What does "use High-Resolution terrain textures" affect?

[yanlaoge]

I am confused about the use of this option. Does it affect the sharpness of the default ground texture, photoreal ground texture, or autogen texture?

[Brad Shiver]

High-resolution terrain textures will increase the sharpness of the ground textures. When checked the resolution will change from 256 to 512 and can be further increased in the Prepar3D.cfg if your video card allows. Note that changes to this setting needs a restart to take effect.

-Brad

[Saldo]

I always thought that groundtextures were 1024x1024 in FSX en P3D , while Fs9 had 256x256...
World ground textures like GEX and FTX Global are also 1024x1024.

Has this been lowered in P3Dv4 , so you need to check High Res Ground Texture to get what we already had ?

[troykr]

I most definitely keep this turned **OFF**.
I have a 980ti.

[Saldo]

Can someone from LM reply on my comment please ...?
Thanks,
Gerard

[troykr]

"World ground textures like GEX and FTX Global are also 1024x1024."

Maybe they are but I'm pretty sure V3's native ground resolution was 256x256 and since V4 can draw further out you need a bigger option than just 256 (and lots more video card memory). From my experimentation with it, it seemed to make things further away look a bit better but I ran into performance issues. I'm thinking this setting is only good for GTX1080 and future cards with heaps more VRAM.

[pmb]

I don't know about the default textures, but ORBX textures have always been 1024, as I read several times. Thus I would be interested in an answer, too.

Kind regards, Michael

[aeronauta]

" .Support for higher resolution ground textures "

From the New Features P3D V4 announcement... I guess it means will use the resolution of the actual textures without restriction..

Jorge

[Saldo]

" .Support for higher resolution ground textures "

From the New Features P3D V4 announcement... I guess it means will use the resolution of the actual textures without restriction..

Jorge

So we have better performance because we now use 4 times smaller textures ( 2x less sharp ).
And if we check Detailed ground textures than we see the same as FSX....

[yanlaoge]

I switched on and off "use High-Resolution terrain textures", and the difference is minimal. I compare TEXTURE_SIZE_EXP=10 and 9, and the difference is minimal, but the difference in loading time is huge. So I just turn it off, and changed TEXTURE_SIZE_EXP back to 9. Still wish LM could allow us to increase lod-radius to bigger than 6.5. In the old FSX this is something that really helps.

[bhorv67]

Then what is the drop down setting in graphics for 1024x1024 or 2048x2048 or 4096x4096, etc...

this is quite confusing.

[Saldo]

That is for 3D objects and clouds.
Not ground texture resolution.

[pmb]

Hi Saldo,

thanks for making this clear. It you ask me, there would be enough room in the UI for a clear naming ("3D objects/clouds texture resolution" instead of just "texture resolution").

Kind regards, Michael

[Saldo]

Hi Saldo,

thanks for making this clear. It you ask me, there would be enough room in the UI for a clear naming ("3D objects/clouds texture resolution" instead of just "texture resolution").

Kind regards, Michael

Totally agree with you Michael

[Beau Hollis]

To clarify, the resolution of the land class textures found in Scenery\World\texture do not change. I believe these are 1024 textures and are intended to represent a 1km area. So the resolution of these textures is about 1 meter per pixel (mpp). Using those textures as a source material, we generate the runtime terrain textures using vector data like rivers and roads, and other techniques to combine. These final runtime textures have always been 256x256, but they are generated at various LODs, and the number of tiles generated for each LOD is based on LOD radius.

Using the high resolution texture settings, you will not notice any improvement in the sharpness of the base materials (rocks, trees, urban neighborhoods, etc. What you will see is more crispness in roads, shorelines, etc. This is the same texture improvement that would be seen using a higher LOD radius. At LOD levels where the terrain texture is 1mpp or less, you will also see crisper textures because you get more of the detail from the source textures. The distance at which you get the full 1mpp terrain textures is doubled using 512 textures, and quadrupled using 1024 textures.

There is a known limitation of this setting currently, which is that photo-real (PR) textures are not improved because the PR source textures are at a fixed resolution and are already assigned to a specific LOD when they are build into the scenery. We plan to look for ways to overcome this limitation.

As for the general texture resolution setting, it is a max value. This means textures that are larger than that size will be sized down to the max size at runtime to save memory. I think the terrain textures are exempt from this downsizing, but even if they are not, it would have had no impact prior to v4 because the lowest setting available is 256.

I hope this helps clear things up a bit.

Thanks