How Will P3D V4.4 Benefit from Physically Based Rendering (PBR)?

[chass32 138]

2 minutes ago, simbol said:

The way you build planes and objects for XP11 is totally different from P3D, so in answer to your question it is not just a copy and paste job.

They will need to re-visit each of their 3D models and put a lot of work and effort to re-map and adjust the materials inside of 3DMax and I doubt anybody would like to do such job for free..

S.

That´s what I wanted to know, thanks Simbol. Of course It´s fair to pay if it´s a lot of work involved. Probably It will take some time too until all their planes are PBR ready, something like what happened with p3dv4 where my favourtie plane (phenom 300) was one of the last ones to be v4 ready.

Cheers

Carlos

[Guest]

On 9/2/2018 at 6:34 PM, GCBraun said:

Personally, I don't care so much about external textures from the plane. Would prefer if the actually made night textures and lightning in P3D look more realistic.

I don't care at ALL about external textures because I never ever leave the cockpit but these 'new' effects will of course also have a great effect in the cockpit! And I can't wait for that! Besides P3D I also fly in Aerofly FS 2 and I suppose that one doesn't do PBR right now but what it DOES do is show real time light on surfaces. It's a bit hard to explain but when the sun shines on the rim (if that is the right word) of the cockpit panel, you can see a bleached out spot where the light reflects. In P3D those kinds of spots are baked into the textures (so no matter where and how you look at things, that bleached out spot remains in place). In AFS2 however this is happening in real time and the spot moves depending on your position and view, just as it would in real life. This (imho) makes a WORLD of difference when it comes to realism! Whenever I switch from AFS2 to P3D I have to get used to every effect being baked into the textures again: it makes things look flat and fake. Luckily it doesn't bother me for too long. Anyway, it would be great if these things like PBR and raytracing will find their way in P3D!

[ErichB 3,640]

1 hour ago, J van E said:

Anyway, it would be great if these things like PBR and raytracing will find their way in P3D!

There is no reason why it wouldn't.  The question is when.  It is actually difficult having this discussion without making comparisons to other sims, but it is becoming more evident that Mr Martin needs to up his game in the gym and apply better grooming techniques because Mr Plane seems to be stealing more and more of his girlfriends.

[chass32 138]

1 hour ago, ErichB said:

...but it is becoming more evident that Mr Martin needs to up his game in the gym and apply better grooming techniques because Mr Plane seems to be stealing more and more of his girlfriends.

What? xD

[JoeFackel 760]

1 hour ago, ErichB said:

that Mr Martin needs to up his game in the gym and apply better grooming techniques because Mr Plane seems to be stealing more and more of his girlfriends.

If this girlfriends are only after the good look then they aren't a big loss 😉

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

Mr. Martin and  Mr. Plane are both nerdy geeks with no girlfriends. Mr. Martin's twin brother is a chiseled, ultra rich F-35 pilot with  a wife and family.

[pmb 5,137]

1 hour ago, ErichB said:

but it is becoming more evident that Mr Martin needs to up his game in the gym and apply better grooming techniques because Mr Plane seems to be stealing more and more of his girlfriends.

Independend on what some hardcore simmers think, I feel Erich isn't completely mistaken. Fall polls will show.

Kind regards, Michael

[Christopher Low 5,352]

I never leave the cockpit during a flight, but I still want the external model textures to be good quality because if they aren't, I will feel uncomfortable. It sounds daft, but that's the way I am. It's a bit like those outlying buildings at airports that some developers think only need low resolution textures because nobody will see them. I don't agree with that concept. I want everything to have high quality textures, and arguably we should be able to have them in the 64bit era.

[charlie130 196]

On 9/3/2018 at 2:20 PM, Chock said:

So yeah, bring PBR on, but make sure it is accompanied by a serious developmental attempt to ensure that you don't need HAL 900 to be able to run the thing at more that 20 fps. And then perhaps update the database so it isn't full of nav aids and airports which were switched off and closed down fifteen years ago in the real world. Things like that matter more than tarted up textures.

Well said.

