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No go airports for weak gpus ...

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No go airports for weak gpus ...

Postby Jabberwocky » Mon Aug 11, 2014 11:56 pm

Hi,

I see more and more airports really nice and lovely designed with a lot of buildings around. However, owner of weak graphic cards have 3 fps there with minimal settings - on good days and if no other planes are there. Newest candidate is EDDS. I can't even start my engines because the instruments can't update at 3 fps. My best bet is setting the time to "night", that appears to make it a little better.

So, it appears, we need a warning list of graphic heavy airports, which can't be visited by users of older computers anymore. Or is there maybe maybe an option to switch off this eye candy in the future? I mean, it's like Rembrandt, those designs are great, it looks great, it feels more authentic, all of that is right ... but at some point, someone wants to land or take off from there and then, this awesomeness comes at a high price.

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Re: No go airports for weak gpus ...

Postby KL-666 » Tue Aug 12, 2014 12:58 am

Maybe my hardware is better, i have some nvidia 670 mobile. But still maybe my experience can help.

I have not experienced much trouble with airports. But very much so with city buildings. Paris is notorious, i can overfly it at 5 fps. But also London and even the few city buildings in Frankfurt can sometimes be problematic.

You can do a little test by looking 360 degrees around at an airport, while monitoring the frame rates. When they go down in a certain direction, and there is the city, the problem is probably the city.

If it is all the same everywhere, then your problem is possibly the airport.

Kind regards, Vincent
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Re: No go airports for weak gpus ...

Postby Jabberwocky » Tue Aug 12, 2014 2:02 am

Hi Vincent,

I noticed Stuttgart (EDDS) today especially because the city buildings are quite near and cover some thrid of the 360 already. And unfortunately, of course, I can only take off there by looking so much to the other side, that I barely see where my runway goes.
There are not many of those really stuffed airports yet, but I see a problem coming up in the future. Of course, I would like to solve that problem by wining the lottery and by a monster computer, but what are the odds, that will happen?

Peter
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Re: No go airports for weak gpus ...

Postby surpii » Tue Aug 12, 2014 5:53 am

I have some trouble with LFPG.
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Re: No go airports for weak gpus ...

Postby sanhozay » Tue Aug 12, 2014 8:50 am

Jabberwocky wrote in Mon Aug 11, 2014 11:56 pm:Or is there maybe maybe an option to switch off this eye candy in the future?

I think this should be given serious consideration. I have a decent graphics card, but only 4MB of memory. Paris is painful. All the work that has been done on it looks great but I avoid it because of the low frame rates.
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Re: No go airports for weak gpus ...

Postby radi » Tue Aug 12, 2014 9:39 am

This discussion comes up every now and then. Users can tackle this problem locally by disabling objects in the .stg files. It's really simple: go to the airport's scenery folder, identify the heavy models (indicators might be large .ac file size, many objects in .ac file, large textures files..., or just the sheer number of models in the scene), put a # in front of the respective line in the .stg. Make sure terrasync does not overwrite your changes next time you start FG.

Someone could also come up with a script that scans a scenery folder, and prints a sorted list of referenced objects with texture size, number of vertices, number of .ac OBJECT etc. I could do it, I'm just to busy with creating city models for FG :lol:

The next step I can think of is to have scenery modelers add a tag to their models indicating the model's importance, say a number from 1 to 5. Airport buildings are probably more important than small village houses. That is stored along with the model in the .stg. Users could then choose to display only the important models if their frame rate goes down, or an algorithm could gradually disable less important objects.

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Re: No go airports for weak gpus ...

Postby f-ojac » Tue Aug 12, 2014 10:11 am

Hi,
Most of you didn't mention if they were using Scenery 2.0 with Terrasync or not, which makes it hard to know. The problem for Paris is known and written there: http://wiki.flightgear.org/Scenery_2.0# ... imitations
It's mostly due to the amount of buildings there. Even if some optimisation on those was recently made (if you're using a well setup Terrasync + Scenery 2.0 you should have a small fps improvement compared to what it was one year or so ago), the arrival of OSM roads made the scenery more complicated. The triangle count has exploded with the arrival of OSM roads. The work being made by psadro should solve this, but there's not enough manpower to work on that part of FG/Terragear to make things change in the very very near future. Also read http://wiki.flightgear.org/TerraGear_roadmap
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Re: No go airports for weak gpus ...

