Playing with the new beta, and as usual fiddling with the HDR settings etc, which I believe is standard deferred rendering. To me, in whatever game I bump into it on, this usually means great lighting hampered by slow (if you turn it up high enough to be effective) AA

 

This got me thinking about something I had bumped into a while ago while reading up on the subject, and I was wondering if this version of AA would have advantages in Xplane or not.

 

http://vidimce.org/publications/sbaa/

 

http://vidimce.org/publications/sbaa/sbaa_i3d2012.pdf

 

I see nothing in the PDF that would indicate that it is DX or Windows only, so for XP, it may be a viable option. As long as it is OpenGL and multi-platform capable (and it looks like it is just a different way of the existing MSAA/FXAA that is in XP pixel data to be calculated), it could work in XP. The biggest question is how much to include the tech with the sim and how much support is available for the devs at LR to get it in workable fashion? If it is as simple as taking a file and including it and calling a certain function with a data struct, maybe we'll get to see it someday. But it would have to be proven a worthy time-consuming venture to Austin before he would consider it an option, which means someone else would have to use it and prove how much more efficient it would be to give it an option and by including it, increase performance in his product by showing an improvement in someone else's.

Well, one of the stated reasons for switching to 64bit was going to be better memory usage, and this method seems to have a built in memory saving over current deferred rendering methods as well as doing it faster, which are both concerns with Xplane-10 in the higher modes right now. It seems to be something they could play with on their own or at least keep an eye on, and I suspect that if it really proves superior, the video card manufacturers will be playing around with it as well. (Would not be surprised if it turned up as a hidden mode accessible through Nvidia inspector) This was just a heads up, since I saw nothing in the PDF that indicated it was incompatible in any way with OGL. (which does not mean that I didn't simply miss something)

 

I just don't know enough about possible Xplane-10 rendering quirks (if any) to know if it would be useful.