It is smoothness of flight and high frame rates that will assist us to continue with the P3d engine and achieve a somewhat realistic flight simulator. That's all I ask of PBR. Smooth accurate flight, so no reduction to 9 FPS on approach to LAX! 

Time will tell if LM can do this. In my experience, the more add ons that I add to P3d and the prettier the graphics get, the slower the sim becomes and the less of a simulation of flight it gets.

FWIW, I saw the Battlefield guys demonstrating Ray tracing and the Nv RTX (HAL 9000 GPU) and when they went from 1080 to 4096 resolution, frame rates went from 60+ to below 30! So the prettier their gory shoot em up got, the slower it got.....🤔

Regards

David

 

[Guest]

49 minutes ago, charlie130 said:

It is smoothness of flight and high frame rates that will assist us to continue with the P3d engine and achieve a somewhat realistic flight simulator. That's all I ask of PBR. Smooth accurate flight, so no reduction to 9 FPS on approach to LAX! 

Time will tell if LM can do this. In my experience, the more add ons that I add to P3d and the prettier the graphics get, the slower the sim becomes and the less of a simulation of flight it gets.

FWIW, I saw the Battlefield guys demonstrating Ray tracing and the Nv RTX (HAL 9000 GPU) and when they went from 1080 to 4096 resolution, frame rates went from 60+ to below 30! So the prettier their gory shoot em up got, the slower it got.....🤔 

Regards

David

 

Isn't it a bit odd to 'ask' high frame rates from PBR...? As you noted, "the prettier their gory shoot em up got, the slower it got": what else did you expect? ;) The same will go for P3D. You can't have prettier pictures without loss of fps. An RTX 2080Ti might sound as the answer to that problem but I am sure you'll need such a card to have PBR and raytracing without fps dropping to single digits.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, charlie130 said:

So the prettier their gory shoot em up got, the slower it got

That's always going to be the case.  Unfortunately you see many people commenting on "it's not optimized" or "it's not utilizing XYZ" without any substance/content/details on exactly "what isn't being optimized" (and without source code any such comments really don't hold much merit or consideration) ... unless one is a software engineer and more specifically a 3D graphics software engineer with access to the source code of the app/game/sim.

The pool of "software engineering" has many fields of focus just like there are Doctors who have a specific discipline or lawyers who specialize at specific aspects of law, etc. etc. ... the complexity of the field dictates a specific discipline ... it's not exclusively "procedural" type of work.

You wouldn't want HAL9000 Dave ... I can get the same level of AI interaction with Siri or Alexa or any of the many AI device being sold today.  What you want is something that can process massive amounts of light calculations in about 16ms (assuming 60Hz/FPS goal) ... HAL9000 would be terrible at that, just a red dot. 😉

The quest for improved "reality" is always going to come at a cost (performance and financial) ... it's why PC game/sim market is so much smaller than the Console market ... money.  I think everyone understands that operating a full featured flight simulator is going to be as cheap or as expensive as one wants to make it.  When new features are added to a sim and it has a performance impact, the user complaints start rolling in ... I sympathize with them, this is an expensive past time, future time, or training time ... but it's been that way since the first PC hit the market and it's not going to change.  This is why places like AVSIM exist with a pool of member knowledge to help each other get the most out of their hardware/software.

Barking at software engineers telling them they aren't writing well optimized code is about as effective as walking into a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there ... it's only going to lead to frustration time and time again and I'm sure it has pushed many away from the hobby (and many have returned, that's a fairly common cycle).

Next time you fire up that 3D shooter, take a closer look ...  how far are you really seeing out to the horizon?  Is it a static horizon?  Does the horizon ever change?  Just how far can you see until it's a blurry mess, 1mi, 2mi, 5mi?  How high can you go in that environment, can you make it to 30,000 or 40,000 or 50,000 feet with nice view of the world?  When you walk thru the halls of that 3D environment, is it always the same does it change with time of day or with a season?  Does the sky always look the same or do clouds and weather dynamically roll in and out if you just sit there?  Can you just wonder off in any direction and if you wonder long enough return back to the same location (one full rotation of the world)?  These are the "optimizations" you see for 3D shooters, and they aren't really optimization they are limitations to keep FPS high ... limitations you don't have in a flight simulator and hence the difference in performance and visuals.

