We Spent That Efficiency (And Other Caveats)

52 comments on “We Spent That Efficiency (And Other Caveats)”

1. After reading all of these posts about graphics, I hope you all have managed to devote 10% of that amount of time on things like better aircraft system simulation.

   1. Agreed, and harder continued focus on cpu gpu efficiency so users don’t get screwed out of their current settings and satisfaction of appealing level of graphics due to so many new mega changes. forcing them to see nice aircraft/ aircraft systems but be the only plane or 3 buildings despite system being nice set up.

2. as in other posts, would cpu power help alleviate if gpu is not 16 lane or a mega beast card?

3. I really hope xplane is not becoming a sim for only the best high end machines in order to run with nice detail and appealing scenery etc. It seems like the power of xp and all its cpu gpu hunger is always ahead of machines and competing with users. Now the threat of having a nice machine not being able to meet nice graphics settings due to v-10s power. Austin is right, we do not have 20 core machines, many users will just be upgrading and wanting to fly the same if not better detail than now. No point to make a way better working appealing graphic sim if then giving the feeling to people that they need always the top of the top. Call of Duty, racing games etc.. always get nicer looking and are better each edition, without the worry of sopping your hardware. To buy cod mwf 3 or battlefield coming out soon and running it on what I and others have now is a no brainer, no worry(* if the current titles run great) , so should the same for xp 10. As always, more is better and welcomed in terms of hardware offerings, but it is no possible to continuously be in this buy sell upgrade competition wit games. There should be no worry or reason that v-10 will run with less appealing features on the same machine or better. Even run faster than v9* with scenery turned down resulting in grass fields- who want’s to fly in grass fields and turn settings down just to get higher frame rate?? No body does, NYC being grass is not cool. Current modern DX11 , high memory cards, core i processors let alone awesome quad for laptop and desktop should without question run xp great. PCIe 16x, sure for the ideal perfect world, 8x great, some with 4x, people save comps for years and expect to use games. Sure hope XP gets done in time and not result in more delays or even a sim when installed forces us to revert back to 9 on a nice and great set up due to a beast of software eating away at everything. It’s like awesome fast dragster racers or nascar, but you can’t drive in on your block. So the same would suck to be true if xp 10 becomes as cool as it sounds and looks, but then can’t even run it without turning scenery way down, even lower than v9 on the same machine, or the sky going gray with low frame warning going off anyway. The key for all us users is to adopt v-10 asap upon release, stay loyal to LR /XP sim and get a Better experience , or at the very least run in similar settings ( meaning buildings, anti aliasing, etc in v9, to having buildings, scenery and smoothness in v-10 as well. NOT worse. Always feels like you must you must you must get 16x lane, a top of the line $$ gpu, cpu, upgrade comp to run xp. I am happy with how v-9 runs on current, and expect no less if not better in v-10.

   1. Not a rant or mad , just nervous and will be very disappointed if it comes true that many users and I would not be able to use the new sim your all working so hard on.

   2. I guess I won’t be able to run X-Plane 10 at high rendering settings or even mid settings! BUT I really appreciate how cities will be drawn in XP10.
      I’m actually someone who would rather fly above nothing than grass and field textures, than above these city textures! I totally agree with Austin, they don’t look good. To me they could never, even improved versions of them.

   3. Why do you hope that? I just hope X-Plane 10 is _efficient_. Big difference!

      I fully respect that not everybody is willing or able to spend a lot of money for hardware, but in 12 or maybe 18 month from now, you can buy todays highend GPU second hand for little money….

      X-Plane is not a game you play for two weeks, most likely you will use it for several years. Hence it is more than ok that it doesn’t target todays lowend hardware!

      Nobody stops you from sticking to X-Plane 9 for the next 18 month, if you cant afford the required hardware today. Most likely AMD/nVidia will have released two further generations of GPUs by then!

