I have seen many people comparing FSX's low framerate against many other products including first person shooters and saying how they don't buy the whole "It's pushing the limits of hardware" thing.You really can't compare the FSX engine against most games.First of all- First Person Shooters- have engines optimized for FIRST PERSON SHOOTERS. FSX would not run in the source engine. Shooters use a technique called binary space partitions which actually optimize the map so only visible polygons are rendered. This GREATLY increases framerate, but depending on the size of the map can literally take days to generate. Once it's done, however- it's done. Naturally no flight sim can use this technique. Rendering a BSP that would even help framerates for the entire world would take- I'm not exageratting here- BILLIONS OF YEARS, and BILLIONS OF TERRABYTES of diskspace. Now, ultimately what this means is in a game like Half-Life, the engine simply looks at your position and has a list of polygons it should render. Anything you can't see (another room for example) is not on the list, so the rendering time does not get wasted. This can literally increase framerates by 50x or more. FSX simply has no way of knowing- It renders every visible (facing you) polygon within a certain distance of you (of course it has to calculate what is within a certain distance of you every frame). So if you behind a hill facing New York City, the program will not be able to tell if New York City is actually visible, so it has to render it all anyway. Line-Of-Sight is pretty much impossible as it would make your framerates 1/10 of what they are now. With the speed of the graphics card, it's simply a tradeoff- and the fastest way to do it is just to render everything visible.Keep in mind also that FSX's 'map size' is the whole world- So although it divides the world into much smaller segments- each segment is still relatively large. So every time scenery data must be parsed, it is parsing ALOT of data. Take Collision detection for example- Every single frame it has to translate, and rotate all of the data and THEN perform collision detection on each polygon (including all autogen and AI- except cars).So my point is that the FSX engine is very good at what it does, but unfortunately suffers in that many optimizations available to other games just can't be done in a flight sim.And I know many people are going to bring up the FS9 argument- that FS9 looks just as good with addons, but better framerate. That is of course subjective, but I can guarantee, that FSX is pushing more polyons and using newer technology (like shaders).So you have to look at FS9 vs. other games that came out then- and you will see it suffered from the same low framerate problem. Doom 3 for example- fantastic graphics that pushed the boundaries and ran quickly compared to FS9. Now most video cards will give you 140+ frames per second in Doom 3, while FS9 for most users in probably 30-50.So in a nutshell, flight sims will either have worse graphics, or lower framerates that their peers- it's just a fact of life.

Thanks for the post. It answers a lot of questions I had in my mind.

Interesting, but I don't agree.Some FPS do what you say, in that they "pre-compile" and optimize so to speak the map. The Unreal and HL engines come to mind. However, look at Farcry. The Editor is live, yes live, meaning you change the map and its instantly available for gameplay. And Farcry is capable of rendering huge Terrains (not to the scope of the entire world, but large maps are many many miles in each direction) at much much higher FPS than FS. A "map" in FS would then be a local area of the world that you're flying in. Nothing else is different.Farcry also has to do some pretty fancy AI (and I would argue that AI which guides a plane from point A to point B at a certain altitude cannot be much more CPU intensive then the rather sophisticated enemies in Farcry (which dynamically look for cover, listen to your sound, and will alert others etc.). Which leaves us with weather, cockpit systems, and flight dynamics which FS has to calculate that farcry doesnt and I really don't think those are the bottle necks of FS, especially if we think about all the additional things that Farcry has to render (more detailed ground, water, underwater, vehicle models, per pixel lighting anyone?) that FS misses.I don't whine about FSX as I really enjoy it, even at the low FPS it provides, but I strongly believe it could be so much more if the engine was overhauled. I don't buy into the whole FPS are totally different and can in no way be compared.

>Interesting, but I don't agree.>>Some FPS do what you say, in that they "pre-compile" and>optimize so to speak the map. The Unreal and HL engines come>to mind. However, look at Farcry. The Editor is live, yes>live, meaning you change the map and its instantly available>for gameplay. And Farcry is capable of rendering huge Terrains>(not to the scope of the entire world, but large maps are many>many miles in each direction) at much much higher FPS than FS.>>A "map" in FS would then be a local area of the world that>you're flying in. Nothing else is different.>>Farcry also has to do some pretty fancy AI (and I would argue>that AI which guides a plane from point A to point B at a>certain altitude cannot be much more CPU intensive then the>rather sophisticated enemies in Farcry (which dynamically look>for cover, listen to your sound, and will alert others etc.).>>>Which leaves us with weather, cockpit systems, and flight>dynamics which FS has to calculate that farcry doesnt and I>really don't think those are the bottle necks of FS,>especially if we think about all the additional things that>Farcry has to render (more detailed ground, water, underwater,>vehicle models, per pixel lighting anyone?) that FS misses.>>I don't whine about FSX as I really enjoy it, even at the low>FPS it provides, but I strongly believe it could be so much>more if the engine was overhauled. I don't buy into the whole>FPS are totally different and can in no way be compared.No, that's not true- I see what you are saying but Farcry is hundreds of times smaller that an area in FS. It uses LOD to HUGE extent as well. Flight sim renders terrain 60-100 miles away in every direction. Flight sim's LOD calculations are done realtime. Farcry uses LOD to the point that things are few hundred meters away are barely discernible.I do see where you are coming from, but you have to keep in mind (even if you aren't familiar with how the engines actually work)-NONE OF THIS IS MAGIC!The difference between a fast engine and slow engine is optimizations. The more you can optimize a map before the rendering engine see it, the faster it will render. Most games can easily do this- including Farcry. It's just not possible in most flight simulators however. Maybe in LOMAC or IL2 they could since those are relatively small areas, but the best civilian flight sims have ALWAYS suffered from low framerates- This is something that we have been dealing with since they came out. Flight Simulator 2 on the Apple ran at like 5 frames per second.

