Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Development Update - Live

[IanHarrison]

 "Now one can appreciate why I have a bad taste in my mouth!"

It's called progress, nothing to get upset about.

You can always go back to driving a horse and cart if you prefer.

[Scottoest]

On 7/4/2024 at 7:42 PM, scotchegg said:

I'm sure he's not a bad egg, and I'm certainly not advocating for any changes as I think he's hardly saying anything provocative enough to need restriction.

OTOH he does say it with enough frequency in enough threads / forums to make me wonder if it's become a core part of his psychology and world view. For example, if he goes into a greasy spoon (British version of diner), orders a fried egg sandwich, and is asked 'You want tea or coffee with that, luv?', is he responding 'Tea please. After all, Microsoft Flight Simulator does not, and likely never will, suit my needs'....?

Haha!

I don't really have any big issue with Ray, though I've absolutely noticed how often he likes to make sure people know he has no intention of using MSFS lol. 

Any MSFS talk in P3D threads also tends to get shut down immediately as 'off-topic', though they'll happily indulge other tangents in threads.  However that particular tendency extends beyond Ray.

[rdyer]

On the subject of MSFS 2024 and ray tracing take a look at this video of Asobo's A Plgue Tale Requiem which I believe uses the same engine for MSFS 2020 and its updated 2024.  You can see the improved Ray Tracing Shadows but also the GPU impact in FPS whcih is significant, on a RTX  2060 Super.

 

 

 

[Tuskin38]

Jorg said performance should be roughly the same as 2020, so it's possible they've found a better raytracing model.

2024 also has less detail than that game.

Edited July 7 by Tuskin38

[Krakin]

It is also an old game

[Sethos]

1 hour ago, rdyer said:

On the subject of MSFS 2024 and ray tracing take a look at this video of Asobo's A Plgue Tale Requiem which I believe uses the same engine for MSFS 2020 and its updated 2024.  You can see the improved Ray Tracing Shadows but also the GPU impact in FPS whcih is significant, on a RTX  2060 Super.

You can't compare those. Ray tracing =/= RTX implementation. You can selectively choose you ray trace certain elements in an engine for an improved looks, which in a limited scope might be a small performance hit. To my knowledge, it's only for cockpit shadows. A full-on RTX implementation, which is an Nvidia feature, is a completely different ballgame and usually encompasses a lot more elements and is very demanding. 

[Noel]

On 7/5/2024 at 11:07 PM, IanHarrison said:

 "Now one can appreciate why I have a bad taste in my mouth!"

It's called progress, nothing to get upset about.

You can always go back to driving a horse and cart if you prefer.

Huh?  The bad taste was from being sucked into paying $200 a pop x3 by taking their EULA literally, which they summarily completely changed later.

[F737MAX]

46 minutes ago, Noel said:

Huh?  The bad taste was from being sucked into paying $200 a pop x3 by taking their EULA literally, which they summarily completely changed later.

Prepar3D is derived from Microsoft ESP (Enterprise Simulator Platform).

There was a reason why LM couldn't offer a home or entertainment version of the P3D sim until MSFS turned up on the scene.

LM failing to abide by the wording of the licencing agreement would have seen MS' legal team in a strong position to win a breach of contract court case.

[ca_metal]

12 hours ago, rdyer said:

On the subject of MSFS 2024 and ray tracing take a look at this video of Asobo's A Plgue Tale Requiem which I believe uses the same engine for MSFS 2020 and its updated 2024.  You can see the improved Ray Tracing Shadows but also the GPU impact in FPS whcih is significant, on a RTX  2060 Super.

MSFS doesn't have the same engine A Plague Tale has. The MSFS engine base was the FTech engine (the one used on the Forza franchise, a racing franchise). But I'd argue that it is so tuned/tweaked now that we should consider a new engine.

 

Quote

Then, the company's CEO shared the main technical challenges to successfully overcome and complete the Microsoft Flight Simulator, having to master the FTech Engine, graphics engine of the Forza franchise, used in Flight Simulator, and Azure, provided by the Microsoft Cloud.