4. Graphics is one of the important aspects for new users.

   Are you guys complaining about PCI-16x? The Graphics card doesn’t just do graphics, though but not in this case, I think. And if simulation is the most important thing, you would have to get a new system anyway, because the processor often does all the job on that. Intel’s Core i7 is probably 100 times faster than one’s processor stuck with an AGP or older than a PCI-16x card. One could easily get a whole gaming PC for under USD 1.000 these days. Maybe even 600. I still see that that is money, but I heavily recommend upgrading/ changing the whole system to get better physics, less lag, etc. X-Plane has lost against FSX in physics. X-Plane would easily win if the hardware would let the potential of the calculation heavy way of simulation X-Plane has.

   1. i have a core i7 quad core 2.3ghz

5. Technology marches on. So does X-Plane. If you have a system that runs one version well, expect that the next version will take advantage of newer technology and will require a better system to run it. If it did not, that’s when you’d be getting “screwed.” So your current settings are not a measure of what you will see when the next whole number increment is released. This is true of any major software application.

   I’m planning on a new system next year for XP10. I’ve been planning that all along. That’s part of the nature of the beast, if I want to get the most bang out of my $30 piece of software. 😉

   1. We’re also not being particularly aggressive in culling old hw.

      We’re dropping DX 8.1 GPUs. That means your GeForce 4 MX from Feb 2002 is now officially obsolete. We’re keeping DX9 support – most other new titlesare more aggressive and set the minimum at DX10. No one here who has posted has admitted to having a pre-DX10 GPU even!

      So yes…we’re bringing up the minimum, but it’s pretty far behind what most users would consider ever using.

      1. And that’s the beauty of X-Plane philosophy, Ben. It always seemed to me that in the past, when the latest and greatest flight sim came out, the best one could hope for is the minimal settings to get the sim to run. I well remember the slideshow that I got the first time I loaded up FS2004. What a joke. X-Plane is far more forgiving, and I think that’s the approach more likely to win in the long run. I *want* to need a new computer, though. Because I know that when I get that system, the world around me will be just that much more real. That’s what makes X-Plane stand above the rest, now, or in the past. The future…well, we’ll know this Christmas!!

      2. No one here admitted he has a pre-DX10 GPU? I was the first to admit that! 🙂 You remember, I asked if my GeForce 7800 GTX can cope with XP10.

         Waiting to see how XP10 will run on my PC…

         1. Ah – fair enough, I missed that. Well, the 7800 is not dropped. You won’t be able to select some of the new-to-v10 rendering options like shadow or HDR mode though.

            1. Ben, thanks for the prompt answer.

               Dropping some of the graphics in XP10 does not matter to me, since my old 7800 GTX is going to be a temporary solution anyway, while I spare some money for a brand new HW configuration. My minimum requirement (be able to run XP10 somehow with this graphics card) is already satisfied.

               Best regards,
               Filippo

      3. Just to be pedantic… 🙂

         It’s worth noting that GeForce 4 MXs are actually DX7-compliant cards. The GF4 MX brand was obtained recycling the good old GeForce 2 architecture. In fact, GF4 MX cards lack hardware programmable shaders.

         If X-Plane 10 drops support for cards that are DX8.1-or-earlier-compliant, this actually means dropping:

         – all GeForce models up to GeForce 4 (both Ti and MX flavours)
         – all ATI Radeon models up to 8×00 series, and ATI Radeon 9200 series (despite their name, these are actually DX8.1 GPUs)

         Hope this info helps people who own aging hardware and aren’t sure whether it can run XP10 or not.

         Best regards,
         Filippo

6. My X-Plane system exists of a 30″ screen, original Mac Pro fitted with 8GB and a new 1GB ATI 5870 card. I usually get good frame rates in X-Plane 9 using (huge) custom scenery. I do however get those annoying pauses every now and then. I read elsewhere on this blog this happens when X-Plane transfers new textures to the card. By the way, to me it seems that the pauses are caused by changes in the weather conditions but I’m not certain.

   The overall memory usage on the card is not high. According to the rendering settings in X-Plane only half of the 1GB is in use.

