fsxaibureau.com

Hi everybody,

just a short question, I don't know whether the problem is on my side or it isn't a failure

The winglet on the 733 model looks extremly blurry, never spotted this on the old AIa model. Moreover, the screenshot made by the painter also do not show such a blurry winglet. The "problem" apears at least on the paints for Air Baltic by Juergen and Air Italy by Nils.



Could you check, if this blurry thing appears on your computers as well? Thanks!

Speaking for my Air Italy paint. The picture shows the FSX paint in every case.

The blurriness has been discussed here:
https://fsxaibureau.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=49

Thanks for your response Nils, even there is no solution for that problem. I will think about to use a 32bit instead with all possible problems occuring from that.

scandic wrote:Thanks for your response Nils, even there is no solution for that problem. I will think about to use a 32bit instead with all possible problems occuring from that.

I don't know why there is a legend about 32bit textures being a problem. Of course, they take up more HD space than dxt3 but nowadays, is this really a problem? I have about 10 GB of ai textures in my sim, most of them 32bits and I have no problem whatsoever!

The only problem with 32bit textures is that they look better than the others! Ouch! (except of course if you use fsx and then you should use the dxt5 HD textures which are really much more detailed)

Cheers

Philippe

Philippe,

The issue with 32bit textures is that the FS engine was just not designed for them. The fact that it can display them does not mean they should be used.
Its all about performance.
I'm not going to attempt to change anyone's mind, you're free to use whatever format you wish to, and clearly after so many years people have entrenched positions.
However look at a vanilla FS9 install. you will not find a SINGLE 32bit texture. ACES never designed the FS engine to handle multitudes of these textures and the VRAM they gobble up.
Now in FSX things are slightly different because it was designed at a time when 1GB+ graphics cards were becoming common and the graphics engine is far more refined than FS9's. That said again look at a vanilla FSX install and you will not see any 32bit bitmaps there. The preferred formats in FSX are DXT5 and DDS.

Having had my system worked over by FS-GS, one of the most important things I was told was to convert any 32bit textures I had. I did and the performance difference was significant. I always laugh when people complain on forums about blurries or stutters and then see screenshots where they are using HD 32bit textures on aircraft and the like!
One example I was told about was regarding VC textures. Did you know that FS is rendering these textures even when the VC is not displayed? Yup if you have a bunch of 32bit VC textures FS will still be rendering them even when you are in spot plane view. Throw in some HD 32 bit aircraft textures then some 32bit AI textures and 32bit scenery textures and then you hit stutter or blurry land. I always convert VC textures to DXT.

Like I said, not here to to persuade anyone, simply passing on information. Ridding my sim of 32bit textures and adding mip maps was the single biggest performance imporvement I got in the sim. Of course you need your cfg settings and Nvidia Inspector settings set up appropriately as well, but I don't get any mip blurring or shimmering, and silky smooth performance in all phases of flight and all views.

IMHO 32bit textures for AI is total overkill. I find that for flying purposes I'm never close enough to any AI aircraft to spot DXT compression and for me the tradeoff between a slight quality loss but significantly improved performance is well worth it and I'm sure Mariano agrees after he did the same thing. Infact I believe he even went to DXT1 with his AI textures.

Again, I respect everyones right to choose and set up their sim as they see fit - Its the beauty of our hobby, this is just background info

Cheers
Garry

atco wrote:Philippe,

The issue with 32bit textures is that the FS engine was just not designed for them. The fact that it can display them does not mean they should be used.
Its all about performance.
I'm not going to attempt to change anyone's mind, you're free to use whatever format you wish to, and clearly after so many years people have entrenched positions.
However look at a vanilla FS9 install. you will not find a SINGLE 32bit texture. ACES never designed the FS engine to handle multitudes of these textures and the VRAM they gobble up.
Now in FSX things are slightly different because it was designed at a time when 1GB+ graphics cards were becoming common and the graphics engine is far more refined than FS9's. That said again look at a vanilla FSX install and you will not see any 32bit bitmaps there. The preferred formats in FSX are DXT5 and DDS.

Having had my system worked over by FS-GS, one of the most important things I was told was to convert any 32bit textures I had. I did and the performance difference was significant. I always laugh when people complain on forums about blurries or stutters and then see screenshots where they are using HD 32bit textures on aircraft and the like!
One example I was told about was regarding VC textures. Did you know that FS is rendering these textures even when the VC is not displayed? Yup if you have a bunch of 32bit VC textures FS will still be rendering them even when you are in spot plane view. Throw in some HD 32 bit aircraft textures then some 32bit AI textures and 32bit scenery textures and then you hit stutter or blurry land. I always convert VC textures to DXT.

Like I said, not here to to persuade anyone, simply passing on information. Ridding my sim of 32bit textures and adding mip maps was the single biggest performance imporvement I got in the sim. Of course you need your cfg settings and Nvidia Inspector settings set up appropriately as well, but I don't get any mip blurring or shimmering, and silky smooth performance in all phases of flight and all views.

IMHO 32bit textures for AI is total overkill. I find that for flying purposes I'm never close enough to any AI aircraft to spot DXT compression and for me the tradeoff between a slight quality loss but significantly improved performance is well worth it and I'm sure Mariano agrees after he did the same thing. Infact I believe he even went to DXT1 with his AI textures.

Again, I respect everyones right to choose and set up their sim as they see fit - Its the beauty of our hobby, this is just background info

Cheers
Garry

Hi Garry,

Thanks for the info.

