DX9 or DX10?

[britfrog 180]

after producing my first video I thought I would see what I could do to make my visuals more realistic. Having read a lot from people who use DX10 I thought I would give it another go as I had not been overly impressed before because of various glitches and texture tearing . I installed Steve's shader mods and removed a line from the fsx.cfg that was dx9 specific, played a bit with nvidia control panel  (telling it to use nvidia settings NOT application controlled) adjusted a few colours especially reducing blues,  and fired up FSX.

 

Well I have to say the result is amazing , How does the saying go?

 

Halleluyah I have seen the light!!!

 

for those that havent been converted it is like being given a new sim to play with especially when lakes and water is concerned add to that no crashes, well it is a no brainer, I cant see me going back to dx9 again that is for sure.

 

If you are still on dx9 do yourself a favour try it and persevere , it is worth it.

 

You will need to download dx10 shader release v3.2.2 from avsim and remove 1 line in fsx cfg so you will now have a dx9 specific cfg and a dx10 one but it is worth it.

 

[mutley 4,498]

Thanks for the heads up Nigel, have you got any example shots you could post?

[Christopher Low 63]

What about the AI planes that have no textures in DX10 mode? Yes, I know that I can use that Texture Converter thing, but it doesn't like one of my ES bgl files (resulting in FSX crashing before reaching the Menu screen). Then there are the airports that aren't fully compatible, like UK2000 Gatwick Xtreme (two misaligned runways can be seen at the same time). Frankly, until all of the problems have been sorted out with DX10 mode, I will be sticking with DX9 (and all those lovely OOMs)

[britfrog 180]

I have taken a few pics Joe so shall upload them later

 

Chris, i flew annecy /gatwick today and flew the ILS down no probs at all! and no 2 runways it just looked normal to me , mind you i was wearing my glasses.I also had es guernsey activated and no probs.

 

However it has to be said that when you use dx10 you do get better depth of vision, more 3d if you like, another noticeable difference is when you approach say mountains, with dx9 they get sharper as you get closer, it is difficult to explain but you see things swimming into sharpness as you approach them, this desnt happen with dx10 they are sharp from miles away. another noticeable difference is when you look at your a/c , it has more depth to it , more shape, more realness, more subtle changes in colour that accentuate its shape.

 

I agree  that it is not perfect , however if you fly online with ai at zero it will enhance the experience , it makes it richer, dare i say more realistic, the clouds seem to have more substance,

 

oh if only m.s. allowed the team to continue to develop the sim as they did games the experience now would be just unreal

 

however if you are a vfr puddle jumper there is no argument  this richens the vfr experience tremendously so dont wait around do it!!

the advantages are no crashes, high frame rates, much deeper depth of vision  in fact for the vfr guys it is a no brainer

what are you waiting for?

 

here is a test for all you doubting thomases change to tex max load to 4096 and you LOD to 9.5 in the cfg and then fly some really heavy scenery like ftx or france vfr now fire up the pmdg ngx in dx9 it will blow rasberries at you, in dx10 it flies perfectly!!

[britfrog 180]

here are some pics as promised, they are NOT retouched , looking at the ngx cockpit the buttons seem to have more depth the shading is more subtle, in the mountain scenes even the mountains a long distance away are sharp, and I like the reflection of the mountains in the lake. Although I have not really had issues recently I did have to be aware that one had to adjust the LOD to suit whatever and wherever you were flying, with dx10 you just run it at the max and it doesnt crash or hang. and in someways that is more important than the few downsides that people have mentioned.

 

[Christopher Low 63]

I can get FSX to suffer an OOM in DX10 mode with LOD radius at 5.5, so I think I know what the outcome of the LOD 9.5 test would be on my PC! That's with AI at a high density setting, but I really don't want to land at a version of Heathrow that looks like a ghost town.

[britfrog 180]

Interesting!

