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Is it that the PBR textures are so performance intensive or am I missing something?
Yes, parallax texturing is incredibly expensive on the GPU. If you have a up-to-date gaming GPU, it should handle it fine, but anything low-to-mid-range is going to struggle.
To be clear, "PBR" and "parallax" are not the same thing. The TRS19 textures support both. PBR is always enabled regardless of graphical settings, whereas parallax is only enabled with "ultra" quality due to the performance hit.
chris
The problem I have with the parallax is that the texture changes the height of the baseboard in a way that if it is used close to track or roads it creates a gap between the track and the baseboard. To avoid this issue I run the shader quality at "standard", not "ultra", not because of the GPU load but because of this height changing issue of the textures.
My question then is by running the shader setting at "standard" instead of "ultra" what other features am I missing" or does this setting only effect parallax?
There's the opposite effect too with the texture pushing the baseboard height over the tracks and roads and it means if a texture was updated to PBR, then the problems abound all over, which I discovered the hard way and I ended up replacing the textures with something else.
The other issue is that gel-look. That jellyfish goo that surrounds the texture is annoying and reminds me of looking at a tidal pool or into a pond with plants and critters underneath. I suppose if th at gel was 100% invisible, it wouldn't be so bad and I could deal with the height issues, but that gel-thing is really disturbing because it's noticeable.
You've identified the shortcomings. The solutions that mitigate these are as follows:
- don't mix old and new textures (this avoids the "gel look" where they meet)
- since the parallax textures have an apparent height (which depends on the texture), raise the track vertices by ~0.12
- if you have bulk replaced one texture with a new one, you may need to "tidy up" where there may have been old merged textures that you didn't see to replace.
(This sorts out "hard edges" or sections of track or sleepers that appear to be missing altogether)
If you are concerned about framerates your choices are:
- turn off Ultra shaders
- for a further small gain, replace all PBR textures (more about texture size than anything else)
- for a much larger fps gain, reduce Shadow level, draw distance, and tree/scenery sliders.
