XP12: the good, the bad, the ugly

[Murmur 3,941]

37 minutes ago, soaring_penguin said:

And this is what I meant in the other thread. I do accept positive criticism, but this boils down to: "Laminar has been doing it wrong all this time". 

Along the development road, there are decisions to be made, and sometimes they turn out not the best for any given problem/solution.
The important thing is sometimes that a decision is being made, just to be able to move forward.

So true. If they prioritized TAA and motion vectoring instead, people would have complained: "LR focus on the wrong things, they should have modernised the lighting before doing TAA!"

LR implemented Vulkan (=DX12) years ago, when every other sim was running at most DX11.

I think they made miracles doing what they did with vastly inferior resources (and this apparently irks some people, who only give "likes" to every post critical of XP. 🤭)

This is early release, they also announced some of the improvements in the road map. Let's see how they improve AA, performance, scenery, etc.

[mSparks 2,086]

10 hours ago, Baber20 said:

This is 2022 not 2002. Shadow rendering isn't really that hard on performance unless it isn't built into the rendering pipeline.

It might not be: try the dataref and see how many miles out you can out you can go without crippling performance.

File a bug report that it is set to low.

But you'd be ignored if you said add it, because they are already added, there are even sliders for shadow and ssao quality.

EDIT:

shadow/csm/near_limit_interior from 120 to 600 (anything above 2000 for me and shadows look terrible and perf blows, exterior version for outside the cockpit) and shadow/total_fade_ratio from 0.7 to 1.0 looks better to me.

BUT, I'm not touching any of that stuff meaningfully any time soon, it's a massive time sink, looks great already and LR art guys will get to it I'm sure.

Edited September 20, 2022 by mSparks

[pryoski 84]

Interesting range of thoughts about XP12 in this discussion. I'm one of those people who tried very hard to like MSFS 2020. Bought it + the Kodiak and optimised it for my rig, but it rarely feels smooth as a hot knife slicing through butter. XP12 is a much better experience for me and I do think the visuals and lighting & clouds are a big improvement over XP11. I have my clouds @ Max btw. Anything less and they start to produce artifacts. 🙂
Looking forward with some relish to the XP12 journey.

[fogboundturtle 2,708]

6 hours ago, soaring_penguin said:

And this is what I meant in the other thread. I do accept positive criticism, but this boils down to: "Laminar has been doing it wrong all this time". 

Along the development road, there are decisions to be made, and sometimes they turn out not the best for any given problem/solution.
The important thing is sometimes that a decision is being made, just to be able to move forward.
We don't know what the status of motion vectoring and TAA was at the time off their decision making, and how difficult it is to implement in Vulkan, while keeping interoperability with all the thee OS's, existing hardware and add-ons.

My last upgrade was 7 years ago, and I don't have currently the means to upgrade, so yes, interoperability is important for me.

BTW, version 12 is running at acceptable levels on my 10 year old Intel i5 and Geforce 1070. Much better then I anticipated (usually above 25, and around 40 outside cities).

World-X-Europe does make a heavy hit, I am still considering if I should be using it in the current state of the beta.

Sure decision were made. Priorities were set. This is 2022, We are not in 2010.  Most modern graphical engine supports temporal AA. The issue is not that it's hard to do in Vulkan and X-plane engine is really old  It hasn't aged well.  You can try to fix it as much as you can but eventually there is so much tech debt that often is smarter to dump the graphic engine and use something new.  The issue with XP12 is that it doesn't scale well with hardware. You say it runs well for you but try the game at a higher resolution with the best hardware possible and you won't get more FPS. The engine is too depending on CPU core IPC still. Not only that. MSAA is almost 10 years old AA tech. It just doesn't do a very good job at cleaning up edges. This is why the industry had moved to temporal AA.  At the end of the day, it's very clear that Austin doesn't care as much about visuals. He should care a bit more.  All the work they have done on cloud and lighting is only exposing all the others things that have not been modernize. It is a beta, so will give them a chance to fix some of it. 

The game has change, LR needs to adapt to the market. otherwise, it will remains niche market. Maybe this is what Austin wants. Who knows.

[rka 916]

5 hours ago, Murmur said:

I think they made miracles doing what they did with vastly inferior resources (and this apparently irks some people, who only give "likes" to every post critical of XP. 🤭)

This is early release, they also announced some of the improvements in the road map. Let's see how they improve AA, performance, scenery, etc.

They have less resources, but they had far more time. As stated above by @fogboundturtle, Austin just set different priorities.

