4 hours ago, mSparks said:

People were choosing their OS/hardware "for the single performance for the games"

windows was the best choice for that. 

Some people who were “in the know” may have done that, but most people choice of OS/hardware had nothing to do with single performance for games. It was more based on availability which is steered by the developers. After all, most people don’t always make their purchase decision knowledgeable in benchmark analysis and performance metrics. It usually word of mouth or advertising sales.

Is there any wonder, why so many people buy their systems only to spend 40% of their time using it and 60% of their time finding better ways to get the most out of it with tweaking their systems to getter better performance if they knew enough about the OS/hardware of choice in the first place?

X Plane is outside of the this issue because they exist on all OS platform so it really mute.

1 hour ago, BobFS88 said:

Some people who were “in the know” may have done that, but most people choice of OS/hardware had nothing to do with single performance for games. It was more based on availability which is steered by the developers.

PC purchase is mostly directed by influencers just like any other industry, they are generally paid for by Microsoft (as we saw them embrace the new generation of influencers with the MSFS launch), they spent the last 2 decades explaining (on mass) why multithread/multicore didn't matter, or if it did it was "only for big IT with big budgets buying microsoft server products".

The people "in the know" ignored them, and went to create/work for facebook, google and twitter etc. 

Or created cross platform products - like X-Plane/Laminar.

What we see now - after more than a decade of consumer PC hardware moving sideways due to lack of demand - is the likes of AMD kicking it up a notch (like they did for 64bit), and bringing chips that once were only destined for the server market (where multithread/multicore was always absolutely essential) into consumers hands for a fraction of the price they were even 2 years ago.

I see a lot of "Laminar legacy code" talk being banded around. Sits up there with "Laminar need more multicore support"

But the truth of the matter is the legacy cruft is in windows, which has had no major investment since windows NT in the mid 90s. Still mostly 16/32bits internally, virtually no software with multithread support (MS only added std:thread to their build tools/VC++ in 2018), and even those that do are crippled by the ancient thread scheduler in the windows kernel.

This isn't an "OS rant", its just an explanation of "why your - unix based - mobile phone can get 60fps in xplane when your PC can't manage 30" for people who aren't aware.

Which brings us to XP12 - and why no, there isn't going to be much of the way of rewrite for "multithread" because XP11 already makes maximum use of what your hardware/OS is capable of.

Where there is headroom is all the truly astronomical improvements in GPU compute - which is where all the awesome stuff like trees and water they have been demoing will run - and the GPU really doesn't care what OS it runs on.

@mSparks

I agree with all of your points, I just want to the highlight this statement below:

5 hours ago, mSparks said:

they spent the last 2 decades explaining (on mass) why multithread/multicore didn't matter, or if it did it was "only for big IT with big budgets buying microsoft server products".

It's too bad IBM didn't win the OS war otherwise developers could have made wide use of multithreading as earlier as 1993-94 timeframe to the masses. 

Edited October 19, 20214 yr by BobFS88

45 minutes ago, BobFS88 said:

It's too bad IBM didn't win the OS war otherwise developers could have made wide use of multithreading as earlier as 1993-94 timeframe to the masses. 

But another way of looking at that, is maybe if microsoft had written (good) software for powerpc they would be worth as much as Apple.

Edited October 19, 20214 yr by mSparks

1 hour ago, mSparks said:

But another way of looking at that, is maybe if microsoft had written software for powerpc they would be worth as much as Apple.

True.

If they were willing to do it right!

Edited October 19, 20214 yr by BobFS88

1 hour ago, mSparks said:

But another way of looking at that, is maybe if microsoft had written (good) software for powerpc they would be worth as much as Apple.

Out of interest then would an equivalently priced Mac run XP significantly faster than a similarly priced Windows PC? In other words if you spent, say, £2000 on a Mac and a PC what gaming performance differences would you see?

Edited October 19, 20214 yr by jarmstro

5 hours ago, jarmstro said:

Out of interest then would an equivalently priced Mac run XP significantly faster than a similarly priced Windows PC? In other words if you spent, say, £2000 on a Mac and a PC what gaming performance differences would you see?

I have a top of the range Mac that I use for work (including X-Plane stuff), and I also bought a gaming windows laptop for half the price. The Windows laptop smashes it on gaming performance any day even though the CPU isn't as good. If I had forked out the same price for a Windows PC as I had for my Mac then I'd have a really top-of-the-range device... Problem is, I just don't like Windows 

 

Just now, tonywob said:

. Problem is, I just don't like Windows 

Problem is I dont like Apple or MS both for the very same reason. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, with the Thorn in teh middle, we have no hope.

18 minutes ago, mjrhealth said:

Problem is I dont like Apple or MS both for the very same reason. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, with the Thorn in teh middle, we have no hope.

Indeed, and they seem to be getting worse with each iteration. Windows 7 was fantastic but since then it's just gone further downhill for me. Mac OS is going the same way, trying to become one and the same thing with iOS

7 hours ago, jarmstro said:

Out of interest then would an equivalently priced Mac run XP significantly faster than a similarly priced Windows PC? In other words if you spent, say, £2000 on a Mac and a PC what gaming performance differences would you see?

Not sure. I do know a equivalently priced Linux box smashes them both for everything except MS word and photoshop, but keep a mac mini because that's not always my choice (and that is far superior to anything you can buy for a similar price). Windows server 2022 has an MSRP of $1,069 for the machine I'm writing this on.

Edited October 19, 20214 yr by mSparks

I wonder what those M1 chips can do, especially when (or if ever?) X-Plane would be rewritten for that platform? 
But I guess it is too early to tell.

 

8 minutes ago, soaring_penguin said:

I wonder what those M1 chips can do, especially when (or if ever?) X-Plane would be rewritten for that platform? 
But I guess it is too early to tell.

 

XP12 will get a native M1 port. (plugins will need to support it, but if the developers have been astute that shouldn't be an issue)

 

Edited October 19, 20214 yr by mSparks

I recently knew someone with an older Mac desktop that was running slow. Simply made a USB boot drive with the latest Linux mint cinnamon and installed it. Huge difference in speed and usability. Saved them tons by not buying a new PC. Excellent OS for normal use.

2 hours ago, Greazer said:

I recently knew someone with an older Mac desktop that was running slow. Simply made a USB boot drive with the latest Linux mint cinnamon and installed it. Huge difference in speed and usability. Saved them tons by not buying a new PC. Excellent OS for normal use.

If only DCS, IL-2 and MFS could also run, natively, in Linux 😕  I would gladly move, well, I guess....

13 hours ago, soaring_penguin said:

I wonder what those M1 chips can do, especially when (or if ever?) X-Plane would be rewritten for that platform? 

It will, almost certainly. Considering that most of the developers of X-Plane seem to use macs to develop X-Plane on, it's pretty much a given for X-Plane 12 at least that we'll get native binaries.

I'll also find out soon enough as I've ordered myself one