When will there be a PC to run MSFS?

[Ray Proudfoot 8,954]

@Alpine Scenery, I notice you’re using a 120” projector for simming. Even at 3840*2160 that is a PPI count of 36.72. A 640*480 15” monitor delivers 53.

Your screen may give you immersion but absolutely no clarity.

https://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/technology/ppi-calculator.php

 

[dogmanbird 269]

edit - just expanding on Ray's post above;

and the larger the projected area the worse the edit - "resolution" will get from the eye's perspective. It's effectively the same as sitting closer to the TV, and probably some minor blurring by the lens design/arrangement in the projector at larger magnifications, depending on the price/quality of the projector

Edited April 29, 2021 by dogmanbird

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

PPI only matters is if you equate it to the same seating distance. PPI is not used for discussing resolution seating distance in video as a standalone term, as it's a non-standard way to refer to it, just resolution at X seating distance is the std. 

It looks fine, a little loss of sharpness in the cockpit is the difference. I do have a 4k monitor, but I don't use it, I'm using the projector. I also have a 1080p monitor and a non-4k projector (have 4 projectors - tried to sell old ones, but no luck... and 5 monitors total - only 2 in use currently).

 

Edited April 29, 2021 by Alpine Scenery

[craigeaglefire 197]

8 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Digital projectors have 4096 horizontal pixels

Digital Cinema DCI projectors at 4K have 4096 horizontal pixels,

your statement 'Digital projectors have 4096 horizontal pixels' is a misnomer - of course, available digital projectors have a wide variety of resolutions...

we are are now 'splitting hairs',

UHD - 3840 x 2160 - can be, imo, correctly be referred to as 4K.

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

2 minutes ago, craigeaglefire said:

Digital Cinema DCI projectors at 4K have 4096 horizontal pixels,

your statement 'Digital projectors have 4096 horizontal pixels' is a misnomer - of course, available digital projectors have a wide variety of resolutions...

we are are now 'splitting hairs',

UHD - 3840 x 2160 - can be, imo, correctly be referred to as 4K.

Right, and some are really annoying with their black bars, and some fake 4k with e-shift, and it goes on and on.
Sounds pretty silly to worry about these tiny differences.

Edited April 29, 2021 by Alpine Scenery

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

10 minutes ago, dogmanbird said:

edit - just expanding on Ray's post above;

and the larger the projected area the worse the clarity will get. It's effectively the same as sitting closer to the TV, and probably some minor blurring by the lens design/arrangement in the projector at larger magnifications, depending on the price/quality of the projector

There are pluses and minuses, just like watching a movie with a projector vs. a TV. Actually, there are sharper projectors than the one I have, but as I said poorer contrast. Everything is trade-offs. The immersion level is at another level however. Again, definitely considered going to a flight chair setup with a 60" to 70" TV, but it's complex to fit it into my setup given I am already wasting a full sized room. I'd have to waste another room entirely.

Edited April 29, 2021 by Alpine Scenery

[dogmanbird 269]

Yeah I know what you're saying. For watching movies I enjoy a big screen regardless of sharpness, and I'm not that fussed about visual quality. I'd far prefer a really good story, framing,editing and acting. 

[ryanbatc 12,854]

This thread is nearly identical to when FSX came out haha.

[dogmanbird 269]

did it have a a really good story, good framing,editing and acting?

[Greazer 1,320]

18 hours ago, Chock said:

Yup, run it at 1920x1080p. It looks alright at that resolution.

1440p is the best compromise, because 1080p -> 1440p is a definitely noticeable improvement much more so than 1440p -> 4k.  

Edited April 29, 2021 by Greazer

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

7 minutes ago, Greazer said:

1440p is the best compromise, because 1080p -> 4k is a definite noticeable improvement much more so than 1440p -> 4k.  

I agree with you, unless there is some scaling artifact I don't know about, it seems like a bad idea running at 4k. Why lose the performance for almost no benefit?

That's all I was trying to say, but PPI is usually used to refer to the source in video or graphics (not the destination device). That is why the argument got so confusing, being in rendering never heard anyone use PPI to refer to their monitor resolution. PPI is not the same as the ability to our eyes to resolve a pixel. A 50% increase in pixels does not equate to a 50% increase in visual acuity. The actual formula is PHD level math.

Edited April 29, 2021 by Alpine Scenery

[Farlis 2,287]

1 hour ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

All my flying is done using a 32” 16:9 UHD monitor with zoom levels fixed at 0.56 in P3D.

Well in that case I assume UHD to indeed have benefits for image clarity.

My standard zoom setting on monitors is usually 70%. 

Going up to 100% would give you everything up 1:1 scale, but then again you don't look at the world through a 32 inch window, don't you? 😉

 

Edited April 29, 2021 by Farlis

[Ray Proudfoot 8,954]

3 minutes ago, Farlis said:

Well in that case I assume UHD to indeed have benefits for image clarity.

My standard zoom setting on monitors is usually 70%. 

