CYVR IS larger than all our previous airports, that doesn't mean it has an "issue".

 

Thanks for taking the time to respond Umberto. I have followed the DX9 vs DX10 argument and learned a little about the difference in memory management. My issue is that I have a few add-ons that don't work with DX10 and hence I don't use it.

 

My concern is that I already have dialed down so many settings and still get OOM's with this scenery, when I am able to run 3 and more complex sceneries together. I mentioned the JFK example previously. I also am able to run Aerosofts EGLL, together with UK2000 Stansted and Gatwick, and London City - all with a complex aircraft such as the PMDG 747 (haven't taken the NGX there yet) and again with full AI and complex weather.

 

If Vancouver really is bigger then those 4 sceneries together (despite the fact that CYVR has very few dynamic scenery objects), then maybe you guys have pushed the envelope a little to far in the graphics department.

Don't get me wrong - I love the look, I love the dynamic shadows, and the night lighting is superb. But at the end of the day we have to live within the limitations of this aged and flawed sim we are using, and if this scenery is too much to handle for FSX/DX9 I'll have to uninstall it and cut my losses.

Personally I'd prefer a "lower resolution/less complexity" alternative ala ORBX, which give me a control panel to customize the scenery to my needs and my computers abilities. Would that be something you would consider?

I find the above verbiage to be utterly wrong and laughable. So you sitting in your office have now decreed to the entire flight sim community that in order to use multiple addons we all now must go to dx10? I find it interesting that the highly respected dev's at Fly Tampa have stated on their forum that dx10 is fraught with issues and recommend to stay away from it. Many current products do not work correctly or display correctly in dx10. So what are we supposed to do with all the other third party scenery? Get rid of it and wait for years for dx10 compliant stuff to take its place? Really Umberto?

 

Your statement this does not have anything to do with FSDT products is absurd. It has everything to do with your product. Why is it other top quality dev's can release such products without issue from the likes of Aerosoft, FT and Flightbeam that all work just fine with the NGX? You remind me of a guy I work with who constantly screws up. When asked about it he always says he is the one that is correct and the other 12 guys must be wrong.

 

It is up to YOU and your company to produce scenery that will work within the framework of fsx and dx9. Just because you have developed something that no longer can, don't think you are going to tell the entire community it has nothing to do with you and now we must all go to dx10!!

 

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy Note 2

 

+1 Eric

 

Umberto, have you seen Flytampa's Dubai.. To me, it seems like that package has more polygons etc. piled into it, [including the dubai city]. Yet, we're not having issues there

Personally I'd prefer a "lower resolution/less complexity" alternative ala ORBX, which give me a control panel to customize the scenery to my needs and my computers abilities. Would that be something you would consider?

 

You already have an immediate "lower resolution" option, which is the "Force HD textures" option in the Addon Manager, which is quite convenient to use, because it doesn't even require a restart, and applies immediately without even a complete reload of the scenery and objects, just the textures.

 

And, we don't need external configuration utilities, because we switch things in/out in real-time without restarting, for example seasonal textures at all objects (not just the photoreal background) switch automatically by date.

 

But the issue is, a configuration panel to turn off things, really helps only if the "removable" thing is already separate from the scenery. For example, a set of many light pylons made as a separate .BGL, could be removed with a configuration panel, and you might be happy the developer gave you the "option".

 

Unfortunately, what we learned about scenery design in past years, with FS9 and before, with GPUs not as fast as the new ones, and with BGL code that was heavily dependent on the main CPU, is not so much valid nowadays with current systems and fast GPUs (which *are* going to get faster and faster). Making a terminal with (this is an *example* I'm not referring to any specific scenery) with all its light pylons as a separate .BGL, would result in FSX breaking objects batching and creating additional drawcalls, even if the developer took care to use the same material as the main terminal. So, by giving you the option to configure, he lost some performances in any case.

 

Instead, we found that it's usually easier to simply throw all that stuff together to the GPU because, provided the thing is not animated and it's using the same material as the main terminal, it's way faster to always draw it as part of the same object, rather then having it separate and "removable", for example with a configuration panel.

 

The main reason we use few 4096 textures instead of many 1024s, is to keep the materials and state changes as low as possible, so we can draw as much as possible in a single drawcall, so that will put the GPU to work, and those don't even flinch, even if you send them hundreds of thousands of polygons to draw, as long as you do it in the way they like.

