1 hour ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

8K is the inevitable march of technology that will be mainstream (in the US) within the next 2 years ... it's following the same pattern and pricing as 4K did on it's initial entry to mainstream just as 1080 HD did before that ... the pattern is identical.  MS and Sony know they need to be ready for 8K and end of 2020 timing might be about right ... or both will come out with an "S" version a year later that can handle 8K at 60 FPS for AA titles.  Running MFS in 8K at 60 FPS would be a PR masterpiece and MS servers probably wouldn't be able to keep up with the sales/subscription demand ... a good situation to be in for all.

Cheers, Rob.

The first consumer 4k tv launched in 2012 and 4k did not become mainstream 2 years later. In fact, there's articles from 2014 where they speculated that the tech would become mainstream in 2019. The hardware in the next gen systems cannot handle 8k far less at 60 fps. Its just not going to happen. You will also not see a hardware refresh just one year later. This is not how the console makers do things. 

This early push towards 8K from TV manufacturers is so dumb. Only the absolute top-end hardware can do 2160p60 now, and not consistently. Many international broadcasts are still in SD and the overwhelming majority of movies are still finished in 2K. And codecs optimised for 8K are still far away. I wish they'd focus on improving the HDR standard which is all over the place, and increasing temporal resolution (frame rate).

21 hours ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

But what is “a more modern approach”?  There is no way (not enough physical memory in your average PC) you can load a global terrain system at the same level of detail you see in GTA V ... and based on the videos I’ve seen MS aren’t trying to do that, phew!  So there will be a terrain paging system in place just like we have in P3D and XP11.

No open world game needs to load an entire level/world into memory (even if they did, it's irrelevant to the CPU/GPU continuing to do their jobs). Since you seem to think that world size is the root cause of performance limitations, I suggest reading this graphics study done on the RAGE engine in GTA V. Part 2 discusses how the game uses LODs and asset streaming to piece together an extremely high detail environment depending on the player's current location (with a much higher poly count and many more rendering passes/postprocessing effects than P3D in many scenarios). P3D's terrain engine uses LODs as well, which means areas of the planet you're not flying over are a blurry mess with no defining features and no buildings. Beyond a 50 mile radius (or whatever your settings are), the rest of the world contains the polygon equivalent of a low to medium end aircraft - not intensive at all. Obviously an entire world at the detail level of GTA isn't really feasible, but IMO that's more of a logistical issue, as the team/data required for such a huge feat doesn't exist.

I was just in Walmart one day last week and of the 47 models they had on display, I couldn't locate a single one that wasn't 4k...

The even had one 52" 4k model for just under $200.

In the UK you can pick a 50" Samsung 4K smart TV for £474  3840x2160 res UHD HDR, possibly cheaper if you shop around, cheaper makes around £300

47 minutes ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

Why, they are just providing the displays that can handle "upto" 8K ... the rest of the industry will catch up just like they caught up to 4K.  Agree with you that not many "cable/sat" is distributed in 4K (in the US anyway, I think Asian markets are more on top of 8K and 4K) but I can't remember the last time I wasted regular cable/sat TV?  All my content is usually thru Prime, Netflix, VUDU, Google Play, YouTube because they all have a ton of 4K content with YouTube being the first to provide 8K content.

Except that they probably can't. Apparently, all 8K TVs released until now cannot decode 8K videos from YouTube, with 4K being the max option. This will probably apply to any future 8K content coming from streaming or disc too. And that content will probably be encoded in AV1 or VVC which are optimised for 8K, and hardware decoding is not ready for either yet.

History is repeating itself. 4K TVs came out lacking HDMI 2.0 support or HEVC and VP9 decoding, and FHD TVs came out without MPEG-4 decoding. So there is no reason to push for 8K TVs when the content and the hardware are not there yet. Right now with 8K TVs you can just watch upscaled content (native resolution is always better) with much heavier power consumption (due to the larger space between the pixels discarding the light generated by the backlight), and might never get to watch actual 8K content.

8K TVs came out too early, and in two years it will probably still be early. Better HDR and higher frame rates would actually be useful now, but 8K markets better I guess.

Edited September 20, 20196 yr by ChaoticBeauty

2 hours ago, n4gix said:

I was just in Walmart one day last week and of the 47 models they had on display, I couldn't locate a single one that wasn't 4k...

The even had one 52" 4k model for just under $200.

No doubt but we didn't get to this point in 2 years

52 minutes ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

Right, so a LOD system so not new technology ... like I've said before GTA V is at most 10 miles (probably more like 5 miles) and a "static" backdrop.  I've played GTA V and at no point was I ever at 30,000 feet moving about 400-500 KTs GS in any direction I like for as long as I like ... like you said, that "modern" engine simply can't handle it.

