The rise and fall of 64bit? My experience.

[Lenny777 299]

On ‎2‎/‎21‎/‎2018 at 0:22 PM, Jetset408 said:

Im Interested in your thoughts and experiences. Please dont take my post as negative whining - we are in a truly fantastic period for flight simulation. I'm just taking time to reflect on some of the flip sides of that.

VAS. That's the only thing that mattered to me. The 32 bit joke given today's technology stopped me from using FSX/P3D for almost a year and went to XP 10. Now I can fairly easily determine where the overhead will take me all the while not having to worry about getting OOMs.

Edited February 23, 2018 by n4gix
Removed excessive quote. Please don't quote a "wall of text"!

[AviatorMoser 353]

On 2/21/2018 at 0:22 PM, Jetset408 said:

Dynamic Lighting sucked every ounce of power, frame rates sunk and stutters were bad. So I decided to upgrade again – to a 1080Ti GTX. My specs as per my signature below show my system is no slouch, yet somehow it’s STILL not enough. My GPU tops out when landing in overcast weather at dusk in a complex add-on airport – just the scenario I WANT to enjoy simulating.

And thats the problem. We are a mere 1 year into 64bit and already I fear the sim has outgrown today’s technology.

I was surprised to see this conclusion, because I feel the opposite has occurred. Technology has grown so fast that P3D feels very outdated and not optimized for the modern hardware. It's still heavily relying on a single thread, still wants to apply antialiasing to every cloud texture, has performance-killing dynamic lighting, and still has no 3D volumetric clouds. In addition, it's airport and navigation database is over a decade old. In many regards, P3D feels like it's still stuck in 2006.

What I would like to see Lockheed Martin do for this platform in 5.0 is just focus on optimizing and modernizing. Until then, it's not exactly enticing me to load it up when I can have a similar experience in FSX or something a little more up to date in X-Plane.

Just my two cents.

[Jetset408 108]

13 minutes ago, AviatorMoser said:

I was surprised to see this conclusion, because I feel the opposite has occurred. Technology has grown so fast that P3D feels very outdated and not optimized for the modern hardware. It's still heavily relying on a single thread, still wants to apply antialiasing to every cloud texture, has performance-killing dynamic lighting, and still has no 3D volumetric clouds. In addition, it's airport and navigation database is over a decade old. In many regards, P3D feels like it's still stuck in 2006.

What I would like to see Lockheed Martin do for this platform in 5.0 is just focus on optimizing and modernizing.

You are right in many respects - when I refer to LM pushing the boundaries and adding lots of nice new features (eg. Dynamic Lighting), you're right in that they are not necessarily doing cutting edge things that other computer games might be doing. They are I suppose catching up with where ESP should be these days, but in doing this, they are finding the limit of the ESP engine and performance is suffering.

I too would like to see 5.0 focus on refreshing and updating the platform. Only issue with that is we would probably have to end up buying all of our addons again - for a third time! :)

And I doubt that's where Lockheed Martin really see themselves going. As long as the sort of professional experiential training can be done off an un-optimized ESP platform, I doubt they will look to push it much further than at present.

Edited February 23, 2018 by Jetset408

[AviatorMoser 353]

12 minutes ago, Jetset408 said:

 Only issue with that is we would probably have to end up buying all of our addons again - for a third time! :)

Haha! Yeah, there's always that. Only reason I still have FSX still installed. I'm too frugal to repurchase a new edition of my toys!

[kiki 89]

Dynamic lightning, what does it actually do?

[AviatorMoser 353]

3 minutes ago, kiki said:

Dynamic lightning, what does it actually do?

It's where multiple sources of lights, such as a lamp, flair, flashlight, etc., cast their own lighting on the surroundings. The surroundings interact with that light and reflect that light or cast shadows appropriately.

Check out this promotional material for Arma 3 (an infantry simulator) from 2012. There are good examples of multiple light sources and objects interacting dynamically.

 

[Guest]

3 hours ago, HighTowers said:

Meaning- One computer runs the base sim, with the aircrafts physics,and everything else happening in the flightdeck. Another computer could be running weather and scenery generation, and yet another running full AI and ATC.

Already built into P3D V4.x for the most part, used by many that do full scale cockpits or serious trainers.

Cheers, Rob.

