Track Resolution Questions

KennySabarese

Newbie here, I've been searching and unable to find an answer to my question.

I have been reading threads on optimizing my settings to get the right balance between FSP and quality. I am testing on two displays, a 50" plasma up to 1920x1080 and a 20" 4:3 Dell Monitor up to 1600x1200.

I believe that I've found that some tracks surroundings don't get any better looking as I turn up the resolution (regardless of FPS my machine can make). Is my observation correct?

If so, is there a way to tell what resolution/quality level tracks are? I've seen some tracks say they are high resolution, I haven't noticed a difinitive way to tell.
 
Your observations are correct, there is a kind of standard set to track texturing, when you make a texture you think of it like this. If your screen is 1280x1024 and when you look at the track, it only takes up 1/4 of the screen, then the track texture width only needs to be 512 wide. When you make textures too big you get shimmering and such. I spose you could put it down to the fact that not all track makers have large screens.

But that's not the end of it, all it takes to improve that quality is to make new textures, there are quite a few people who do this from time to time, one of the most popular re-texturers is SLN, http://updates.slnart.com/
You can also re-texture it yourself if you have it in you. A new texture will not cause miss matches so the door is wide open to go for it.
 
mianiak said:
Your observations are correct, there is a kind of standard set to track texturing, when you make a texture you think of it like this. If your screen is 1280x1024 and when you look at the track, it only takes up 1/4 of the screen, then the track texture width only needs to be 512 wide.
Click to expand...

I don't 100% understand what you mean by this.

mianiak said:
When you make textures too big you get shimmering and such. I spose you could put it down to the fact that not all track makers have large screens.
Click to expand...

Hrm, I can't tell if I have this symptom or not. Would this happen with Toban Short course on a 50" plasma at 1920x1080? I am worried it might just be not enough anti aliasing which is hard on the eyes.

I'll check out those re-textures and see if there is any difference.
 
erm,, how can I explain it,,,, step out of the box and think of the track as a bunch of pixels on a screen, forget that it is a 3d model, because in the end, it comes to your eyes as a 2d picture on a monitor screen.


Ok, this is not a 100% accurate example, because you cant have a 100% accurate example when you have different monitors and different resolutions, but I hope it will give you the idea.

When your looking out of the cockpit, the road you see ahead of you takes up about 1/4 of your screen, meaning that the rectangle you see going off into the distance stops about halfway down the screen and has grass on either side, so you make the road texture 512 pixels wide.

The grass on each side takes up about the same, 1/4 (split in half). so infact the grass on the left takes up 1/8th and the grass on the right takes up 1/8th, so your grass texture needs to be 256 pixels wide.

When you put them together you have 256(grass)+512(road)+256(grass) which make 1024 pixels., now if your monitor screen was 1024 wide, then it will all fit in perfectly with no stretching or compressing of the image.

But for your screen at 1920, you are enlarging the texture almost double so you can fit it in, your going to start to see pixel bleeding on edges of colours etc, which is going to make it look blurry and messy.

Lets say you want the best quality for your screen which is 1920 wide. then you might want to make the road texture 1024 wide and the grass textures 512 wide, doubling them in size basically, so the you would have, 512(grass)+1024(road)+512(grass) which makes 2048 pixels wide, a bit bigger than your screen, but much closer to your screen size than a 1024px wide tex.

Now, the other scenario, if you take a 2048 picture and shrink it down to almost half the size, you are going to start to see jaggered lines, which will cause shimmering when you move around the 3d environment.

From her you get into antialiasing and anisotropic filtering and so on which is not my field so I can't explain that part properly. But basically, they filter out jaggered lines and blurry images to give you the clearest picture they can.

What your seeing with Toban is a stretched image, your system is enlarging it so it will fit on the screen.
Your lucky here, because it just so happens that SLN has made a texture pack for Toban, go to SLN's site http://updates.slnart.com/ click on tracks and scroll down to Toban. Add those textures and test it again.
 
Thank you for the explanation. Makes sense now. I'll go ahead and play with this some more.

Is there any way to tell what resolution a track is built for?
 
KennySabarese said:
Is there any way to tell what resolution a track is built for?
Click to expand...
I really don't know the correct answer to that question, I wouldn't say that it is designed for any certain resolution, what I think it boils down to is system performance.
 
So I went to the 20 inch display and switched resolution between 800x600 and 1600x1200 with the same quality settings and there was very little, if any, difference between the two. Am I crazy?
 
Nope :D. but if you made the monitor smaller it would look sharper. ;) It doesn't matter what resolution you run your monitor at, its physically 20 inches big.
The only differences you would probably notice is less aliasing (jaggered lines)
 
Yeah barely any difference at all really. So the question is, at what screen does does turning up the res matter.
 
You asking for some basic things without trying to understand a way how computer graphics is generated. At this point it would be hard to answer your question because there are a lot of factors which may affect final quality of image.

1. Native resolution - for LCD displays (and I think plasma also) you should use native resolution of the display.
2. higher resolution means smaller points (if we are talking about the same target display size). Smaller points means less aliasing on object edges
2b. some cards (mainly nV) have worse antialiasing than others
3. higher res may slightly improve texture quality. but it is not such significant due to aniso filtering and human eye perception.
4. higher resolution usually means less fps
5. using shaders to combine textures may result better feeling of details even if source textures are lower res. (so, low texture res must not result low quality image)
6. Plasma display may hide some imperfections of computer generated 3d scene, while LCD one will expose it more.

So.. do not make a case study from simple things. Use native resolution of display if your rig can handle it providing required and stable fps. Otherwise chose greatest resolution to meet the same condition.
 
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Thank you for the explanation. I am trying to get the right balance of settings to get decent FPS but still have good quality. I think the main problem I'm experiencing is aliasing. Specifically where the edge of the track meets the grass, or the edges of walls at Watkins Glen. It's very distracting.

Right now I'm not using a very great graphics card. It's a 9400M which is in the 13" MacBook Pro (1 revision old) I'm using an old Dell LCD that supports 1600x1200 at 60hz. (I don't really care about the plasma really, I don't really use it that much, was just doing some experimenting with it)

I'm spending days just trying different combinations of resolution, DX7/8/9, anti-aliasing, and in-game settings to get the right balance. It's extremely frustrating, to say the least.

I'm trying to hold off on building a rig until rFactor 2 comes out so I can take it's System Requirements into consideration before I plop down any cash. I'm hoping to do a 3 monitor setup with 20-24" LCDs. But I want to play the game using my current setup to practice for my HPDE events coming up this season (non-sim) and I'd like for it to be as pleasant as possible.
 
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