   I need to set most rendering options to “normal”. When I set items such as “object count” or “forests” higher X-Plane runs out of its 32-bit memory limit and crashes.
   I do realise that this is probably due to the complexity of my scenery. For instance I use OSM2XP for buildings, and the object count is huge. I do hope memory usage is optimised in X-Plane 10, because at this moment X-Plane crashing due to “out of memory” is my main issue.

   1. “I do hope memory usage is optimised in X-Plane 10, because at this moment X-Plane crashing due to “out of memory” is my main issue.”

      … could this be a hint that it is time to begin thinking about a 64-bit version of X-Plane? 🙂

   2. Using a 64bits OS helps too, xplane will have a bit more of memory for those facades.

      1. It does? X-Plane is a 32-bit process, so it would only help if the OS can decrease its in-process intrusion into 32-bit processes. This is definitely not a win on OS X – not sure about Win/Lin.

         1. Yeah i think it’s a Windows thing.
            On a 32 bit windows OS , the system won’t be able to give xplane the max ram it can use, whatever the ammount of ram you have installed.
            I can’t remember exactly the full story, but let’s say you have 4g of Ram installed, windows32 bits will only use 3G, if the system is using 1G for itself and backgrounded apps, Xplane will only have 2G to use.
            If you’re on windows64 bits, Xplane will have 3G with the above numbers.

            1. You can get 3 GB even on a 32-bit OS – at least for XP you could put /3GB in the boot.ini file or something. So unless you can get up to 3.5 I don’t think 64-bits is a win. Maybe someone can dig up the exact numbers from a MS tech article or something…

            2. On french xplane boards we had some user (leBelge) that was having out of memory crashes when setting objects slider to more than “a lot” on a tile with lots of osm buildings.
               His computer had only 2G of ram, so i suggested him to add 2G more.
               That’s what he did, and was still having crashes.
               I told him that maybe it’s a 32 bits limitation, that he should try a 64 bits OS.
               He switched from seven32 to seven64, and it’s now working without crashs, so i was thinking that seven32 wasn’t able to use all the installed ram.

            3. Perhaps the user’s 32-bit install wasn’t using the /3GB trick? On vista and later you have to do some horrid command-line voodoo to enable 3 GB in 32-bit processes that are large address aware – ti’s not just a boot.ini thing.

7. FWIW, in FSX, the more I use Tileproxy, the less I need autogen objects. Custom objects stay put anyway… I’m looking at buying Sim-Savvy’s Massive Scenery, and I hope that something like either one of these is available – not only does it closely represent the area I actually fly over, it drastically speeds things up when objects are turned off. From 3000′, the thing I miss the most is the way roads cut through large areas of woods.

   What I’m saying is that actual VFR is really nice with satellite imagery, and if the terrain textures/features generated are good enough to navigate by… well, I can do without a million little houses.

   I don’t know if OpenStreetMap (or whatever it was) is still being considered, but for me, getting the 2d ground textures and 3d landmarks is far more important than simple masses of eye candy. Masses of trees where they really exist would be fantastic, even if it’s simply larger “block models” with textures. Enemy Engages (though dated now) did this sorta well. http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/502/leb4.gif/sr=1

   1. I agree. 3D is definitely nice, but if it’s repetitive objects, only a few of which you can show in realtime, on repetitive ground, it’s not very convincing. On the other hand, orthophotos are too flat, but they actually capture reality instead of showing a limited expression of a limited interpretation, never look the same, etc. That just works better for me, even with the artifacts usually associated with them. Now to ship orthophotos for the entire world on a few DVDs…

      Your OSM remark reminds me of the scenery in my area. In X-Plane 9 the area around EHAM is pretty horrible if I may say so. There’s just about nothing there, and what’s there is very coarse. The few roads that exist can be off by kilometers; only rough outlines of a few lakes; no terrain to make up for it (not really X-Plane’s fault: even with perfect data you’d mostly get a few dunes and dikes).

      I’m confident OSM will take care of the roads in X-Plane 10. But what about waterways? You can’t even see the canal around the polder now. Having some water ‘detail’ would be a massive improvement. Ben? I understand it’s probably too late to change anything, but how are things now?

