to those who complain about stutters at this stage

[LHookins 3,102]

I noticed a couple of stutters after your engine blew up. 🙂 

Hook

[Paraffin 2,197]

31 minutes ago, LHookins said:

You'll be happier sticking with XPlane.  By the time you reduce the "extreme settings" in the new sim it'll probably look about like XPlane does now on your system.  No need to give up all the things you already have just to have a new sim to fly.

Maybe, but we don't know that yet. Consider the possibility that if the scenery is "built" remotely on the server and streamed to the client PC, we could have better quality scenery at the same frame smooth rates we have now. The client PC would only be running the flight model and aircraft graphics. 

Scenery quality may be more a function of how fast your Internet connection is. Which is worrying in my case, but at least I do have options there.

[LHookins 3,102]

8 minutes ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

I've seen repeated comments where users don't want to "fiddle" or "tweak" and I can understand the desire.

Those who don't want to tweak settings don't have to.  The sims will default to a suggested setting for your computer.  I don't mess with all the esoteric settings that get recommended, just a few that I know will affect performance.  And if I ever get tired of seeing the minimal stutters I still get occasionally, I'd *really* like to be able to do some digging and see if they can be eliminated.

 

11 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

Maybe, but we don't know that yet.

We don't know *anything* yet other than what we've seen in screen shots and videos.  I knew the first day when I watched the first video that there were only a few ways to get that kind of detail, and some wouldn't work on my Internet connection.  

I honestly can't say at this point whether I'll be happier with P3Dv4 (or v5 when it is released) than with whatever I can make MSFS do on my system.  With any luck LM will be incorporating some new stuff in P3Dv5 that originated in MSFS.  Maybe.  Not counting on it.  Just fix the gawdawful landscape in the desert southwest of the USA.  Better textures and mesh.

I'll still fly the new sim, but no way to know at this time if it will totally replace what I've already got like P3Dv4 did with P3Dv2.5.

Hook

[Superdelphinus 718]

1 hour ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

 How is performance shocking?  I don't find performance shocking at all considering what has to be accomplished.  Do a quick google search on gaming performance and you'll see more articles on how to improve "gaming" FPS and their suggestions are always the same, "reduce graphics settings" ... this is for all main stream 3D shooter titles ... no different that what needs to be done for flight simulators.

The more I see these types of comments the more I'm convinced Microsoft needs to provide NO graphic settings options and just run their own benchmark and configure graphics quality based on how well the end user's hardware scores (encrypt and hide all configuration files).  You get what your hardware can deliver nothing more and nothing less.

As far as stutters, they don't bother me so long as there aren't too many and it becomes distracting, but for some just one stutter drives them nuts ... to each his or her own.  The stutters I saw in the MFS videos is NOT a deal breaker for me .

I think it’s shocking (though obviously that’s a bit dramatic) because you get  graphics that are worse than practically anything else, and on top of that, many systems struggle to attain consistent frame rates to display them. You can say there’s all these special things going on that means it’s all ok, but I think if the new sim comes out that gives me much, much better graphics, at much faster (and more importantly, consistent) refresh rates, whilst at the same time offering the same or better physics, on the same system, it would rather prove that I am right. I think this is entirely possible, and I’d be surprised if it didn’t turn out to be the case.

I don’t really understand the second point unless you really are saying that users shouldn’t be trusted with establishing their own settings? I’m perfectly capable of setting up games so they work how I want them on my pc, and understand the impact raising particular settings will have. What is frustrating is not being able to get a game to work nicely on a good pc, 13 years later. P3d is better, but it’s £200 and still I find it very hard to get a consistent frame rate that isn’t bouncing around. I predict that the new game is going to be much more in line with the way every other major game works nowadays - on a decent pc you are going to be able to get 60fps without having to put everything on low settings. 

Stuttering really bothers me in the games I play, and I set things slightly below where I could so I can be sure everything is fluid - especially on racing sims. This is possible on absolutely everything bar fsx/p3d - and I just don’t think they’re that special. XP11 is fine.

FAOD I don’t care at all about stutters in these videos. Even if they aren’t issues with the video itself, this is an alpha we’re looking at. 

[Superdelphinus 718]

On the Scarlett side of things, who knows. Wouldn’t be surprised if they do something a bit like the PS4 where you can have a binary choice between performance or pretty. 

[LHookins 3,102]

1 hour ago, Superdelphinus said:

I find it very hard to get a consistent frame rate that isn’t bouncing around.

There's a very simple solution to that:  Turn off the frame rate counter.

I have my frames set to unlimited, and I doubt the frame rate is the same between any two frames.  It bounces between 30 and 60, sometimes up to 70, sometimes briefly down to under 20.  The only time I notice a problem and turn the FPS counter on is when it's obviously low.  I want to know how low and what situations cause it.  I don't care what the actual value is.

