Requesting APPLE's support for FLYII

[Guest jrewing]

Hi John, et al.;I wrote to Apple last fall and asked them to address the problems wth OpenGL and 2D rendering, based on a comment made by Rich about the slowness of rendering the instruments and gauges in 2D.Like Franklin, I received a form letter response with no detail or substance.One suggestion I have is to contact either MacNN or Macintouch about this problem. If they post these concerns and complaints on their web sites, it will get the attention of a lot of Mac users and may just get Apple to sit up and take notice.Another suggestion is that if anyone is a registered Mac developer, they may have access to feedback channels that we lowly customers are not privy to.My $0.02,John

[Mac_Paint 35]

One would think that SOMEONE at Apple uses Fly! II in their leisure time. Com' on you Apple employee, lend a hand. Gives us a little help here, please.Pete

[Guest]

It's a long shot, guys. Everyone I know who is part of the OpenGL forum does not believe it is worthwhile to add direct frame buffer access as a GL extension. The reason is two-fold, I believe:(1) Much of the PC/Mac OpenGL driver advancements in recent years really have been driven by id's Carmack, since he outright refuses to use "proprietary" systems. Since Quake is a benchmark product, driver makers have been catering their GL drivers to run Quake well so their performance numbers look well, regardless if they crater in other apps. OpenGL is really geared towards 3D-only applications.(2) Probably very soon you will see video cards where the frame buffer is not actually laid out in a logical manner. Many consoles already do this, by "swizzling" the pixels into blocks for quicker access. If we did get a GL extension today, I could fix problems on todays hardware, but it would probably break in the future on a swizzled frame buffer. Apple (or nVidia) may be unwilling to even consider a solution that is so short term.I'm looking at another alternative as well, which is rendering the entire cockpit offscreen in main memory, then slicing it into textures and drawing it in 3D. But, this will require constant texture swaps to the video card, which may in the end cause a worse frame rate hit even though the actual drawing will be much, much faster.Rich

[Guest]

Rich... we certainly appreciate your efforts to on your own personal time make Fly! II more useable for us Mac folks. The OpenGL issue doesn't sound very promising for the future of Fly! for the Mac. I hope this doesn't deter us from at least getting it patched up to what the PC guys have now. That might hold us over for awhile until the next version of Fly!... if there is one. Again, thanks for your effort!!! Rich@LEWBeige G3 233 MHz DT rev.1 G4 400 MHz NewerTech upgrade OS 9.2.2 384 MB RAM ATI Radeon Mac (PCI) Thrustmaster FCS/WCS

[Guest jrewing]

Hey Rich,I don't know much at all about OpenGL or programming graphics applications, but ...If 2D rendering is so slow, why aren't both PCs and Macs equally affected? Why do the Macs have such pathetic frame rates when compared to PC?John

[Fall_guy 1]

Hi Rich,Thanks for the explanation regarding the Open GL issue....I really do appreciate your time. Bottom line......Its becoming clear that there does'nt appear to be much point in pursuing Apple as regards changes to their OpenGL. Therefore in your professional opinion is there anything you think we could take up with Apple, which may instigate change and improvement to the existing FlyII performance.If for example many of us complained directly to Apple regarding the performance issue of FlyII, is there something Apple could actually do...... to help performance issues, or are they likely to hold TRI responsible.Conclusion: Is there anything, we could ask Apple to correct or help with, which will go someway to making FlyII more playable.Thanks again Rich for your dedication and devotion.John and all other Mac users concerned

[Guest]

John,For now, I'll leave it at this: somebody at Apple is reading this thread, because we were contacted today at the office. I don't know if anything will come of it, but we'll see who gets involved to see if we can brainstorm some ideas with them.Rich

[Guest]