I was at gatwick this morning with about 40 a/c on the ground all showing the right airlines and no blanks and that was with lod of 9.5 , I am off out now but will take a few pics of thiefrow , i generally run about 60% ai traffic , i would expect your p.c. to do similar .

btw i had never had an oom until last week when i was messing around with dx9 , ctd's yes , but never an oom

[UKJim 502]

I am interested in doing this too but not sure what is needed in terms of FSX settings, Config changes, additional file downloads etc etc. Is there a nice tutorial I can follow to get it in dx10?

 

Or can I be cheeky and ask for a step by step guide?

 

Screens do look amazing though mate

[britfrog 180]

I am interested in doing this too but not sure what is needed in terms of FSX settings, Config changes, additional file downloads etc etc. Is there a nice tutorial I can follow to get it in dx10?

 

Or can I be cheeky and ask for a step by step guide?

 

Screens do look amazing though mate

 

Jim like anything in fsx you can go as deep as you want , I shall enclose a few links to dx10 sites the most important is Steve's cus it is he who is Fixing DX10. or at least making it useable

On the top right of his blog is a shortcut to an avsim location where you can download his fixes, dont worry they will not affect fsx in DX9.

However you will need to have a dx9 fsx .cfg and a DX10 fsx.cfg so you will need to keep them handy , I keep them in the same location as the normal fsx.cfg

 

the only main difference between the two cfg files is this line

 

SWAP_WAIT_TIMEOUT=2

which you remove in the dx10cfg, this stops black squares arriving as scenery refreshes.

and you really need a bufferpools=1 line plus a value if you dont already have one there

however you must apply steves shader fixes 3.2.2

 

and that is all, initially , that is all I have done and i am very happy with the results, there are more tweaks  available which you can read about on steve's blog and the following sites but currently I dont feel the need to complicate the issue. No doubt in time I will try these tweaks and report back but currently I am just enjoying the new sim. Which i cant make misbehave.

 

 

http://stevesfsxanalysis.wordpress.com/

The "How-To" doc - DX-10 Discussions, Hints and Help - The AVSIM Community

DX-10 Discussions, Hints and Help - The AVSIM Community

 

If you need help just ask , i will do what I can for you.

 

P.S. I have just seen that you have an amd graphics card, there are some specific "fixes" i have seen for this card, but dont try to get too far at first , see how it works with the shader fix and the change in the cfg file then go from there.

[UKJim 502]

Sorry mate - I have only just picked this up - I will try some of this later as I am always keen on trying new things. 

 

If I get stuck I will shout

 

Once again, thanks for the help buddy

 

Jim

[britfrog 180]

I can get FSX to suffer an OOM in DX10 mode with LOD radius at 5.5, so I think I know what the outcome of the LOD 9.5 test would be on my PC! That's with AI at a high density setting, but I really don't want to land at a version of Heathrow that looks like a ghost town.

 

I hear what you are saying Chris so i flew thiefrow to Orly,, theifrow is uk2000 , with generation x photoscenery and i think ai set around 50 or 60% I didnt check, however texture max load is 4096 (i am now going to try to double that) and LOD is 9.5 look at the following pics

 

Heathrow not fully loaded  but not a ghost town

terminal 5 busy enough

generation x scenery

the french coast with france vfr scenery

Orly with a fair few a/c

 

I think you should get more out of your p.c. although I went for an I7 , I have read lots of threads that reckon it is a waste of money compared to an I5 and that you can get the same performance from an I5. Personally I have slight doubts now, especially when one considers the problems you are having, maybe they dont produce the same as an I7 but I am no specialist . certainly it may be worth letting fsx remake a new .cfg file and then just add the very basic mandatory mods to see what happens.

[Christopher Low 63]

Do you run Heathrow Xtreme at GO Xtreme or the Max setting, Brit?

[britfrog 180]

Chris, to be honest  EGLL has been in the p.c. so long and used so little I didnt know there was a choice! however when i go into it on the first page it has a green dot next to the extreme choice, so i guess it is the extreme version.

[Christopher Low 63]

Another question, Brit.......do you use ES Treescapes and UK2000 VFR Airfields?

