When we fly, _we_ are done loading, but if the graphics card’s driver has taken all of our “upload texture” instructions and gone “ha ha yeah right I’ll do that later” then there can be this kind of overhang. Normally by the end of the first frame the driver has realized we’re serious and brought in everything we need; I’m not sure what’s going on over a 20 second period.

This is interesting Ben. You say that XPL should be ready after scenery loading, but since 10.30 I think, I am experiencing something different. Having lot of custom sceneries (ortho, airports, castles etc), X-Plane finishes loading and then it runs on 1 to 10 fps for a while, while (20 s or so) feeding the data into graphics card. I realized this by looking to rendering options, watching the graphics memory consumption, which rises slowly during this process. When it stops (arround 2GB of graphics memory consumption), X-Plane runs nicely between 30 to 50 fps, until next tile is being loaded and the process repeats. I don’t remember this was happening in 10.25, but have no idea how to test it. My card is nVidia 980 with 4GB of video ram

You’ll have to try the actual meshes and see how it goes. I really can’t comment on third party higher-than-normal-setting meshes…I don’t have the data.

Thanks Ben. My complication is that they’re essentially tied together. SimHeaven’s stuff, as I understand it, comes pre-loaded with aipilot’s HD mesh. I guess I could dump out the mesh. The ortho is essential and I really want extended DSF range for immersion.

Hi Rich,

HD meshes and orthophotos are -not- the same things, and they have really different memory footprints.

Properly built orthophoto scenery packs are not very RAM intensive, and I’d be surprised if they don’t work well with extended DSF range on moderate systems; 64 GB will not be necessary.

High density meshes are RAM intensive and slow to load, and will have an even higher RAM footprint when extended.

In the long term, HD meshes will be replaced with hardware tessellation, which will give us high density only where we need it with a lower RAM footprint.

I literally cannot enjoy flying without photoscenery and such any longer and the low res distance is the last hurdle for immersion on my side…. Well, that and being able to run enough clouds to have them display deep enough to avoid them popping in and out….

Thanks again for all the great work.

ahaha ok…good work!!

Right – the limit you see isn’t the LOD of the objects, it’s the LOD of the -engine- instantiating those objects around the user’s aircraft. I don’t know if those are art-controllable or have to be set in code right now – I’ll have to look.

As of this writing, it’s still broken; I spent about 2 days working on it last week and when I was done, I had made things significantly worse. I’ll take another stab at it once we’re in beta.