John,There are a few reasons. First, many higher end PC's today are running 266Mhz motherboards with 266DDR RAM. Even the dual PowerPC G4 machines only run 133Mhz with PC133 SDRAM, so data paths across the bus can be affected. Second, higher end video cards on the PC currently support AGP 4X for faster texture uploading from system memory. I know the dual G4 says it has AGP 4X; I'm not sure about other Apple models (I know the iMac only has 2X). But, the overwhelming reason probably boils down to drivers. Sometimes on the PC you'll see nVidia release a driver update, and framerates will almost double. Obviously the hardware was not the issue, simply a refinement found in the software. But, on the PC you might have a whole team of folks constantly working on drivers.Many years ago when I was working with ATI (through Apple) on some Mac related video issues, there seemed to be only one guy at ATI that maintained their drivers for the Mac. This poor guy had the weight of the world on him, and everyone was relying on him to pull miracles out of his hat to improve framerates. Whether this still exists or not, I don't know, but I would expect there are probably fewer people maintaining Apple's OpenGL than their PC counterparts. Also, you'll notice we no longer support OpenGL on the PC (as we did with Fly! 2K), simply because DirectX has reached the point of maturity that it generally offers us the better frame rate vs. features we need for Fly!, particularly in the areas of direct frame buffer access. I pointed it out earlier, but it is worth repeating: using MMX, in many cases I can blit up to 4 pixels to the frame buffer in a single instruction. On the Mac with OpenGL, I have to make a function call to set each pixel. Each function call has the overhead of many individual PowerPC instructions, then the actual pixel setting operation. I may get a 6:1 or 8:1 blit ration of PC over Mac simply because of the bottleneck imposed by using SetPixel.The overall motherboard, video, and processor design and equipment of the Mac is not really a problem. Particularly in the CPU department (where we are very floating point dependent), the PowerPC absolutely kicks butt. And now that some configurations are coming with "modern" cards like the GeForce 3 & 4, the video subsystem is not an issue. But, the middleware concerns me, and in many ways the RAVE support under OS 8/9 was a better system for what Fly! was designed for.Rich

[Guest jrewing]

Hey Rich,Thanks for the explanation! It's at least encouraging that someone at Apple appears to be paying attention. Maybe there isn't much they can do, but the absolute worst is just being ignored! ;-)Again, I appreciate your efforts and patience.JR (there are too many Johns in this thread!)

[elodie 0]

>Sometimes on the PC you'll >see nVidia release a driver update, and framerates will >almost double. Hi Rich,Just posted a thread : "New NVIDIA Driver" on this Mac forum.Unfortunately, the framerates are far from being doubled

[Guest ftessler]

Rich,Well, I find that encouraging. Thanks for keeping us posted.-Franklin------------------------------Franklin TesslerG4/500Fly! for Mac Forum Co-moderator

[Fall_guy 1]

Cheers Rich,Thanks for keeping us all informed.JohnDC-10 Project

[Guest]

Unfortunately what Rich says about Apple's hardware is precisely why I have finally done something I had swore to never do, Buy a PC. ( I know, I know) x(Apple says that they want to be a gaming platform but unless you play "Quake", gaming on the Mac is years behind the PC market. The sad part is that Apple finally has the Processors to kick everyones butt but the underlying architecture of my 133 system bus, 2X AGP and Bad Video Drivers keep the performance bottle up. I have owned a Mac since the day I started using computers and from the IIci through my current G4, I watched Apple refuse to take the lead, or even come up to standard on things like, System bus speed, AGP and Video Card memory and speed (not necessarily Apples fault). The new Imac being another fine example with a Geforce 2mx budget card. I will continue my G4 for everything but gaming as I am still convinced that it is better OS to use, but I enjoy Gaming and especially Flight Simming and I simply don't want to wait another couple of years to get the performance from the G4 or G5 to run FLY II several years from now when FLY 3 is out. I just now with my G4/400 and ATI Radeon 32meg card have a system of handling FLY2K! with reasonable performance. If someone at Apple is reading this thread, I sincerely hope that they take it seriously or I think many others who enjoy simming as much as I do, and I know many of you do, may end up doing the same thing next time you want to upgrade. Perhap the new G4 line-up with the Geforce 4 Ti's will finally do the trick but for what it will cost me to upgrade my card, I built my own windoze gaming machine. Sorry AppleRegardsPaul:-coolPaul GollnickG4/400 Radeon OS9.2.2

[Guest nycflyer]

I too, am putting together a PC just for Fly. I never had bought a PC in my life. The last time I was using a PC was doing PASCAL programming under DOS 15 years ago!I'm not going to invest any more in my G4, it's fine as is for everything else and no amount of upgrading will match the Fly! performance on a PC unfortunately. -----------------------Scott CannizzaroKTEBG4/400 - Radeon32 - 9.22

[Guest]

Hey PaulI have a G4/400 too (with 1GB RAM) and I'm waiting for the ATI 8500 ...Just in case that there will be no improvement on the Mac side: How much do you invest into the Windoze thing to get good gaiming results?Max