Comments on: The Guilty Parties (e.g. why 850 is slow for now) https:/2006/07/the-guilty-parties-e-g-why-850-is-slow-for-now/ Developer resources for the X-Plane flight simulator Tue, 01 Feb 2011 00:30:56 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.1 By: Benjamin Supnik https:/2006/07/the-guilty-parties-e-g-why-850-is-slow-for-now/#comment-1486 Sat, 29 Jul 2006 20:03:00 +0000 http://www.x-plane.com/dev_blog/?p=559#comment-1486 Kaminari,

I did some investigation regarding 830 vs 840…after 840 shipped it was brought to my attention that some users believed 840 to be slow. (I saw that because we did not receive ANY bug reports on this during the beta, which was frustrating. 850 beta feedback has been much better!!)

Anyway, after extensive testing I could find no indication of lowered sim efficiency vs. 832. We look at sim efficiency in every release and I don’t think we’ve had a step backward in the entire v8 run*. So I can only conclude that users are running 840 vs 832 with different settings in some subtle way.

It should be noted that we do not consider global scenery as slowing the sim down – we view it as raising the amount of work the sim does. You will have to run global scenery on a lower setting than the older scenery to get the same speed, but then you’ll still be getting more detail, even on lower settings.

*The only exception I know of is: cards that do not support the OpenGL “VBO” extension but do support display-list optimizations may be slower in newer releases, as we move to using VBOs as our primary OpenGL interface. But the only cards I know of with this problem are Intel integrated graphics chips, which can’t run 850 with any kind of speed anyway, and Matrox cards, which have poor OpenGL support.

*cheers*
Ben

]]> By: Ryusennin https:/2006/07/the-guilty-parties-e-g-why-850-is-slow-for-now/#comment-1487 Sat, 29 Jul 2006 01:33:00 +0000 http://www.x-plane.com/dev_blog/?p=559#comment-1487 Although the reflective water is a welcome feature (albeit not nearly as convincing as a real water shader), I can’t help but smile when I read “improved graphics”. Anyway, the big question I never found an answer for is, why is 8.40 so much slower than 8.30? The latter was almost the perfect XP8 in terms of performance. And I’m talking about a P4 2.7 GHz with a Radeon 9600 here. Then all of a sudden, and without any logical explanation, 8.40 comes out of the blue with half the framerate of 8.30. In my book, this is not optimization but regression. It’s rather sad that 8.40 is now used as a low-end benchmark for 8.50. Not even mentioning the constant frustration of hearing “the next release of X-Plane will require a new hardware upgrade”. I think the XP team doesn’t realize that this is the single main reason why so many talented aircraft and scenery designers have left the XP community during the last five years. This time, I’m really concerned that XP8 will be the last version for me too. Time will tell soon enough. Bah, just another bitter rant that will go down the drain…

]]> By: Bosse https:/2006/07/the-guilty-parties-e-g-why-850-is-slow-for-now/#comment-1488 Fri, 28 Jul 2006 17:06:00 +0000 http://www.x-plane.com/dev_blog/?p=559#comment-1488 I would appreciate if the release notes were a bit more detailed about settings, e.g. framerate versus “looks”. It’s not obvious what setting affects performance most.

-Bo

]]> By: Bosse https:/2006/07/the-guilty-parties-e-g-why-850-is-slow-for-now/#comment-1489 Fri, 28 Jul 2006 17:06:00 +0000 http://www.x-plane.com/dev_blog/?p=559#comment-1489 I would appreciate if the release notes were a bit more detailed about settings, e.g. framerate versus “looks”. It’s not obvious what setting affects performance most.

-Bo

]]>