Color banding with night textures

[Nick - A2A]

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

Yeah, I think I have some of their LP's knocking around somewhere!

I haven't actually tried, but I guess some of the shader modding tools for P3D could also be used to reduce the appearance of banding artefacts, perhaps in combination with global gamma adjustment.

[...] 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.

I gather that TFDi offer RealLight commercially to other developers, though I guess that many of the bigger ones would prefer to develop their own bespoke solutions which they have complete control over. I haven't tried the FSL Spotlights either, but the tinkerer in me wonders if it would be possible for the end user to link them to the knobs in, let's say the A2A Cessnas, using Lua scripts or something if the existing light textures were deleted.

On a (very) loosely related note, one of the selling points of the new RXP GPS gauges is that apparently they use HDPI 32bits RGBA bitmaps to eliminate banding artefacts on the displays. Probably not so important for the GNS units, but for the GTNs it seems to make a difference.

Nick

[WB_FlashOver]

This is a great thread. I had never really noticed the banding or abrupt gradients in FSX 'till I bought my Acer 2K 144Hz 1ms TN panel. Then the banding stuck out like a turd in a punch bowl. It really was distracting. I messed with panel adjustments using the monitor adjustment image you can find online but that helped very little. I passed it off as a limitation of the TN panels.

Then I moved to P3Dv4.1 and the banding is totally gone. Other advantages with lighting in P3Dv4 is that now the landing lights actually light up the ground instead of whiting out the area. FSX was easier to taxi with lights off as I could not tell the difference from runway, taxiway or grass. Landing light banding was the worse. The sky banding was terrible as well.

So I can confirm that the newer 64bit sim with all it's modernization has greatly improved this and that it is not the TN panels. They might make it more noticeable but they are capable of no banding if the program is capable of it.

Cheers
Roger

[Gabe777]

Well this last post cheers me up a bit !

I am planning a switch by Easter from FSX and a cheapo 200 buck TN panel, to P3D v4 and a 500 buck QHD (2K) VA 3000:1, 10 bit panel.

I love flying at night but the sky banding and general colour mottling and blotchinessitus, just puts me off.

Hope the new combo improves matters !

Apologies for all the made up adjectives that litter my post but how else do you describe how disgusting the image is at night in FSX ?

Blotchyosity disgustingus..... there we are.... a new name for the disease that has blighted night simming for ever !