Wish DTS would have got the FLIGHT code instead of FSX

[majuh 14]

Flight could've easily been ported to DirectX 12:

 

[magnetite 38]

5 hours ago, JimmiG said:

Both the FSX and Flight engines have IMO outlived their usefulness. They're outdated and based on old tech and ideas, with things duct taped on throughout the years. A new engine, written from the ground up for multi threading, 64-bit and DX12 would both perform much better and look more comparable to modern PC games released in the last 5 years, rather than like some time anomaly from 2004.

There's a lot of recent games that don't use DX12. There's also a lot of older games which had their rendering engines upgraded to DX11 from DX9 like FSW had done.

FSX has actually had multithreading since SP1. It was only a single threaded app in the RTM days.

At the end of the day, there isn't a lot they can do about it. If nothing short of scrapping FSX's code and rebuilding everything from scratch with a new engine will satisfy someone's performance expectations, I'd suggest finding a sim to use that isn't based around FSX/ESP codebase.

[stonelance 136]

I've said my opinion many times as majuh has quoted.  I'm very familiar with both FSX and Flight code as I worked on both.  Flight could have been converted to a more modern rendering API easily.  Between FSX and Flight we completely abstracted the low level rendering layer to make it easier to convert to other APIs.  The entire time during development I had my fingers crossed that we could switch to DX11 before releasing, but to the leadership the market penetration of Vista\Win 8 wasn't enough to justify it.  As a exercise in learning how DX12 works I took the Flight code and converted it in a few weeks.  There would still have been work to get it shippable, but overall it was pretty easy and very little game code changed.  It probably could have been ported to vulkan almost as easily.  There is no way Dovetail will be able to move their sim over to DX12 as easily as it was to move Flight, but they probably have no intentions to do that.  It would be another complete re-haul of the graphics and because of the design of FSX, it would touch a lot of the affected systems that need to render things.  Also, the DX10 support in FSX was a total hack just to get it in so ACES could say it really supports Vista.  Why do you think it was so buggy?

There are pros and cons to both FSX and Flight.  The right choice depends a lot on what they want, but ultimately I feel the long term right choice would have been Flight.  I think to some degree they may have picked FSX because they figured less fans would ###### about that choice.  Unfortunately fan reception of Flight was not great either (some of it deserved, and some of it not).

They put a lot of emphasis on it being fantastic because it is 64 bit because that is what a bunch of noisy fans want, but really the problem was not the lack of 64 bit, but the lack of efficient memory usage.  64 bit is great, and it should have been done, but it is a long term bet, not really a short term one.  Also, in general 64 bit slightly increases memory usage and slightly reduces perf, so it isn't great unless it is actually needed.  The amount of GPU memory on newer cards helps as well since you can be a 32 bit app and still access all 8 or 12 GB of memory on the GPU.  The main issue is system memory usage, and getting that data from the hard drive to the graphics memory.  One of the downsides of FSX was that it did a lot of work in the CPU and Flight moved a lot of it to the GPU.

[OzWhitey 3,353]

Why did Dovetail not use the much-more modern MS Flight code? On the surface, it makes perfect sense. However, I suspect they feared the destruction of their company via another event like the 'Occupy Redmond' movement - a famous event in Avsim's history - one that almost brought Microsoft to its knees, before that organisation was saved by the Obama administration/NWO.

Does anyone know if Dighost is still in a FEMA camp?

Solidarity forever!

[JimmiG 244]

19 hours ago, magnetite said:

There's a lot of recent games that don't use DX12. There's also a lot of older games which had their rendering engines upgraded to DX11 from DX9 like FSW had done.

FSX has actually had multithreading since SP1. It was only a single threaded app in the RTM days.

At the end of the day, there isn't a lot they can do about it. If nothing short of scrapping FSX's code and rebuilding everything from scratch with a new engine will satisfy someone's performance expectations, I'd suggest finding a sim to use that isn't based around FSX/ESP codebase.

Some DX11 engines indeed also look pretty good. Those that have been upgraded from DX9 have had way more resources poured into them than the ESP engine, so that's not really comparable. GTA 5 is probably an evolution of the GTA IV engine, and it looks pretty good and runs at 60+ FPS..but think about the development budget of Rockstar compared to someone like DTG...

FSX doesn't have multi-threaded *rendering*. The scenery loading/compositing is multi-threaded, but the actual rendering engine is single threaded. If you just fly around in a circle (no new scenery being streamed in), it only uses one CPU core.

If they think they can meet my performance and quality expectations by just tweaking FSX, then fine. But I'll have to see the results before I get excited. Will also be interesting to see what LM can do with P3D v4. It's moving to 64-bit, and they are talking about features like PBR. The problem with that engine, as with any ESP derivative, is performance and single-threaded CPU dependency. There's also AFS2 and X-Plane 11. FSW doesn't exist in a vacuum.

[magnetite 38]

5 hours ago, JimmiG said:

FSX doesn't have multi-threaded *rendering*. The scenery loading/compositing is multi-threaded, but the actual rendering engine is single threaded. If you just fly around in a circle (no new scenery being streamed in), it only uses one CPU core.

If they think they can meet my performance and quality expectations by just tweaking FSX, then fine. But I'll have to see the results before I get excited. Will also be interesting to see what LM can do with P3D v4. It's moving to 64-bit, and they are talking about features like PBR. The problem with that engine, as with any ESP derivative, is performance and single-threaded CPU dependency. There's also AFS2 and X-Plane 11. FSW doesn't exist in a vacuum.

You know, even the latest version of P3D doesn't use multithreaded rendering. Who's to say that would magically fix the performance problems? If that's all FSX was doing was rendering it might. However, it also has to do a whole bunch of calculations like physics, weather, AI, etc. All those would be competing with the rendering threads for resources.

 

Quote

If they think they can meet my performance and quality expectations by just tweaking FSX, then fine. But I'll have to see the results before I get excited. Will also be interesting to see what LM can do with P3D v4. It's moving to 64-bit, and they are talking about features like PBR. The problem with that engine, as with any ESP derivative, is performance and single-threaded CPU dependency. There's also AFS2 and X-Plane 11. FSW doesn't exist in a vacuum.

How are you so sure it's this single threaded rendering that is the cause of all the performance problems? I've done many tests with Intel GPA that showed me, least on my system, that the bottleneck was the time it took to transfer things from the CPU to the GPU. The results for FSX DX10 and P3D 3.4 were very similar. The CPU was actually the fastest part of the system, and thus not the bottleneck. Most of you guys just look at the task manager, and assume because there's one thread at 100%, that it is the cause of the problems. You really can't diagnose performance issues staring at the task manager. It requires under the hood diagnostic software like Intel GPA or Nvidia PerfHUD to actually figure out these issues.

Edited May 20, 2017 by magnetite