22 hours ago, mSparks said:

Show me someone praising photogrammetry in VR and I might reconsider just how little regard I have for it.

I wanted to raise my hand, but I feel like I'll be finger pointed if I do... 😉

My 2 cents for what its worth:

Then visuals are composed of many sub items:

- simulating the lighting/medium/receiver (lights, shadows, tone mapping/exposure, white balance, ...)
- rendering the graphics (PBR, BRDF, SSS, etc...)
- painting the textures (decals, procedural, details)
- generating the geometry (shape preserving LOD, GS generated surface details - rocks, grass, foliage, trees, etc...),
- and many more things too long to describe.

When comparing simulator visuals, most posts are only about the "overall impression", but the devil hides in the details.

Visuals are VERY important in a simulator, but eye candy is not. The problem is where do you draw the line between what is eye candy or not. In addition there are what I call factually/scientifically based visuals, and Hollywood based visuals. To me this is orthogonal in that you can have eye candy based on science (lighting) and eye candy only for the sake of it (lens flare, motion blur), and both are not exclusive to each other and the mix is important. For example, I don't find FS2020 lighting accurate (wrong light characteristics in airports like directional and intensity, and wrong rendering technique making them fuzzy and same size/power regardless of distance - even more so in VR). However I do find XP11 airport lights accurate enough, and their rendering is not fuzzy, but their "star" shaped halo is in the category of Hollywood visuals to me and is too prominent.

Then there is VR which is magnifying everything around you, including all the rendering defects... and regarding photogrammetry, when done right and seen in the conditions it is meant for (from higher above), and when rendering with a lighting which is realistic enough visually, I can assure you it fools my brain a lot in VR. I'm still amazed at the visuals during KLAX approach in FS2020 in VR for example, where looking to the side and below gives a convincing representation. But again this is when seen from a certain height (and there is no streaming problem either).

I believe it is important to keep a little bit of "Hollywood" style visuals even in a scientifically pure based rendering, because it talks to our senses, and contributes to tricking our brains that it is "real". And there is no denial FS2020 is illustrating what all known modern rendering techniques can bring to our hobby visually, but there is no denial either the very same techniques and more will find their way in XP12 and P3D6. I believe it is still much easier to adopt new rendering engine techniques which are evolving every 5 years due technological shifts in the gaming industry, than adopting more accurate simulation techniques which are increasingly building by experience over decades only.

PS: some people were wondering how come XP12 rendering more on GPU could maintain same or better perf than XP11. There are lots of reasons it is possible!

For those wanting to take a deep dive in the GPU, here is a 2015 paper which I find is explaining a lot of this (albeit very technically): http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2015/aaltonenhaar_siggraph2015_combined_final_footer_220dpi.pdf

As for the "visible" portion of the rendering, aka lighting, shadows, tone mapping etc..., here is a 2021 paper which I find equally interesting:
http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2021/jpatry_advances2021.pdf

If you want to know everything behind Unreal 5 Nanite:
http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2021/Karis_Nanite_SIGGRAPH_Advances_2021_final.pdf

There are so many papers on this site that after reading the most recent ones, and even some older ones, you might come to realize FS2020 graphics are a little bit outdated already 🙂

Edited December 15, 20214 yr by RXP

22 minutes ago, RXP said:

The problem is where do you draw the line between what is eye candy or not.

The answer to that problem is fairly simple. The point the memory pressure is so high you can no longer maintain 90fps VR.

Even on Linux, a 5900X and RTX3070 I cannot achieve that with the full max world objects setting in X-Plane 11 (can do 90fps VR max world objects with a hack to reduce the number of trees).

So an "even more world objects than xplane max world objects" settting is about as useful as a glass of water at a bachelor party, making the entire sim online only and "might stop working if the other half is watching netflix" just fuel for the fire.

Oh, and that isn't 90fps average VR, it's 90fps minumum VR, a fraction of a second with less actually feels like you got punched in the face (freezing the world for more than about 1 hundredth of a second is a pretty good simulation of getting punched in the face).

Edited December 15, 20214 yr by mSparks

15 minutes ago, mSparks said:

The answer to that problem is fairly simple.

It really is not that fairly simple in my opinion, because it mostly depends only on customer perception, which is not absolute but relative to one's experience with other games/simulators.

18 minutes ago, RXP said:

because it mostly depends only on customer perception, which is not absolute but relative to one's experience with other games/simulators.

The 90fps thing is a physical and biological thing, In VR 90fps is actually low, Sony require 120fps mins for VR titles to make it onto their store.

It's just completely different physiological process than watching a monitor when you have the rest of the real world around you for reference, in VR the screen is your entire world, and the brain is very good at converting what you see into a sense of motion, does a reasonable job even when its only getting purely 2D signals from a monitor. 

XP11 has some GPU compute headroom XP12 will make use of (XP11 barely using any), but its not huge, because steam VR is using it to keep the mins, aka reprojection, aka "the black edges" the MS VR guys are currently reporting, aka XP11 issues a couple of years ago:

 

Edited December 15, 20214 yr by mSparks

@mSparks

[ off-topic ]

I'm a convinced VR user for nearly 2 years, and knows a lot of the related tech. Motion re-projection and motion smoothing are not the same and they are addressing the 2 aspects (physiological and biological if I understand what you mean with these - aka vestibular and visual in any order). It is also wrong to assume a 120/144Hz Index "requires" an app to render at 120/144Hz, this is not the point at all in my opinion.

