Shimmering / flickering of textures

Question

hi there!

I just 'converted' to XPL after almost 25 years of MSFS, and so far am very happy with my experience. However, there is a weird problem I am facing which seems unlikely to be a driver issue, because I never had this issue on the same hardware with FSX / DirectX. I think it is either a XPL specific issue or an OpenGL aspect.

Please reference the video recorded (link below) you will see what I mean when you look at the right side before 00:08 mark, there is a gray colored building which displays the shimmering effect. I can even see the triangular polys. After 00:09 mark, the view will switch and you will see most of the buildings in the bottom of the screen shimmering / flickering this way. I have seen the issue is specific to buildings and tree textures.

I am running on AMD FX6300 processor with AMD Radeon R9 380 GPU. AMD driver version is 15.300.1025.1001 (latest stable from AMD) and as I mentioned I never had this flickering issue with FSX and DirectX.

I have tested with older drivers from AMD as well, and I have also tested plain vanilla XPL10 installation (without any plugins installed) and the effect is the same. I have attached log.txt as well.

The video is here: http://1drv.ms/1moWgqV

Would appreciate any help on this matter!

Arvind.

Download file

 

Answer 1

Hi Arvind,

What you are seeing has a fancy term called "temporal aliasing."  We don't currently have the technology to get rid of it, but you might be able to reduce its visibility. It happens on small buildings that are about 1 pixel wide, so you can turn down the world detail level to get rid of these buildings and their accompanying shimmer.

You can also try a different anti-aliasing setting. The best setting will be the 2x SSAA + FXAA (or higher) available when you turn on HDR rendering. This setting is GPU intensive though so you may need to experiment with what setting will work best for you. Note you will need to restart X-Plane between each change to actually see its effects.

Comments

Thanks, Jennifer!

I did notice that HDR made a noticeable improvement in the quality. That begs the question: in your experience, is this problem more pronounced in specific GPU? Would using a Nvidia GTX be any better?

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I had to speak with a developer about this, so I'm no expert. ;) But my understanding is that it's more of a monitor issue. Smaller pixels in your monitor will help make it less noticeable, so HD & retina monitors will have less of an issue for example. GPU comes into play because higher levels of anti-aliasing are more demanding.