47 minutes ago, OneOfMany said:

The rendering engine you keep referring to as being overhauled is the "last" step! The game engine must do all of the calculations of location, weather conditions, flight input, atmospheric conditions, inputting controller changes, inputting viewport, calculating ai and real time and other player locations, updating gauges, calculating fuel load, changes of cog,... all before rendering what you see. This is the optimization being spoken of. 

So when I asked if we should talk about the simulation aspect, I was right. 

And when I said discussions here keep changing the bar, I was also right.

This discussion started as FPS vs graphics, then for some reason it is shifted to how it is optimized for simulation aspects like COG, location and all the list you mentioned? Are we talking about how fast can a cloud render or how many cpu cycles avionics take? If you really read the discussion, you will see I'm not the one going all over the place with no evidence, and I actually said excatly what you said! In order to understand a bottleneck you will need to find the cause first.

Hence, my claim is that it is already perfectly fine the way it is right now in all those tasks + Vulkan rendering engine. There is literaly a graph in the simulator that breaks down how much every piece in it takes. "Calculating cog" or any simulation aspect is not where the FPS bottleneck comes from *in this case*, this is what I'm saying all over this thread.

 

Edited September 11, 20214 yr by akita

😂😂😂

1 hour ago, akita said:

This discussion started as FPS vs graphics, then for some reason it is shifted to how it is optimized for simulation aspects like COG, location and all the list you mentioned?

You are Correct. 

The difference is that the other flight Sims are (with the exception of small sprite and navigation logic being pulled from outside sources), loading the physical world and everything required to create it is being stored and processed locally on your physical hardware. As it is with most games. Preprocessing a land class autogen you have on your ssd/hdd is relatively simple, streaming it in for caching is another story. No other game brings in the amount of "live" and "world" detail from a server in a different part of the world and can process it locally to "render" it. 

It's easy to plop in trees, draw and move some clouds, and approximate a city by dropping in some pre-defined buildings and roads. The ability to do so on a scale of the actual world is completely different. This is the challenge presented to other flight sim developers. A rendering engine is not going to solve this. 

Edited September 11, 20214 yr by OneOfMany

39 minutes ago, OneOfMany said:

You are Correct. 

The difference is that the other flight Sims are (with the exception of small sprite and navigation logic being pulled from outside sources), loading the physical world and everything required to create it is being stored and processed locally on your physical hardware. As it is with most games. Preprocessing a land class autogen you have on your ssd/hdd is relatively simple, streaming it in for caching is another story. No other game brings in the amount of "live" and "world" detail from a server in a different part of the world and can process it locally to "render" it. 

It's easy to plop in trees, draw and move some clouds, and approximate a city by dropping in some pre-defined buildings and roads. The ability to do so on a scale of the actual world is completely different. This is the challenge presented to other flight sim developers. A rendering engine is not going to solve this. 

Yes, both are different worlds however when it comes to the visual outcome its mostly agree to disagree as this is another discussion regarding a full prcedural data driven scenery vs photogrammtry and orthos.

So let's not dive in even more 😉

Apologies. From reading your previous posts, and your subsequent responses, I thought you were unclear on the concept of "layers" of processing, and how the layers proceeding rendering have anything to do with fps. 

I'll just leave it with the fact that if two pieces of software can provide the same fps, and one has to process more data and can keep up, it has a superior pipeline for its engine. This does not mean it is more accurate, only that it is better optimized. 

 

6 hours ago, Glenn Fitzpatrick said:

The thing that has me the most curious is this -

 

... seeming as it is  it is called X Plane why isn't it available on X Box ?   What is with that ?

It will soon be available. It will be called Plane Box.

32 minutes ago, David Mills said:

It will soon be available. It will be called Plane Box.

🤣🤣🤣🤣

12 hours ago, akita said:

If we actually stick to facts, Xplane 12 is dropping OpenGL for good and embracing Vulkan/Metal, both are much newer than DX11, in fact even newer than DX12. So it's actually the contrary, MSFS architecture is already really dated.

If we indeed stick to facts, rendering APIs are not a direct indicative of performance nor how dated a graphics engine is. Rendering APIs are for giving developers access to the graphics hardware - which makes only a very tiny part of a game architecture. They come in all sorts of flavors, like OpenGL which makes the driver handles all of the low level things such as VRAM allocation or Vulkan which grants a lower level access but requires developers to allocate VRAM themselves. However the actual meaty part (processing vertices, memory management, multithreading, LODs, ...) are all implemented in the graphics engine, which is what makes most of the game architecture, not graphics APIs. Not only that, most graphics engines are written in a way that they can work with any graphics API thanks to abstraction layers, again showing that there is much more to a graphics engine than what graphics API it uses. Calling MSFS architecture dated just because it uses an older graphics API (at least on PC) is pretty much ignoring all of that. Also, having a lower level access allows developers to minimize the driver overhead, which is why developers have started switching to lower level graphics APIs, but they do not make rendering magically faster. I can write a terribly inefficient Vulkan game which can easily beaten by much more complex OpenGL games.