I'm out there to FLY, not to monitor frame rates.  People talk about immersion as if it were the Holy Grail, but the frame rate counter is a major immersion killer.  It was bad enough when I had to monitor VAS usage under P3Dv2.5, but at least I discovered what settings made the OOM errors go away.  Then I quit worrying about it.

Hook

[Murmur 3,941]

4 hours ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

Flight Simulators can:

1.  Load the entire planet into memory (yes the entire planet, if you don't believe me zoom out to orbit in your FS platform of choice) ... 3D shooters do NOT, at most a 1-10 mile map until it "loads the next level/mission" so 3D shooters do NOT have to be continuously loading terrain for 250+ miles in any view direction (a huge benefit to performance)

 

1 or 10000 miles doesn't make any difference for the CPU/GPU. The only thing that counts is the amount of polygons loaded/shown and the visual/lighting effects applied. Maybe an AAA title shows more polygons than a flight sim even if the visibility is only 10 miles, who knows?

But apart from that, most of the other features you listed were there even in fs9. And yet you can max it out and have many hundreds of fps on a top of the line pc. This seems a clear indication that most of those features have a negligible impact on performance, and the main culprit of poor performance is probably an inadequate graphic engine.

It will be interesting to revisit arguments like these if MFS will provide better performance and better visuals compared to today sims and in line with AAA games.

[Krakin 5,748]

6 hours ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

Flight Simulators can:

1.  Load the entire planet into memory (yes the entire planet, if you don't believe me zoom out to orbit in your FS platform of choice) ... 3D shooters do NOT, at most a 1-10 mile map until it "loads the next level/mission" so 3D shooters do NOT have to be continuously loading terrain for 250+ miles in any view direction (a huge benefit to performance).

 

I think the fact that we have to look at a loading screen when switching locations makes this point moot. I think you have to take another look at what modern games are doing. FSX was about 15GB but AAA games are pushing 50GB these days with less landmass to explore compared to sim. Take a guess at why that is.

Edited September 17, 2019 by Krakin

[nickhod 425]

17 hours ago, Superdelphinus said:

Instinctively it feels like more flight sims are special therefore we accept shocking relative performance, but delighted to be corrected.   

There's no reason that a flight simulator shouldn't achieve the performance that we see in AAA FPS titles. In many cases a flight simulator scene will be less polygon and texture heavy than a complex FPS scene. A character model in an FPS might be 50k polys, and you might have 4 or 5 on screen, all with their own physics an AI, then all the highly detailed scenery. For comparison a polygon budget of an entire aircraft (inside and out) might be 200-300k polys.

Your GPU only cares about polygon count. You might have a 10 mile draw distance, but you're drawing at a low LOD past a few miles. Photogrammetry actually helps with this as they have various LOD mesh tiles.

Volumetric clouds and dynamic lights are the two most GPU intensive features of a flight sim, but in a modern sim they will be almost completely handled by the GPU.

The point being, in a modern sim, so much is being handled by the GPU that you get to decide what FPS you want, based on the amount of "prettiness" you want.
On P3D / XP, I can't decide that I want 90fps, it's not even realistic.

Obviously there's a lot of physics to be calculated per frame but:

a) Increasingly some of this can be done on the GPU
b) Implemented well, it can be done across many CPU cores.
c) If you remove the ability to completely replace the physics engine (and I predict MSFS will), you can heavily optimise it per (a&b)

I would assume and hope that MSFS has been written to achieve 90fps (for smooth VR) in heavy load scenarios.

This is totally achievable with the hardware we have today. A lot of people are still in the "hey 17fps isn't that bad" mindset with older sims.

[ca_metal 2,015]

2 hours ago, nickhod said:

There's no reason that a flight simulator shouldn't achieve the performance that we see in AAA FPS titles. In many cases a flight simulator scene will be less polygon and texture heavy than a complex FPS scene. A character model in an FPS might be 50k polys, and you might have 4 or 5 on screen, all with their own physics an AI, then all the highly detailed scenery. For comparison a polygon budget of an entire aircraft (inside and out) might be 200-300k polys.

Your GPU only cares about polygon count. You might have a 10 mile draw distance, but you're drawing at a low LOD past a few miles. Photogrammetry actually helps with this as they have various LOD mesh tiles.

Volumetric clouds and dynamic lights are the two most GPU intensive features of a flight sim, but in a modern sim they will be almost completely handled by the GPU.

The point being, in a modern sim, so much is being handled by the GPU that you get to decide what FPS you want, based on the amount of "prettiness" you want.
On P3D / XP, I can't decide that I want 90fps, it's not even realistic.

Obviously there's a lot of physics to be calculated per frame but:

a) Increasingly some of this can be done on the GPU
b) Implemented well, it can be done across many CPU cores.
c) If you remove the ability to completely replace the physics engine (and I predict MSFS will), you can heavily optimise it per (a&b)

I would assume and hope that MSFS has been written to achieve 90fps (for smooth VR) in heavy load scenarios.

