I do the exact same thing but with original textures. Downscaling at 512×512 does not improve that much the frame rate, but it does improve it at 256×256 size. And the difference is great. Still, clouds look quite good like that.

The weight of textures goes down from something like 800Ko to 50Ko, which is easier to handle for my old GeForce 8600m with 256Mo of VRam (MacBook Pro late 2008)…

I think we can’t make more than that to improve clouds frame rate…

I still set the general quality of XP on “high” to have something good looking (for aircraft and runway textures) but I do downscale cloud textures and few others, especially some big terrain textures. That’s not ideal but works for me.

Cheers.

This is _mind_blowing 😉 !
Thks for reply ben.
Cheers.

“I don’t know if there are things we can do to make the clouds faster (there may be)”

One way I use since some days is using the 256×256 cloud textures somebody provided at the .org.

Before that, I could not fly in 1920×1080 when I had 3 layers of cumulus clouds, even when clouds set to only 10%.

Now I can, and I don’t really see a big difference.

I don’t know if this is REALLY related to the clouds resolution, though. Rumour says it is 😉

Hi Dave,

The theme of this reply is: ‘we have already read your mind’. 🙂

1. We already lower the density of puffs significantly inside cloud formations. There’s a limit to how much you can get away with that before it becomes _really_ obvious that you have flown into an ’empty room’ though.

2. There is already some low-res bathymetric data in the v10 DSFs in another raster layer.

cheers
ben

Hi Ben!

Well I don’t know if it is a good way to improve clouds rendering speed but why not only draw the external envelope of those clouds?

XP10 already drop the visibility when approaching a layer, which is not really a nice looking effect… So you would only drop visibility inside, not outside. That would also maybe give the possibility to render big CB for example without using monumental amounts of puff textures as you would only draw the external shape… Of course the latter will still be needed for smaller clouds…
No?

About rendering engine, I was wondering if it would be possible to recut DSF files using bathymetry topographic data? Not the whole precise set of data but just enough to naturally draw coastlines using physics for water to fill oceans and lakes. Just like Outerra-like rendering engines… Could XP10 handle this? Just a thought…

Cheers!

No. I don’t know if there are things we can do to make the clouds faster (there may be), but there isn’t a known item just waiting to be done on the clouds to make them faster. By comparison, I have a few optimizations to the scenery rendering engine that just need to be coded.

Are clouds on that list of possible improvements?

They are still a bit of a performance killer.

Dom

I still have a list of improvements we can make!

concerning the graphics engine, I haven’t read of many interventions on it lately: do You think that XP has reached a sort of “mature” stage where almost everything that could be offloaded to he GPU has been done, or is there still room for further improvements in future releases?

Thanks and keep up with Your fantastic work!
Filippo

The auto crash is all we need; if you file a bug, please include the same email that you used in the crash report so that we can link the two together.