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

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

Thanks Kevin. I asked Rob Ainscough about this when P3d4 was first released, as I was wondering why the Speedtree textures are so odd looking in P3d. Some of the trees are that awful electric green in color. They look okay in other 3D apps that I have, but obviously the implementations are varied.

[Gibbage 199]

7 minutes ago, Dave CBFS said:

Not sure if it's related, but have a look in your "Prepar3D v4 / SimObjects / Misc / Desert Hawk 3.1 / texture" folder.

Interesting texture names...

Interesting.  Its part way there, but not fully.  The "reflection" map looks like its part PBR.  

The key difference between PBR and Specular is the reflections.  In Spec, you have a specular map with the RGB handling the spec power and color, and the Alpha handling the bloom or how wide the spec is.  Reflections are handled in the Albedo/Diffuse alpha.  In PBR, you have whats called a "combined" map.  Each channel of the RGB handles an aspect of the reflection.  R would be the Gloss channel (how shart or how dull the reflection is) and the G would handle the metalness (how much power the reflection has).  The B would handle the AO map.  

In the Desert Hawk 3.1 reflection.dds file, the R channel clearly has the spec channel in it, but the G and B dont.  That could be the gloss channel, and the G looks like a metalness map.  The white peaces being metal, the black being non-metal parts.  I can tell that this asset was also created by Substance, and it handle PBR texture creation.  

My biggest concern is the lack of anything in the blue channel, or the AO channel.  AO really helps out a lot and is a vital component of proper PBR shaders.  It could be removed since it does not support PBR yet.  It should be a shame of P3D/LM didnt do AO on PBR.  

My other guess is that this texture was created in Substance, and since it does not work in Spec engines, this was a way for them to hack it into P3D.  Thats also possible.  I have not worked with Substance much, but I know its a powerful texture tool.

[ErichB 3,642]

This announcement completely took me by surprise. I would have thought PBR would be left for V5. Good times ahead

Will PBR eliminate or reduce shimmering textures at airports if PBR was implemented for the airport

Will PBR eliminate the need for shader utilities like PTA and Tomato Shade  - more specifically, will PBR also impact atmospheric light scattering under different conditions or does it only affect the appearance of physical surfaces under different lighting conditions? 

 

[Pete Dowson 558]

My main interest is in improved performance. To me, with a 210 degree FOV curved screen needing 3 separate scenery windows, performance is a much higher priority need than better textures and surface effects. After all, with my airliner flying in Europe my view is mostly of the clouds below, not metallic surfaces.

When I first heard of this I thought, wow, moving more graphics work over to the GPU alleviating the current almost constant 100% loading on my Core 0 (even at 4.8 GHz). But if instead it merely involves even more complex modelling it sounds like it could have a negative affect on performance.

I hope someone will assure me that this is not so, that it will be good after all ...

Pete

 

[Guest]

3 hours ago, jabloomf1230 said:

The textures that LM included for the 3D Speedtree models appear to be PBR textures

They are not PBR textures.

Cheers, Rob.

[Guest]

5 hours ago, ErichB said:

This announcement completely took me by surprise.

There has been NO public announcement.

3 hours ago, Pete Dowson said:

I hope someone will assure me that this is not so, that it will be good after all .

PBR didn't hurt XP11 performance but keep in mind PBR is a lighting concept and comes with many levels of implementation.  I still believe adding support for DX11/DX12 BC6H/BC7 texture compression would be big improvement to performance, but I seem to be alone in that thought as no one has picked up on it nor have I seen much enthusiasm from 3rd party.

Cheers, Rob.

[shivers9 1,174]

1 hour ago, Pete Dowson said:

I hope someone will assure me that this is not so, that it will be good after all ...

+1 I vote for an end to studders and P3D getting over this CTD after a couple hours or changing views. I don't want this Flight Sim to be converted to a Texture Sim.

[FalconAF 213]

On ‎9‎/‎1‎/‎2018 at 10:32 PM, LRW said:

So, one pickup truck shy of a country song. 

You forgot rain, trains, prisons, gettin' drunk, and Mama.

And no...you don't have to call me darlin'...darlin'.  You never even called me by my name.

(If anybody reading this is under 30 years old and only listens to rap music, this post will make absolutely no sense to you...…..)

😎

Edit:  (But if you're curious, you'll need to watch this whole video, particularly from about the 3:00 minute point to the end of it).  

 

Edited September 3, 2018 by FalconAF

[ErichB 3,642]

7 hours ago, Rob Ainscough said:

There has been NO public announcement

Speculation is supposed to be fun, Rob..    Regardless of the lack of formal announcement, it is in the public domain and PBR is about as good as speculation gets on the flightsim prairie.  People have been banging on about it ever since XP11 did it.

As positive and upbeat as this all is, I'm more intrigued as to what they are doing with the snap, crackle and popping terrain and autogen - and shimmers,  if anything at all.

 

[simbol 5,819]

10 hours ago, ErichB said:

does it only affect the appearance of physical surfaces under different lighting conditions? 