This is totally achievable with the hardware we have today. A lot of people are still in the "hey 17fps isn't that bad" mindset with older sims.

I think the same, but some people here are so closed minded that they don’t see the big changes the game industry has achieved. FSims aren’t the only games that suffered from cpu bound problems and the gaming studios found ways to optimize things and use more the GPU on tasks that used to be handled by the CPU. The APIs also evolved a lot since the dx9/dx10/OpenGL era.

Well, I think MS is capable to do the same on the new MSFS2020. We will see.

[stevphfeniey 56]

Y'all see one or two examples of slightly annoying behavior, while I just see entire threads of grumpy old men complaining about anything and everything.

Just hold on tight and wait patiently for the game to come out. If it's bad then it's bad and y'all can just go back to P3D or XP which still work just fine and are still seeing updates. If it's good then we have a new sim which looks, performs and flies great (that I'm personally excited to just look at stuff in).

Y'all have absolutely nothing to lose with FS2020, calm the word not allowed down.

Edited September 17, 2019 by stevphfeniey

[Krakin 5,748]

7 hours ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

15GB - where did that come from? 

ORBX GB South is 72GB alone, I've flown P3D hitting 25GB RAM and 22GB VRAM ... just recently posted a video showing the usage?

You're bringing ORBX up but we have issues with FSX running stock and stock FSX was about 15GB.

[Krakin 5,748]

3 hours ago, stevphfeniey said:

Y'all see one or two examples of slightly annoying behavior, while I just see entire threads of grumpy old men complaining about anything and everything.

As long as they don't get toxic, the arguments are healthy. I've learned a lot looking at the back and forth going on.

[Superdelphinus 718]

3 hours ago, stevphfeniey said:

Y'all see one or two examples of slightly annoying behavior, while I just see entire threads of grumpy old men complaining about anything and everything.

Y'all have absolutely nothing to lose with FS2020, calm the word not allowed down.

So edgy

[dtrjones 356]

On 9/16/2019 at 7:53 PM, Rob_Ainscough said:

Flight Simulators can:

1.  Load the entire planet into memory (yes the entire planet, if you don't believe me zoom out to orbit in your FS platform of choice) ... 3D shooters do NOT, at most a 1-10 mile map until it "loads the next level/mission" so 3D shooters do NOT have to be continuously loading terrain for 250+ miles in any view direction (a huge benefit to performance).

2.  Have a flexible an extremely powerful SDK ... I'm not aware of any 3D shooter where you can actually replace the flight physics model with your own

3.  Completely open architecture, nothing scripted or everything can be scripted and one is free to do whatever they want, no magical out of boundary invisible walls

4.  Real time weather based on actual real world weather ... no 3D shooter has this 

5.  A real time world clock that impacts everything in the simulation from AI flights 8000 miles away to your local GA 20 miles away ... not even a concept in 3D shooters

6.  Ability to integrate 1000's of different controller devices ... 3D shooters can't

7.  250-500 dynamic lights, this would bring any 3D shooter to it's knees (at best I've seen 2-4 DLs in a 3D shooter)

8.  Dynamic Reflections (again something 3D shooters avoid on a global scale and DR is used localized and sparingly with the exception of RayTrace supported games)

9.  Multi-view and Multi-monitor support .

How is performance shocking?  I don't find performance shocking at all considering what has to be accomplished.  Do a quick google search on gaming performance and you'll see more articles on how to improve "gaming" FPS and their suggestions are always the same, "reduce graphics settings" ... this is for all main stream 3D shooter titles ... no different that what needs to be done for flight simulators.

The more I see these types of comments the more I'm convinced Microsoft needs to provide NO graphic settings options and just run their own benchmark and configure graphics quality based on how well the end user's hardware scores (encrypt and hide all configuration files).  You get what your hardware can deliver nothing more and nothing less.

As far as stutters, they don't bother me so long as there aren't too many and it becomes distracting, but for some just one stutter drives them nuts ... to each his or her own.  The stutters I saw in the MFS videos is NOT a deal breaker for me.

Cheers, Rob.

I agree flight simulators have to do a lot. However the most popular flight simulators also are the longest running with a long history of supported accessories and addon's. That limits the scope somewhat for the true levels of optimisations required to bring a product truely into the current space where something like and first person shooter gets turned around in a couple of years which makes a massive difference in optimisation.

Honestly making a flight simulator from the ground up today would be scary but probably the only way to see a true reflection of performance on todays hardware. So it is interesting we'll have Deskstick coming out soon, but the new Microsoft Flight Simulator probably would have unloaded more legacy performance baggage than any of the core aviation simulators to date in my opinion and will also have the best results of that in visual quality.

The biggest loser here which I know you love is P3D, I feel that platform will suffer to bring in new users who do not have a direct purpose to be trained on that sim so I can see 'general' interest falling from consumers and 3PDs once they get to know how to make Microsoft Flight Simulator tick, and they will.