Very low texture detail at airfields

[DarkFire]

I have all graphics settings at maximum, with the exception of MSAA set to off and no anisotropic filtering. The ground textures and both Batumi and Sochi-Adler (I haven't tried other airfields yet but the issue is likely to be the same) are displayed in such low resolution that runway and taxiway centrelines are barely visible from more than ~15m away.

 

I have no mods installed, this is a vanilla installation of the latest version (as of 0230 hours GMT on 03/09/2015) of DCS 1.5

 

Attached are some screen shots showing what I mean.

 

Edited to add my system info file & game logs.

 

Further edited to add: I've watched some youtube videos by Bunyap and others and it appears that ALL my game textures are somehow stuck on low resolution :cry:

 

Final edit: I tried changing the texture settings from high --> low and back to high. The texture quality didn't change. For some reason increasing the ground texture setting to high didn't change the actual texture set.

 

Final, final edit: I tried repairing my open beta installation. Other than installing some run-times this made no difference.

Edited October 4, 2015 by DarkFire

[dooom]

that looks to me like you need anisotropic filtering on... it prevents taht blur as the textures renders into the distance.

 

Try it ON

[DarkFire]

Tried turning on/up the MSAA setting: no difference to texture resolution. Large frame rate INCREASE :huh:

Tried turning on/up anisotropic filtering: no difference to texture resolution. Slight frame rate decrease.

[xoxen]

I have the same issue, all maxed out, taxiing lines appear very late and are washed out.

Edited October 5, 2015 by xoxen
added picture

[Exorcet]

Tried turning on/up the MSAA setting: no difference to texture resolution. Large frame rate INCREASE :huh:

Tried turning on/up anisotropic filtering: no difference to texture resolution. Slight frame rate decrease.

 

Is your graphics card overwriting these settings?

[DarkFire]

Is your graphics card overwriting these settings?

 

No, everything is set to application controlled.

[Blooze]

Be sure that depth of field is off.

[DarkFire]

Yep, DoF is set to off.

 

I even tried un-installing DCS beta, torrented the entire 10 Gb installation from scratch then installed the modules. Unfortunately it didn't change the situation :helpsmilie:

 

I originally thought that some texture issues might have been caused by the fact that before I installed DCS 1.5 I'd forgotten to uninstall all my 1.2.6 mods, which included a number of texture mods, so when 1.5 copied stuff across maybe it caused an error between the 1.5 ground textures and whatever came from 1.2.6 but since I tried a totally clean installation this can't be the cause.

 

I've had a look inside my most recent log file and it looks like the game engine is generating quite a few texture errors like this:

 

00021.973 INFO TERRAIN: lSystem::lSystem

00021.973 ERROR DXGUI_EDGE_RENDER: Cannot load texture ''

 

and this:

 

00021.727 INFO RENDERER: Metashader cache: 0 (0) cached shaders out of date

00021.793 ERROR DX11BACKEND: rendertarget "rtDynamicCloudMap" not found

 

Some more:

 

00026.180 ERROR DX11BACKEND: texture "dxgui/skins/skinme/images/setimage/button.png" not found

 

00217.126 WARNING NGMODEL: Model 'trees_1_blk' has invalid bounding box.

00217.127 WARNING NGMODEL: Model 'trees_3_blk' has invalid bounding box.

00217.128 WARNING NGMODEL: Model 'trees_5_blk' has invalid bounding box.

 

00254.680 ERROR EDTERRAINGRAPHICS3: Material: edgemat FxMaterial_Runway31 terrain/shaders31/Runway31.fx|FOG_ENABLE|LIGHT_TEXTURE airfield_asphalt_06.png airfield_asphalt_06_nm.png black.png black.png 0

00254.680 ERROR EDTERRAINGRAPHICS3: dont bind geometry edgelgeom 000000004CC0D6C8

00254.680 ERROR EDTERRAINGRAPHICS3: no T stream

00255.840 ERROR EDTERRAINGRAPHICS3: Material: edgemat FxMaterial_Runway31 terrain/shaders31/Runway31.fx|FOG_ENABLE|LIGHT_TEXTURE airfield_asphalt_06.png airfield_asphalt_06_nm.png black.png black.png 0

00255.840 ERROR EDTERRAINGRAPHICS3: dont bind geometry edgelgeom 000000004CC0CEB8

00255.840 ERROR EDTERRAINGRAPHICS3: no T stream

 

02100.733 ERROR DX11BACKEND: rendertarget "HeatAir" not found

 

And there are many more. It reads as if the game engine either can't find, or can't load, the correct texture files. No idea what the cause is though... :cry:

 

Attached is the entire most recent DCS log file.

Edited October 6, 2015 by DarkFire

[xoxen]

Could there be a relation between the amount of vram and this behavior? I maxed out everything as mentioned but have 2gb vram "only". I will try lower settings and watch this tonight. If I find something I will share.

[DarkFire]

Could there be a relation between the amount of vram and this behavior? I maxed out everything as mentioned but have 2gb vram "only". I will try lower settings and watch this tonight. If I find something I will share.