[britfrog 180]

No, i understand that treescapes is good but I find its price quite expensive for what it is.

For vfr stuff i use ftx on a separate HD , but I hardly use that now as there a few issues with that drive, I suppose i shall soon have to harden my heart and reinstall it all again.  Also I understand that there are some problems using ftx global in dx10 which they know about and are supposedly addressing,

In my spare time I am trying to port over a few of my favorite ftx uk airports so they work in gen x scenery

 

I use the gen x for IFR and big airports and jets and online flying and also the france vfr scenery as well as austria and spain and the Med, it is this drive that i am  using for dx10 so there are 3 small a/c installed here as well.

 

[UKJim 502]

I tried this DX10 stuff - it took longer to load my game which is bad but not too much longer so acceptable. I could see a slight difference in shading but as for the ground textures being nice and sharp they were blurry for me even with a LOD of 9.5. 

 

My DX9 settings are LOD 5.5 so I tried that and to be honest the difference was not a great difference from DX9 to DX10

 

I might have another go tonight or tomorrow and maybe take two screenshots of the same location to see if I can see a difference in screens. I am going to try a low and slow scenario too and see if my terrain looks any better than usual. 

 

It would be easy to include a switch in my automated batch file to switch between DX10 and DX9 so I am not giving up just yet. 

[Christopher Low 63]

I never saw much of a difference in visual quality between DX9 and DX10 either, Jim. In fact, DX10 didn't seem to like my AA and AF settings, so some aspects actually looked worse!

[UKJim 502]

If the terrain looks sharper and shading looks better in DX10 for low and slow flying - I will simply have a DX10 switch when I choose to fly low and slow. But at the moment I think I may just stay with DX9.

[britfrog 180]

This is an interesting development, I have read somewhere that AA doesnt work in dx10 you simply setup the nvidia control panel with nvidia inspector however Jim I notice that you use an AMD card so this is irrelevant, but it may explain the blurryness, however I did see but did not digest several pages that I came across on the enclosed links at the top of this thread which rectify this for you.

 

However I cannot understand why Chris has issues and such poor performance he has a pretty fair P.C.

 

I did just for my own sanity look at 2 cockpit shots that I have of the NGX  panel one in dx9 the other in dx10 Now i should not imagine that LOD would have any effect on the quality of the 2 photos but i zoomed in on the buttons of the main panel and lower DU and made them about 8 inches tall (so they were depixelating) and there was no doubt that the button in dx 10 was clearer at a closer zoom than the dx9 one, and although it is recognised the shadeing in dx10 is better than dx9 the main thing of interest to me is that dx10 doesnt crash, well so they say and that to a certain degree is borne out for me with the fact that I can run lod 9.5 with the ngx, and that was not possible for me in dx9.

 

However when you read all the threads about dx10 there are some people that simply will not fly with anything else and others who for whatever reason cant get it to work for them

 

[Christopher Low 63]

When you say "poor performance", I assume that you are referring to OOM problems? Whilst framerates can struggle on my PC in extremely dense areas, they are good over 99% of the UK.

[britfrog 180]

sorry maybe i could have worded that better, Chris, I have just spent a few days trying to help mistwalker, and he seems to have now corrected his problems, of oom's however I havent heard from him for a week now so maybe he is on holiday or flying the sim all day. have you set up the graphics card using nvidia inspector? and what memory has the graphics card?

[Christopher Low 63]

Yes, I use Nvidia Inspector. It is a 1GB card, and I run FSX at 8xS AA, 2xSGSS, and 16x AF.

 

[Bruce (a.k.a. brian747) 142]

Not being in the least critical of anyone at all in any way, just simple-mindedly asking a dumb question.....

 

I recall a number of my addons displaying at Install time statements like "NOT compatible with DX10". In view of that, why on earth would I want to risk encountering problems by enabling it?   

 

Just asking......

 

Cheers,

 

Brian

 

[UKJim 502]

Yeah - Alderney earth simulations addon - the buildings show a dodgy blue texture if I enable DX10