No one said LODs were a new concept. And what static backdrop are you talking about?

Poly count, drawcalls, and intensive rendering effects (shadows and reflections to name a few) are the main performance killers. Not Speed, not altitude, and not distance. Sure, if the assets are so incredibly large in file size, they can't be loaded quick enough. But that's one of the big reasons for breaking up the world into sections and using LODs/multiple files. In GTA V, you're moving significantly slower, but loading significantly larger assets. Instead of the same basic low res house textures used for miles around, you're loading and unloading many HD textures, unique to your immediate surroundings. The radius isn't nearly as big, but the complexity of what's being drawn on the screen is generally much greater in games like GTA V, Just Cause, or even larger scale Battlefield maps.

It's also worth nothing that FlyInside Flight Simulator, Aerofly FS, and DCS have no issues loading scenery at high speeds. And before anyone says it, no it's not due to lack of AI or "advanced" aircraft systems.

 

52 minutes ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

Global terrain data for the entire planet does exists (at the very least one season and some areas having multiple seasons)

It would take a lot more than terrain data to populate the entire planet at the level of GTA V. Enough data exists for building placement, roads, railways, powerlines, water features, land types etc to handle the basics. I suppose a system could be written to populate miscellaneous clutter objects along the sides of roads and you'd end up with something decently complex, but the work involved to create such a system that worked at a global level would be insane. Even then, it would likely still look pretty artificial and have many odd looking areas. I think the photogrammetry/autogen blend MSFS seems to be using will be more than sufficient in most cases. I'm just worried about how the transitions between the two will look.

8 hours ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

I guess you missed the line below in the Steam stats regarding 3840 x 1080?  Steam data is interesting, but it's incomplete.  And is VR usage really only 0.40%, that's gotta be wrong ... if that were the case all VR manufacturers would be out of business.

I read your comment about the multi-screen stats. But that section probably comprises a very small percentage of the overall numbers that took part in the survey. Apart from flight sims and racing sims, hardly anyone else uses multiple monitors. So those using 3840x1080 multi-screens are probably a high percentage of what's likely a very small number.

The VR stats may not be too far out. I read an article recently saying that VR usage is not nearly as common as you'd think from the amount of press it gets. It also said that the corporate market is quite a big customer. If you consider that Steam apparently had more than 90 million active users at the beginning of this year, if 0.4% is representative of the number that use VR that's still 360,000 and that's not including those out there who don't use Steam. Many games, particularly older ones, are not directly VR compatible and, like multi-screen use, it tends to be flight and racing sims which have the most users - both quite niche genres. I think that compatibility and cost are what stop most gamers from buying VR headsets.

18 hours ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

I guess you missed the line below in the Steam stats regarding 3840 x 1080?  Steam data is interesting, but it's incomplete.  And is VR usage really only 0.40%, that's gotta be wrong ... if that were the case all VR manufacturers would be out of business.

It's probably accurate. The current automated XP Usage Data shows only 2.06% of users have flown in VR during 2019, so far. 

We hear about VR a lot here on Avsim because we're the hardest of the hardcore for flight sims. VR tech is expensive, still in the very early stages of improvement for higher resolution and wider view angles. Every time a slightly better system comes out, you have to drop a ton of new cash on it again. I'm a little surprised that the numbers are even as high as 2-4% across the entire user base.

VR is still a good bet for the future, and I'm glad the current flight sims are supporting it. No word about MSFS yet, but I think they'd be crazy not to. That is, unless they're going all-in on "couch-gaming" at 120 fps on a single big TV screen for immersion, instead of VR.

X-plane’s usage data also reports very low usage too. It’s why they’re all trying to find lots of different uses for the tech that might appeal to the casual hoards. Currently it’s too expensive and/or too limited and low quality for it to be a must have. 

3 hours ago, Superdelphinus said:

X-plane’s usage data also reports very low usage too.

If you check the steamdb.info charts, FSX:SE has about twice as many people flying as XPlane.  This is probably not a good representative number across all users but gives us a ballpark estimate.

Hook

Sorry I meant the xplane data on vr

1 hour ago, Superdelphinus said:

Sorry I meant the xplane data on vr

Oh... sorry, missed that.  VR isn't exactly mainstream anywhere, is it?  Hopefully it becomes more popular as the tech improves.

Hook

 

1 hour ago, LHookins said:

Hopefully it becomes more popular as the tech improves.

It will. Just think about what an experience it would be to have full HD or even 4k VR with a realistic field of view and the visuals of MSFS. I tried VR in P3D but the resolution and field of view at this time are not enough for me but it's most certainly the future of simming and I think gaming in general.