Color banding with night textures

[Oracle427]

Yesterday evening I spent a long time learning about why FSX color banding occurs with night textures and what can be done about it.

The solution isn't perfect due to serious limitations with the FSX engine it but was primarily a matter of turning down Gamma and then fine tuning brightness and contrast. The cockpit and sky looks far far better now.

I also learned about a few interesting quirks of FSX lighting system (not A2A).

Turning on the landing or taxi lights will illuminate the ground ahead for miles. This is perceptible with the gamma lowered to a level where banding is mostly eliminated.

Turning on the dome light illuminates the entire visible world. Those are some really powerful lamps on the 172!

I found that lowering the gamma until banding disappeared also had the benefit of making the ground, cockpit and sky much darker to levels that are much closer to reality. In fact must of the cockpit becomes invisible just like reality. This forces me to use the shift 3 menu to simulate operating the controls by feel if I don't want to flip on the dome light at night which would be normal to avoid ruining night vision.

[Nick - A2A]

Thanks for posting that Oracle. The colour banding can be a bit of an immersion-killer under certain conditions, so I'll have to investigate this on my own system. I believe you use FSX DX10 so just curious as to how you adjusted your gamma settings? As far as I'm aware, something like SweetFX would be needed for this, unless we're talking in terms of a global gamma adjustment via the monitor or NVIDIA desktop colour settings.

I should probably look into reinstalling SweetFX at some point. I did experiment with the tweaks available through ENBSeries a while back, but it's not compatible with DX10 as far as I'm aware.

Cheers,
Nick

[Oracle427]

I adjusted the gamma using the Nvidia control panel display settings.

I can post my settings later but mileage may vary based on differences in hardware. It is now very dark at night such that the lower panel can not be seen at all unless the flood light is turned on ot the glareshield lighting is turned up a lot.

This means that mousing over switches and knobs down there is impossible. I had to use the shift3 menu instead. At first I thought it was annoying, but in reality it really is that dark and you do need a light to be able to see the switches. Turning up the interior lighting is risky.

I felt that using shift3 is s fair compromise to simulate knowing where the switches are in the darkness.

Modern aircraft are a little better here because they usually have back lighted bezels making it safe for preserving night vision.

The biggest benefit is that the ground is really dark once again and you just might fly into a dark hillside if you didn't plan and adhere to a safe route.

[Nick - A2A]

Yes, I'd be interested to see what gamma setting you use. One tip which may help with the night lighting in the Pipers if you have them: in both the Cherokee and Comanche you can assign a key command to the red interior light using the A2A Input Configurator (e.g. I use shift + L). This means you can get some subtle (and rather beautiful) panel lighting without having to resort to Shift + 3 which should allow you to see and set the other interior lights as required.

Cheers,
Nick

[Oracle427]

According to my control panel under Adjust desktop color settings:
Use NVidia settings is selected
All Channels
45% Bright
52% Contrast
1 Gamma
58% Digital Vibrance
0 degrees Hue

I don't recall what any of these were set to before and it was not set to the default settings, but all I know is that it is much better now.

My monitor is an Acer X233H
Vid card is NVidia GTX 960

[Gabe777]

I am also getting blotchy banding in the C182 on the dash when I use the glareshield dimmer lights.

Is this an FSX issue or my rubbish TN LCD monitor ?

Are IPS monitors better at reducing banding or will I find this on any monitor in FSX ?

THNX

[Oracle427]

Try what I suggest. The FSX shading and texture system has limitations and this is what you see.

IRL, it is extremely dark in the cockpit at night. You can barely see your hands or the light switches on these small GA aircraft. With the cabin lights off, the settings should be really dark and banding will also mostly be eliminated.

[Gabe777]

I understand that it can be reduced or hidden, but wondering why I get this in the sky, on the ground at night, inside the C182, but not in other planes.

Is it DXT textures, the game engine or just my rubbish 6 year old 6 bit TN monitor ?

Will an IPS monitor reduce this effect or would I be wasting my money ?

Anyone know ?

[AKar]

That banding is not caused by your monitor, but a graphics artifact. It has to do how lightning effects are classically done in FSX/P3D, texture gurus around can surely explain that easily in a few words.

I was once playing around with FSL Spotlights some, and it appeared to avoid this issue to a good extent in my quick tests at least. I don't think it can be easily integrated into A2A with clickable knobs and everything, and to disable the original texture-based lightning.

-Esa

[Gabe777]

So you have an IPS 10 bit monitor ? And the colour banding is still there ?

[Oracle427]

The monitor can NOT overcome the limitations of the sim engine.

[AKar]

So you have an IPS 10 bit monitor ? And the colour banding is still there ?

In fact I do, and the banding is still there (it is not my primary sim monitor, I mainly use it for Lightroom and PS).

Banding issues due to monitor are rather subtle, and only present in smooth color gradients for most of the time. Even then, the image itself is more often the problem than the monitor.

-Esa

[Nick - A2A]

A bit of thread necromancy going on here, but it's quite an interesting topic as it looks like P3Dv4 has potential to overcome the colour banding that we typically see with the 16 bit lighting textures used by FSX and earlier versions of P3D.

The movable dynamic spotlights in the A2A Comanche and T-6 are one good example. Elsewhere developers such as TFDi seem to be introducing new dimmable lighting technology so hopefully slightly more convincing night lighting will become the norm in 64 bit editions of P3D. Though I haven't tried TFDi's 717 yet, I'm rather tempted to take a look...

Nick

[Paul K]

Blimey, Nick - 'thread necromancy'. Weren't they a heavy metal band in the 1970s ?

Actually, I'm glad this has been resurrected, as I missed it first time around, and colour banding has always been evident on my screen too. This is very interesting - I wonder how many people install the software that comes with a monitor, and whether that software provides options that are unavailable elsewhere. Or is it just Nvidia Inspector on a CD ? I never bothered installing it, but I might dig it out.

[AKar]

The movable dynamic spotlights in the A2A Comanche and T-6 are one good example. Elsewhere developers such as TFDi seem to be introducing new dimmable lighting technology so hopefully slightly more convincing night lighting will become the norm in 64 bit editions of P3D. Though I haven't tried TFDi's 717 yet, I'm rather tempted to take a look...

Yeah, it is interesting to see all these new solutions to an old problem coming up. So far to me, FSL Spotlights seems technically most convincing (it worked already without v4 specific features), and TFDi RealLight looks promising as well. It is somewhat regrettable that all these solutions seem to remain pretty much product-specific. Even if they are offered to wider audience, more complex addons would likely require specific profiling by their devs to interact correctly with the lightning solution.

Edit: Paul, my monitors did not come with any specific software as far as I recall, though I have them calibrated using Spyder. The issue is due to textures lacking depth to provide smooth gradation, monitor settings have little, if any impact, unless brightness is tuned excessively dark.

-Esa