Here is a quote from Janov on the org: regarding what kind of improvement to expect in the EA phase:

Quote

Well, there are some gains to be expected with future optimization - but I would not hope for more than 10 or 20 percent - which would bring you from 30 to 36 fps.

The number of your cores (as impressive as it is) will have no effect on continuous framerate in X-Plane. It is essentially still a single-CPU-core application. Some plans exist to allow a second core to calculate a different view (for multi-monitor applications) - but this will have no benefit for you running a single 4K display.

MSFS runs a modern graphics engine uninhibited by technical debt, developed by dozens of graphics engineers.

Also note that orthoimage ground textures are naturally faster to display than a vector-based landscape... it is just like having a giant wallpaper texture that gets draped across the landscape, this is much faster than calculating the position of every subtexture that makes up the landscape in X-Plane.

I think the truth of the matter is that if you are in flight simulation for the visual experience (mostly)... you will fare better with MSFS.

Good luck!

The guy he is answering has a 4K HEDT system and is getting less than 30 fps with everything stock. With a better single core perf on my CPU, I am getting 35. Everything stock as well, not even XEurope.

[Gary1124 181]

8 hours ago, soaring_penguin said:

And this is what I meant in the other thread. I do accept positive criticism, but this boils down to: "Laminar has been doing it wrong all this time". 

Along the development road, there are decisions to be made, and sometimes they turn out not the best for any given problem/solution.
The important thing is sometimes that a decision is being made, just to be able to move forward.
We don't know what the status of motion vectoring and TAA was at the time off their decision making, and how difficult it is to implement in Vulkan, while keeping interoperability with all the thee OS's, existing hardware and add-ons.

My last upgrade was 7 years ago, and I don't have currently the means to upgrade, so yes, interoperability is important for me.

BTW, version 12 is running at acceptable levels on my 10 year old Intel i5 and Geforce 1070. Much better then I anticipated (usually above 25, and around 40 outside cities).

World-X-Europe does make a heavy hit, I am still considering if I should be using it in the current state of the beta.

People make mistake in unfair comparison. Unfair because MS Developes for one OS. Their own. LR developes for three plus mobile now. Not their own proprietary OS's either.

[Bjoern 1,153]

9 hours ago, soaring_penguin said:

World-X-Europe does make a heavy hit, I am still considering if I should be using it in the current state of the beta.

Some of X-World's layers like "Details" or "Extras" can be disabled. This should recover the odd frame or two.

[soaring_penguin 428]

2 hours ago, Bjoern said:

Some of X-World's layers like "Details" or "Extras" can be disabled. This should recover the odd frame or two.

In another post, I learned that lowering texture quality with one notch, will improve (lessen) your VRAM usage and allow for more fps

(in that if your VRAM is used up, there is a sharp drop in fps). Only if you have more then 12GB of VRAM, you should put it to the full max, or so is said.

[Bjoern 1,153]

Lowering texture quality makes sense as any excess textures will probably be shoved into RAM, which is slower than VRAM and incurs extra latency due to additional transport overhead.

I'm glad that I went for a 6900XT. No issues with 16 GB.

[UKflyer 630]

this not good with the new beta, anyone else seen this yet? Bad flickering in the sky

https://www.veed.io/view/7d80456b-a990-414c-91ea-6ad47006f523

[Gary1124 181]

1 hour ago, UKflyer said:

this not good with the new beta, anyone else seen this yet? Bad flickering in the sky

https://www.veed.io/view/7d80456b-a990-414c-91ea-6ad47006f523

How did it look from the cockpit I wonder.?

[OlliePen 88]

23 minutes ago, Gary1124 said:

How did it look from the cockpit I wonder.?

Probably magical. If I were to see that whilst flying, I'd immediately ask my gal to come check my eye pupils for proper dilatory responses and to make sure there wasn't any unusual slurring of my speech.

[UKflyer 630]

46 minutes ago, Gary1124 said:

How did it look from the cockpit I wonder.?

not good either, this beta is stuffed

https://www.veed.io/view/e11628ea-c2ab-4f30-bb03-ab972adafca4

Edited September 22, 2022 by UKflyer

[mSparks 2,086]

1 hour ago, UKflyer said:

not good either, this beta is stuffed

https://www.veed.io/view/e11628ea-c2ab-4f30-bb03-ab972adafca4

Did you submit a bug report?

http://dev.x-plane.com/support/bugreport.html

[UKflyer 630]

40 minutes ago, mSparks said:

Did you submit a bug report?

http://dev.x-plane.com/support/bugreport.html

will do thanks for the link