OK, so why can't FS use LOD to a huge extend then? You say FS renders terrain 60-100 miles away....but really what does it render, a very rough mesh colored some way. I see what you mean, but rendering wise this can't be a problem at all, but I'm sure you mean that it has to load that and calculate the low version on the fly. Well, why? Couldn't it just load every nth mesh point for any given distance? This significantly lowers the LOD it has to render.Things 100 m away are barely discernible in Farcry. Fair enough, but consider that things closer than that are SIGNIFICANTLY more detailed in Farcry then in FS. So both have to load alot of detail all the time as the player moves around, and then render that detail. I would love to do a side by side comparison for polygen count between the two, and I'm certain Farcry would have many many more. And farcry can't do any pre-compiling of their maps either. Maybe they can, but they don't! And on top of that they use actual light on their maps too, which again they have to render in real time and cant pre-calculate.I just don't see a distinction big enough to warrent what...4x performace difference?

I can see either what the deal is with rendering power in FSX. The terrain tiles are simply 2D textures slapped onto a polygon. The only things that's truly 3D are the aircraft, vehicles and autogen. Now in Oblivion I have tens of thousands of tiny 3D grass polygons that move with the wind or move when I pass them. On top of that there are many more things to render with a way higher LOD than anything in FSX. I don't get it. Please enlighten me.Remember Elite back in the days? Um...20 years ago? That one had only polygons and the only difference in FSX is that there is a texture slapped on top of it.Now to make it simple: My 7600 GT is supposed to be capable or rendering 700 MILLION vertices. Divide by 4 and you have a standard FSX cell polygon = 175 MILLION Polygons. Divide that by an acceptable frame rate of 20fps = 8.75 MILLION polygons. Sorry, I don't believe for a second that FSX uses just a fraction of 8.75 million polygons.

You really can't compare the FSX engine against most games.No you can't compare the bloated inefficient and outdated coding of the FS series with the latest coding engines out there. Next point?

>Next point?You did not really bother to understand (or you can't?) his point.Michael J.

You did not really bother to understand (or you can't?) his point.Understood it quite well thank you. An apology for mediocrity.

Thanks to the original poster for posting this, you sound like you know this stuff pretty well and it made sense to me, I really have limited computer skills. And no offense to Len, but he speaks of bad coding and stuff, I'd like to understand more about why the coding is bad, I'm guessing Len, (if you're reading this), that you are a programmer as well, so if possible, could you maybe explain in layman's terms what makes the coding so bad.Thanks,Jeff

"Shooters use a technique called binary space>partitions which actually optimize the map so only visible>polygons are rendered."Indeed, they did 5 years ago. BSP hasn't been around for a while now in modern FPS. Plus, it doesn't work in outdoor environments.The point is BSP as a LOD scheme is outdated and has been replaced by others. In my opinion there is no reason why FS should perform much worse than modern limited area FPS - if it would use the right LOD algorithms...I think it's not a question of technical feasability rather than one of economic feasability - ie would it cost too much to build a sophisticated FS engine (in the minds of MS accountants).Christian

The terrain is just as much 3D as the aircraft.FSX has vastly more polygons than FS9 did. On top of that you have shaders, so instead of a single texture pass per poly, you have multiple.The buildings use bump mapping, which dramatically erodes performance.You try to make it simple, but it's actually nowhere near as simple as you think. I've been playing 3D shooters for years (Doom 3, Half-Life 2, FarCry, Quake 4, etc) and I can tell you those engines render nowhere near as much detail as FSX.Oh, and from your post a lot of what you're doing is guessing. The premise that the "terrain is 2D textures slapped onto a polygon" shows your lack of knowledge about the engine.I can assure you when I dumb down FSX so that there's no autogen, 100% mesh complexity, 1m mesh resolution, textures at 1m, water at 2.X max, no traffic and scenery at very sparse, I actually get higher framerates than FS9 with no autogen, 100% mesh complexity, scenery at very sparse, and no traffic. Same resolution for both, and the flight model in FSX actually feels better. That's a fairer comparison of both engines, don't you think?James

You've proven to know nothing about 3D graphics rendering. Next.James

LOL!!Len's just a troll. He's obviously feeling hungry.James

Remember LOMAC? Try running that at max settings, on a high-powered system! And it's over 2 years old!!!Funny how everyone went on and on about it being such a sophisticated engine, yet doesn't have ANYWHERE near the detail of FSX.James