Posted: Sun May 21, 2006 7:55 pmNot my own, but taken from the avsim forums. I am sure many of you will find it usefull with all the photoreal NZ scenery that is available at the moment. Read the orginal page here: http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az= ... &mode=full
Intro
Photorealistic sceneries are becoming more popular. Unfortunately, FS2004 is not very good at handling the large amount of textures that need to be loaded. This can result in "blurries"Â, especially if you fly fast.
For now, here are the settings and tweaks I have found to work well, after continious tweaking, experimenting and testing.
The key is to make sure there's enough computing resources to load the textures quickly enough to avoid blurries. Features like AI traffic, weather and water detail take away resources that could otherwise be used for loading the scenery textures.
Inside FS2004: The basic stuff
I have outlined the most important settings that I have found to have the biggest impact on blurries. Generally, anything that causes lower framerate (including addons, weather, detailed aircraft) will cause more blurries.
Hardware tab (Display settings)
Framerate: Unlimited
Mipmap detail level: 4
FS2004 seems to load textures on a "Âper frame"Â basis, so the higher the framerate is, the better the quality of the scenery will be. Locking the framerate to a lower number will actually cause more blurries to appear. Generally, if framerate starts dropping below 30 FPS, the sim will have trouble keeping up and you will see blurry textures. If you manage to get over 60-70 FPS, blurries will virtually be non-existant.
3D clouds/cloud detail (Display settings)
It's OK to use 3D clouds if you keep the draw distance of the clouds fairly low (about 40 miles). You may also want to compress the clouds or use the FSW high performance replacements. If you get blurries, especially in heavy weather, consider reducing or turning off 3D clouds.
AI Traffic
AI Traffic can cause lower FPS. This depends on where you are flying. For example, over Megascenery Socal, there's a lot of AI traffic, so setting traffic to 100% will cause a hefty drop. Over the Real Germany and Switzerland Professional sceneries, the traffic isn't as dense, even with this slider set to the far rightt, so you might get away with a setting of 100%. I recommend a setting of 25% unless you absolutely need/want more AI traffic. If you won't need the AI traffic at all (just sightseeing), disable it alltogether.
Extended Terrain Textures
Enabling ETT loads detailed textures farther away from the aircraft. This impacts the performance of photographic sceneries in two ways:
i) Longer loading time "“ the scenery can take several minutes to load when ETT are enabled.
ii) More blurries "“ ETT cause more blurries to appear in the scenery, especially when flying fast (over 200 kts.).
If you can live with the longer loading time and have a fast system, or if you only fly slow aircraft, you can enable this option. If you get blurries or can't stand waiting up to 4 minutes for the scenery to load, disable it.
If you disable it, you will see green, ugly textures in the distance. You can change the weather settings to create a Low Visibility Layer with 10-30 miles Visibility, and increase the max altitude of this layer to above the max altitude you plan on flying at. This should hide the ugly textures, and this visiblity setting is actually more realistic than Unlimited visibility in most cases. If you're using Real World weather or don't want to always change the visibility settings, there's an FS9.cfg tweak that can do this automatically for you. See further down.
Dusk/Dawn blending
Only affects flying at dusk/dawn and gives you nicer textures. If you have a fast system, you can enable this option. You might have to reduce some other options when flying at dusk/dawn (AI Traffic, 3D clouds, Extended Terrain Textures) in order to eliminate blurries.
Water Detail
Setting this to High can cause more blurries to appear and causes "Âmicro stutters"Â. This is especially true in coastal regions (Megascenery, coastal regions of the England and Wales scenery). Inland, where there are only smaller lakes, using the High setting has a smaller impact. Setting this to Low will still give you "Âshiny"Â water but not as detailed as the High setting. Usually, Low is good enough unless you're flying a floatplane and want to land on water.
Autogen
Few photographic sceneries use Autogen. Megascenery does, however you might prefer the appearance of the scenery without autogen. Try with and without and see what you prefer. Autogen has no noticable impact on blurries, at least not on my system.
Display driver settings (ATI Radeon 9700 Pro)
I have a Radeon 9700 Pro 128MB, and these are the settings I prefer for FS2004. If you have a faster videocard such as the 9800 XT 256MB, you can probably use higher settings. If you have another brand videocard, such as the GeforceFX, this may not apply to your card, as each videocard reacts differently to some of these settings.
Anti-Aliasing: 4x
Anisotropic Filtering: 8X Performance mode.
