Comments on: DDS and V10 – What Does It Do?

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 17:57:48 +0000

In reply to jeff mueller. yeah that's about right.

By: jeff mueller

jeff mueller — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 15:42:27 +0000

So, if I understand this correctly, DDS does give us better framerates, INDIRECTLY.

Because it produces better graphics, we are able to turn, for example, the resolution down from “very high” to “high”, gain a couple fps, and retain the look of “very high”.

Is that a correct summation?

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 16:31:45 +0000

In reply to Tom Knudsen.

Hi Tom,

I’m afraid that’s beyond the scope of what I can answer in a blog post.

By: Tom Knudsen

Tom Knudsen — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 12:40:23 +0000

In reply to Ben Supnik.

Thanks Ben..

So DSF is the way to go?

Just wondering what programs are best suited and what way is easiest to go in order to figure out what kind of texture area I need to focus on in order to make a landclass scenery over i.e Norway

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 01:59:38 +0000

In reply to Tom Knudsen. No, but if you want to change textures, you can put library entries into a custom scenery pack with a region to specify which lat/lon boxes they go to.

By: Tom Knudsen

Tom Knudsen — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 00:12:58 +0000

Dear Ben

Thanks for excellent information..
I have one question for you, is there a way to isolate certain part of the word i.e Norway regarding to its groundtexture? Is there a spesific dds file number/name to look for?

By: Alberto

Alberto — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 00:10:35 +0000

In reply to Ben Supnik. Just to report my experience, I always leave texture compression off (I have 2 Gb of VRAM) on Linux x64 and never had problems, evben with x-plane taking 2.5 Gb of RAM and 1.5 of VRAM. So at least the nvidia binary driver seems to do the right thing with the virtual address space.

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 18:25:53 +0000

In reply to cestomano. Some day we could in theory have RGTC compression for normal maps, but most authors seem to want the 'A' channel for specularity...

By: cestomano

cestomano — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 14:24:55 +0000

In reply to Ben Supnik.

No, I want normal maps but I can live with the results… it’s not the same than in PNG but it’s enough.

Thanks for clarifing 😉

By: Flo

Flo — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 14:16:20 +0000

I run uncompressed on Win7-64, texture resolution very high, HDR, 1920×1080 pix on a GTX670 – 2 GB.
X-Plane usually tells me that about 1 GB of textures are used whilst NVIDIA Inspector monitors a VRAM usage of about 1,5 – 2,0 GB (no other apps running). Never had stutters or drops in framerate caused by running out of VRAM (as far as I can tell), even with detailed payware aircraft and scenery (no photoscenery here).
But I have to say that I hardly can tell compressed from uncompressed (visually). Texture quality settings in the NVIDIA driver (very high) makes much more difference on my system. Same applies to running very high vs. extreme resolution. Aliasing is the main problem in terms of visual quality in HDR mode IMHO.

Flo