Fslabs A320 Cockpit Textures

[Avice]

Soas happy as I've generally been with P3D overall, I'm finding that, generally, PBR is a no-go for me as it eats up all my VRAM. With sceneries I could still get away with it by simply lowering the texture resolution. However, am I right when I say that this does not appear to affect aircraft VCs at all? The Feelthere Embraer v3 gets me, sitting at a default airport with no texture modifications of any kind, up to 5GB of 7.1GB available VRAM used... That means the addon is unusable for me. The Aerosoft CRJ is a little lighter at 4GB used. I would love to get these values lower, but I'm unsure how. Any ideas?

Also, somewhat unrelated, but it seems as though AA is not really doing anything for me. That is to say, if I use 8x SSAA I seem to be getting AA, but MSAA seems completely useless. Is that a common thing for people?

MSAA is definitely useless in flight simulators if you use 1080p resolution, but I do not know how effective it is at higher screen resolutions. As for SSAA, all I know is that 4x SSAA makes a big difference for me at 1080p resolution in P3Dv4.5HF2.

resize the .dds's to a smaller size.. 4096x4096 --> 2048x2048 or smaller

texture artists are having it easy with 4096 or larger sheets, remember trying to make something look good with 512s?

A question to ponder.. If you are running @1080p, where is that 4096 texture, and others, supposed to fit? ?

I'm still on FSX yet, A VC with 1024 textures, without all the memory usage, look so much better at 4K than 4096 textures at 1080p.

I should have added that I'm on 5.1HF1, and I do feel as though MSAA generally worked okay more or less so far. However, I've never done consistent tests so I can't be sure. It's possible that this has to do also with PBR textures or the size of some of the decals on the EMB cockpit, which can be ratehr tiny and therefore prone to the shimmering that I thought MSAA would get rid of. Doesn't seem to do very much, though.

I've used the F22 as my go-to testbed for VRAM usage, and indeed here I see a deterioration of clarity with 1024 textures compared to high resolutions, although I can still read what the decals say quite wel... However, in both the Aerosoft CRJ and Feelthere Embraer v3 I see very little difference in resolution between 1024 and 2048, making me wonder if dropping the resolution does anything in the VC of these airplanes. I also don't see much of a VRAM savings, but then perhaps I'm not too sure how much to expect in the first place...

So, I made a little survey of VRAM consumption among my installed addons. All conditions of the default flight but with a different aircraft, all at default VTBS with OrbX Global and Trees loaded but otherwise little else. I start P3Dv5, choose the aircraft and load the flight, note the VRAM, restart P3Dv5 and repeat. Here's what I found:

Yes, I do. All the v3 E-Jets have this issue, people have been moaning about it since the release and the service packs have not done anything to fix it. On the FeelThere forum the devs suggested it was because most of the VC textures are 4K, and maybe that's why, but in my experience these aircraft are performance hogs for the level of fidelity they offer (ie more than Carenado, less than PMDG). They're OK aircraft, certainly the best E-Jets available for P3D, and I'm flying the 170 a lot now, but they hit FPS and VRAM hard. Also, because pretty much all the systems and gauges are in a single C++ DLL (a .gau file) it's all or nothing - as soon as any of the gauges or panels is displayed it seems to initialise all the systems and hit the FPS. The only performance control you really have is the FPS refresh rate for the glass displays, which can be set via the included config application, and that's just trading FPS for jerky displays - and even at 100% they aren't completely smooth. The taxi and landing lights are also provided by the DLL and not via effects attached in the aircraft.cfg file. Turning on the taxi lights caused a distinct FPS drop on my system, but I think that might be an issue with Wideview.

BTW, the downsized textures available on the library here are for the 175/195, but not the 170/190. I made my own set of downsized textures for the 170 (all 4K textures dropped to 2K) and it does make things faster to load, the VC doesn't have to get completely repainted every single time you pop outside for a second, but it hasn't really reduced the VRAM usage by a lot, so I don't think the VC textures are the whole picture. The fact that the aircraft apparently uses 1GB+ more VRAM than the 737NGXu tells me there's something off here. I've just tweaked my settings to what will give me reasonable FPS and I switch profiles when I use the E-Jets; in the end, that was all I could do. When the GPU market eventually settles down (I'm thinking late 2021 at this rate!) I will buy a new card with 11+GB VRAM (the Radeon 6800 looks to be hitting the sweet spot with 16GB VRAM and it's beating the RTX 3080 in tests). My fault for cheaping out and buying the 2080 SUPER instead of the Ti last time I upgraded.

Thanks for confirming @neilhewitt. Rather sad to hear, though. I'm not entirely sure why 4k VC textures would play a role, though, given that setting textures to 1024 should greatly alleviate VRAM consumption if that were the sole reason. So I'm with you that there's something else going on. One thing I noticed is that this addon has a virtual cabin, so that is definitely one thing that causes higher-than-normal VRAM consumption. Something else could be a lack of optimization in regards of the amount of texture maps used to cover the model. Good optimization will use the least amount of texture maps possible - bad optimization uses more texture maps than necessary, increasing VRAM consumption. Then, because all textures appear to be PBR, which requires an addition of two texture files (normal and metallic) per diffuse map, quickly you end up with a tripling of wasted VRAM consumption.

However, the increase of 1.3Gb over any other addon I tested is still humongous, and thus I feel like lack of optimization may not be the whole story here. Given where I put my priorities in simming, this, to me, means that it's unlikely that I'll fly the Feelthere Embraer most anywhere. Definitely not around the likes of EHAM and LFPG, which is precisely where I'd wanted to fly them...

For what it's worth, I'm flying it into FlyTampa EHAM currently and it is flyable. I have had to tweak my settings (P3D and EHAM) quite low but I'm not all about the eye candy and autogen doesn't seem to cost much vs scenery buildings so I have lots of stuff on the ground. I do get a big stutter when EHAM first builds on approach, and shortly before landing, but I think that's GSX generating all the jetways and so I've just trimmed it to one SODE jetway at the gate I'm arriving at and I'll see if it helps.

One thing that's rather annoying is that the cockpit windows are tinted green. This is some kind of overlay and apparently it's an issue with P3Dv5 (it seems to be less noticeable with 5.1 HF1 but when the light strikes the glass at the right angle... you'll see it). FeelThere are saying it *might* be fixed in a future update but they are apparently dependent on Aeroplane Heaven who seem to have done this part of the aircraft. I've just taken to thinking of it as a window treatment and it doesn't bother me so much now. Add to that the problem with cockpit lights (they literally just turn off at a certain time of day as do the panel backlights) and there are some real long-term problems with this product. That said, there have been two service packs and they have fixed a lot of issues. Just not very quickly.

I'm not particularly willing to sacrifice the exterior graphics just to fly one plane that is quite clearly messed up in one way or another. I think I might try to reduce VRAM usage by downsizing the textures manually, especially those of the virtual cabin.

Then I went ahead and bought the FSL - it takes you less than 10 minutes getting used to the slight difference in "artistic approach" to the VC and you're blown away. Before, I always thought the Aerosoft looked more polished, but in retrospect it feels more cartoonish and less dynamic than the FSL. With the FSL you get a proper Airbus cockpit that feels like the real deal. It just immerses you. That doesn't come across very well in the screenshots though, but I personally have never looked back.

Note how nice the "light" / "Glow" on the VHF 1 is. Also but not the screenshot to show off best most of the panels you see below are different shades of Blue/grey. Like they have been changed over time/services.

3a8082e126