Going up to 100% would give you everything up 1:1 scale, but then again you don't look at the world through a 32 inch window, don't you? 😉

 

I read an interesting take on the ‘correct’ zoom setting but can’t find it. You divide the vertical pixels by the horizontal ones and that gives you the ideal setting.

I divided 2160 by 3840 and the result was 0.56. It seems to work pretty well. Yes, agreed we don’t view the world through a 16:9 display so some compromises need making.

[eslader 1,783]

I think there's some stuff getting lost in the weeds of technical discussion here. And hey, as an ex TV guy myself, I can nerd out about resolutions and standards with the best of 'em, but... Why?

The bottom line is that regardless of what specific resolution your monitor can display, if you ask the system to show you a resolution that's too high for it to process efficiently, your framerates will go down. And really, I don't even like using the term framerates, again because it's a tech-nerd concept that leads to "look how far I can pee" contests. I remember several years ago seeing some amazing screenshots from various games that didn't look that good when I played them. And it turned out the guy taking the screenshot was pausing the game, turning the graphics sliders all the way up, and getting the shot. He certainly wasn't playing it like that because no one wants to play a slideshow. Meanwhile people are building systems and tweaking settings and water cooling their boxes to get that extra trickle of performance so they can brag that they game at 120fps or some nonsense number. Reminds me of the car stereo contests where people sink thousands into a system that emits one tone at incredibly high volume for a few seconds before something blows. You can't even be in the car when they're running it because it would destroy your hearing. What's the freakin' point?

Here's what the flight sim end user cares about if you can pry him away from competing on specs: Is it smooth, and can I read the gauges?

Honestly to the average person who doesn't spend all day staring at videos, the difference between 30 and 60fps is barely noticeable. As is the difference between 4k and 1080 on a sub-30 inch monitor that's 3 feet from your face. Many won't know the difference. They'll say they do, but it's like those experiments when people sample wine from a $100 bottle and a $14 bottle and end up rating the $14 bottle higher because they don't know which one is more expensive.

There's a lot of confirmation bias that goes on in the video world, which is why people happily plunk down a bunch of money for a squillion-megapixel camera that has a cheap lens. Bigger numbers lead to bigger perceived quality. The last job I had in the broadcast world, I shot on a $70,000 camera, and $50,000 of that was in the lens. People who asked were often visibly startled when I told them what the resolution of the sensors were. "My camera has better resolution than that!"  Yeah, and your lens is junk, as is your light sensitivity, so I guarantee I'm taking better pictures than you.

4k has its uses. On a 65" TV or a VR headset with Fresnel lenses that magnify the image to something huge, the difference between 4k and 1080 is noticeable because of the distance between pixels. On an average-sized computer monitor? Not so much. And since 4k requires a great deal more horsepower to run than 1080, why bother unless there's a reason? Even in the VR example, I run a Reverb G2 for DCS, which is a 4k output split between two screens running 2k each, and everything looks great. 4k per eye would be overkill. And considering the processor overhead, there's absolutely no reason to run this thing in 4k on regular sized and spaced displays.

With the exception of the framerate bug, which will happen no matter how good or bad your hardware is, I'm getting smooth animation almost everywhere except over huge cities like NYC, and even that's not bad until the bug hits. And I'm running a 3 year old Ryzen 7 2700x and a 1080Ti. Hardly bleeding edge anymore. 

For those who have been in the simming world for any length of time, that's amazing. When FSX came out we used to joke that you'd need to steal the computer off the Starship Enterprise to run the thing with all the sliders turned up. It was *years* before hardware caught up to that sim. Once they fix the bug that was introduced in the last big update, I'm totally happy and, honestly, astonished with the performance of this sim.

 

 

 

Edited April 29, 2021 by eslader

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

7 minutes ago, eslader said:

4k has its uses. On a 65" TV or a VR headset with Fresnel lenses that magnify the image to something huge, the difference between 4k and 1080 is noticeable because of the distance between pixels. On an average-sized computer monitor? Not so much. And since 4k requires a great deal more horsepower to run than 1080, why bother unless there's a reason? Even in the VR example, I run a Reverb G2 for DCS, which is a 4k output split between two screens running 2k each, and everything looks great. 4k per eye would be overkill. And considering the processor overhead, there's absolutely no reason to run this thing in 4k on regular sized and spaced displays.

There are just a lot of variables here, but I agree with your overall sentiment. That said, 4k monitors tend to be more expensive using more expensive panels with higher native sharpness. So it's hard to say just X vs X unless you are talking very similar quality of monitor. It's not really apples to apples, as I can find 1080p monitor sharper than the 1080p monitor I use.

The reason I said my 4k monitor wasn't very good is because it has low contrast, if you do a lot of night flying, you generally want contrast over sharpness. My 1080p monitor has higher contrast and less sharpness, optimally I'd own a reference level monitor (I used to, but I didn't want to pay for another one since I now use a projector).  The other advantage of using a projector is it forces me to make my renders naturally sharper looking and the scenery being so blown up lets me see minor issues in rendering photos that are harder to spot on small monitors. So I have multiple reasons beyond just that.

Edited April 29, 2021 by Alpine Scenery