 

This approach makes configuration manager not very effective, because the very act of making something "removable" is already slowing down things, up to a point that the little you gain by sending a bit less polygons to the card, is nullified by the overhead of having more objects to handle and breaking the object batching and adding new drawcalls.

Umberto, have you seen Flytampa's Dubai.. To me, it seems like that package has more polygons etc. piled into it, [including the dubai city]. Yet, we're not having issues there

 

I haven't seen it, but I've asked an user to measure memory over it and the result is:

 

- FSX with default Dubai scenery and no AI, requires 669 MB in total.

 

- FSX with Fly-Tampa Dubai and no AI, requires 1.3GB in total

 

This means, FT Dubai takes about 600 MB, which is even more than CYVR.

 

But since it's all desert around it, there's no "Orbx Dubai" to purchase (such as PNW), there's no "complex and free Dubai city scenery" (such Vancouver+) to install, there's no "Megascenery Dubai" and no other airports in the area, you can afford to use a larger than CYVR scenery there.

 

We enjoy a similar situation at KDFW, which is very large, tons of gates, parkings and docking system, no OOMs whatsoever, not because it's better than CYVR, but because there's not much else you can stuff in there and the default scenery underneath is almost empty.

 

Next scenery we are considering Libreville, Gabon (the ICAO code name is a tell-tale), we might do a 2GB scenery and nobody will complain.

Funny how FT Dubai is more than Vancouver yet performs more than twice as well.

 

It is not just the "internal frame rate" if one is close to OOM, then the fps will fluctuate rapidly between 15 and 30, that is the issue..

 

I have posted a screenshot like you said,, what is your next suggestion?

Funny how FT Dubai is more than Vancouver yet performs more than twice as well.

 

That clearly indicates you either haven't read my reply, of you don't want to understand.

 

First, we are discussing about OOM not fps. YOU are having an fps problem, which we'll eventually found out and you had an obvious duplicate scenery, as many others pointed you out.

 

I've already show my screen displaying the whole scenery in view at 51.2 fps. Another user on FSDT forum posted a screenshot with the PMDG on Approach at 42 fps and nobody in this thread is complaining about bad fps, only you are. We are only discussing about memory requirements.

 

For some reasons, you are having fps problems at CYVR, and that's one thing, but it's not what we are discussing here, we were discussing if it's fair a developer should release a scenery that takes "so much memory", like CYVR, which is why I've shown the FT Dubai numbers, clearly indicating that is even larger than CYVR.

 

And of coure, fact that there's nothing else around it, you have far less chances to get into conflicts with something else.

 

It is not just the "internal frame rate" if one is close to OOM, then the fps will fluctuate rapidly between 15 and 30, that is the issue..

 

I've already said you should't post here about your fps problem, which obviously doesn't belong here.

 

I have posted a screenshot like you said,, what is your next suggestion?

 

I'll reply you on the appropriate place, which is of course the FSDT forum. Don't keep posting about your specific low fps issue here, in a thread that discussed OOMs, you are only confusing other users.

That clearly indicates you either haven't read my reply, of you don't want to understand.

 

First, we are discussing about OOM not fps. YOU are having an fps problem, which we'll eventually found out and you had an obvious duplicate scenery, as many others pointed you out.

 

I've already show my screen displaying the whole scenery in view at 51.2 fps. Another user on FSDT forum posted a screenshot with the PMDG on Approach at 42 fps and nobody in this thread is complaining about bad fps, only you are. We are only discussing about memory requirements.

 

For some reasons, you are having fps problems at CYVR, and that's one thing, but it's not what we are discussing here, we were discussing if it's fair a developer should release a scenery that takes "so much memory", like CYVR, which is why I've shown the FT Dubai numbers, clearly indicating that is even larger than CYVR.

 

And of coure, fact that there's nothing else around it, you have far less chances to get into conflicts with something else.

 

 

 

I've already said you should't post here about your fps problem, which obviously doesn't belong here.

 

 

 

I'll reply you on the appropriate place, which is of course the FSDT forum. Don't keep posting about your specific low fps issue here, in a thread that discussed OOMs, you are only confusing other users.

 

The out of memory issue causes the fps loss Umberto.. Wow.

The out of memory issue causes the fps loss Umberto.. Wow.

 

If you have an OOM, you will see an unmistakable message from FSX saying "Your computer has run of of memory", and after that, textures will start to disappear. I'm not recall you saying having such message.

