Scenery draw distance

[Spyke]

Hi all.

I have noticed that when flying circuits, approaches etc around added-on sceneries the ground building textures and static textures seem to pop into view only when I'm very close to them. I'm running with mipmap set to 5, most scenery sliders set to very high/very dense, but not maxxed out, in 1024x768. Direct x is at 9.0b and I'm using the new omega 4.7 drivers based on Cat 4.7s

Specs: Amd 3.2 Athlonxp
Radeon 8500pro 128mb
512mb DDR400 ram
Windows XP Home

What do you suggest- have I missed something obvious? I've tried adjusting the sliders, but they don't seem to do anything for it. My frames per sec are pretty good, 16 (really busy areas) to 60 plus, and pretty smooth.

Thanks in advance!

[RollerBall]

Make the following mods in your fs9.cfg file

[DISPLAY]
UPPER_FRAMERATE_LIMIT=15
TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=450

[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=2.500000
TERRAIN_EXTENDED_RADIUS=4.00000
TERRAIN_EXTENDED_LEVELS=1241896

The higher TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT figure makes your ground textures load quicker but only higher performance cards can take higher figures as there is a FR hit. Some people recommend increasing it to 800 so experiment a bit.

The new TERRAIN_RADIUS figures affect how far from your position you will see clear ground textures. Again, experiment as once again there is a FR hit.

[Spyke]

Thaanks Rollerball. I've gone in there and played about with those figures. I tried your suggested figures, then tried different values till settling for:

TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=600
TERRAIN_DEFAULT_RADIUS=2.000000
TERRAIN_EXTENDED_RADIUS=7.00000

I thought there was a little improvement, but to be honest, it's still really annoying seeing the buildings, lights, pylons, containers etc just popping up so obviously. After passing them I can see them being deleted in my wake when looking back.

Do you think there could be something more fundamental wrong here?

[Daz]

im thinking possible lack of RAM or slow to load textures from the hard drive

[Spyke]

Ok, so I've already triedd speeding up the way tesxtures are drawn, using Rollerball's tips.... Anything else I can do before I have to go for another stick of memory?

Thanks.

[Skittles]

TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=200
TERRAIN_DEFAULT_RADIUS=9.000000  
TERRAIN_EXTENDED_RADIUS=9.00000  

These are the figures I have.  I've tinkered with the TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT ranging from 60 to 400. 200 seems the best for me.

[Spyke]

Hi,

Thanks for replies- I'll try some more tweaking with those settings first and let you know how I get on!

Cheers!