Texture Preference: Highest Quality
Mipmap detail: Highest Quality
Wait for vertical sync: Off
TruForm: Off
Turning Vsync off causes some "Âtearing"Â in FS2004. It allows the videocard to render at full speed (without having to wait for the monitor to draw each frame), and causes slightly less blurries in some cases where the framerate is very high (60+ FPS). Enable it if the tearing effect bothers you.
FS9.cfg+misc tweaks:
Many of the following tweaks apply when flying over generic scenery as well
Load textures farther away to reduce blurries:
Find these lines in FS9.cfg and change them to read:
TERRAIN_DEFAULT_RADIUS=9.000000
TERRAIN_EXTENDED_RADIUS=9.900000
TERRAIN_EXTENDED_LEVELS=4
Load textures faster
Find and edit:
TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=
I use 400. You can try a higher or lower setting to see what gives the best performance on your system. The default setting is very conservative so don't be afraid to try high values. You'll likely get stuttering if you set it too high.
Workaround for the Autogen performance bug:
In FS9.cfg, find this line and edit it to read:
TERRAIN_USE_VECTOR_OBJECTS=0
Go into your FS9 folder, then the Autogen folder, and rename the file
default.xml
-to-
default.bak
Performance should improve, especially over densely populated regions. This can also affect blurries when flying near the "Âedge"Â of a photorealistic scenery because the autogen is taking away resources that would otherwise be used for loading the textures.
Improve the appearance of detailed Mesh:
Find and edit this line in fs9.cfg (default for this is 19):
TERRAIN_MAX_VERTEX_LEVEL=21
This will allow FS2004 to draw detailed Mesh more accurately.
Remove "Âcanyons"Â and other Mesh weirdness in photographic sceneries
This is caused by the "Âvalleys"Â FS9 creates for rivers/streams. When you're using a photographic scenery, the actual stream lines are not drawn. The stream lines you see are actually part of the photo texture. The Microsoft stream lines and the actual photographic stream lines are rarely aligned because Microsoft uses very innacurate stream line data. This causes "Âvalleys"Â or canyons to appear in the scenery near rivers or streams.
In your FS9 folder, find and open terrain.cfg. Near the top, you should see:
//Stream Lines
Under this are textures 1024 and 1025. At the bottom of each offset=-10
For textures 1024 and 1025 (stream lines), change it to read:
offset=flat
You may want to set it back to -10 when you're not flying over photographic scenery.
Hide the green textures when Extended Terrain Textures are disabled:
You can do this by changing the visibility setting inside FS9, but when using Real Weather or Weather Themes, this is not always possible. In that case:
In fs9.cfg, find and edit:
MAX_UNLIMITED_VIS=44000
You can try various settings to see what you prefer. Lower means scenery is cut off close to the viewer, higher means you'll see some of the green textures.
Note: This setting is automatically reset to 96560 every time you click OK in the display settings in FS9. You will then need to re-edit FS9.cfg to put it back to your prefered setting.
Compress the cloud textures
First, make a backup of the entire FS9\Texture folder.
You can find replacements from the FSW homepage. These are of lower resolution than default and provide excellent performance. If you want the highest resolution but still want to improve performance:
Use Image Tool (http://www.projectopensky.com/files/ind ... getool.exe) and open the Cloud bitmaps (<fs9 folder>)\texture\. Click Image, Format and then select DXT3. Re-save the file.
The cumulus01.bmp is the most resource hungry texture. You may also want to compress the cirrus*.bmp files and the other cumulus bmp file.
If you have a Radeon videocard, the image quality should not be affected much. Geforce2, 3 and 4 cards have very poor quality when using compressed textures so this is not a good solution. I have not yet seen the texture compression on a GeforceFX card. Try it and see what it looks like. In some cases, compressing these textures can cause lockups. In that case, just restore the backups (you did make backups, didn't you?).
Harddrive partitioning
If you have two harddrives, keep FS2004 on one drive and install your detailed sceneries to another. If you have the excellent Partition Magic by Powerquest, use it to create a dedicated partition for your photographic sceneries. Make sure you put the sceneries on the faster of the harddrives (if you have one 5400 RPM drive and one 7200 RPM, put the sceneries on the 7200 RPM drive). This will speed up file searches and some other general Windows tasks. Also, make sure to defragment both BEFORE and AFTER installing a photographic scenery. They contain thousands of texture files that easily get fragmented.
Hopefully, this should allow you to enjoy photographic sceneries without blurries, or at least keep the blurries to a minimum.