[Guest]

14 minutes ago, AviatorMoser said:

Check out this promotional material for Arma 3 (an infantry simulator) from 2012. There are good examples of multiple light sources and objects interacting dynamically.

And what's your view distance?  Are you able to traverse the entire planet?  It's always a mistake to compare 3D shooters with Flight Simulators.

Cheers, Rob.

[regis9 3,999]

2 hours ago, Buffy Foster said:

IDK why go all the way down to 1080p?  Theres lots of real nice 2560x1440 monitors with G-Sync even.

My thought exactly.  I have a 32” 2k monitor and for me that’s a sweet spot.  Very clear visuals and a minimal performance difference from 1080p on a GTX1070.

[Buffy Foster 133]

I saw a really nice looking extra-wide one that was also curved; I think from Dell?  Kinda spendy though; like US$700 or so.  *starts my Christmas list early*

[AviatorMoser 353]

13 minutes ago, Rob Ainscough said:

And what's your view distance?  Are you able to traverse the entire planet?  It's always a mistake to compare 3D shooters with Flight Simulators.

Cheers, Rob.

It's always a mistake to not read either. If you read the question by @kiki, he was asking what dynamic lighting does, and I gave him a brief explanation and demo video of software where it's application is obvious.

The English language exists so that people can read and understand each other, quite effectively I might add.

[Lenny777 299]

So to get back to the original assertion: The rise and fall of 64 bit? I noticed it was a question and good because I'd leave "rise and fall" to Gibbons in his titled work "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" as the rhetorical tool is very badly misplaced here unless one feels that technology is due for a fall and that 64-bit is a failure which won't garner much agreement here. The real question should have been is P3Dv4 in decline and due for a fall. In some sense maybe so but for me the current investment by thousands of dedicated simmers in the new 64 bit version with the VAS issue essentially gone it will be some time before this incarnation is completely redone.

[kiki 89]

1 hour ago, AviatorMoser said:

It's where multiple sources of lights, such as a lamp, flair, flashlight, etc., cast their own lighting on the surroundings. The surroundings interact with that light and reflect that light or cast shadows appropriately.

Check out this promotional material for Arma 3 (an infantry simulator) from 2012. There are good examples of multiple light sources and objects interacting dynamically.

Thank you, now I understand it! ;)

 

 

[Guest]

2 hours ago, AviatorMoser said:

It's always a mistake to not read either. If you read the question by @kiki, he was asking what dynamic lighting does, and I gave him a brief explanation and demo video of software where it's application is obvious.

I'm well aware of the question and my response is the same, no need for the jabs.  You'd be better off demonstrating dynamic lighting On/Off in P3D V4 rather than using a 3D shooter because the implementation of dynamic lighting varies considerably where many different techniques can be used with a variance of results and quality.  The "lighting" presented in Arma 3 is specific to Arma 3 (or whatever engine it uses) ... for example deferred rendering is faster based on where it happens in the render pipeline but has AA limitations and Transparency limitations and shadow limitations (think XP11) and requires high bandwidth, older GPUs don't support multiple render targets.  Forward rendering (think P3D V4) operates the render in different way but has less restriction around AA and transparency and render targets but is slower ... and then there is the combination of a little of both.

DL implementation that will vary, such as being able to see shadows that a light sources generate ... 3D shooters may implement this, but Flight Simulators (the ones I've used) don't.  A 3D shooter is often "enclosed" (distance) in a very specific poly count world tuned to work with current middle tier hardware, therefore lighting for that world be it static or dynamic or a little of both and not be representative of what one might see in a Flight simulator.

Here is Dynamic Lighting from P3D V4:

P3D V4 DL external (GSX vehicle lights up the aircraft):

P3D V4 DL on VC (VC becomes lighter as the aircraft moves under the light):

P3D V3.x without DL (notice the aircraft stays dark as it moves under the airport light)

Cheers, Rob.

 

[simmerhead 885]

I appreciate all the new graphic eye candy in P3D, but just wish we had hardware to fully enjoy it - and that is not meant as a critique of P3D. It is just frustrating knowing that even a $10000 computer can't make P3D fly with all the eye candy in combination with the premium scenery, airport and aircraft add-ons. I've got the money to spend, but I chose not to, until there is hardware that can really take advantage of what P3D has to offer.