Interesting Austin interview

[darshonaut 237]

28 minutes ago, Murmur said:

I know this question might lead to a locked thread (hopefully not!), but I'm genuinely curious to know the reasons that brought you to that choice.

 

Let's just say I enjoy this sim more. It just feels good flying even the stock aircraft. 

MSFS has some things that annoy me and never get fixed after two years, while they add photogrammetry and try to get it running stable for Xbox.

I'll check in again for the 40 year update for the A310 and then again when I read that the issues I am having with the sim are fixed.

Spending 60 bucks for another sim that works well where it matters for me, including numerous aircraft I do not have in the other sim, was in my book a very clever investment, instead of buying another bunch of Carenado happy flyers or whatever they release there monthly. 

I had some good times with the other sim ! Ain't gonna lie. But the last year was too much of a drag.
With the manpower they are throwing at it, they will get it running stable eventually and then propably fix their bugs and copy all the stuff that XP does better.

It's good to have choices. I have hopes for the Asobo sim in future years.

 

[MrBitstFlyer 3,873]

1 hour ago, UKflyer said:

Flew over London earlier seeing every object imaginable, built up clouds, in the PMDG 737 and was getting 60+ fps. I don't see this ever being possible with XP12. Try not to compare the sims too much, they both have their positives and negatives.

I didn't mention FPS, but I did say 'I still consider MSFS an excellent simulator' and 'The MSFS community should be happy as MSFS is a great sim'. The OP asked if MSFS users should be happy, which I stated they ought to be. The OP stated they had moved to XP12, so I gave my reasons why I'm spending most of my time in XP12 at the moment too.

I did make another post where I said both sims overlap each other in several areas, but do things differently in others.  I personally feel both sims  are great to fly in (MSFS is now very smooth!), but each of us will sway to one or the other based on what we feel is important.  I have logged 1700 hours in MSFS, yet the lighting in XP12 is SO GOOD I am willing to lose some of the good stuff in MSFS because of it.  The problem is when somebody says 'MSFS is rubbish because its lighting is not as good as XP12.  Clearly this is not the case and would be better re-phrased as 'both sims are great, but my preference is XP12 because of the lighting', or 'I prefer MSFS because of the clouds'.

You opened your post by comparing the FPS in each sim 🙂

[tonywob 4,769]

4 hours ago, peroni said:

Is there anything you can share please? 

 

I can't.. I don't contract for them anymore sorry.

 

4 hours ago, jcomm said:

TonyXP - is a registered trade mark waiting for ya !

Ha, I have my own ideas, but real life full-time job takes that away

[blingthinger 649]

7 hours ago, fogboundturtle said:

he just doesn't get it. I am sorry but this interview hurts my head. Calling a simulator with great scenery a driving simulator just show you disconnected from reality he is.  He also said that 4K is useless.  He also think XP12 has great performance already which is a hyperbole at best. It's was a real struggle to watch the whole thing. 

Not out of touch. It's called denial. He's fully aware of the power of ortho and is essentially powerless to change that. I also do not understand why he can't just bring himself to say "yeah, we let people use ortho too".

Where he IS out of touch is missing the power of social media and the snap decisions people make from it.

And he's failing to bring 3rd party into the mix in his interviews. Aside from 3rd parties, this lighting engine is second to none. As a scenery visualization tool, it's simply the best.

For some odd reason, he's not publicly connecting those dots because without 3rd party, yeah, it would struggle along like it did before Ortho4xp hit youtube.

As for performance.... that is a dose of "beta version" hyperbole. For now. Even his devs readily acknowledge that the sim core is still highly single threaded. When it goes fully multi threaded over the coming year(s), it will scream. Social media is too impatient though and he's not using his words and enthusiasm well enough to overcome the trolls.

 

Edited September 23, 2022 by blingthinger

[abrams_tank 7,409]

On 9/24/2022 at 12:48 AM, fogboundturtle said:

he just doesn't get it. I am sorry but this interview hurts my head. Calling a simulator with great scenery a driving simulator just show you disconnected from reality he is.  He also said that 4K is useless.  He also think XP12 has great performance already which is a hyperbole at best. It's was a real struggle to watch the whole thing. 

Hi, does anybody know where in the video Austin said that 4K is useless, roughly what time stamp?

Edited September 24, 2022 by abrams_tank

[mSparks 2,086]

22 hours ago, blingthinger said:

He's fully aware of the power of ortho and is essentially powerless to change that

Xplane has had ortho since at least 2016

https://github.com/oscarpilote/Ortho4XP/commits/master?after=d53ba032c8d9e04cf06e0edbe696cfd337f17da9+174&branch=master&qualified_name=refs%2Fheads%2Fmaster

So like, what do you think he should change about that???

22 hours ago, blingthinger said:

Even his devs readily acknowledge that the sim core is still highly single threaded.

erm, not really.

It has a dependency on single core performance, mostly because 3rd parties are a long way from understanding paralell compute, but under the hood XP has both well defined multithreading of the CPU, XP12 adds gpu compute which is 100% paralell compute,  XP has been spreading the load over multiple PCs for like 3 versions or smth now. 

Please stop spreading such non sense and pretending you have a clue what you are talking about here when you clearly dont. There is even a profiler built in to XP to show how its handling multiple threads, Developer->show microprofiler:

 

Edited September 24, 2022 by mSparks

[blingthinger 649]

33 minutes ago, mSparks said:

Xplane has had ortho since at least 2016

Oh yes, I'm well aware. XP+ortho4xp was the trail blazer in being the first platform to deliver free ortho to the masses. That's really what shot it to fame on the youtubes.

I don't expect anything from him. I'll buy the sim if it had ortho or not, for a variety of reasons. Where he keeps shooting himself in the foot is in declaring that ortho is a waste of time. Now, for a pure training sim, yeah, sure, there's an argument there.

The problem is that he's saying these things in public interviews that are mostly observed by the common consumer. Not the FAA-cert-minded student or CFI.

What's more, there are plenty of regions in the world that will never look good with the default ground textures. Ever. SW USA for example.

If he's going to pop on to a public social media platform, trying to drum up sales and credit card swipes, why on earth would he say it's garbage? Why not say "Oh, yeah! we totally let users use ortho!"?? Doesn't add up.

He's obviously picking an extreme side, maybe out of frustration, hoping to convince people to join him. That tactic doesn't work these days if $$ is your goal and social media is your microphone.

 

43 minutes ago, mSparks said:

Please stop spreading such non sense and pretending you have a clue what you are talking about here when you clearly dont.

I'm very aware of how the engine works. And I'm actually parroting Sidney:

"However, a lot of things that happen frame to frame are not parallel yet. This is mostly due to legacy design decisions which got baked into the engine in one way or another. This whole mess needs to be cleaned up first before we can start parallelizing the frame."

https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/topic/272138-very-low-cpu-and-gpu-usage-low-fps/&do=findComment&comment=2402898

I did not declare it "entirely" single threaded, just "heavily". What's more, for the average user who sees v12 using nothing more than 1.5 core's worth of CPU, they're going to call that a single threaded application (and completely miss the nuance that it's insanely efficient already!). They couldn't care less about the microprofiler showing that there are indeed many threads going all at once.

I look at the microprofiler just as much as you. I see tons of places to set up mutexes, semaphores, and barriers. I look forward to the day when XP is properly multi-threaded.

[mSparks 2,086]

8 minutes ago, blingthinger said:

n the foot is in declaring that ortho is a waste of time.

A waste of his time.

What he is discussing is as much an improvement over ortho as it is default textures.

We've seen some of that already, with details like

turning lvl16 ortho into "as good as if not better than" lvl20 ortho on airports. They have a looong way to go there - but Ortho is absolutely not in the journey (other than some fixes as Oscar has been discussing), because its already there.

16 minutes ago, blingthinger said:

"However, a lot of things that happen frame to frame are not parallel yet. This is mostly due to legacy design decisions which got baked into the engine in one way or another. This whole mess needs to be cleaned up first before we can start parallelizing the frame."

There is a BIG difference between having "more they can do" and:

On 9/24/2022 at 1:58 AM, blingthinger said:

still highly single threaded.

The flight model (flit per frame) is "a lot of things", but removing the "flit before scenery" requirement will still only use two cores (and shave 3ms off that microprofile).

21 minutes ago, blingthinger said:

What's more, for the average user who sees v12 using nothing more than 1.5 core's worth of CPU

Well, for a start, I still keep blaming windows for that, because I'm definately seeing a lot more than "1.5 cores" in full use even back on XP11.

Secondly, the point of multithreading is reducing wait times, not "using more cores", the greater core utilisation you have the worse per frame performance will be (because wait times will be longer).

Pretty sure we saw exactly that mistake in one of the early MSFS sim updates, where they bumped up to using nearly every core to the max and fps tanked for pretty much everyone, then undid it pretty quickly after.

utilisation to perf is very much like cars on a highway, what you want is lots of lanes - all being used - but not so much traffic on them that it turns into Istanbul at rush hour.

 

[blingthinger 649]

13 minutes ago, mSparks said:

A waste of his time.

He's not clarifying that and even if he did, it would be completely misinterpreted. And used as troll fodder. He signs his own checks though, so whatever...

 

14 minutes ago, mSparks said:

Well, for a start, I still keep blaming windows for that, because I'm definately seeing a lot more than "1.5 cores" in full use even back on XP11.

Even on linux I see at most 2-2.5 core's worth of usage (the 195 below) in use during regular flight. Usually 1.5 around KPDX. That's on a 8 core cpu. That said, when I do this:

>ps --no-headers -mo spid,%cpu -p 5091 
      -     195
   5091 88.3
   5093  0.0
   5094  0.0
   5095  0.0
   5096  0.0
   5097  0.0
   5098  0.0
   5099  0.0
   5100  0.0
   5101  0.0
   5102  0.0
   5103  0.0
   5104  0.0
   5105  0.0
   5106  0.0
   5108  0.0
   5109 35.2
   5110 35.2
   5111  7.3
   5112  7.2
   5113  6.6
   5114  6.9
   5115  7.3
   5116  0.0
   5117  0.0
   5120  0.0
   5121  0.0
   5123  0.0
   5125  0.0
   5127  0.0
   5128  0.0
   5129  0.0
   5130  0.0
   5132  0.0
   5144  0.0
   5146  0.0
   5147  0.1
   5148  0.0
   5149  0.8
   5150  0.0
   5151  0.0
   5343  0.0
   5344  0.0
   5345  0.0
   5346  0.0
   5347  0.0
   5350  0.0
   5370  0.0
   5371  0.0
   6513  0.0
   6605  0.4
   6607  0.0
   8961  0.0
 

I see 50+ threads. So, yes xp12 is multithreaded. But for now, unless scenery is loading, there's an average of three of them appreciably working at any given time. And even then, only 1 comes close to 100% all the time.

At the least, ground detection is begging to be multithreaded! There's plenty of performance coming in the future. And yes, that AI FM swarm...is also begging for threads.

[mSparks 2,086]

6 hours ago, blingthinger said:

And even then, only 1 comes close to 100% all the time.

this will always be the case, that is the "main thread", the one thread to rule them all, that synchronises the graphics, physics and aircraft systems, that blocks until everything for the next frame is ready and determines the framerate.

