Classic British Flight Sim

Hi Chaps

You may think the title of the thread odd but here's a tale for you. You'll all be aware of my recent obsession with white autogen houses and the sizes of trees in FSX.. I know what you're thinking and I've thought it myself Anyhoo.. I thought I'd pop to have a look at ES Scillies, Alderney and Guernsey as last time I went, I thought I remembered them all looking pretty realistic tree and house-wise and so it was. GUE has a few 'giants' but by and large, the trees there are much smaller and match better the size of the 'various' coloured houses. I popped to Ald and much the same so on to the Scillies.. much the same again.

Back to GUE once more for another goof driving that Huey I posted on one of Ian's threads and I suddenly wondered if there was anything I could do to sharpen things up a bit closer in. My scenery settings are pretty much default I think.. especially Mesh Res, Texture Res, Mesh Complexity, Level of Detail Radius and water. Global texture size I put to max in the RH side of the pane and nothing much happened so I thought I'd try and increase the Texture resolution from it's default 2m to 60cm. Bless my cotton socks GUE tightened up like a good un making 'low and slow' much more rewarding and there was a slight increase in performance. I say slight because GUE really punishes my system and the odd frame here and there isn't really worth talking about.

I thought I'd pop to Alderney next and I couldn't believe it. Alderney ran ok before but now, with my frames locked at 45fps.. it sit's at 44-45 all the way round the island. As a comparison, this is what I see with the default FS scenery in the back of beyond with nothing more than trees and mountains to disturb the flow. Just to make sure this wasn't a one-off.. I went to the Scillies which had been a bit of a toughie until GUE came along when it suddenly looked reasonable Lows of 27-28 now all around the island

Don't ask me why increasing the texture resolution has helped my performance because I honestly don't know. You'd think it would be able to process a blur faster than something pin sharp wouldn't you but this doesn't seem to be the case. So excited was I by this find (don't tell me.. you're all on 60cm or higher anyway ).. I thought I'd pass it on. So.. global texture size to 'unbelieveable' (hard right) and Texture resolution from the default 2m to 60cm.

As I said, it didn't do much for GUE speed-wise but it now looks better and a better looking 3-legged dog-like running scenery is better than a sh1te looking 3-legged dog-like running scenery.. result. The Scillies it's helped tremendously.. looks better and runs faster and Alderney.. no comparison. Looks a treat and flies as well

ATB
DaveB

Not an odd title at all, I seem to remember in the deep dark history of FSX tweaking that ChrisN of Simflight recommeded that before tweaking all settings (or at least some of them) they be set at maximum. His thinking was that FSX expected maxed out settings and that to dial them back caused extra CPU cycles in dumbing it down. Strewth its almost as if FSX was a living thing.
For me the only things I turn down are the Clouds to the middle setting, airport suppport vehicle traffic to least and Autogen to normal.

If I remember correctly (and I may be wrong) but your supposed to set the mesh resolution to match the texture resolution otherwise the graphics card has more trouble trying to marry the two up.

Hello Mate

Well.. you know of the trouble I had with the FSX version of the QW RJ/146. A whole raft of suggestions were made including taking off ACC and SP1 then reloading them again as the fault lay with a fudged Simconnect (there's a lot of it about I gather). I went for none of that chosing to let the cfg rewrite itself whereupon the RJ loaded. The major difference I noticed was this line.. TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD=1024. In the new cfg, the load size was down to 512. Having checked it again just, it's back to 1024 so whether the RJ will load again.. who knows The settings from within FS are as that 'new' cfg load with the exception of the screen res and colour.. Global texture resolution (moved from high to v high) and on the scenery tab, the settings are as follows:

Level of detail radius: Medium
Mesh Complexity: 72
Mesh Resolution: 76
Texture Resolution: 60cm (was 2m default)
Water effects: Mid 2.x
Scenery complexity: Dense (not sure if this was Normal)
Autogen density: Dense (not sure if this was Normal either)
Ground scenery shadows: not ticked
Special effects detail: High

I've always believed that on a fresh cfg, FS read the system and gave you settings accordingly. I may well be wrong. The Aircraft tab is on ULTRA and I've certainly not touched that either! Are you saying that if I set the texture res to match the Mesh res, it could be better still?

ATB
DaveB

TSR2 wrote:If I remember correctly (and I may be wrong) but your supposed to set the mesh resolution to match the texture resolution otherwise the graphics card has more trouble trying to marry the two up.

The mesh resolution and texture resolution are two separate things. They should match the respective resolution of the texture files and mesh files.

There is no point in setting the texture resoluion to less than the resolution of the texture bgls since the system cannot interpolate textures. One can set the mesh resolution less than that of the mesh files, in which case the graphics system will interpolate extra heights (but at the cost of extra processor cycles).

The Alderney texture resolution is 30cm per pixel and the mesh is 3m between points. In general (apart from some higher res areas), England and Wales texture resolution is 1.2m per pixel and the mesh is 5m.

What settings are you using in George?

Fiddling with FSX can lead to you being sectioned, Dave! This is the single reason why Paul and I went for the stability of P3D. Which, once it's tweaked it stays tweaked!

Anyway, there are a couple of guides which a great many of the extreme (PMDG ) sim flyers out there use to set their FSX/P3D installs. I've followed one guru, while Paul has followed the other and we are both very very 'appy

I follow a guy called Kosta and I copy his recommendations to the letter, including the Nvidia Inspector graphics settings, and he explains everything in his blog here: http://kostasfsworld.wordpress.com/fsx- ... are-guide/

Paul prefers the Jesus Bojote system of submitting your config file for analysis and a tweaked one created for you which you can download. That gave me a reduction of 5 FPS but it suits Paul's machine. You can find that one here : http://www.venetubo.com/fsx.html

Have a look at Kosta's page first as he does explain most of the tweaks in detail.

Either way saves an awful lot of trial and error. E.g. I'm locked to 30 FPS in sim because it is half the refresh rate of the 60hz screen and V-sync in NI is set to half refresh rate which apparently syncs with the 30 FPS. And no - I don't have to understand it, I just do it and it works.

Ian

TSR2 wrote:What settings are you using in George?

Currently I have Mesh resolution 5m and Texture resolution 1m, but I change it depnding upon where I am flying.

I tried that uploading the FSX.cfg file and the updated one screwed FSX up so went back to my original

GHD wrote:

TSR2 wrote:What settings are you using in George?

Currently I have Mesh resolution 5m and Texture resolution 1m, but I change it depnding upon where I am flying.

Is that for GenX UK flying George?