      1. Hello Jonathan,

         At the moment I’m trying to create a Goole Earth based scenery of The Netherlands at zoom level 15. The daylight part is done, still working on the night lit scenery. See some screendumps at the end on my home page link.

   2. You can already use open street map data to generate forests, buildings, landmarks for xplane : http://ggka.online.fr/xp/lor24.jpg

      I’m pretty sure xplane10 default forests will be generated from OSM data.

      1. Hi Benny –

         We’re using OSM for water and roads, but _not_ buildings or forests! Forests are autogenerated from land class data and the road grid itself, not the OSM forest data.

         In theory the base roads should work well with osm2xp forests and buildings (location-wise). We do put a small amount of rounding into the data to reduce size and smooth things out.

         1. As AlpilotX was working with you on this point, i was thinking that OSM was the data used for forests.

            Thanks for the clarification 🙂

            And talking about landclass data, where does it’s coming?

            1. alpilotx creates the land class data in raster form from a number of high quality sources…CORINE and NLCD are in there if I remember right, but he could describe it in a lot more detail.

            2. Well, I repeat this every now or then – but of course I can’t expect everybody to read all my posts I ever made 🙂

               So, yes, as Ben tells you, OSM is “only” used for roads/railroads/powerlines and water (which is quite a lot). And the road network helps to create the new autogen cities (well, there will be no artificial city road networks like they were in XP9).

               For the forests. As Ben told, the are all derived from landclass data. And believe me, this is fer better for us, as the landclass data gives out a bit more (and more accurate) information of the type of the forest too (which is often not the case with OSM). And, it also consistently has details all over the data area (where OSM forests are so-so , sometimes incredibly detailed, other times completely absent).

               Additionally, we have a quite good match up between forests and the ground textures. Not perfect, but quite good … Because – of course – the whole ground texturing is driven by the same landclass data too (which – I think – you will recognize as a good idea).

               Finally, the sources. We have NLCD for the USA (Alaska, and Hawaii included), CORINE for Europe (yes, thats the same source I used for my forests years ago), LCDB for New Zealand. All of these are around 100m resolution. And for the rest of the planet GlobCOVER (around 300m resolution). Remember the old XP9 landclass source data was around 1km resolution … so the looks of the landscape will change quite a bit (and beside all of this, we are continually working on putting in more and more new textures).

            3. There is another nice thing about the land class data: it is RASTER, not vector, which makes it MUCH easier to work with than OSM. 🙂

            4. Thanks for the info 🙂

8. Well, I hope that it will be a X-Plane 10 demo, to check our machines. Is going to be a demo?

   1. Yes, there will be.

      1. demo as in demo mode off the dvd, or a beta/ almost GM demo for download prior to Christmas

      2. It would be helpful if there was a benchmark scenario to test system performance. Perhaps with instructions for settings to test different aspects of the system, e.g. CPU, GPU, memory.
         Is this something LR can provide with XP10?

         1. X-Plane 9 already has a time demo built in; it is being revamped in X-Plane 10 to be a better predictor of X-Plane performance, in patricular with respect to the graphics card.

            Like X-Plane 9 we’re also doing a demo.

            So I think those two tools will give everyone the info they need to characterize their sysems: the ability to see real performance before purchasing and a standard metric to use when comparing systems.

9. Ben, is there a table anywhere that shows what each graphics setting is dependent on (and if not, could one be made)? For example, as in your last post, shadows are dependent on PCIe bus link speed, shader clock rate (I assume), etc, etc. It would help people that know about hardware to better optimize their system, and it would encourage newbies to learn more about their hardware and how it works.

10. I totally second what Ravi said. It would be great to have small “info-boxes/popups” or a chart to look up the roughly estimated impact of the major settings, wheater they are primarily cpu-, gpu-, bus bandwith- or ram-affecting. It´s not fun to do all that by mere testing and comparing over and over again.
    I´m aware that this wouldn´t make testing redundant and that each system has a own life, but nevertheless it would reduce the need of testing a lot…
    It took me month, to filter the rumors, desinformation and monkey business about the graphics and sim-settings of a well-known flight simulation…

    Can´t wait to see x-plane 10 in action!
    Best regards
    Flo

11. I also support the idea of having the option of an auto-config wizard in 10.x that would scan your system and suggest a “balanced” set of settings (what an expression…) that you could then tune according to your own needs…

12. Are we EVER gonna see screenshots of the 10th version of X-plane ???

    This blog is very interesting to read, but we always see X-plane 9 screenshots with X-plane 10 features.
    It’d be nice to have an “X-plane 10” screenshots or even… videos!!!

