http://xplanescenery.blogspot.com/2007/04/cpu-or-gpu.html

A GPU upgrade would only be required if you want to run the sim and you’re below min system requirements.

just a hardware guide question.

Under what circumstances(in general) is a graphics card upgrade required ? What rendering elements are CPU or GPU intensive ?

1. Please DO NOT report bugs on this blog!!!!!! I cannot process bugs reliably here. Go to the x-plane contact page and use the bug report form.

2. 8 GB of RAM won’t help. X-Plane is limited to 3 GB of RAM by the OS (even a 64-bit one) because it is a 32-bit app. Conceivably someday video drivers could use extra RAM but I suspect that for a while, 4 GB will be the most it pays to have (unless you are running another big app with x-plane).

3. We aren’t quite ready to solicit hardware-performance infor yet, but we will be shortly. I’ll post here or to the news group when we need specific actions – thanks for the offer.

http://x-plane.ukisama.org/files/screenshot_14_146.jpg
http://x-plane.ukisama.org/files/screenshot_13_975.jpg

You should be able to see more of the right part of the runway if you are sitting on the right part of the cockpit.

Thanks!

anything somebody can do to help you with that? Deliver performance reports or what?

1. Make the forests look like forests.

Instead of throwing trees over the whole place, try to make some sort of engine that places trees in “formations” and “groups” so that it looks like in reality where trees grow in certain areas. This makes the sim look so real. Just look at msfx. So we need those woods to be more “patchy”, where trees are then placed on earth surface that HAS THE COLOR of green. A “tree-engine” like this would make trees impossible to grow on vegetable (yellow) soil and therefor make the sim look more real to life.

2. Even more high-res groundtexture. With objects being the latest trend, flight simulators
‘ are looking so much like the real thing. The objects are already pretty highres but when you fly low or semi-low you realize the ground will have to be more highres for the trees to really “blend in”. Otherwise it just looks like ehum, objects on a blurred flat lowres image. Highres textures with different sorts of ground and then placing trees on the green areas only would make a huge difference!

Anyway, thanks for your work. I have just seen some new screens of xp9 and I am thinking of getting a copy in the near future when bugs and that stuff is wiped out.

Cheers Ben!

jonhay: you are totally right – the FX5200 should not be used with shaders. We will be providing settings to let you use the 5200 without shaders in a future beta update.

anon: there is a “dependency” in the rendering system when some of those advanced features are used…an image must be drawn and then used relatively soon after. So when I see such a huge performance gap, I wonder if the problem is that the machine is waiting for completion of those images before it can proceed.

One of the reasons xp9 is beta right now is that we don’t have a lot of video cards within the company (because there aren’t that many of us). So we expect to see a lot of variation based on hardware. As we learn about gotchas like this in the hardware, hopefully we can optimize at least some of them.

placed at EDHR, RW33 I get

about 200 FPS with both turned off
about 42 FPS with Fog
about 65 FPS with water
about 26 FPS with boot on

A drop from 200 to 26 – can this be true? There are hopefully optimisations coming in this area. Me wonders how you guys do test this stuff (on what hardware …) 😉