video card is PCI Express. Are they
sharing the same bus, or is the issue more about the interrupts from the PCI
card simply preventing the CPU from doing work?

What makes and models of sound cards with 5.1 sound do you think offer a
better design for flight sims? Since I use the same system as a living
room Media Center, sound quality would be important to me.

--
Will