"It is not easy to answer this question. I would say that the first difficulty was to successfully deport 99.9% of the game data to the cloud with Microsoft Azure technology, which allows us to model the entire planet at a high level detailing. "

"Then, we had the great support of Turn 10 during all the years of development of the simulator to learn all the physics, photo-realism, density and base structure of the FTech Engine, which in the version we used, was slightly modified to support the large load of data. "

"In short, the visual rendering is calculated on the player's Windows 10, but all the 3D Textures and Data used come from the FTech Engine in a mix with Azure."

Source: Asobo Studio says it will maintain content support and updates on Microsoft Flight Simulator for 10 years (madinfinite.com)

My point is, we will need to wait and see the impact of using ray tracing. If they say the performance is the same, we will need to wait and see. We don't even know if they are considering Ray Tracing when they say "same performance".

[Tuskin38]

11 minutes ago, ca_metal said:

If they say the performance is the same, we will need to wait and see.

He also said he doesn't expect the system requirements to change either.

[ca_metal]

2 minutes ago, Tuskin38 said:

He also said he doesn't expect the system requirements to change either.

Yeah, he said, but the minimum requirement isn't supposed to run Ray Tracing, the GTX 970 doesn't even have the ability to run Ray Tracing. So, about Ray Tracing, we should wait and see how it performs. 

My opinion: it will run fine if you have at least a RTX 3000 series. 

[Tuskin38]

6 minutes ago, ca_metal said:

My opinion: it will run fine if you have at least a RTX 3000 series. 

It's probably a graphics card agonistic version of raytracing, since the X-Boxes do not use Nvidia cards, and I doubt they'd want to alienate AMD users.

Edited July 7 by Tuskin38

[ca_metal]

6 minutes ago, Tuskin38 said:

It's probably a graphics card agonistic version of raytracing, since the X-Boxes do not use Nvidia cards, and I doubt they'd want to alienate AMD users.

I don't think they will, but the users need a capable card, not necessarily having dedicated cores (Nvidia RT cores), but it needs to have the needed brute force to run Ray Tracing. For AMD gpus, I think you need to have at least a RX6000. It doesn't mean you won't be able to turn it on if you have anything bellow that, but it's possible the performance will be really bad.

Edited July 7 by ca_metal

[Inu]

1 hour ago, ca_metal said:

I don't think they will, but the users need a capable card, not necessarily having dedicated cores (Nvidia RT cores), but it needs to have the needed brute force to run Ray Tracing. For AMD gpus, I think you need to have at least a RX6000. It doesn't mean you won't be able to turn it on if you have anything bellow that, but it's possible the performance will be really bad.

This + ray tracing can work in parallel to the normal lighting pipeline.

So it really depends on what is getting ray traced in the scene & the desired effect.

If they try to ray trace (not the same as ray marching) the entire atmosphere + every object in the scene for every effect (shadows, reflections, global illumination etc...), then performance will probably suffer, ray tracing the entire scene has really bad performance compared to a rasterizer engine even today.

OTOH ray tracing cockpit interiors only for example, seems reasonable, interior scenes is where this tech shines mostly anyway.

BTW, did sobo say anything about the real (imo) modern game changing feature in the RTX series? AKA mesh shaders?

Edited July 7 by Inu

[ca_metal]

7 minutes ago, Inu said:

This + ray tracing can work in parallel to the normal lighting pipeline.

So it really depends on what is getting ray traced in the scene & the desired effect.

If they try to ray trace (not the same as ray marching) the entire atmosphere + every object in the scene for every effect (shadows, reflection, global illumination etc...), theb performance will probably suffer, ray tracing the entire scene has really bad performance compared to a rasterizer engine even today.

OTOH ray tracing cockpit interiors only for example, seems reasonable, interior scenes is where this tech shines mostly anyway.

BTW, did sobo say anything about the real (imo) modern game changing feature in the RTX series? AKA mesh shaders?

I don't think they've said the ray tracing (shadows) is limited to cockpits. I don't even know if they can limit ray tracing like that (ray tracing inside the cockpit, but turn the effect off for the outside scenery). 

About game changing features in the RTX series, I think the RTX IO would be more beneficial than mesh shaders. And still, not a word about that.