 

Mostly this.. assuming the texture was done properly of course..

R.

[simbol 5,819]

I just can't believe how speculative the whole article has been on this basis..Really?

Assuming this is true -which we don't know as it could have been made up, as Rob has said several times, no public announcement has been made- there are no dates specified above, and very little information to conclude anything.. the first phase of PBR could be just anything: Documentation to allow developers understand the changes, new variables and properties to allow the new textures to be interpreted but represented with the current rendering, etc. this doesn't mean full implementation of the PBR lighting rendering at all..

I strongly advise everyone to just calm down and wait until LM does a public announcement, everything discused here are just conspiracy theories without any real understanding of what LM is planning for the future.

Regards,
Simbol

[GSalden 4,656]

10 hours ago, Pete Dowson said:

My main interest is in improved performance. To me, with a 210 degree FOV curved screen needing 3 separate scenery windows, performance is a much higher priority need than better textures and surface effects. After all, with my airliner flying in Europe my view is mostly of the clouds below, not metallic surfaces.

When I first heard of this I thought, wow, moving more graphics work over to the GPU alleviating the current almost constant 100% loading on my Core 0 (even at 4.8 GHz). But if instead it merely involves even more complex modelling it sounds like it could have a negative affect on performance.

I hope someone will assure me that this is not so, that it will be good after all ...

Pete

 

If LM was able to use 2 cores for the main thread ...

[iFlySimX 751]

14 hours ago, Pete Dowson said:

My main interest is in improved performance. To me, with a 210 degree FOV curved screen needing 3 separate scenery windows, performance is a much higher priority need than better textures and surface effects. After all, with my airliner flying in Europe my view is mostly of the clouds below, not metallic surfaces.

When I first heard of this I thought, wow, moving more graphics work over to the GPU alleviating the current almost constant 100% loading on my Core 0 (even at 4.8 GHz). But if instead it merely involves even more complex modelling it sounds like it could have a negative affect on performance.

I hope someone will assure me that this is not so, that it will be good after all ...

Pete

 

I agree with this 100%

[Chock 17,769]

14 hours ago, Pete Dowson said:

My main interest is in improved performance. To me, with a 210 degree FOV curved screen needing 3 separate scenery windows, performance is a much higher priority need than better textures and surface effects. After all, with my airliner flying in Europe my view is mostly of the clouds below, not metallic surfaces.

Pete

Regrettably, a large number of people appear to want pretty pictures over and above everything else when it comes to flight sims. To some extent that is understandable when it tends to be screenshots of new products which whet buyer's appetites.

Whilst I do welcome the idea of visual improvements in general; after all, part of the enjoyment of flying is not only looking at the machines which make it possible, but also the view out of their windows. But having said that, I've never really understood why so many people appear to rate the visuals so critically over and above things such as realistic physics and performance. The latter are fundamental to a convincing flight experience, but instead you get people going into raptures over rain and snow running down a windscreen being depicted in a flight simulator when it still can't simulate a stall or airframe icing properly, which that snow on the windscreen probably should be indicating would occur.

It is after all the point of a flight simulator to simulate flight, and how P3D does that has not really progressed much in terms of capabilities and functionality beyond how FS95 achieved it (compare a flight model file from the two if you think this isn't the case). The system often requires developers to step completely outside of the simulator itself to make things possible, which itself can impact on performance sometimes. And that performance has been another elephant in the room for decades; MSFS and its derivatives such as P3D - which let's not forget is on VERSION 4 at this point, so it's had some time - have been notorious for requiring a sledgehammer to crack a walnut in terms of hardware horsepower. The last thing we need is for the developers to be pouring more petrol on that particular fire.

PBR will make for some nice screenshots, but it'll still be the case that most of the scenery in P3D will look like something off a sega megadrive in comparison to other graphical efforts. So to answer the original question of: How will P3D V4.4 Benefit from PBR? The answer may well be that it won't really benefit from it if it looks prettier but runs worse, but what will benefit from it is developers with all those pretty screenshots to market their products which take down that FPS even more lol.

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.

Edited September 3, 2018 by Chock

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

Hey Chock, although I agree that the focus of a flightsim should be how realistically the aircraft is simulated, that is also the hardest part of the app to program. That's because the programmers are usually not real world pilots. And even when they are, they cannot possibly be familiar with every possible aircraft. For example, the developers at A2A own and/or fly most of the real world GA aircraft that they simulate and sell. But with regards to the P-51, they had to find real world pilots to test out their simulated version to see if its flight dynamics were realistic.

Hence, flight dynamics is a property of each aircraft and not  the sim. What is embedded in the sim is basic FD, just enough to make a default aircraft conform to the laws of physics. The complex aircraft go to great lengths to overcome the simplified built-in flight dynamics. I believe that the best simulated aircraft in P3d4 easily surpass any FS9 versions. But we can disagree on that point.

Edited September 3, 2018 by jabloomf1230