I see that you were "annoyed" by the fact that people called X-Plane's graphics engine dated (which is also not true, graphics engines do not age the way most people think, which is why we hear P3D is held back by FSX engine nonsense every day), but defending X-Plane's graphics engine by making misleading comparisons is not right either.

Edited September 11, 20214 yr by BiologicalNanobot

I sometimes think that, for X-Plane users, their final words on their deathbed will not be goodbyes to their family, nor recollections of treasured life memories, nor words of comfort with their spiritual counselors. Instead, their final, gasping words will be about Vulkan or Orthos.

11 minutes ago, David Mills said:

their final, gasping words will be about Vulkan or Orthos.

more fun than Greatful Dead

10 hours ago, BiologicalNanobot said:

I see that you were "annoyed" by the fact that people called X-Plane's graphics engine dated (which is also not true, graphics engines do not age the way most people think, which is why we hear P3D is held back by FSX engine nonsense every day), but defending X-Plane's graphics engine by making misleading comparisons is not right either.

"Misleading"? more like nitpicking now.

Since all you mentioned (VRAM, multithreading...) requires changes for a low profile API a better term will be "duh". What can an engine do is tightly related to what possibilities the API give and vice versa, i.e. a lower profile API needs the game to manage memory and not the driver like in DX11/OpenGL and therefore to implement Vulkan/DX12 it's rather obvious that memory management of a game engine is changing since it is a required. I even mentioned that what Asobo is probably doing now preparing the move to DX12 at some point, and that's what P3D did as well as Xplane with Vulkan, all of them are not simple ports more of a a game engine redesign to make the best out of a new API.

"Annoyed" is beyond me, every discussion I have is civil and with 0% feelings, however when people who are joining* the discussion just to be bitter and imagine how "an Xplane user will die his last words will be..." like @David Mills above, is it really me the insane one here? Seriously, what the hell is wrong with people here that the very first thing it pops their mind to get personal? Is your self confidence is so low?  

*(more like cheerleading or think they are "funny" with low class humor instead of actually giving anything valuable)

Edited September 12, 20214 yr by akita

MSFS with its "outdated" DX11 API looks and performs (considering its complex and more advanced graphics effects) so much better than both P3D and x-plane, both using the "newer" DX12/Vulcan APIs. obviously the API in use alone does not make a game automatically look or perform better, unless the game developer also makes tremendous changes to the game to make use of all the new API's capabilities. if he doesn't for example also make great use of GPU computing (as MSFS does) the game can still look and perform much worse using the newer APIs. the developers "final, gasping words will be about Vulkan and DX12": Lord I have sinned. forgive me for not making better use of my graphics API.

Edited September 12, 20214 yr by turbomax

15 hours ago, BiologicalNanobot said:

If we indeed stick to facts, rendering APIs are not a direct indicative of performance nor how dated a graphics engine is. Rendering APIs are for giving developers access to the graphics hardware - which makes only a very tiny part of a game architecture.

exactly. no more questions, your honor!

Edited September 12, 20214 yr by turbomax

The average gamer doesn't care about apis, papis, teryaki, whatever, all the terms that folks throw at each other, trying to sound "edumacated".

The average gamer also doesn't spend $5,000 on a "gaming pc" (the dude who invented this term found a gold mine of extracting money from gullible gamers, because, let's be honest here, every PC is a "gaming PC". He/she runs games on whatever hardware is at hand. 

What the average gamer cares about is firing up his flight simulator without muss or fuss, without having to start 30 different programs before you can actually click the .exe button. 

What the average gamer cares about is not having to spend the cost of a semester at a college in order to move the visuals from atrocious to serviceable. 

What the average gamer cares about is being able to play MSFS on the hardware he has, without being confronted with a constant stutter fest even at low/medium settings. 

On all these points, MSFS 2020 delivers. 

And I'm only talking about performance and not about all the other stuff like: the enormously large freeware community, the Working Title stuff, the G 1000 NXi, etc. 

 

Edited September 12, 20214 yr by Ricardo41

32 minutes ago, Ricardo41 said:

The average gamer also doesn't spend $5,000 on a "gaming pc" (the dude who invented this term found a gold mine of extracting money from gullible gamers, because, let's be honest here, every PC is a "gaming PC". He/she runs games on whatever hardware is at hand. 

What the average gamer cares about is firing up his flight simulator without muss or fuss, without having to start 30 different programs before you can actually click the .exe button. 

What the average gamer cares about is not having to spend the cost of a semester at a college in order to move the visuals from atrocious to serviceable. 

What the average gamer cares about is being able to play MSFS on the hardware he has, without being confronted with a constant stutter fest even at low/medium settings. 

Pretty much says the same thing about X-plane mobile users. Just substitute MSFS with X Plane mobile and you have have the same user profile. The advantage for them is that they are not tied to a console either.