graphical issues
 

hello all,
I wish I didnt have to come here to complain almost every 3 weeks, but my pc is homebuilt, and i wish i had the money (18 and a horrible time to be that age) to make everything right with the world.

down to business

I bought X-plane 9 to enjoy something different (and far more realistic) than FSX. unfortunately, i have some interesting graphical issues.

the game runs fine (even though somewhere along the line is HAS to tell me i set my GFX settings a bit high, it really bugs me) but when i fly over mountainous terrain (we are talking northern texas-ish (((forgive me if im wrong, but im trying to detail wher i am flying by a non-lined globe map))) and, no matter what, i see these huge...things coming up from the ground and shooting up into infinity.
they are robins egg blue and have some black "noise" its not static, the column "flickers" but does not disappear. also, sometimes i have other anomalies, where there are long "pipes that run horozontally across the aircraft. it doesnt happena ll the time, but its usually over land.
i dont know what graphics setting causes this (i ruled out AA and AF) but perhaps someone can shed some light on the subj.

ill try to get (and post) some screens to show what i mean

Read some of these posts. might be some help here.

http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?showtopic=28966

What type of vid card you using? That is a driver issue for sure!

-S

well, the drivers for my card
(ATI HD 2400 256 AGP built by visiontek) are as up to date as they can be. ill look for some drivers, but i doubt there will be any

That is interesting. I don't recall seeing tat on my x1900 XTX, but I haven't played X-Plane much on my newer 4870. I'll pop it in tonight and see if I get the same thing. If I had to guess, its an OpenGL thing or Catalyst AI screwing up.

A few things to try in the meantime:

1. Disable OpenGL Triple Buffering to see if that helps.
2. Disable Catalyst AI (Though this may only affect DirectX and X-Plane is one of the rare titles that using OpenGL)
3. Upgrade to 9.2 Catalyst that has OpenGL 3.0 in it.

-S

wilco. its too bad.
i broke mach 7 earlier and i come to land in edwards...with these mostrous monoliths poking out at me.
I love X-plane, and its too bad all the good planes are payware

One more thought then. Try turning down the texture size in options.

where it says the texture resolution?

I have it on ultra high (i will try turning it up before turning it down, very movie-russian way of doing it)

i hope thats what it takes.

Well no wonder! You would need at least 1GB+ for that setting! That is something a 2400 does not have. Turn it down 3 notches. That should be more inline with your video card RAM.

Your frame rates should go way up with a lower setting as well. You are currently caching out to system RAM!

-S

like i dont have 3 gigs system RAM?

I cranked it up to extreme res, and all is seemingly fine. I'll try to see where i was and try again..

sometimes, the movierussians know what they are doing!
("But kapitan! the reactor is at 110%!"
Then put it at 115%!!!")
:DL

EDIT: i am getting a smooth game with all settings as is

It has nothing to do with your system RAM, it is your video card RAM. Your Video Card has a maximum of 256MB on it I am guessing. Ultra Textures really require 1GB of video card memory or more. Less than that and it swaps out to your system RAM over a slow BUS. This may be the cause of your strange artifacts since over land, it has to load more textures yet doesn't have enough storage to do so.

Besides, smooth frame rates in X-Plane are not enough. It's modeling requires you maintain extremely high frame rates due to the way it calculates flight. Drop below that and it is no better at simulating flight than MS FLight Simulator. X-Plane actually calculates airflow over the flight surfaces of the aircraft instead of just giving you a fake flight model. This require high FPS to achieve.

-S

yeah, the Framerates started dropping off last night (proly cuz of something i dun know about going on in the BG.) but i really hate that i cant use the good textures, tis not fair

Buy a better video card. A 2400 is pretty low range.

-S

I take it the textures setting fixed this?

-S

pretty much, i knocked down some other options... but i will not reduce my game to 16 bit color...

now i have to deal with my refresh rate...anyone care to educate the Refreshrate dumb?