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Huge improvement from forcing Anisotropic in driver settings

Graphics issues like: bad framerates, weird colors, OpenGL errors etc. Bad graphics ar usually the result of bad graphics cards or drivers.
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Huge improvement from forcing Anisotropic in driver settings

Postby iamzac » Thu Nov 29, 2018 7:24 am

I found this accidentally, while trying to fix another problem, I turned on anisotropic filtering from the nvidia control panel program settings and noticed huge graphics improvements, without any significant frame rate loss (for 4x with a nvidia 950 ti).
I thought I was already using anisotropic filtering because in the launcher I have this option: --texture-filtering=4 but it turns out it was actually not working.
Now the planes and the scenery look a lot better for me, much closer to how they look in x-plane so I thought that I should share this in case I am not the only one that didn't knew this.
It's like upgrading from a very old version of a program to a brand new one.
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Re: Huge improvement from forcing Anisotropic in driver sett

Postby wkitty42 » Thu Nov 29, 2018 11:15 pm

AFAIK, ansiotropic is not the same thing as antialias... IIRC, texture-filtering and another one are used for antialias...
"You get more air close to the ground," said Angalo. "I read that in a book. You get lots of air low down, and not much when you go up."
"Why not?" said Gurder.
"Dunno. It's frightened of heights, I guess."
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Re: Huge improvement from forcing Anisotropic in driver sett

Postby iamzac » Fri Nov 30, 2018 9:26 am

wkitty42 wrote in Thu Nov 29, 2018 11:15 pm:AFAIK, ansiotropic is not the same thing as antialias... IIRC, texture-filtering and another one are used for antialias...


According to the manual texture-filtering is used for ansiotropic filtering and /sim/rendering/multi-samples for antialiasing.
Anyway this has no connection to antialiasing which works fine, only the anisotropic filtering option seems not to work, or if it works it doesn't work as the version forced by the driver.
This is not something new, FlightGear planes and scenery looked blurry and distorted for a long time for me under both windows and linux but I assumed this is how it's supposed to look, now I found out that it can look much better.
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Re: Huge improvement from forcing Anisotropic in driver sett

Postby wkitty42 » Fri Nov 30, 2018 5:27 pm

ahhh... my bad...
"You get more air close to the ground," said Angalo. "I read that in a book. You get lots of air low down, and not much when you go up."
"Why not?" said Gurder.
"Dunno. It's frightened of heights, I guess."
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Re: Huge improvement from forcing Anisotropic in driver sett

Postby wlbragg » Fri Nov 30, 2018 9:52 pm

@iamzac
Any chance we could see before after pictures?
Kansas and Ohio/Midwest scenery development.
KEQA, 3AU, KRCP Airport Layout
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Re: Huge improvement from forcing Anisotropic in driver sett

Postby iamzac » Sat Dec 01, 2018 4:53 am

wlbragg wrote in Fri Nov 30, 2018 9:52 pm:@iamzac
Any chance we could see before after pictures?


You can either see it for yourself or it doesn't matter, I don't see how seeing how it looks for me would make any difference.
Plus I would have to waste about an hour loading multiple planes with multiple liveries and also searching for the right places with the settings off and then repeating it with the setting on and I don't see how this would help.
In your case if you have a nvidia 640 then it most likely doesn't work considering that with my nvidia 950 ti it barely works, I mean I only lost a small amount of framerate (about 2-4 fps I think) but when you frame rate is bellow 30 every frame matters.
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Re: Huge improvement from forcing Anisotropic in driver sett

Postby legoboyvdlp » Fri Dec 07, 2018 3:07 pm

Image

Image

Image

Image

The last two screenshots are texture filtering 16 in the nividia control panel - the first with texture filtering enabled in the launcher, the second without.

With --texture-filtering=16, but it not forced in the control panel, the aircraft was much darker and everything unclear... to be fair maybe I was underneath a cloud (in the cloud shadows) or something...


I think it is evident that FlightGear looks much better with texture filtering forced in the control panel! Let me check antialiasing and the G1000...
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Re: Huge improvement from forcing Anisotropic in driver sett

Postby legoboyvdlp » Fri Dec 07, 2018 3:13 pm

No noticeable benefit, wierd trees... I think while texturing filtering has a benefit, FlightGear's own antialiasing is better...
I think the launcher text also looks not as good with FXAA on.

Image
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Re: Huge improvement from forcing Anisotropic in driver sett

Postby Thorsten » Fri Dec 07, 2018 3:15 pm

At the quality level where the trees use alpha to coverage (i.e. convert transparency into a raster of fully opaque/fully transparent pixels to simulate foliage) FG needs its own software AA to accomplish that.
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Re: Huge improvement from forcing Anisotropic in driver sett

Postby legoboyvdlp » Fri Dec 07, 2018 3:16 pm

Ah, ok - thanks. Still, it would seem Nividia's texture filtering is excellent... the result is impressive!
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Re: Huge improvement from forcing Anisotropic in driver sett

Postby Thorsten » Fri Dec 07, 2018 3:20 pm

I sure won't say bad things about NVIDIA drivers. :mrgreen:
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Re: Huge improvement from forcing Anisotropic in driver sett

Postby iamzac » Fri Dec 07, 2018 3:24 pm

legoboyvdlp wrote in Fri Dec 07, 2018 3:13 pm:No noticeable benefit, wierd trees... I think while texturing filtering has a benefit, FlightGear's own antialiasing is better...
I think the launcher text also looks not as good with FXAA on.


FXAA breaks the trees alphas, regular forced antialiasing doesn't although it does make the text look fuzzy so I also prefer the FG one.
And for the fg1000 issue there is a separate antialiasing option for transparency with 4x supersampling (I think) that fixes it but eats the frame rate on my PC.
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Re: Huge improvement from forcing Anisotropic in driver sett

Postby wlbragg » Fri Dec 07, 2018 5:54 pm

You can either see it for yourself or it doesn't matter, I don't see how seeing how it looks for me would make any difference.

For the record, I wanted to see what you thought looked
blurry and distorted
VS
much better

Don't want to cause you to waist much time with it.
I post before and after images all the time, didn't really stop to think it could be an issue.
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Re: Huge improvement from forcing Anisotropic in driver sett

Postby legoboyvdlp » Sun Feb 10, 2019 10:47 pm

Problem solved

Code: Select all
 --texture-filtering=number   Specify anisotropic filtering of terrain textures. Valid values is 1, 2, 4, 8, 16. Default is 1.


Anisotropic filtering is only on terrain textures, not on aircraft textures. That would explain why it appears to have no effect on aircraft
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Re: Huge improvement from forcing Anisotropic in driver sett

Postby wkitty42 » Sun Feb 10, 2019 11:21 pm

ahhh... close reading of the available information opens the doors once thought closed/jammed ;)
"You get more air close to the ground," said Angalo. "I read that in a book. You get lots of air low down, and not much when you go up."
"Why not?" said Gurder.
"Dunno. It's frightened of heights, I guess."
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