To be honest, I have not flown in fs for years. I spend most of my time painting aircraft, and occasionally, I visit some fs busy airports to spot ai, so performance is not really an issue for me!

And while currently discovering the joy of Imagetool that makes format conversion a breeze, I did notice that I can actually spot almost no visible difference between 32bits and mipped dxt3, so I guess I would convert all my 32bit textures back to mipped dxt3 if I were to use fs9 again for flying

I was just reacting to the fact that some people always mention 32bits textures as the source of all evil in fs, and I wanted to say that I use them without any problem. (ok, and without any third party sophisticated ui aircraft!

Cheers

Philippe

atco wrote:Philippe,

The issue with 32bit textures is that the FS engine was just not designed for them. The fact that it can display them does not mean they should be used.
Its all about performance.
I'm not going to attempt to change anyone's mind, you're free to use whatever format you wish to, and clearly after so many years people have entrenched positions.
However look at a vanilla FS9 install. you will not find a SINGLE 32bit texture. ACES never designed the FS engine to handle multitudes of these textures and the VRAM they gobble up.
Now in FSX things are slightly different because it was designed at a time when 1GB+ graphics cards were becoming common and the graphics engine is far more refined than FS9's. That said again look at a vanilla FSX install and you will not see any 32bit bitmaps there. The preferred formats in FSX are DXT5 and DDS.

Having had my system worked over by FS-GS, one of the most important things I was told was to convert any 32bit textures I had. I did and the performance difference was significant. I always laugh when people complain on forums about blurries or stutters and then see screenshots where they are using HD 32bit textures on aircraft and the like!
One example I was told about was regarding VC textures. Did you know that FS is rendering these textures even when the VC is not displayed? Yup if you have a bunch of 32bit VC textures FS will still be rendering them even when you are in spot plane view. Throw in some HD 32 bit aircraft textures then some 32bit AI textures and 32bit scenery textures and then you hit stutter or blurry land. I always convert VC textures to DXT.

Like I said, not here to to persuade anyone, simply passing on information. Ridding my sim of 32bit textures and adding mip maps was the single biggest performance imporvement I got in the sim. Of course you need your cfg settings and Nvidia Inspector settings set up appropriately as well, but I don't get any mip blurring or shimmering, and silky smooth performance in all phases of flight and all views.

IMHO 32bit textures for AI is total overkill. I find that for flying purposes I'm never close enough to any AI aircraft to spot DXT compression and for me the tradeoff between a slight quality loss but significantly improved performance is well worth it and I'm sure Mariano agrees after he did the same thing. Infact I believe he even went to DXT1 with his AI textures.

Again, I respect everyones right to choose and set up their sim as they see fit - Its the beauty of our hobby, this is just background info

Cheers
Garry

Whats the proper Nvidia Inspector setup for MipMap in FS?

Fairly straight forward - Used to be more complicated in the days of nhancer.

My FS9 settings are:
Antialiasing Behaviour Flags: None
Antialiasing Mode: Overide any application setting
Antialiasing: 8xS
Transparency SS: 2x supersampling

Anisotropic Filtering Mode: User defined/Off
Anisotropic Filtering: 16x
Texture Filtering - Negative LOD BIAS: Clamp
Texture Filtering - Quality: High Quality

Power Management: Prefer Maximum Performance
Vertical Synch: Force on

This is using a GTX570, you will obviously need to adjust according to the power and VRAM of your card especially with Transparency supersampling as thats quite resource intensive.
The most important setting for keeping mips sharp are Negative LOD BIAS and Texture filtering quality.

IMHO 32bit textures for AI is total overkill. I find that for flying purposes I'm never close enough to any AI aircraft to spot DXT compression and for me the tradeoff between a slight quality loss but significantly improved performance is well worth it and I'm sure Mariano agrees after he did the same thing. Infact I believe he even went to DXT1 with his AI textures.

Hi Garry, actually, the only textures I convert to DXT1 are small aircraft like light GA aircraft. Honestly, you can never tell the difference. I try to use Imagetool to convert to DXT1 though, I find that DXTBMP creates a lot of artifacts when converting to DXT1.

I fully agree with everything else you said though. I don't have FS9 installed anymore, but I remember the incorrect and excessive use of 32bit, or even DXT3, very annoying. Especially by scenery designers, some of them quite big. If you look at the masters (FlyTampa), they barely use anything else other than DXT1 and their sceneries are works of art. No need to use DXT3 at huge 1024x1024 format when you don't need a variable transparency alpha, it just uses up a lot more room than DXT1 for no reason.

I remember the beautiful Barbados freeware scenery for FS9, was barely getting 10-15fps. I went through the scenery folder and it was full of 32bit textures. After converting all the textures to the proper format (DX1 and DX3), I was achieving my locked FPS steadily.

I was just reacting to the fact that some people always mention 32bits textures as the source of all evil in fs, and I wanted to say that I use them without any problem.

I think that is just it Philippe. You don't seem to run you Sim, so you probably don't notice the performance hit. To be honest, I barely get enough time to run my FSX as well, but I am really anal about the textures and maintaining them in proper format for best performance. I check every single AI aircraft I add in DXTBMP and I often convert it to the proper format or have to add an alpha channel. Especially for the Aardvarks, I find that missing alpha channels on the main textures leads to very slow loading of the texture in the sim. You can really notice this as well in FSRepaint. Open an Aardvark without an Alpha and compare how slowly it loads compared to one with an Alpha channel. There is a noticeable difference.