Does P3d process autgen in the GPU ?

[jcomm 5,890]

And... what other remarkable advantages does the latest P3D version present in terms of being able to better use modern graphics cards.

 

I have a Geeforce GTX 960 4 GB card - any oppinions welcome :-)

[Guest]

Not sure I understand your question, but I'll take a stab at it - everything goes thru the GPU pipeline at some point, it's just a matter of what one uses to manipulate the render (software .. aka CPU or accelerated aka GPU)  The AG has a pretty efficient draw call batching system but AG buildings have a little more geometric complexity and uniqueness.  As 3rd party provide their own AG buildings that complexity can increase.

 

I think what you might be looking for is shader performance and how the render pipeline and GPU accelerate shader performance ... shader model 5.0 was introduced in DX11. DX11.3 and DX12 add shader model 5.1.  Shaders come in many forms and do all kinds of image manipulation from pixels shaders, vertex shaders, geometry shaders, compute shaders, and tessellation shaders.  For example HDR is shader based.  Shaders can be set for software emulation (this is somethings done to improve accuracy) but it's not "normal" ... GPUs operate on shaders much faster but at times with a cost to accuracy.  On nVidia this is where "CUDA" API comes in -- provides access to the GPU cores to operate shaders.

 

Graphics options in P3D that are very dependent on GPU acceleration are:

1.  Dynamic Reflections

2.  Volumetric Fog

3.  All shadows (building, tree, simobject, clouds)

4.  Environment Reflections

5.  Water (especially Ultra setting)

 

As you increase resolution, you increase the number of pixels that must be processed in the render pipeline.

 

I don't have a 960, but I do have a 970 4GB on one of my test PCs and it operates P3D surprisingly well even with 3 2560 x 1440 monitors.

 

Cheers, Rob.

[jcomm 5,890]

Thx Rob,

 

that answered my question beautifully  :-)

 

P.S.: Have been following your videos with Aerofly - I see you like it, at least from the rendering pov .... I wish we could have the same level of complexity in Aerofly we have in weather modeling, AI, aircraft systems and so on in P3D / FSX and somehow also X-Plane 10...