How are you rendering xplane10?

[Geofa 108]

I have experimented within the short demo to find the way I like xplane setup. This gives me great visuals, and reasonable performance which I can tweak for better by just lowering visibilty settings ..Just wondering what you all may have come up with.IntelCore i7 920@2.67 ghz, 12gb ram, win 64 nvidia geforce gtx 460

[ryanbatc 12,857]

I've not been very successful but I'll try yours out and see!

[woweezowee 10]

Geofa, some hints to further improve - you might be able to use per pixel lighning and/or full HDR with anti aliasing with the following (without loosing too much eye candy):Change extreme res to very high res.Lower water reflexion.Less cars (minimum).One notch less trees.Reduce number of cloud puffs even a bit further.World detail: mediumAlso: People please check the manual and read about those settings. It is pretty well explained what setting uses GPU or CPU and how much negative effect it has on FPS.

[Geofa 108]

Yeah-I've tried that. I really feel I need the look of both the extreme res, water ,trees and world detail. Clouds I might try along with pixel/hdr. In any case I get mostly in the 20's which is good enough for me with this kind of looks.

[woweezowee 10]

such are different tastes ;). Extreme Res I fully understand. But I also used XP9 with "very high" in order to push some other settings, so I'll keep that. But the water, really? Medium setting not enough? This makes a huge impact!

[Murmur 3,941]

Lowering "world detail distance" should help with FPS, in some cases changing that setting gives a good boost to FPS without too much degradation of visual quality.You could also see if lowering one notch the "number of trees" and "number of objects" helps, they're very CPU intensive.Decreasing the number of cloud puffs should be another noticeable boost to FPS (of course only in cloudy conditions). To compensate for the decreased number of puffs, if cloud density becomes too sparse, you'll probably need to increase the "size of cloud puffs" (this should not impact FPS).Changing these numbers though, will change the final appearence of clouds, so you could find them better or worse looking.A final note, having a high lateral field of view should somewhat impact FPS too. However of course it's a very subjective setting, for example I would find 82 degrees very "fisheye" even on a large widescreen monitor, while clearly it's the sweet spot in your case!Marco

[kjjj11223344 48]

Does anyone know why the demo is using only about 50 percent of my CPU? I turned hyperthreading on and it was the same thing, only using about 46-50 percent, yet I had very CPU intensive settings enabled and my frames dipped as a result. Shouldn't the CPU usage go up when I enable these settings?

[ryanbatc 12,857]

Also: People please check the manual and read about those settings. It is pretty well explained what setting uses GPU or CPU and how much negative effect it has on FPS.

Could you point me in the right direction for the demo manual?

[woweezowee 10]

Sure. There is an "Instructions"-Folder within the X-Plane 10 Demo installation. Also the link is directly on the homepage. Get it here:http://www.x-plane.com/files/manuals/X-Plane_10_Desktop_manual.pdf

[Murmur 3,941]

The specific paragraphs are:"Configuring the Rendering Options" (page 34) and"Setting the Rendering Options for Best Performance" (page 39)

[GoranM 3,764]

Does anyone know why the demo is using only about 50 percent of my CPU? I turned hyperthreading on and it was the same thing, only using about 46-50 percent, yet I had very CPU intensive settings enabled and my frames dipped as a result. Shouldn't the CPU usage go up when I enable these settings?

IIRC, XP10 uses the CPU/CPU's for the flight model only. Everything else is graphics card/RAM dependent. The flight model doesn't need all your CPU power. It takes what it needs.

[kjjj11223344 48]

IIRC, XP10 uses the CPU/CPU's for the flight model only. Everything else is graphics card/RAM dependent. The flight model doesn't need all your CPU power. It takes what it needs.

Okay, that makes more sense.

[alpilotx 505]

IIRC, XP10 uses the CPU/CPU's for the flight model only. Everything else is graphics card/RAM dependent. The flight model doesn't need all your CPU power. It takes what it needs.

No Goran, thats not exactly correct. There is still a lot (and really a lot), of the scenery that is processed in RAM and with the CPU (lots of the object geometry is "materialized" first there, before its pushed to the 3D card for rendering etc). Or all the scenery loading / processing, and not to forget AI, or the weather ...But its correct, that with XP10 there is now much more the 3D card can do (which gives a better balance than what we had in XP9 :) )

[h2egc 31]

Once Ben get's this into the 64bit version I'll be in heaven!I'm getting really good performance right now with low cloud settings and shadows. No HDR for me at this time.

[alpilotx 505]

I would like to share my settings too (just so you have another "data point"). When I am looking at ryanbatcund, I am surprised he has problems, because his computer should be really well capable for XP10. I am the global scenery developers (for those who don't know here), and I am working on XP10 with a very similar machine (GeForce 570, 16 GByte RAM, Core i7-2600K ... not overclocked! And all this on 64bit Linux, latest OpenSUSE 12.1). And I am getting quite good results even at higher settings. The only area, where even my machine is seeing its limits are places like KSEA, with the enormous amounts of geometry to draw. But, just by stepping back a little bit on the settings, I get for example 16-17 FPS (not super smooth, but already quite nicely usable) ... and if I go a bit out in the wild (less urbanized regions) , I can easily reach 30-50 FPS (even with the almost maxed out settings).See here a screenshot of KSEA with FPS in top left turned on (as proof) :And here are the corresponding rendering options:Maybe some comments on the rendering settings:

• If HDR is turned on, the AA settings on top left are irrelevant! HDR enables the "deferred rendering" draw path, which needs a completely different approach to AA, than you would achieve with the "usual" techniques. This deferred rendering technique is not unique to X-Plane (but is used by many state of the art games), and has some advantages and disadvantages. See the Wikipedia article on this http://en.wikipedia....eferred_shading (they are telling it too

  ... due to separating the lighting stage from the geometric stage, hardware anti-aliasing does not produce correct results any more: although the first pass used when rendering the basic properties (diffuse, normal etc.) can use anti-aliasing, it's not until full lighting has been applied that anti-alias is needed. One of the usual techniques to overcome this limitation is using edge detection on the final image and then applying blur over the edges[4], however recently more advanced post-process edge-smoothing techniques have been developed, such as MLAA[5] (used in Killzone 3 and Dragon Age 2, among others), FXAA[6] (used in Crysis 2, FEAR 3, Duke Nukem Forever), SRAA[7], DLAA[8] (used in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II), post MSAA (used in Crysis 2 as default anti-aliasing solution). ...

• And yes, I am absolutely pro HDR (and especially atmospheric scattering!). When it first tarted to really work in our internal builds (which is not so long ago), I was completely sold on it ... This way the lighting really starts to look real.
• Water: you don't need complete! Thats an overkill :) ...
• Shadows are very important on framrate. When you come to a place, where FPS drops, by just going down a notch on shadows can yield some nice results.
• One other, maybe less looked at setting. The "lateral field of view" ... although it can nicely change how much you can see from the surrounding landscape, it also means that you have to render more content on screen. So, even though, I sometimes go for very high FOVs (it mimics the fish-eye lense effect ... looks quite nice for screenshots!), I usually don't go above 75 degrees. And i can recommend, to try lower it a bit (for example to 60), to get out some extra FPS without the need to lower other settings.

AND, stay on top with you graphics drivers (I have read in other forums, where this made a big difference for some users ... as far as going from a "non working sim", to "nice reulst" ... just by updating drivers).And also look at Ben Supniks "tricks" for settings on his blog:http://www.x-plane.com/blog/2011/11/a-few-settings-tricks-to-try/