 

Again, stop posting here about your fps problem, which doesn't have anything to do with this discussion.

If you have an OOM, you will see an unmistakable message from FSX saying "Your computer has run of of memory", and after that, textures will start to disappear. I'm not recall you saying having such message.

 

Again, stop posting here about your fps problem, which doesn't have anything to do with this discussion.

 

The OOM is not absolute, the run up to a OOM is fluctuating fps as the resources are overloaded.

The OOM is not absolute, the run up to a OOM is fluctuating fps as the resources are overloaded.

Dont know how many times he has asked you to stop posting in here please post in the correct forum please

The OOM is not absolute, the run up to a OOM is fluctuating fps as the resources are overloaded.

 

That's wrong too.

 

Under a normal situation, the fps will be very good up to the last time before the OOM because, the OOM message from FSX is NOT a "real" OOM. It's NOT happening when you *really* reached 4GB. If you did, FSX would simply crashed.

 

Instead, FSX is alerting way in advance and, there's even a *patch* made by someone to FSX itself, to get rid of the warning, so it doesn't stop your flying. AFTER that, if you have FSUIPC installed, you'll hear the "ding" sound alerting you are even closer the the memory limit, and after that, FSX will finally crash.

 

And of course, I can't see anybody else stating that they had particularly low fps before getting that OOM, or nobody else except you, which such low fps with a default airplane, so I believe your problem is really unique, and if you stopped arguing and provided me with that screenshot I've asked you something like 10 times in a row on our forum, and you always managed not to do it, we would already be on the next step troubleshooting your problem.

Umberto,

 

Do you ever see yourself moving FSDT over to XP10?

Do you ever see yourself moving FSDT over to XP10?

 

That's a very good question, and I believe it might deserve a very long answer, that might derail this thread into places it shouldn't...

 

Let's say that we don't see that in the short/mid term. We have some faith that P3D should at least come up with a new version, before we can make up our minds entirely on other options.

 

I'm sure that, by that time that, even without an FSDT scenery, those famous 4GB will be filled up anyway by something else, so anybody will go into panic end-of-the world-mode, if a DX11-compatible P3D will be out, any discussion about "we shouldn't suggest to use DX10, because of the other non-compatible add-ons", will sort it out itself, because of DX11. Of course, assuming DX11 in P3D will be better than DX10 in FSX. I think it will, but it will be probably even less backward compatible.

 

And, this would still be a temporary solution. DX11 might give us a bit more of breathing space, but that's just delaying the inevitable: sooner or later, those 4GB will be filled again, even with DX11.

 

A real solution would be moving to a 64 bit app, but that's probably way more complex, LM said there are still parts of FSX which were written in ASM (probably during the Reagan administration...well, maybe not, but you get the point...), and those are very hard to convert to 64 bit. "WE" Mac users had to suffer for *years* to finally get a 64 bit Photoshop, while Windows users got it way earlier, and Adobe surely has way more resources to spend on Photoshop, than LM will ever have for P3D.

 

Right now, they haven't been able to release an updated exported from 3D Studio that doesn't crash when exporting large models (with "large" = about 1/5th of a PMDG-like VC ), although the problem has been reported to LM more than 1 year ago by us, FlyTampa and FSLabs, and they acknowledged its existence.

 

So, part of me wants to be optimistic about P3D's future, and part is quite worried.

 

This to say: we look at X-Plane more like a Plan-C, rather than a Plan-B option. IF people will stop buying FSX add-ons, we hope to have P3D to sustain the market. If that won't be an option, we'll have a look how far X-Plane progressed to that date.

FSDT haven't stated you HAVE to use DX10 but pointed out that it WILL save you memory if you do and will help to save OOM's in very heavy areas, you have to admit with all the addons people are trying to run at the same time there is only so much the system can take if it can only run 4GB of memory.

 

Just to be clear, FSDT have shown that using DX10 with this airport will save memory. You may find, as I have, that with other scenery it doesn't necessarily work this way.

 

Scott

I for one don't have FPS issues around CYVR (20fps is use able) but KSEA I do and its the same PNW region with only orbx PNW.

 

What someone needs to do and ts a big task is reinstall a very fresh copy of FSX and then right away put CYVR on and see where the VAS is at. Then add the NGX. Again VAS test. Screenshots of it all and the record will be set straight. I think.

 

BTW. HD textures option is greyed out for me with the checkmark there so I can't disable it.