Postby KL-666 » Tue Aug 12, 2014 3:37 pm

I have modified the airports with buildings map to include number of objects within a radius of about 10NM. I know that objects can be different in size, but the number of objects can be used as an indication. With less than a 1000 objects my frame rate stays maximum. Above 1000 objects there may be looking angles with half the frame rate.

I guess you have to find out for yourself, which amount of objects is generally safe for you. There are very nice airports with less than 100 objects around, like limc and liml.

The map: http://iveze.nl/fgmap

Kind regards, Vincent
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Re: No go airports for weak gpus ...

Postby psadro_gm » Tue Aug 12, 2014 3:47 pm

I'd like to see both LOD range and user settable masks in the .stg file.

I'm currently working on splitting the airport layouts ( just the ground - no buildings ) into multiple .BTGs for this purpose - no need to even load the airport taxiway markings when you're >5 miles from the airport.
Some people may opt out of ever loading them to save on memory, etc.

I'm still looking for a way to do this without backward compatible breakage, however.
8.50 airport parser, textured roads and streams...
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Re: No go airports for weak gpus ...

Postby Johan G » Tue Aug 12, 2014 7:47 pm

Backwards compatibility is appreciated, but can take a lot of effort to work well. ;)

I do hope you are thinking of the, I assume, even harder forward compatibility when planning and working on the structure for the next generation scenery. ;)
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Re: No go airports for weak gpus ...

Postby Hooray » Tue Aug 12, 2014 8:16 pm

well, I'd suggest to check the wiki, there should be a list of "Developed Airports", which should be matching what you're looking for here ?
See: http://wiki.flightgear.org/Developed_Airports

If this isn't sufficient, please just extend the table accordingly - but let's not come up with yet another unmaintained "forum list" ...
Please don't send support requests by PM, instead post your questions on the forum so that all users can contribute and benefit
Thanks & all the best,
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Re: No go airports for weak gpus ...

Postby KL-666 » Tue Aug 12, 2014 8:49 pm

That wiki page with developed airports is so outdated that less than 10% of developed airports are there. I.e. Germany has some 30 airports and there are only 12 on the list, Spain has some 48 airports developed with 2 !! on the list. This list is virtually unusable. I really wonder why people keep referring to it.

Kind regards, Vincent
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Re: No go airports for weak gpus ...

Postby Hooray » Tue Aug 12, 2014 9:09 pm

KL-666 wrote in Tue Aug 12, 2014 8:49 pm:This list is virtually unusable. I really wonder why people keep referring to it.


Quite simple: so that others can help maintain such articles over time - that's the whole point of having a wiki after all, which is much more user-friendly than possibly telling people to check out some thread that is either extremely outdated or that contains dozens of pages and hundreds of postings. Keep in mind that many end-users are not necessarily participating in the forum.

PS: I really don't understand why people complain about outdated wiki docs, if all they need to do is simply registering an account to help update/maintain such articles. As can be seen, the topic remains relevant - instead of having this discussion, we could also go ahead and lock this thread and tell people to check out a handful of old threads discussing the same thing - which is kinda why we actually have the wiki article. But as long as people prefer scratching their own itch, they won't contribute to the bigger picture unfortunately - which also is pretty much the difference between people providing end-user support here vs. those creating write-ups to make troubleshooting scale, even for times where we may not so much manpower available.
Please don't send support requests by PM, instead post your questions on the forum so that all users can contribute and benefit
Thanks & all the best,
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Re: No go airports for weak gpus ...

Postby KL-666 » Tue Aug 12, 2014 9:23 pm

Hi Hooray,

I do not believe in manual maintenance, it just does not happen. If you have read all posts, you would have seen my referral to a complete list of builtup airports generated from current data (1-8-14).

Also i do not understand the urge to close this topic. It is not about (avoiding) builtup airports, but about avoiding builtup airports with too many heavy objects around them. I posted earlier about an object count around builtup airports too. Seems relevant to me.

Kind regards, Vincent
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Re: No go airports for weak gpus ...

Postby clrCoda » Tue Feb 03, 2015 3:11 am

I need to resurrect this topic for a bit.

I inherited a machine. It's a bit better than my old machine, much stronger GPU. But still too weak to run many airports with scenery 2.0.
The answer seems obvious to me... I will use old scenery like 1.0.1 and 1.0.0.

A search around the web turns up a few links, but no one appears to have this older scenery to share for download.

Does anyone know where this scenery for the entire world in 1.0.1 and 1.0.0 can be found?

Ray
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