Comments on: This One Goes to 11

By: Benjamin Supnik

Benjamin Supnik — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 09:19:00 +0000

Photosmith - visibility is limited by two things:

1. The number of DSF tiles loaded (six right now) - basically if the visibility is too high with too few tiles, you see off the edge. We have definitely discussed loading 12 tiles, something would be possible on some machines. Right now vis tends to be a physical RAM limit but is rapidly becoming an address space limit.

Bear in mind that before v8, load time pauses were proportional to tile count, so loading a 4x3 (instead of 3x2) area would really be slow.

Of course, there are limits ... even with 4x3 we would still start to have issues beyond 100 km of DSF, and that's not _that_ much distance.

2. Framerate goes down with more DSF scenery, so there's a real performance issues. But this really isn't a "design limit".

Bear in mind that the real design limit is that we have to use DSFs...by using the "earth orbit textures" we can get a lot more visibility....but they just don't blend well with the DSFs...one of the open questions is: if we blend from DSF to earth orbit after 4x3 DSFs, will that transition be less noticeable.

It may be that we need to go to 4x3 DSFs for those with the RAM, and somehow put some mountains and other "large-scale" features into the earth-orbit textures.

By: Photosmith

Photosmith — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 22:35:00 +0000

You describe visibility as a “design limit”. Just curious, but what is the limit defined by? Is it the video card’s VRAM, or the total system RAM? Is there any chance you will kick the maximum higher than 25 miles at some point so people who have high RAM (either the 1GB VRAM cards, or systems with 4GB system ram for example) can fully use that capability?

By: stefano

stefano — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 18:26:00 +0000

I am still hoping to see an improvement of the framerate during gameplay when using a multicore/multiprocessor machine… :o| (or even a cluster! ;o))
Something using fixed multiple threads, or automatic ones like the ones of OpenMP, assigned to different cores… . But I understand the problem of converting the code into an intelligent “multithingy”. But it will soon or later happen, or not? In the end, that’s were the market is going now with all these double, quad, etc cores popping up.

By: Steven Haigh

Steven Haigh — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 21:51:00 +0000

Interesting you should say that. I just purchase a 2.66Ghz Mac Pro with 2Gb RAM and an X1900. What I can tell you is that Xplane rocks. You can crank up the settings most of the way, however you will get some times where performance grinds to 3-4fps, however most of the time, it'll be at least 30fps. It looks great though :)

I still run Xplane at 1024x768, as I find a lot of panels etc of third party aircraft just don't scale well to higher resolutions.

Grab one, you won't be disappointed :)

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 06:11:00 +0000

Kudos to you Ben for this post!
I couldn't agree more that you need to stay ahead of the curve!
While it may be a little frustrating for users of older machines to have to 'turn down' the complexity rigt off the bat, I think most would agree that, if they suddenly had the newest greatest machine, they'd want X-Plane to show them a little something extra that only that class of computer can handle.
I say this somewhat selfishly as I'm looking to buy a new Mac Pro with the Radeon X1900 (or whatever comes out in January). I know that I would also be disappointed if all I got was the same visual effects as my MacBookPro, but just more fps...
The jump from PowerBook to MacBookPro was spectacular; I really appreciate that everyone gets something with X-Plane, and that X-Plane simply tries to make full use of all resources available, regardless of the CPU/GPU's generation!

Thank you for an amazing product,
Peter

By: Schimmi

Schimmi — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 07:07:00 +0000

What I wonder in X-Plane and FS2k4 as well is, why there is no better automatic regulation which automatically set object density, object quality and so on based on the current frame rate. So e.g. if I am in clear sky condition a lot of things are shown. When a rain conditions come up or clouds appear which decrease framerate considerable scenery detail should go down to keep proper framerate. I only know from FS2k4 that they somehow reduced autogen stuff based on framerate, but still things like object details of an airports are always constant.