Terrain LOD switch

[geloxo]

Hi,

This is an old pain in the ass, but still persists in P3D5. Even on max settings the terrain LOD switch ocurrs too close to aircraft, suffering from the known mesh / texture popping. Basically you suddenly see the mesh switch from lower detail to higher detail. The problem is that the switch still happens too close to aircraft and if you rise mesh resolution to something like 5m, 2m or 1m you see the shape in mountains continuously changing while you are flying over them at low altitude. Even at 10m the effect is still very noticeable. This is a killer for VFR flights.

Please, is there anything available to reduce this effect? The max settings gives you 6.5 LOD radius and 90 tesselation factor. Can those settings being increased in the core application or the LOD switch improved so that this happens at a higher distance from the current position?

Cheers

[JorgenSA]

It does not really matter what version of P3D you have here. You go into Prepar3D.cfg, and experiment with the settings under [TERRAIN].

But be aware that you can run into issues with available VRAM on your graphics card.

Jorgen

[YoYo]

I use radius for = 8.5000, it work well for me.

[geloxo]

I know about the [TERRAIN] settings. What I mean is if the game core could support higher settings natively, because as soon as you change anything on the options it will override any manual tunning you made. With today´s HW we could even double the LOD distance to 13 and go beyond in some cases, for instance. The impact on FPS due to terrain details is not that high indeed.

On the other hand the highest Tesselation factor just goes to 90. Why not higer too? Those two settings are the ones producing the popping and with that effect it has no sense to go with high resolution mesh of 5m to 1m, so it´s a waste.

EDIT: I found a temporary solution for this. I didn´t remember that we have the settings presets feature available. So I made a copy of my favourite settings file (the one at My Documents) and changed the LOD there, as this allows "on the fly" tunning without restarting the sim by just selecting this file on the options menu. This is 4 times the default LOD and I don´t see severe impacts on performance.

[TERRAIN]
LOD_RADIUS=24.500000

So far so good, and much better results.

Cheers

[AnkH]

I always thought that P3D does anyway not accept any value above the maximal value possible to set via GUI? So I wonder what such a high LOD setting really does?

[YoYo]

[TERRAIN]
LOD_RADIUS=24.500000

24K? Wow .... did you notice FPS impact for this?

[boez]

Any value above 6.5 is ignored and has been since the terrain engine was modified for v4.

However you can increase the terrain lod by a small factor using the check box on the settings page (use high resolution terrain textures).

[geloxo]

Aarrgh.. Indeed this was a total fail, you are right. After some research this setting has nothing to do with the mesh LOD, which was was I was looking for. It handles the details of the ground textures at far distance…

Cheers