texture loading in FSX

[markturner 0]

First may i say its great to be back!! Well done Tom et all for your hard work and great luck that damage was repairable. So I thought I would celebrate with a question!!Which settings control the speed at which textures are loaded into the sim, especially the high res textures. Is there any way to force higher res textures to be loaded quicker? From my knowledge of how the sim and scenery work, I guess its a combination of lod radius, hardware and TBM. But there must be an algorithm that changes texture res relative to distance and if so , i wondered if it was tweakable. I would really like to get my textures high res as quickly as possible and as far away as possible..Cheers, Mark

[Chock 17,769]

Usually this is down to anisotropic filtering, which accesses the mip maps on DDS textures, in order to improve the look of textures at various sizes and oblique viewing angles. This has a bearing on how your terrain will look, since the viewing angle changes as the distance increases, forcing texture pixellation to be re-interpolated even at fixed distances as the mapping angle changes. Because a DDS texture can have mip maps, it effectively already has much of the scaling and re-interpolation work done, which the graphics processor would otherwise have to do, so things should load up quicker because of that, providing you have enough RAM to keep the textures loaded up and ready to rock.Since the mip map format is mostly designed with Direct X and anisotropic filtering in mind, the two things worth tweaking are Direct X (i.e have the latest version installed) and anisotropic filtering (i.e. play around with your graphics card settings to ensure the card is doing all it is capable of). RAM capacity and clock speed will help too of course.Al

[markturner 0]

Usually this is down to anisotropic filtering, which accesses the mip maps on DDS textures, in order to improve the look of textures at various sizes and oblique viewing angles. This has a bearing on how your terrain will look, since the viewing angle changes as the distance increases, forcing texture pixellation to be re-interpolated even at fixed distances as the mapping angle changes. Because a DDS texture can have mip maps, it effectively already has much of the scaling and re-interpolation work done, which the graphics processor would otherwise have to do, so things should load up quicker because of that, providing you have enough RAM to keep the textures loaded up and ready to rock.Since the mip map format is mostly designed with Direct X and anisotropic filtering in mind, the two things worth tweaking are Direct X (i.e have the latest version installed) and anisotropic filtering (i.e. play around with your graphics card settings to ensure the card is doing all it is capable of). RAM capacity and clock speed will help too of course.Al

Hi Al, have had a look, the only place I can see mip maps mentioned is in nhancer, and according to Nicks guide, this should set to off. Any thoughts on that ? My set up is now working pretty good, ( i have overclocked 9450, 4GB memory, 8800gtx, vista64, so not a bad set up) I have lod radius set at 8.5 (!!!) but it has not had any detrimental effect on frame rates or smoothness that I can see. I can pan around really quick, but still notice that as I fly over some features, that some of the high res textures are not fully loaded. If I pause the sim, they all snap in over about a 3 second period. Its this that I want address, as they are the ones you notice. Does anyone know where the settings for this are located? O r is it all hard coded in the exe? cheers, Mark

[Chock 17,769]

Setting mip mapping off is just like any other trade off, it depends on whether you are happy with the way things look on a certain setting; some people can't live without anti-aliasing, others can, and the same is true of every setting in FS, including mip mapping.Mip mapping does use up more memory, in favour of making the textures load quicker, so you have to decide whether 'the game is worth the candle' to you personally when considering how you like things to look, and perhaps more importantly, what you are, and are not, prepared to put up with. The 'MIP' bit of mip map stands for 'Multim In Parvo', which is latin for 'many in a small space', referring to the many textures a mip map contains, so you can tell just from the name that it is going to use up more system resources.You'll find that Trilinear filtering can also have an effect on things too, because it is Trilinear filtering which interpolates between mip maps to create the 'in between' texture sizes, which also eats up your RAM.To get a good grasp on what you can try, check this wiki page out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MipmapA lot will depend on what else you have running too, so it may just be simply a case of RAM overheads. If you have a limit on RAM (and in some way or another, everybody does), it might be that your computer has to dump a previously loaded texture from something you flew over five minutes ago, so it has room for the new one to load up.I'm not certain that is the case with your system, but it could be. Even when you set a low level of detail radius, the old stuff in your RAM still has to be dumped at some point to make room for more currently needed data. And that might be the problem; it seems obvious to limit the detail radius to keep the pressure on your system small, but in practice it can make things worse sometimes. That is because, as you fly along, it means your small radius rapidly changes position as it traverses the landscape, making your system have to dump things more often than it might otherwise have to do with a larger radius, so in some repsects, it can make things tougher for your RAM, with it constantly having to dump and load data. It will be doing it with smaller packets of data, but it will be doing that more often, and that's where the RAM bus speed can be the bottleneck.You might have seen some posts which say that people's computers seem to inexplicably run better on higher settings, and it is usually this kind of thing which is behind that phenomenon. To get your head around that, imagine a small flashlight beam moving across a wall in the dark - the lighted area will change rapidly, as your wrist does the work to move the flashlight beam. Now imagine a large flashlight beam covering the whole of that wall, it illuminates more stuff, but nothing has to change for it to do so, and your wrist does no work at all. In this analogy, the work your wrist is doing equates to the work your RAM and processors have to do when you have a small level of detail radius set in FS.Your specs state you have 4g of RAM, which is a fair amount, but if you run other stuff along with FS, such as Track-IR, additional weather programs, co-pilot add-ons etc, it all puts pressure on the system by eating up some RAM, as indeed does the operating system you have and anything else that happens to be running, so even doing something as simple as running 'End It All' (or a similar 'unecessary app' killer) prior to cranking up FS, might be enough to solve the problem.Hope that helps a bit.Al

