A first glimpse at Prepar3d v2.3

[ALEKSEY2017 0]

Rob, good to you time, is interesting to us, whether you noticed correction of light of landing fires in version 2.3? Here link: http://www.prepar3d.com/forum-5/?mingleforumaction=viewtopic&t=7554

[Chris Bell 165]

i have been working directly with LM Dev's addressing Night Environment lighting support for P3D

as a result of fixing P3D's support for Night Environments lighting

 

i believe the other lighting issue is now resolved as well

and will be properly addressed in v2.3

 

Rob,

been following your output and contribution to this process with great interest

keep up the good work

[Juicehead 16]

I dont imagine they addressed the fps drop with night lighting did they?

[Chris Bell 165]

that’s exactly what they did!

and improved on it significenty

 

i am a commercial member; my product (links in my sig) is a night lighting solution

we were having issues with P3D v2.1 > till now; i worked with LM engineers to address the issue

since it was recently addressed for us; consequentially the issue with other lighting is also resolved in P3D v2.3

im not sure to what extent though in regards to other lighting systems

[Guest]

 

 

Rob, if you're not allowed to talk about buildings autogen, just let me know. I think I made the same question in the past and you ignored it again.

 

Can you clarify?  I didn't really see you ask a question, more a statement?  With the 2.3 Beta I have not seen any performance improvements with Building AutoGen and I'm not sure that is on the plate to be improved ... like I said earlier a Building is best case 3X more polygons (more likely average of 5X more polygons) than trees so they are going to put more stress on a GPU especially with shadows cast/receive.  

 

If I were to hazard a guess as to why buildings can't be as well tuned as trees it would be that trees are always 2 polygons so they can be better instanced into a batch for processing more efficiently, where-as buildings are not always the same poly count so can't benefit as much from instancing in a batch.  But this is pure speculation on my part.

 

 

 

Rob, good to you time, is interesting to us, whether you noticed correction of light of landing fires in version 2.3?

 

I think you mean AI aircraft landing lights, I have not specifically tested that in 2.3 beta, but i will tonight ... the solution to the problem in 2.2 was to use REX 4 texture direct.

 

There are some other lighting issues I've found in the 2.3 Beta (that weren't in 2.2) and have reported to LM.  Early Beta, I'm confident LM can address/resolve.

 

Cheers, Rob.

[ChaoticBeauty 6,692]

Can you clarify?  I didn't really see you ask a question, more a statement?  With the 2.3 Beta I have not seen any performance improvements with Building AutoGen and I'm not sure that is on the plate to be improved ... like I said earlier a Building is best case 3X more polygons (more likely average of 5X more polygons) than trees so they are going to put more stress on a GPU especially with shadows cast/receive.  

 

If I were to hazard a guess as to why buildings can't be as well tuned as trees it would be that trees are always 2 polygons so they can be better instanced into a batch for processing more efficiently, where-as buildings are not always the same poly count so can't benefit as much from instancing in a batch.  But this is pure speculation on my part.

 

I'll try to make myself more clear. In 2.2 the vegetation autogen received memory optimisation (17x less memory usage for trees), the LOD system from FSX was brought back, and performance optimisation included eliminating some work, and moving the rest to background threads and the GPU. In the Prepar3D forums Zach Heylmun said that because of the variety, buildings autogen cannot receive the same memory usage optimisations. I asked whether it's possible that they will receive the same performance optimisations (multi-threading and moving work to the GPU) at least, and Zach didn't respond. So I was wondering whether you are aware if they have any plans of moving the workload of the buildings autogen to the background threads and the GPU, just like the vegetation autogen.

[Chris Bell 165]

There are some other lighting issues I've found in the 2.3 Beta (that weren't in 2.2) and have reported to LM. Early Beta, I'm confident LM can address/resolve.

 

Cheers, Rob.

Early/First v2.3 beta release did not yet include the fix i was referring to in regards to night lighting

[JSilva 42]

Early/First v2.3 beta release did not yet include the fix i was referring to in regards to night lighting

Will the fix be included in the second beta of v2.3?

[Chris Bell 165]

Yes Silva; i believe it will be included in the v2.3 B2

this is scheduled to be included in the final v2.3 release

[Guest]

 

 

Early/First v2.3 beta release did not yet include the fix i was referring to in regards to night lighting

 

My reference was towards other lighting issues was during day and cloud shadows disappearing at certain view angles.

 

 

 

In the Prepar3D forums Zach Heylmun said that because of the variety, buildings autogen cannot receive the same memory usage optimisations.

 

I think your answer is in Zach's original response which mirrors my response.  The tree benefits came from instancing because trees are always the same 2 poly, buildings are not the same (vary in poly count) so no instancing benefits.  As far as I know no additional R&D is being done with Autogen building ... at least it has not been announced as such.  To get the same benefits as trees, all buildings would have to be the same poly count ... keep in mind this was a VAS improvement benefit, it didn't really impact fps performance.

 

Cheers, Rob.

[ChaoticBeauty 6,692]

I think your answer is in Zach's original response which mirrors my response.  The tree benefits came from instancing because trees are always the same 2 poly, buildings are not the same (vary in poly count) so no instancing benefits.  As far as I know no additional R&D is being done with Autogen building ... at least it has not been announced as such.  To get the same benefits as trees, all buildings would have to be the same poly count ... keep in mind this was a VAS improvement benefit, it didn't really impact fps performance.

 

So you mean that multi-threading and moving workload to the GPU didn't really increase the performance?

[Guest]

 

So you mean that multi-threading and moving workload to the GPU didn't really increase the performance?

 

You lost me here, are you saying the CPU is doing software rendering of buildings and light calcs?  I'm pretty sure that's not the case in any version of V2.x.   I saw no performance gains in terms of FPS going from 2.1 to 2.2 ... if that's what you mean by performance?  I saw significant VAS improvements and VAS resource seem to reach a peak and level out enabling long distance flights without hitting OOM.

 

Either way, I'm not aware of any additional work being done with Autogen system.

 

Cheers, Rob.

[ChaoticBeauty 6,692]

You lost me here, are you saying the CPU is doing software rendering of buildings and light calcs?  I'm pretty sure that's not the case in any version of V2.x.   I saw no performance gains in terms of FPS going from 2.1 to 2.2 ... if that's what you mean by performance?  I saw significant VAS improvements and VAS resource seem to reach a peak and level out enabling long distance flights without hitting OOM.

 

Either way, I'm not aware of any additional work being done with Autogen system.

 

No, I was talking about the autogen itself, not the models. They said that for 2.2, the workload for the vegetation autogen was cut down, moved to the background threads and the GPU to increase performance. The VAS usage optimisations were a different thing.

[Guest]

 

 

They said that for 2.2, the workload for the vegetation autogen was cut down, moved to the background threads and the GPU to increase performance.

 

Pretty sure that's DX11 Instancing ... this includes position, scale, color, etc. etc.  ... don't think it's different, part of the benefit is a lot less data to move around and far fewer draw calls.  You can't apply DX11 instancing to geometry that is not the same (such as building).

 

Cheers, Rob.

[ChaoticBeauty 6,692]

Pretty sure that's DX11 Instancing ... this includes position, scale, color, etc. etc.  ... don't think it's different, part of the benefit is a lot less data to move around and far fewer draw calls.  You can't apply DX11 instancing to geometry that is not the same (such as building).

 

If it's instancing, then you're right that it cannot be applied to the buildings. However this confuses me further, because in the DirectX 11 developer blog they said that instancing would be in 2.0.