So should developers just stop doing flight simulators for PCs and wait for that day when hardware is in console price ranges?  I hope NOT ... I'd much rather deal with all the warts and make the best of it as can be accomplished at any price range.  Sure, there can be days of frustration dealing with the warts, but there are many more days of accomplishment, fun, training, etc.  The world is waiting, not the "next level".

Cheers, Rob.

[virtuali 4,421]

On 9/20/2018 at 11:04 PM, Rob Ainscough said:

These are the "optimizations" you see for 3D shooters, and they aren't really optimization they are limitations to keep FPS high ... limitations you don't have in a flight simulator and hence the difference in performance and visuals.

And, incidentally, is precisely the lack of such limitations, which are the cause for supposedly "poor performances" of flight simulators, which makes flight simulation so much more compelling (at least for simmers) than 1st person shooters.

[JoeFackel 760]

On 9/20/2018 at 11:04 PM, Rob Ainscough said:

Next time you fire up that 3D shooter, take a closer look ...  how far are you really seeing out to the horizon?  Is it a static horizon?  Does the horizon ever change?  Just how far can you see until it's a blurry mess, 1mi, 2mi, 5mi?  How high can you go in that environment, can you make it to 30,000 or 40,000 or 50,000 feet with nice view of the world?  When you walk thru the halls of that 3D environment, is it always the same does it change with time of day or with a season?  Does the sky always look the same or do clouds and weather dynamically roll in and out if you just sit there?  Can you just wonder off in any direction and if you wonder long enough return back to the same location (one full rotation of the world)?  These are the "optimizations" you see for 3D shooters, and they aren't really optimization they are limitations to keep FPS high ... limitations you don't have in a flight simulator and hence the difference in performance and visuals.

Exactly the problem of the handful of simmers who don't understand why our sims look like they look. Realizing how LIMITED this high-end shooters like FarCry, GTA etc. would open some eyes and let them understand why it's always the hardware that has to catch up with flightsims.

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

On 9/2/2018 at 3:45 PM, jabloomf1230 said:

Can I ask you a PBR-specific question? The textures that LM included for the 3D Speedtree models appear to be PBR textures, as Speedtree utilizes PBR textures by default. One can see this by opening a Speedtree texture in Photoshop. Does P3d 4 already support PBR in a limited way? I'm not versed enough in HLSL to know whether the shaders have been updated silently. Thanks.

I noticed that Rob A. posted on the REX official forums that he was under the impression that PBR worked in P3d 4.4 for autogen buildings, but not autogen trees. That's too bad since the default Speedtrees  from IDV have PBR textures and look quite nice in other games. LM converted them to models with regular DDS textures for use in the Speedtree vegetation library.

[Gabe777 132]

So now we have arrived at the point where entire airports are covered in this PBR nonsense.

Don't know what Orbx's Leeds Bradford is like in P3D, but in X plane my GPU usage (a GTX 1080 with 8GB VRAM), goes from 50 percent in standard Orbx airports like Stockholm or Southampton, to 100 percent in front of the tetminal buildings.

My CPU stays at 25 percent as per usual. As a result, the stuttering is crazy, and FPS probably in single digits.

The MASSIVE amount of PBR is killing the performance.

Once you move away from the main aprons (end of runway for example) OR at night..... GPU is back down to 50 percent and FPS returns to its typical 35 to 45.

And unbelievably,  there is no option to use lower rez textures or in any way, reduce the debilitating effect of over-using their 'new toy' ... PBR.

PBR is the new dynamic lighting. A performance killer.

Roll on FS2020.... let's hope they learn from the mistakes of every sim that has gone before it.

1.Share the load between CPU and GPU,

2. don't overdo the effects... just 'because you can' ... and

3. make it scaleable.

Hopefully in a week or so, I'll have a better idea of whether they have achieved this... 😉😎

 

Edited October 27, 2019 by Gabe777