1 hour ago, Bjoern said:

niche application

Removing GL's guts while retaining the relative ease of use of the function libraries? Maybe niche for now. The current rage is being able to run old games on new systems. That frequently requires emulators etc. It may not have high visibility now, but I don't see it as merely a fun experiment. Might take a few more years to show up on most folks' radars though.

XP's extensibility is a great proving ground for this. Games don't offer the same versatility, so I agree, they have no need for this. They don't care about giving 3rd parties such deep access and SDK breadth. Zink seems to be a great (and still somewhat experimental) way to satisfy both using a modern API while not slapping neophyte 3rd parties up the head with memory management demands, etc.

Edited August 21, 20232 yr by blingthinger

On 8/20/2023 at 12:03 PM, Mike_CFII_MEL said:

Hi,

I can attest to this! I have the ability to run MS2020 utilizing SEVEN screen. Three at 2K for my exterior visuals and four at 1366x768, while running MS2020 on the ultra setting. I have a difficult time running one computer with one monitor while using XP12. I get flickers and stutters.

When I run XP12, I have to run FIVE computers. One for each visual display, one for glass screens and one as the server and still have to deal with flickers.

When I run MS2020, I run two computers and the second computer only runs the two CDU screens.

Prior to LR few beta releases my setup ran like BUTTER! they did something on their end. That's the only reason I looked into MS2020, I couldn't get rid of the stutters/flickers.

My setup: Gigabyte X670E motherboard, Asus 4090 TUF video board, Samsung 2TB NVME 990 Pro, 64GB DDR5 @ 60000mhz.

If 2020 can run that smooth even while pulling data from the internet, XP12 should run like a polished telescope lens (that smooth) running one computer and one monitor.

Same here,

I flew out of Tampa (today using badweather) where the stormy clouds rendering from the gulf of Mexico did affect the fps a lot

So I downgraded the rendering but happy at 2x

I Believe the clouds are playing a bigger(better) role all across the area rendered ,not just the visualization

Me think

 

On 8/21/2023 at 8:30 PM, blingthinger said:

Removing GL's guts while retaining the relative ease of use of the function libraries? Maybe niche for now. The current rage is being able to run old games on new systems. That frequently requires emulators etc. It may not have high visibility now, but I don't see it as merely a fun experiment. Might take a few more years to show up on most folks' radars though.

XP's extensibility is a great proving ground for this. Games don't offer the same versatility, so I agree, they have no need for this. They don't care about giving 3rd parties such deep access and SDK breadth. Zink seems to be a great (and still somewhat experimental) way to satisfy both using a modern API while not slapping neophyte 3rd parties up the head with memory management demands, etc.

Wrapping rendering API calls itself isn't quite niche (see the well working DXVK on Linux, which enables playing DirectX games), but X-Plane has a slightly different approach in that the rendering engine has to provide two contexts, one for Vulkan, one for OpenGL, at the same time. This is what caused all the headaches with plugins since XP 11.50 and that's what's "niche" about it.

"Not caring about deep access" puts it a bit negatively. In, say, 95% of cases, the developers and publishers simply didn't consider their product to become a classic that is still being actively played, modded and fixed by volunteers ten or twenty years later.

I think one of the main motivation for Zink is some underlying fear that OpenGL will be deprecated by driver and OS developers for good one day, taking with it the comparatively easy to handle API calls for developers (Vulkan is a biut of a nightmare to work on for what I know).

But we'll see. Zink may get its big break once it's as fast as the application's native OpenGL API.

21 minutes ago, Bjoern said:

some underlying fear that OpenGL

It was added to xplane because of the poor AMD OGL drivers, which has being an issue for years. Its probably far easier to deal with zink than 2 different drivers, add Intel GPU, which is currently a real issue, and than there is another headache

4 hours ago, Bjoern said:

Vulkan is a biut of a nightmare

~1000 lines for the most common 'hello triangle' example? Though a lot of that is simply error checking and a dose of overly verbose structures etc., it's a very different monster. Plus you don't want 3rd parties mucking around in the memory allocation. Blurry textures has been a big enough beast to tame without their 'help'.

GL will die eventually, but it will take a few decades. I have yet to conjure up a negative to this scenario (other than the current teething pains) and obviously Valve thinks the same. Otherwise Mike B. wouldn't be blogging about Zink so often.

Sidney's the one who pushed Zink onto windows and nobody else really has this use case that I've seen. That says more about the capability reach of XP than anything. It's neither positive nor negative to describe games as having shallow access. Games simply don't permit or need to permit 3rd parties the level of drawing access that XP provides. Their ecosystems are far more fixed and regimented. For most users, replacing textures or using reshade is as far as they'll ever need to go. XP opens more doors than that.

9 hours ago, mjrhealth said:

It was added to xplane because of the poor AMD OGL drivers

 

4 hours ago, blingthinger said:

GL will die eventually

The benefits of zink are multifaceted. Its not just AMDs sketchy drivers or maintaining long term support for old code. Although they are both very good reasons for them adopting it.

MacOS only supports openGL version 2.1 in plugins for example (maybe 2.4, smth very low) - this is why skyscapes couldnt be written for XP11, zink gives plugin authors the latest and greatest version of opengl on mac.

Vulkan needs more code just to get in a position to draw something than most plugins have code, plus all the different hardware related complexities.

Zink gives authors a common graphics API to work from for all platforms where LR can be responsible for fixing hardware support and testing. (So plugin authors that dont have a windows or mac device can still write quality plugins for all platforms)

There is probably a few more, but it is as much about extending the capabilities available to plugin authors as it is about keeping old ones going.

 

11 hours ago, mjrhealth said:

It was added to xplane because of the poor AMD OGL drivers, which has being an issue for years.

That's another factor, but not the factor. The prime one was lack of proper VLK-OGL bridging in any AMD driver (proprietary or open source).

Edited August 23, 20232 yr by Bjoern

Zink uncovers a bug in NV drivers. Not bad, Sid. Not bad.

Sidney comment