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Earthview: Difference between revisions
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Since there is no detailed terrain mesh involved and there is essentially just a single textured sphere in the field of view, performance is generally excellent even on low end graphics cards. | Since there is no detailed terrain mesh involved and there is essentially just a single textured sphere in the field of view, performance is generally excellent even on low end graphics cards. | ||
The main requirement (especially if custom hires textures are used) is available memory and GPU texture memory | The main requirement (especially if custom hires textures are used) is available memory and GPU texture memory. All textures are split into eight tiles, four for the northern hemisphere, and four for the southern hemisphere and each tile is loaded, or unloaded, according to visibility. As such, GPU memory is efficiently used and limited graphic card memory should not be an issue for the default texture size. However, the loading of a texture tile induces some bottleneck and FG may hang for a couple of seconds, or more (depending on tile resolution), while the texture appears. | ||
Where this is feasible and supported by the GPU drivers, pre-compressed and mipmapped dds textures offer the fastest loading times. As such textures can not be used with many OpenSource graphics drivers, the default textures are not in dds format. | Where this is feasible and supported by the GPU drivers, pre-compressed and mipmapped dds textures offer the fastest loading times. As such textures can not be used with many OpenSource graphics drivers, the default textures are not in dds format, but these can be generated along the lines discussed in the "Customization" section. For high-end graphic cards, it is possible to actually force the loading of all texture tiles at once when Earthview starts. This is triggered with the command line option: | ||
--prop:/earthview/show-force-all=true | |||
With the maximum resolution textures (16384x16384 pixels for a world tile and 8192x8192 pixels for the a cloud and a normalmap tile), expect a minute or more for the loading, around 6GB of GPU memory and 16GB of RAM to be filled. If you can afford it, there will be no other loading bottleneck afterwards. These numbers can accordingly be lowered using lower resolution tiles. | |||
Finally, while it is possible to use Earthview in rendering schemes other then ALS, this is neither supported nor endorsed. While they work perfectly well for the normal operations envelope of a flightsim, at high altitude the default renderer as well as [[Project Rembrandt]] do not render a realistic horizon line, plausible atmosphere visuals or the hard shadows of outer space and Earthview can not compensate for these issues. | |||
== Customization == | == Customization == | ||