 

Don't think so. I used to run 1.2.x perfectly with some replacement high-res ground textures and never had this issue.

 

I've since tried disabling my nVidia control panel, also to no avail :(

 

The next step might have to be to uninstall the old version, wipe clean the registry of all entries relating to it and then try it again.

[DarkFire]

Nope, didn't work :(

 

I uninstalled DCS 1.2.x, removed all trace of it from the registry, uninstalled 1.5, removed all trace of it from the registry, restarted the machine, did a fresh install of 1.5.

 

The problem is still persisting. I'm running out of ideas about where the issue is with this problem. In addition to the textures I've also noticed that I'm not getting heat blur, not getting the lens flare effect, not getting any of the effects that I've set under the options menu.

 

Attached is the latest log file which seems to contain even more error messages than the last one did :helpsmilie:

 

Edited to add:

 

1. DXDiag reports no DirectX errors, though I don't know in fairness if DCS uses DX or something else like Open GL.

 

2. Apparently I have the latest WHQL-signed Nvidia drivers for my graphics card (driver version 355.98 )

 

The only things I can think of are either that somehow my download was corrupted or that there's some sort of hardware problem, but it's strange that two of us (and apparently only two of us) both have the same issue, yet everything else about the game seems to work perfectly, absent unrelated but known issues.

Edited October 7, 2015 by DarkFire

[DarkFire]

Final entry for now.

 

I tried uninstalling 1.5 then re-downloading from one of the other HTTP sources and then re-installed the game. Didn't make any difference. Still low-res textures, still no heat blur, still no cloud effects or lens flare.

 

I'm at a loss at this point as to what the cause is. Hey ho, maybe a future update will fix the issue for me.

[HiJack]

Uninstall your Nvidia driver with a uninstall and clean up utility. Then reboot a couple of times to check that the driver does not install itself again. Then you can add the updated Nvidia driver. Reboot even if the installation says you don't need to.

[Hardcard]

Don't think so. I used to run 1.2.x perfectly with some replacement high-res ground textures and never had this issue.

 

Well, DCS 1.5 uses another graphics engine which is likely to use more vram. Have you monitored vram usage with sofware like MSI Afterburner+Rivatuner statistics server? I think you should do it.

 

It definitely seems like there's no anisotropic filter being applied... Have you tried reinstalling DirectX? If I were you, I'd eliminate the DCS profile in your graphics driver settings and see if that changes anything.

Btw, you haven't provided system specs yet.

Edited October 8, 2015 by Hardcard

[DarkFire]

Thanks for the tip HiJack, sadly though that didn't fix the issue.

 

Hardcard: Ah, I hadn't noticed that! My system specs are:

 

CPU: Intel core i7 960 @ 3.2 GHz

RAM: 16 Gb DDR3.

GRAPHICS: Nvidia GTX 760 with 2 Gb of memory.

OS: Windows 7 64 bit.

 

I suppose it could be that my graphics card doesn't have enough memory to display all the textures at maximum resolution. Could that really be the cause? :huh:

[HiJack]

Sorry to hear that. The GPU should be fine I believe. There must be something other going on here. Can you download and run "HWMonitor" and monitor your power? Gather as much information as possible.

 

Did you also check that you have Visual C++ redistributals 2013 installed? Try removing all other Visual C++ (2008, 2012 etc...)

[xaoslaad]

Those lines on the runway blurring is antistrophic filtering or anti aliasing (probably the former since someone already said that and I have no reason to doubt them). I had it too and boosted those up and it went away. Agree it was very ugly to look at.

[xoxen]

We have the same graphic card. Maybe has to do with this. Will try the anti aliasing and anisotropic settings. Lower settings in general didn't do the thing.

Xoxen.

 

P.S.: Raising the Anisotropic Filtering made it for me. I have no idea about the FPS as I cannot read it but the view distance and detail of the runway is like I expect it. Many thanks to xaoslaad for the advise.

Edited October 8, 2015 by xoxen

[unknown]

I will post some shots for comparison.

 

1. pic showing my settings

2. pic showing the runway at sochi with the settings

3. pic showing the runway with Anisotropic Filtering off

[unknown]

If you are concerned about the quality of the runway texture itself being "low-res" like in pic 1 in this post compared to the texture you saw in one of bunyap's recent videos, it depends on which airfield you are.

 

1. pic showing runway at Sochi

2. pic showing runway at Anapa

[DarkFire]

OK, I'm going to call this as being "fixed" for now. I moved anisotropic filtering up to 8x which resulted in the 1st attached screen shot. Vapour trails, heat blur and lens flare are all working correctly.

 

The ground textures are great, as shown from 10,000m in screen shots 2 and 3.

 

I still think there's a problem because changing ground textures from low to high seems to make no difference whatsoever, but the anisotropic filtering did improve things drastically. I have to say, if this is working as intended it's by far the most aggressive texture LOD I've ever seen in a game. Fine for actual terrain textures but maybe the object, or at least runway & taxiway LOD could be made a little less aggressive for better effect?

 

Lastly, a very big thanks to everyone who contributed suggestions to help. This is a fine example of why I'm very proud of being a member of the DCS community :notworthy: