Why does my Xplane 12 look so dreadful?

[Sims Smith 302]

On 5/13/2023 at 9:53 AM, mSparks said:

this may be a complete red herring, but I think it is worth mentioning just in case. 

Those having AA related issues try renaming the shadercache folder. (in Output)

and see if it makes a difference.

I am very reliably informed it doesn't, but the last time I did, the folder immediarely doubled in size, and both my performance and visuals (specifically in VR) improved noticeably afterwards.

Will deleting the folder achieve the same? It should force recreate the shader cache. 

[mSparks 2,086]

4 hours ago, Sims Smith said:

Will deleting the folder achieve the same? It should force recreate the shader cache. 

yes.

reason I say rename is if it does seem to work/do something you can rename the new folder, and set the old one back and see if the issues return.

 

[bogdansrb 230]

Quote

X-Plane of course has it's own issues, a significant portion of which have been traced back to the system that shuffles stuff around between disk, ram and vram aiui, particularly bad when combined with the CPU utilisation and file system bugs in windows (e.g. when windows just starts sending garbage when XP tries to read the disk instead of the actual file contents. )

X-Plane's major issue at this point is openGL. They should've gotten rid of it completely when they transitioned to vulkan. It's ridiculous how big of a difference you can get in FPS between aircraft and with different combinations of plugins and aircraft, just because of the OGL code that they run.

[jcomm 5,936]

12 minutes ago, bogdansrb said:

X-Plane's major issue at this point is openGL. They should've gotten rid of it completely when they transitioned to vulkan. It's ridiculous how big of a difference you can get in FPS between aircraft and with different combinations of plugins and aircraft, just because of the OGL code that they run.

I wasn't even aware opengl was still in use 🤔

[GoranM 3,764]

1 hour ago, bogdansrb said:

X-Plane's major issue at this point is openGL. They should've gotten rid of it completely when they transitioned to vulkan. It's ridiculous how big of a difference you can get in FPS between aircraft and with different combinations of plugins and aircraft, just because of the OGL code that they run.

X-Plane 12 doesn't use OpenGL.  At all.

[bogdansrb 230]

3 minutes ago, GoranM said:

X-Plane 12 doesn't use OpenGL.  At all.

Quote

While X-Plane can use OpenGL, Vulkan, or Metal drivers to render to a graphics card, plugin-drawing is supported only via OpenGL. OpenGL is not the fastest or most modern API, but it does provide a robust way to draw in 3-d without exposing complicated and error prone implementation details like memory management, resource barriers, or concurrency, making it an appropriate choice for custom user interface and custom aircraft glass displays.

 

[GoranM 3,764]

4 minutes ago, bogdansrb said:

 

I repeat, X-Plane 12 DOES NOT use OpenGL.  Laminar got rid of OpenGL for XP12 after the 2 years of it being developed in XP11.  You can easily see this for yourself in the settings.  There is no option to enable Vulkan or Metal, because OpenGL is gone.  It MAY be able to interpret OpenGL that is coded in 3rd party aircraft, it is not native to X-Plane 12.

Edited May 22, 2023 by GoranM

[bogdansrb 230]

12 minutes ago, GoranM said:

I repeat, X-Plane 12 DOES NOT use OpenGL.  Laminar got rid of OpenGL for XP12 after the 2 years of it being developed in XP11.  You can easily see this for yourself in the settings.  There is no option to enable Vulkan or Metal, because OpenGL is gone.  It MAY be able to interpret OpenGL that is coded in 3rd party aircraft, it is not native to X-Plane 12.

X-Plane 12 doesn't use OGL as the renderer, but the backend stuff in plugins and 3rd party aircraft is still OGL. Hence the reason for Zink. And x-plane is pretty much 3rd party aircraft and plugins.

Quote

Thus now with -Plane 12.04b3 on Windows and Linux, Zink is used for running the OpenGL support atop the native Vulkan hardware drivers that typically is in better shape. The X-Plane developers are also looking at potentially using Zink on macOS in the future too by going the MoltenVK route. If they can succeed in their macOS goal, they would have OpenGL atop Zink running atop MoltenVK that in turn is interacting with the Apple Metal driver.

Quote

Fast forward to the Vulkan and Metal port and we suddenly have an issue: Neither Vulkan nor Metal is OpenGL, but there are now hundreds of plugins out there that all assume X-Plane uses OpenGL and the OpenGL context is there. Killing OpenGL for plugins would mean countless plugins would stop working, requiring potentially lengthy update processes or maybe they’ll just never work at all again because the author lost interest in X-Plane or developing the plugin. This is how we ended up with the OpenGL Bridge in X-Plane 11.50: We create a real OpenGL context, share some memory from within Vulkan to that OpenGL context, then let plugins continue to draw how they used to do. X-Plane takes care of all of the heavy synchronization and resource creation rules under the hood and everyone is happy.

 

Edited May 22, 2023 by bogdansrb

[GoranM 3,764]

8 minutes ago, bogdansrb said:

X-Plane 12 doesn't use OGL as the renderer, but the backend stuff in plugins and 3rd party aircraft is still OGL. Hence the reason for Zink. And x-plane is pretty much 3rd party aircraft and plugins.

 

Yeah?  So it can interpret 3rd party add ons, that still use OGL.  That's on 3rd party devs to change in their add ons, should they choose to.  The fact LR accommodated 3rd party devs, is a good thing.  It still doesn't change the fact that X-Plane 12 doesn't use OGL, natively, as it's renderer.  Would you rather X-Plane 12 DOESN'T run add ons that use OGL through some kind of interpreter?

Bottom line, X-Plane 12 uses Metal and Vulkan as it's renderer.  

You said this...

2 hours ago, bogdansrb said:

They should've gotten rid of it completely when they transitioned to vulkan.

And they DID get rid of it.  

That's all that needs to be said.

Edited May 22, 2023 by GoranM

[The_Flying_Potato 25]

On 5/13/2023 at 9:03 AM, rondon9898 said:

https://pasteboard.co/zsLm80lH3H3E.png

https://pasteboard.co/C0KR4id5lgXz.png

https://pasteboard.co/a0bDGHALz8ZJ.png

https://pasteboard.co/PIbBjsaTacS7.png

Here are some screenshots. For some reason, the screenshots look quite a lot better than the actual image, which is much more jagged.

When you say VRAM problems - what could they be?

I'm afraid I don't know - where is that file? I'm familiar with the file structure in P3D and MSFS but not XPL

Sorry for the delay. scenery_packs.ini is in your <drive>:\X-Plane 12\Custom Scenery folder. It is the files that  is read when you load X-Plane that is used to determine the one-above-the-other order of the scenery files.

 

I'd forgotten I'd already responded!

 

Edited May 22, 2023 by The_Flying_Potato
Ooops.

[bogdansrb 230]

8 hours ago, GoranM said:

Yeah?  So it can interpret 3rd party add ons, that still use OGL.  That's on 3rd party devs to change in their add ons, should they choose to.  The fact LR accommodated 3rd party devs, is a good thing.  It still doesn't change the fact that X-Plane 12 doesn't use OGL, natively, as it's renderer.  Would you rather X-Plane 12 DOESN'T run add ons that use OGL through some kind of interpreter?

Bottom line, X-Plane 12 uses Metal and Vulkan as it's renderer.  

You said this...

And they DID get rid of it.  

That's all that needs to be said.

Do you actually read before posting? I even bolded the text for you.

[mSparks 2,086]

20 minutes ago, bogdansrb said:

Do you actually read before posting? I even bolded the text for you.

that was before zink, by 3rd parties.

Zink enables 3rd parties to switch to vulkan without rewriting any of their code - the whole point of everything you bolded.

see here:

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/02/zink-driver-for-opengl-over-vulkan-gets-a-10x-performance-boost-for-doom-2016/

Edited May 22, 2023 by mSparks

[bogdansrb 230]

1 hour ago, mSparks said:

that was before zink, by 3rd parties.

Zink enables 3rd parties to switch to vulkan without rewriting any of their code - the whole point of everything you bolded.

see here:

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/02/zink-driver-for-opengl-over-vulkan-gets-a-10x-performance-boost-for-doom-2016/

Yes. But it's still hit and miss, some planes didn't even work with zink when it was released, others I suspect will need some optimizations.

[mSparks 2,086]

4 hours ago, bogdansrb said:

Yes. But it's still hit and miss, some planes didn't even work with zink when it was released, others I suspect will need some optimizations.

can you give an example?

Im using terrain radar and avitab in the 744 in VR and its absolutely glorious already, even if I am still super excited and a little bit impatient to get my hands on a working openXR build.

[GoranM 3,764]

8 hours ago, bogdansrb said:

Do you actually read before posting? I even bolded the text for you.

Always.  You said this...

19 hours ago, bogdansrb said:

X-Plane's major issue at this point is openGL. They should've gotten rid of it completely when they transitioned to vulkan.

And I posted this...

18 hours ago, GoranM said:

X-Plane 12 doesn't use OpenGL.  At all.

Any further ambiguous details you left out in your initial post, were addressed in following posts.