The #1 reason that many aircraft have #@##%ty framerates is because they run their systems in there instead of offloading the work to another thread, also the #1 reason the sparky744 got above and beyond

is because xtlua does exactly that - takes the ("3rd party") aircraft systems off the main thread and lets them run independently of the rest of xplane, while taking away the hard work of synchronizing that back up with the main thread.

Edited September 25, 2022 by mSparks

[rka 916]

3 minutes ago, mSparks said:

this will always be the case, that is the "main thread", the one thread to rule them all, that synchronises the graphics, physics and aircraft systems, that blocks until everything for the next frame is ready and determines the framerate.

The #1 reason that many aircraft have #@##%ty framerates is because they run their systems in there instead of offloading the work to another thread, also the #1 reason the sparky744 got above and beyond

is because xtlua does exactly that - takes the aircraft systems off the main thread and lets them run independently of the rest of xplane, while taking away the hard work of synchronizing that back up with the main thread.

That IMHO brings up the question - if you can do it, why can't LR do it?

[jcomm 5,929]

Yesterday I reinstalled MFS to taste the Fenix A320 in it's latest version.

Then I decided to give a look at how MFS uses threads, specially since I had disabled SMT in the BIOS / Win 11 / 5600x.

Checking the resource monitor shows a completely heaven use of all 6 cores, less #2, and I guess that if I reenable SMT the 12 cores will get busy with MFS running...

While I can't complain about XP12's performance, truth is that I am sure the heaviest addons, coupled with dense weather and detailed scenery can bring it to it's knees more easily than MFS.

 

[rka 916]

22 minutes ago, jcomm said:

and I guess that if I reenable SMT the 12 cores will get busy with MFS running...

Yes.

[mSparks 2,086]

35 minutes ago, rka said:

That IMHO brings up the question - if you can do it, why can't LR do it?

Firstly they did, if you look inside the code of the C172 for example, you will see nothing in it's "after_physics" declaration, all the interaction is done via command buffers, and all their default systems like the FMC, the GXXXxs, the NDs (one of the biggest "under the hood" upgrades for XP12 so far is two independant NDs instead of one) dont consume time on the main thread.

Secondly, they did before windows even really developed native support for it (windows VC++ 2018), up until that point multithreading was very much an afterthought on windows (main reason Linux demolished windows in the server space is because Linux was a fully asynchronous operating system since its very first days in the early 90s). People being stuck on windows definitely held and holds them back.

Thirdly, "doing more" wasn't really a priority when buying a CPU with more than 4 cores required a business account with the likes of Dell.

Fourthly, "cos that's my day job". I've been building software that

distributed across multiple servers for like 15-20 years now, back when the equivalent compute of an AMD 5900X cost around $30,000. That was before buzzwords like "big data" were a twinkle in their daddies eye and "consumer" software like hadoop were not available (April 1, 2006).

Edited September 25, 2022 by mSparks

[rka 916]

2 minutes ago, mSparks said:

Firstly they did, if you look inside the code of the C172 for example, you will see nothing in it's "after_physics" declaration, all the interaction is done via command buffers, and all their default systems like the FMC, the GXXXxs, the NDs (one of the biggest "under the hood" upgrades for XP12 so far is two independant NDs instead of one) dont consume time on the main thread.

Secondly, they did before windows even really developed native support for it (windows VC++ 2018), up until that point multithreading was very much an afterthought on windows (main reason Linux demolished windows in the server space is because Linux was a fully asynchronous operating system since its very first days in the early 90s). People being stuck on windows definitely held and holds them back.

Thirdly, "doing more" wasn't really a priority when buying a CPU with more than 4 cores required a business account with the likes of Dell.

Fourthly, "cos that's my day job". I've been building software that

distributed across multiple servers for like 10-15 years now, back when the equivalent compute of an AMD 5900X cost around $30,000. That was before buzzwords like "big data" were a twinkle in their daddies eye and "consumer" software like hadoop were not available (April 1, 2006).

Have you offered your help to LR? Looks like they could use it, no?