Major Texture Problem

WarHorse47

WarHorse47

SOH-CM-2024
Well, it looks like I've got a major problem on my hands, and no clear solution. Any advice would be appreciated at this point.

First some background. I have an older machine with an ATI 9700 138 mb video card. Up until recently I've been able to run FS9 at a decent frame rate with no blurries, and only an occassional stutter. This is with decent textures, effects, real weather and resolution.

Awhile back I started to notice some problems with the scenery textures with one specific aircraft. At the time I concluded that the gauges were taking up additional resources, so once I swapped out the gauges the problem went away.

Later I started to notice problems with more simplier aircraft, primarly prop aircraft. If I started from spot view, the propeller and pilot textures were delayed. IN other words they were missing, but later popped into view. Also, with some smoke effects, the smoke was missing and from the spot view the entire aircraft would dissappear from view. If I restarted my flight, the textures loaded just fine and as expected.

Now I'm flying some older models like Ito's P-61, and after a few minutes flight all the scenery textures are very, very blurry. And now as I switch views, none of the aircraft textures are appearing.

I've gone back and forth making adjustments to FS9 Display features and my video card settings, and can't seem to make a difference. There has been no change in my video drivers for a long, long time (that I know of), and no major change to my FS9.cfg other than the latest attempts to change settings. And yes, I have started with a clean FS9.cfg, but the problems return which makes me think that its something with my card settings or the card itself is going bad.

I've got something out of whack, and am no longer enjoying the sim. I have to continually reload the aircraft and/or scenery textures. Boy, am I bummed.

Any ideas??

Thanks in advance.

--WH
 
Warhorse

I am no guru when it comes to problems...but I can give you a things to look at as possible causes:

1) Any new services/programs running in the back ground? Sometimes sneaky things work their way into the start up list and will run in the back ground, eating up system resources?

2) When was the last time you pulled your system out, opened it up and cleaned it out to remove dust/dirt/combwebs. Dust laying up on the fan blades and cards can cause your system to run hotter...this will degrade performance and shorten the life of you system.

3) When was the last time you defragmented your HDs? A highly fragmented HD causes slower reading times, and that can cripple the performance of your simming and gaming.

Those are the first four areas I search if my system/sim begin to act funny.

OBIO
 
Thanks, OBIO.

I think I've got some of the issues resolved. I must have reset my TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULTI setting to 100 for some dumb reason. I reset it back to 400, and my scenery textues are back to normal.

I'm still getting the VC and some prop textures loading slow, so there maybe something else going on. But at least its not as bad as it was. :kilroy:

In response to your questions:
1) Nope. They're shut down with FSAutoStart.
2) Da box gets cleaned out at least twice a year. Just did it two months ago.
3) I floss and defrag daily. :mixedsmi:

--WH
 
Very good info OBIO.

To add to you info, a good defragging always helps my machine clear it's throat. I defrag my drive when things start acting goofy. It seems to help a lot.

I also use a little program called "Game Booster" to shut down resources not needed when I fly.

Warhorse, as a test and just a thought. Do you always fly out of the same airport? What I'm leaning towards is, if you do, you can pretty much rule things out and be sure it's not texture related...unless you added scenery objects in close approximation that could be trying to load heavy textures and cause your video card to hiccup from too much load. I've had similar cases and I've been miles from the scenery objects. Once they got deactivated things were back to normal.

just thinking out loud. sometimes it helps
 
Obio's advice is excellent. My immediate thoughts are :
1. Have you updated vid card drivers, added a tweak such as nhancer, modded the ATI display app or changed your display config settings at all? (Sounds as though you must have if the Texture bandwidth setting was changed). After Obios suggestions start again setting up your vid card and then FS vid settings.
2. Addon scenery: any new addon scenery in the area you're flying? A lot of older scenery objects have all sorts of memory leaks which cause ultra-blurry textures and crappy FPS. Try unticking all addon scenery in the region you're flying temporarily to see if the situation improves. If it does, enable it one piece at a time until you isolate the offender.
3. Added a new addon such as a weather app, ai traffic, different world environment textures or autogen? All of them can savage your resources. Again, remove and test.

LPXO
 
Hi,

Defrag yes .. when it's necessary.
And it's rarely necessary at least with NTFS under XP (this my OS)
I download a bunch of material each month and representing a average of 50-60 GB
So I install .. uninstall .. burn .. delete .. copy - past .. compress ..uncompress .. etc a bunch of files :)
Fragmentation ? unknow :)
After two months .. analyse give me a 0.4 % of fragmentation :)
So at least .. defragmenting is not bad .. but must be performed when necessary
..
The myth of fragmentation and all that it tells is not nearly to disappear :monkies:
 
Following on from the foregoing, next I think I'd go and clean out trash....any/all of your windows 'temp' files and ie history/temp internet pages; then run something like 'Flightsim manager' and clean out any duplicated/un-used gauges
and textures, also use it to clean up your scenery .cfg, make sure there are no layers/areas 'missing'

ttfn

Pete
 
Hi, everyone. Thought I'd provide an update on my first post.

I've been testing and experimenting with my FS9.cfg and vid card settings all week, and am not making much progress. :salute:

In response to some of your questions and suggestions, no I have had no recent addons to my FS9 setup. The only new aircraft in a month have been the LaFrance Vampire and Ito's Black Widow. No changes to scenery for quite some time, no changes to my video drivers at all. All trash is removed, and the HD is defragged daily.

My most recent test was with my FS9.cfg. First, I took a short flight with my AS Vampire this morning. The VC glass textures took a long time to load. After a minute of flight, all my ground textures got the blurries. As I cycled views, I noticed that the pilot textures did not load.

The basic problem with most of my aircraft is similar to what I just described. With my prop aircraft its more problematic in that any effect textures take a long time to load, such as engine smoke or props. In some instances after flying for awhile only some of the model textures appear, where some parts of the a/c are still white or grey indicating the texure isn't loading.

Anyways, this morning's test was to see how a default FS9.cfg would perform. So I renamed my FS9.cfg, started up the sim, and repeated my Vampire flight. Same problem as before which is that my ground textures looked horrible after a one minute and the VC glass took forever to load.:kilroy:

So, my focus is now on my vid card, drivers and settings.

--WH
 
Just my two cents. All the above are worth doing for reasons beyond just FS. As for my same problems, invisible aircraft from trying to display smoke and some lagging textures, they went away when I finally had enough $$ to get a better vid card and more RAM. Can't say which did the trick as they got put in about the same time.
 
aeromed202 said:
Just my two cents. All the above are worth doing for reasons beyond just FS. As for my same problems, invisible aircraft from trying to display smoke and some lagging textures, they went away when I finally had enough $$ to get a better vid card and more RAM. Can't say which did the trick as they got put in about the same time.
Click to expand...
I hear ya'. I'm pushing my puter as long as I can.

IN looking at my recepits this morning to check my specs and hardware, I realized I purchased in in February 2003. Considering a five year life span on a computer, I think I got my money's worth.

I'm working hard to take care of some house and auto projects as well as staging myself to retire sometime. Unfortunately that all costs $$$, and naturally have a higher priority than the hobby.

Life goes on :ernae:

--WH
 
Got my texture problems resovled, folks. Thanks for everyone's input.:jump:

It was a combination of an entry error in my FS9.cfg, older video drivers, and real weather clouds. Although I've been using real weather for some time, after some experimentation I concluded that there were consuming more resouces than usual. Not sure if that is related to FS9 or to how FSUIPC handles weather and cloud layers.

Anyways, things are nice, clear and smooth.
Thanks again :ernae:

--WH
 
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