[brucek 38]

[Chock 17,769]

You'll get endless arguments from people about whether doing it in the sim or in the graphics card app, or in an external enhancement utility is the way to go.My personal take on the matter is that it should be better to do it with the graphics card app, since at least in theory one would hope that would 'cut to the chase' better, having come from the makers of the hardware it pertains to. But having said that, ATI have proved to be gloriously inept where Catalyst is concerned, so that might be a moot point if you have an ATI device. Things may well be better with NVidia, but I can't say for sure. In fairness to ATI though, I run FSX on an ATI card and it does a pretty good job for me, although I know many will not have enjoyed a similarly trouble-free experience.With all that in mind, since enhancement utilities are intended to override the FS settings and we know FSX has at least some performance issues thanks to the stumbling block that is multiple core technology, I'd say go for it in your enhancement app, as it is likely to be geared toward doing the right thing.Expect someone along shortly to disagree with that assessment though :( Al

[markturner 0]

Thx for the long and detailed reply, lots to digest there! As frame rates and performance is not really an issue yet, i would definitely be keen to ramp up any settings that may help snap the detailed textures in quicker. Obviously if this is possible, I can then find a balance point between looks and frame rates. I can see in nhancer that there is a choice to have bi linear or tri linear mip maps, will try both out. Is this the only way of tweaking performance in this area? Or is there some config file entry such as bufferpools or texture bandwidth multiplier that affects texture load and resolution as well? cheers, Mark

[Guest harleyman52]

A LOD of 8.5 will kill load times..Perhaps it just to much for your system...Try 5.5 and defragg often...Very often.I defragg after every hour of flight whan finished

[markturner 0]

I have not noticed any problems with load times, I have loads of photoscenery, but I only enable the area I want to fly in, in the scenery library, which really helps. I also defrag every time on boot, which keeps it all nice.

[brucek 38]

You'll get endless arguments from people about whether doing it in the sim or in the graphics card app, or in an external enhancement utility is the way to go............Al

Thanks Al :)Bruce.

[markturner 0]

Hi guys, I spent last night testing, and although I discovered some interesting things, I still have not found any setting that seems to effect the loading of the high res textures close up. If I puase the sim over some scenery, over a period of between 2 and 15 seconds , it seems to load one or two sets of higher res textures until the scenery below is completely crisp. I cant seem to find anything that will speed that up or force it as default. I have tried TBM, Lod radius, and affinity mask adjustments and they dont really seem to have that much effect on the up close textures.....

[sargeski 16]

Hi guys, I spent last night testing, and although I discovered some interesting things, I still have not found any setting that seems to effect the loading of the high res textures close up. If I puase the sim over some scenery, over a period of between 2 and 15 seconds , it seems to load one or two sets of higher res textures until the scenery below is completely crisp. I cant seem to find anything that will speed that up or force it as default. I have tried TBM, Lod radius, and affinity mask adjustments and they dont really seem to have that much effect on the up close textures.....

Mark,If it takes your system 2 to 15 seconds to sharpen the textures below your aircraft when you pause FSX, then you are running your slider settings too high and/or FSX is severely fragmented. We are talking about the blurries here. There is no magic bullet to cure the blurries. You have to configure and tune FSX to your liking. If textures are loading too slow for you, then you need to make some concessions elsewhere in your FSX settings and give some resources back to FSX to process your textures faster.Also keep in mind that the faster you fly and the lower you fly (especially at higher speeds) the more likely you are to experience the blurries.If you have not already done so, I would recommend that you read Nick's guide on setting up and tuning FSX.http://www.simforums.com/forums/forum_posts.asp?TID=29041Just keep in mind getting FSX to run to your satisfaction is going to be a balancing act and require some give and take................and/or a whole lot of money.

[markturner 0]

Thx sargeski, i have indeed read and followed Nicks guide. I run autogen at zero, as i use photoscenery and i reckon the two dont mix. Other than that, sliders are as recommended. Do you know of any particular area I can look at to trade with? The sim runs pretty damn good apart from this, and also, its not all textures that are blurry, only patches. Cheers,Mark

[sargeski 16]

Thx sargeski, i have indeed read and followed Nicks guide. I run autogen at zero, as i use photoscenery and i reckon the two dont mix. Other than that, sliders are as recommended. Do you know of any particular area I can look at to trade with? The sim runs pretty damn good apart from this, and also, its not all textures that are blurry, only patches. Cheers,Mark

Mark,It would seem to me that if only patches are blurry, then its possible it may be an issue with those particular patches (the photo scenery itself in use).

[markturner 0]

Hey Sargeski, what I mean is that certain areas are taking longer to snap into maximum clarity, its not a blanket problem, they come crisp in time and when they do, all good. They can be in the middle of an area that has already "crisped up" . I guess its tied to the area under view, I think the sim obviously loads textures where you look, if you swivel the view around, it will be loading stuff in various areas.The discussion is throwing up some interesting points, but I still feel that the exact information regarding the way, distance and algorithms of texture loading have not come out yet. Perhaps this is something that only the Aces team or someone with intimate knowledge like that can throw light on. Perhaps i should head over to the scenery department, and see if people who make scenery can shed any light onto how the sim renders it. The key areas are: Which texture resolution is rendered. How is this decided. What distance out is the texture rendered. How is that decided. How fast the sim can load the textures and what / where is the bottleneck. If we knew these things, we could tweak, experiment and alter to see if we could improve.Thanks for the input all, and feel free to continue the discussion!! cheers,Mark