To make it short: the only purpose of a higher panel refresh rate is to allow more reprojected frames in between computed frames, with the neat effect of reducing the impact on the vestibular system (feeling less dizzy). Re-projection is a marginal GPU cost (rendering each view as a textured quad in a different pos/rot). Motion smoothing on the other hand permits eliminating a visual annoying, juddering, which is a consequence of both a lower rendering rate than the panel refresh rate, and the reprojection. This is visual only and looks like doubled image. However motion smoothing comes at a higher cost because it involves a lot of computations comparing frames*. You can see juddering a lot when translating the head, whereas you see nearly none when rotating the head on a single axes (because of reprojection). In practice, I'm perfectly fine running a G2 at 4:1 motion smoothing (22.5fps/90Hz) and the Index at 5:1 (18fps/90Hz).

[ back-to-topic ]

 

*NB: SteamVR and Occulus are both using the NVidia Optical Flow lib (IIRC) ( https://developer.nvidia.com/opticalflow-sdk ). On Turing and Ampere hardware, it is using the Tensor cores which give higher precision and shouldn't cost much GPU resources, because nearly no simulator is using the tensor cores which are therefore sleeping idle otherwise. In my opinion the main problem is that all of this could be made much better if both the API (OXR and/or OVR) would provide the means to address this question. In effect, taking FS2020 as an example, it is using the TAA algorithm which requires the app to compute the pixel motion vector texture. Should the app would pass this texture to the VR API, there would be nearly no need to recompute it and it would be even more precise because it would be done at the rendering engine emitting the drawing itself, not at the VR level evaluating sRGB output pixels...

 

Edited December 15, 20214 yr by RXP

13 minutes ago, RXP said:

higher panel refresh rate

I'm oversimplifying because the details are much less important than the point that current very high end tech (regardless of application) can not do XP11 max world objects without creating unwanted sensory perceptions, so more than XP11 max world objects is worthless any time soon.

There is a whole different conversation in there about the details, things like the lighting (more accurate formula rather than more formula) and better use of hardware resources (Mmmmm treees, millions and millions of treesss, and those clouds, yeah baby).

This is why the likes of Beat Saber are so successful even though technically speaking their object complexity is about as basic as it gets (some cubes and a tiny bit of vector graphics with no fill).

At the same time, even current mid range hardware can achieve the 90fps mins, they just need much lower settings to keep it there, turn the weather off, turn the scenery complexity down further: Even xplane/MSFS on minimum settings in VR blows MSFS on Ultra but 2D out of the water (but the wallet is going to hurt after, because no one wants to use min settings)

Edited December 15, 20214 yr by mSparks

On 12/14/2021 at 9:58 PM, mSparks said:

Which seems to be the way many people are trending.

For IFR that may be the case, but not for VFR.

I just did a short flight with the legendary Zibo to test my new rig and boy everything looked so pale and green all around, I cannot get used to it anymore. I sincerely hope XP will be a different story in the scenery department.

Edited December 16, 20214 yr by CarlosF

3 hours ago, CarlosF said:

For IFR that may be the case, but not for VFR.

I just did a short flight with the legendary Zibo to test my new rig and boy everything looked so pale and green all around, I cannot get used to it anymore. I sincerely hope XP will be a different story in the scenery department.

This is why ruining yourself with "better looking" but not usable is not a good idea.

But nvm, just because its not a good idea hardly ever stopped anyone ever unless something else stops them first ej 😉

1 hour ago, mSparks said:

not usable

Not usable is totally subjective.

I'm not a RW pilot, In the many years I've been simming, I have taught myself IFR basics and so my needs are not the same as someone who uses the sim for RW IFR/VFR practice, so, the other sim is quite usable for me and provides the eye-candy I look for. Looking forward XP12, however not for the reason you imply but for the sake of competition and options availability. Who knows, maybe XP12 turns out to be all and everything everyone is looking for.

Edited December 17, 20214 yr by CarlosF

26 minutes ago, CarlosF said:

Not usable is totally subjective.

Whooooosh....

That's the sound my post made flying right over your head....

Enjoy the MSFS beta, I gotta go not enjoy myself with xplane for a while, suffer in silence is the name of the game from here on out.

5 hours ago, mSparks said:

This is why ruining yourself with "better looking" but not usable is not a good idea.

 

3 hours ago, mSparks said:

Whooooosh....

That's the sound my post made flying right over your head....

Whether it’s a good idea or not is down to a user. If he wishes to do that is none of your business. Just accept people have different opinions and those should be respected.

No need at all for your second post. You really need to think before you post. Respect the views and opinions of others.

4 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

No need at all for your second post.

Simply explaining that I wasnt talking about the MSFS alpha or beta on a thread about xplane 12 scenery in the only way I could think how.

plus I winked, that makes it cute and playful.

Edited December 17, 20214 yr by mSparks

8 minutes ago, mSparks said:

Simply explaining that I wasnt talking about the MSFS alpha or beta on a thread about xplane 12 scenery in the only way I could think how.

plus I winked, that makes it cute and playful.

Nothing in that post was helpful or informative. Your “whoosh” comment showed no respect to the person you directed it at.

There was no wink, not that would make any difference. Can you not just ignore comments instead of feeling compelled to answer them thereby adding to the unfriendly nature of this forum?

I see nothing like this in the P3D forum. The pinned topic at the top of this forum is both accurate and deserving.

20 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Nothing in that post was helpful or informative. Your “whoosh” comment showed no respect to the person you directed it at.

I had to think long and hard about how to tell someone in the most polite way possible that calling xp12 scenery not usable "subjective" and thinking I was in fact talking about MSFS in a thread about xplane 12 scenery deserves a certain lack of respect.

"whoosh" seemed apt.

4 minutes ago, mSparks said:

I had to think long and hard about how to tell someone in the most polite way possible that calling xp12 scenery not usable "subjective" and thinking I was in fact talking about MSFS in a thread about xplane 12 scenery deserves a certain lack of respect.

"whoosh" seemed apt.

You're not compelled to answer topics. It's optional. Stay silent for a change.