13. Pretty please, will there be finally an easy wing view option in the new X-Plane?

14. I have a couple of questions about coming X-plane:

    1. Will XP10 have HDR with heavy effects when looking into direct sunlight? In reallift sun is so much sharper than other things so an effective HDR will be very important for a real life effect.

    2. Will XP10 have extreme sun depiction like seen in some other games – so you really give the sense of looking at the sun.
    Take a look at this coming car-simulation:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wOxYVlw6oLU

    .. at around 0:32 – they have fantastic sun depiction and fantastic HDR aswell. Worth a look. C.A.R.S. really have state of the art graphics.

    3. Will the weather have thunderstorms that can be dangerous to fly into? In FSX you can always juts fly straight through everything – it has no effect at all which is a unrealistic.

    4. Wil the weather have things we havent seen before in FSX, xp etc like: Hail, runway water/snow that have an effect on the physics (braking, skidding etc).

    1. I don’t want to answer for Ben here, but there is already Hail, runway / snow on runway and braking effects on wet runways, effects in X-plane 9. And if X-plane 9 thunderstorms LOOK ridiculous (sorry….I mean cumulus clouds rotating), they are still dangerous to fly into in X-plane 9. YOu could lose the plane due to abusive G-forces.

       For the sun I can’t answer. But for these points above, I doubt that they remove it from the next version

       1. That’s okay, you can answer for me, your answer is spot on. I think we actually have _all_ of those things in v9.
          1 & 2 – look at the sun in v9 – watch a blinding glare cover the whole screen. The windshield cracks will become hard to see through too on some windshield types.
          3. Thunderstorms are totally full of turbulence. Fly into one and it won’t be much fun.
          4. Wet runways cause skidding – that’s been in there for a while too!

          1. Thanks for the answer.
             About the sun, really do take a look at the youtube video – their sun in the racesim is SPOT ON! Maybe you can be inspired by that. If you pay 10€ you’re able to try the pre-alpha of the game to see the effect by yourself.

15. Interesting I’ve currently a slow laptop, think to save for one year to buy and built my own PC with all the best, a Intel i7 995 X etc .. but I don’t know about the GPU ..

    The latest ATI 6990 is currently the fastest single card, but some benchmarks show that the combination ( SLI ) of two nVidia 580 would be greater than just one 6990.

    But I read below that currently, X-Plane 10 wil don’t benefits of SLI/Crossfire architecture..

    So, what do you advice to me ?

    After all, I have the time, I’ll buy it in one year, when the technologies will be even better than now..

    Best regards, Valentin from France, a X-Plane enthusiast since V8 !

    1. Valentin,

       the Radeon HD 6990 is actually a dual-GPU card, i.e. a single card with two GPUs fitted on it.

       This is completely equivalent to having two cards, i.e. it relies on the CrossFire technology to work, which we know X-Plane can’t take advantage of. Therefore You would gain no benefit compared to the single-GPU (and much cheaper) Radeon HD 6970.

       My personal advice is to go with the 6970 or equivalent single-GPU solution from Nvidia (GTX 580).

       Regards,
       Filippo

16. MM ok thanks Filippo !

    But maybe in one year, X-Plane will support those SLI/Crossfire architecture, and the FPS would be increased dramatically..

    Just wait and see and.. save !

17. Hello X-Team,
    I know you’re quite busy with XP10 and it’s not the right place for this but i was wondering if you’ll keep developping X-Plane for Palm Pre et webos Platform. The new devices (HP TOuchpad and HP Pre3) are quite powerful to handle the software. Please consider this mail and consider make it available in France too. Thanks in Advance

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