Welcome dave! a first question for you

[windrunner]

I'm very happy about this new section, and I predict I'll be a daily visitor here;dave, I wish you a good work!

(And I'm glad of being the first poster here)

This is what has been torturing my FS experience, I am not sure if it's called "stutters" or not, but sometimes to fly becomes a little difficult,

You fly easily.....


And suddenly...BUMP!



Sometimes it comes each 10 or 12 seconds. I have the impression it is more frequent when clouds are around, or there's some added scenery.

MY sistem specs:

AMD Athlon 64 3200+
2.20 ghz, 1 gb RAM

XP Home edition SP2

ATI Radeon X1600 Series 512 mb

Good luck!

[Roger]

What do you think Dave? Looks like a video card driver problem to me or maybe overheating?

[Dave3cu]

Thanks for your best wishes Windrunner:

Great!! First question, and I already need help.

Those would be my first guesses, Roger. That image does not look like anything I've seen due to simple 'lag'.

Windrunner, has this been a problem from the get-go, or something that has happened recently or been building up?

Dave

[windrunner]

It happens all the time, I am sure it has something to do with my video card. I have the last Catalyst drivers. I think I need to tweak the settings? not sure what it may be. It happens from the very beginning. I have this new sistem from 6 monthes now, and everything is fresh (os, drivers, etc).

Time to tweak the video card, I think.

[Roger]

Good luck Damian!

Thanks for giving your system specs...that helps a great deal in any diagnostics.

Btw clouds can be a real drain on pc/vid card resources...I wonder if the effect goes away if you run with 'Clear weather'?

[ScruffyDuck]

Is it slider dependent? If you turn all the sliders way down and remove things like 3D clouds do you still get the problem? If yes then I would agree that it is more likely to be hardware related. If it goes away then you would need to add stuff back slowly until the stutters return.

Does it happen wherever you are or only at certain locations?

[Dave3cu]

Damian,

Ran across the topic from Apr 7, '06, where you announced your hardware upgrades that are your current system. At that time you said things were smooth, good FPS even with clouds and ai.

Can you think of anything since then, possibly a driver update, that coincide with the start of your problem??

Not trying to confuse the situation, just trying to zero in on possible causes

When going thru Jon's suggestions, include the FPS slider, taking it down to 25 or so.

Dave

[windrunner]

Well guys, today I've left aside my Fs projects and expent some time only flying and looking around. Dave, in those early days I had a "virgin" Fs with no addons; now I have so many things installed that I don't even remember...lol.

My first impression is that the perfomance is still good: the sim runs smooth and I see no problems in the fps side (anyway, I have locked them at 25: I am one of those who believes the human eye will not caught up more than that anyway, but this is rather "controversial" hehe).

I followed scruffy's advice and started the test by lowering the sliders. I had ALL of them to the maximum. I've discovered the one is causing me the issue: the Autogen. When I minimized to zero, I had no more delays nor those "psychedelic hipnosis" screens (I was starting to see Lucy in the sky with diamonds....)

I think I've found the problem. I have Ground Environment installed and my fs9.cfg terrain section altered (yes, I did altered it myself time ago) like this,

[TERRAIN]
TERRAIN_ERROR_FACTOR=100.000000
TERRAIN_MIN_DEM_AREA=10.000000
TERRAIN_MAX_DEM_AREA=100.000000
TERRAIN_MAX_VERTEX_LEVEL=19
TERRAIN_TEXTURE_SIZE_EXP=8
TERRAIN_AUTOGEN_DENSITY=5
TERRAIN_USE_GRADIENT_MAP=1
TERRAIN_EXTENDED_TEXTURES=1
TERRAIN_DEFAULT_RADIUS=9.500000
TERRAIN_EXTENDED_RADIUS=4.500000
TERRAIN_EXTENDED_LEVELS=0

I think I had changed the default and extended radius. Can some of you post wich is the default terrain values? may be GE does not support these new values, and I want to revert to the default, may be GE autogen needs that ones.

Thanks you!

[ScruffyDuck]

Here's mine for a default FS 9 Setup

[TERRAIN]
TERRAIN_ERROR_FACTOR=60.000000
TERRAIN_MIN_DEM_AREA=10.000000
TERRAIN_MAX_DEM_AREA=100.000000
TERRAIN_MAX_VERTEX_LEVEL=19
TERRAIN_TEXTURE_SIZE_EXP=8
TERRAIN_AUTOGEN_DENSITY=2
TERRAIN_USE_GRADIENT_MAP=1
TERRAIN_EXTENDED_TEXTURES=0
TERRAIN_DEFAULT_RADIUS=0.000000
TERRAIN_EXTENDED_RADIUS=0.000000
TERRAIN_EXTENDED_LEVELS=-1073741772

[windrunner]

Great scruffy, thanks, I'll give it a try, and let's see what it comes out!

[windrunner]

After some tweaking around the cfg, I've finally discovered how to avoid this stutters. I changed the section Display.

[DISPLAY]
UPPER_FRAMERATE_LIMIT=22
TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=400
TextureMaxLoad=20

Everything is fine now, I have an stutter from time to time, but more rarely than the usual till now, and flying is OK. I have to say I only had this issue at FS9 and not GW3, because never touched GW3.cfg.

Thanks for your help, guys, see you next time!

[Dan]

Interesting Windrunner! I've been playing around with that tweak www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforums/showthread.php?t=25421 for a couple of days now and found that 80/10 at 22 works best on my system.

It is a great tweak, even though the fps's did not improve much, I found that I have much smoother flights and very little spits & sputters with lower frame rates. So, in a sense I guess, it allows less powerful systems to load textures faster and in return the plane flies smoother. Tested it out with the new Digital Aviation Cheyenne which now flies a lot better then before the tweak.

Dan

_{…it’s great being a kid again – without the glue!} ;D

[windrunner]

I agree, it's a very useful tip. I tried the TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=100, but I got better results with 400.

I've never been too much worried about fps or blurries; fortunately they were in the range of 20 and never got blurries. Those stutters were, instead, a real nighmare, now under control.

I still want to understand another interesting value to modify: "TERRAIN_EXTENDED_LEVELS". Mine was 0, but I've changed to 232, like adviced in that thread. Still wandering what it really changes.

[Dave3cu]

Damian,

Glad to see you got your problem sorted out.

I still want to understand another interesting value to modify: "TERRAIN_EXTENDED_LEVELS". Mine was 0, but I've changed to 232, like adviced in that thread. Still wandering what it really changes.

From a discussion at SimV:

TERRAIN_EXTENDED_LEVELS=1 (5 does not exist on this setting and it cannot be any higher than 1 unless you have full buffer mesh installed from FSGenesis)

I've been thinking that this discussion, relating to 'Stutters and Blurries', would be a good candidate for our first 'Tweaks' sticky.

Though the topic has been on many boards for a couple of years I stumbled across it only recently. Like Dan, I have been playing around with it for a few days, with similar results.

Dave

[windrunner]

hi Dave, after "googleing" for a while (yes, I invented a new word), I've found there are two different main interpretations avbout the "TERRAIN_EXTENDED_LEVELS" function.

The first is the one you've wrote above: the only accepted value is 1 (even if the default value is a weird number like 1242456) ; the second, instead, says that asigning a higher value (let's say 900) it will help the mesh to be faster generated and will make the scenery run like a Harley Davidson in the route 66....

I am not sure, but I'll test these different values.