September 24th, 2020 - Development Update

[spacedyemeerkat 421]

2 minutes ago, CallsignDE said:

Am I blind? Where did they confirm it? 

Number 11 in the Forum Feedback section, main post in this thread.

Edited September 25, 2020 by spacedyemeerkat

[CallsignDE 37]

1 minute ago, spacedyemeerkat said:

Number 11 in the Forum Feedback section, main post in this thread.

Well, I am. Thanks! 

[Baber20 1,438]

Good to see the confirmation of DX12. Fix for grainy reflections might be raytraced reflections with dxr coming with dx12. Just a speculation though.

[Tinribs 52]

I would think with the G2 releasing next month. VR might be in Octobers update. 

[Scottoest 1,561]

 

2 hours ago, langly said:

I wish they'd just fix their software rather than shoving more scenery into their scenery simulator.

Software development with hundreds of people isn't just everyone sitting in a room, and everyone can do any job.

[omarsmak30 4,068]

If I am right, we will expect monthly world updates? 

Also in regards to DX12, I just hope Asobo implements it correctly, P3Dv5 was a disaster on my RTX2080, I had crack the sliders lower than my 4.5 to avoid P3D from Vram out of memory error and made it look... Ugly. Although XP Vulkan on my machine looks to be good on the vram management with high settings which makes me believe, maybe something LM has done not correctly in regards to vram management in v5

[Bottle 663]

Somewhere out there is an article by a scenery developer that nicely explains the benefits and risks of DX12. Sorry I can't find it to post here. From what they wrote, the move to DX12 fills me with trepidation. The take-home message was DX12 takes direct control of the GPU without the safety net of going through drivers. It means a program can become very unstable and close down the whole system unless it's programmed very well and extensively tested. Asobo might be able to do it, but we might see a massive increase in CTDs from addons.

[Will Fly For Cheese 1,710]

1 hour ago, crimplene said:

This is not how it works. The scenery team is not programming the autopilot or the G1000. The scenery people might not even be programmers. Would you rather they did NOT update the scenery until the other team fixed all the bugs?

Yes I would. Everyone should be on the case with the faults. Pretty scenery can wait.

They're gilding the lily while it's being eaten alive by big ugly bugs.

 

Edited September 25, 2020 by Will Fly For Cheese

[omarsmak30 4,068]

22 minutes ago, Bottle said:

Somewhere out there is an article by a scenery developer that nicely explains the benefits and risks of DX12. Sorry I can't find it to post here. From what they wrote, the move to DX12 fills me with trepidation. The take-home message was DX12 takes direct control of the GPU without the safety net of going through drivers. It means a program can become very unstable and close down the whole system unless it's programmed very well and extensively tested. Asobo might be able to do it, but we might see a massive increase in CTDs from addons.

Aha interesting, so somewhat explains why P3D is struggling with DX12, so basically DX12 is a monster that needs extra care to handle. 

[Moria15 950]

9 minutes ago, omarsmak30 said:

Aha interesting, so somewhat explains why P3D is struggling with DX12, so basically DX12 is a monster that needs extra care to handle. 

Always has been which is why the takeup of DX12 has been so slow in the industry..  Having been involved in a number of DX12 releases,  everyone screams.. we want DX12  and then after the implementation everyone screams.. give me back DX11.   Out of three projects I have worked on, 2 went back to DX11 quickly, and in the third, our scenery standards had to go backwards to make sure we didn't exceen memory capacity on graphics cards so it actually became a downgrade.

DX12 is NOT a panacea and in most cases will introduce a crippling series of bugs during introduction.

Graham

[pstrub 998]

45 minutes ago, Bottle said:

Somewhere out there is an article by a scenery developer that nicely explains the benefits and risks of DX12. Sorry I can't find it to post here. From what they wrote, the move to DX12 fills me with trepidation. The take-home message was DX12 takes direct control of the GPU without the safety net of going through drivers. It means a program can become very unstable and close down the whole system unless it's programmed very well and extensively tested. Asobo might be able to do it, but we might see a massive increase in CTDs from addons.

Yes, and that's why they probably chose to use DX11 to start with, because it's a lot easier to implement. 

I don't understand why everyone is so obsessed with DX12 for MSFS - yes, I'd love to see it too in the future, but as long as we don't have VR, the frame rates are fine on modern hardware, and I assume there are some other optimisations coming within the next months. But when looking at the forums (more so in the official forums), it looks like people are cheering for it just for the sake of having the latest and greatest.

Yes, if DX12 is implemented correctly it's going to give us a performance boost, especially in the case of a flight simulator, where the number of draw calls traditionally has been very high compared to a typical game. Yes, it's going to come to MSFS eventually, but it takes time to implement, and it seems a good decision to me to address other issues and feature requests before that. 

I was really sure they mentioned on an earlier roadmap or in an interview that they are going to implement DX12 in a future update - but I can't find it anymore. Maybe in one of the long video interviews with Jörg Neumann, or in the earlier interviews?

 

Edited September 25, 2020 by pstrub

[JDWalley 354]

Looking at the Feedback Snapshot, it's good to see that they've (supposedly) fixed the A320 issues and are at least looking at the problems with the Garmin.  But how is it that they don't even list two of the most obvious bugs -- the missing controller sensitivity page and the non-recording of new flights to the logbook?  Both were items that were working fine until 1.8.3.0 broke them, and one would think that restoring that functionality would be one of the earliest priorities (and one of the easier fixes).  But, from the looks of this update, it seems they haven't even started to work on fixes for them.  Which raises the obvious question: how many other currently-working things will get broken in the 9/29 patch, and how long will it take Asobo to getting around to fixing them?

Edited September 25, 2020 by JDWalley

[ChaoticBeauty 6,692]

8 hours ago, tamsini said:

Is DirectX 12 the technology introduced with P3Dv5 that caused horrendous performance with GPUs that did not have at least 11GB of vRAM? I'm not trolling - I'm just concerned that this may be an issue with MSFS 2020. I have lost touch with P3D and not sure if this was addressed.

As others said, DirectX 12 places a lot more responsibility on the developers to optimise GPU usage. It will surely take a while until it is fully stable, however if it is somewhat reassuring, Prepar3D v5 is the only instance where I've seen this VRAM issue. The most common issue I've seen with DirectX 12 implementations so far is microstuttering, though it is worth noting that NVIDIA cards didn't really perform well with DirectX 12 until Turing, and being by far the most popular GPU vendor it is only to be expected that these issues would be exaggerated.

8 minutes ago, JDWalley said:

But how is it that they don't even list two of the most obvious bugs -- the missing controller sensitivity page and the non-recording of new flights to the logbook?

They only listed the top voted bugs from the official forums, so you could say this is a list of bugs compiled by the community. Asobo acknowledged the sensitivity screen bug since the day after the patch and it's likely already fixed for the upcoming patch. Not sure about the logbook issues though.

[tweekz 2,165]

Quite happy with that blog update.

First they acknowledged the sensitivity issues, my nemesis. Second they confirmed DX12 (again) in the feedback snapshot.

And last but not least, the content of the Japan update shows they really mean it with continued development.

 

Also I can now see more clearly their financial plan. If they keep the sim supported, they can sell their paid DLCs more easily. If there are three or four paid DLCs per year, this is more economically feasible than selling iterations of a sim or a paid sub. All complimented with the cuts they get from the marketplace.

MS is doing a lot of things right here.

[Ianrivaldosmith 5,317]

DX12 will be great for people with 3090. 3080 20GB etc . DX12 will be a nightmare for anyone with less than 20GB VRAM......