Comments on: Driver Update – AMD Drivers Fixed

By: Jakob Grzywacz

Sun, 02 Mar 2014 15:34:24 +0000

Its visible with atho scattering on and a descent visibility. Set it to 10SM with some low clouds. If there are rivers behind the limit of visibility, there are rendered in red shine within the mist or haze.

I failed back to an earlier driver, until thats resolved, so I can’t reproduce it at the moment.

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By: Jakob Grzywacz

Sun, 02 Mar 2014 15:31:45 +0000

By: Ben Supnik

Sat, 01 Mar 2014 22:36:43 +0000

In reply to Philipp.

Blue out!? Philipp – you and Roman are _nuts_. 🙂 🙂 🙂

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By: Philipp

Sat, 01 Mar 2014 22:19:46 +0000

By: Ben Supnik

Thu, 27 Feb 2014 18:35:58 +0000

In reply to Filippo.

I’ve watched some of the Mantle presentations; it’s theoretically possible that we may someday use it. Mantle provides two advantages:

1. Because it’s modern and coded with multi-core and modern hardware in mind from day one, the abstractions fit the top-end cards perfectly, where-as OpenGL has a fair amount of “weird stuff” due to the gradual evolution. (Lord knows how many times they’ve refactored the texturing API, for example.)

2. Because it is lower level, it moves scheduling and resource management into the host app (that would be X-Plane in our case) – the theory is that the driver is making guesses when it schedules and manages resources, where-as the app really knows what it wants.

But those aren’t totally wins. In case 1, we support plenty of hw too old to run Mantle, and someday there will be newer hardware with different characteristics…whether Mantle handles that new hardware gracefully or not is too be determined. In case 2, writing scheduling and resource management is a big complicated task, so having the driver not do it might make the driver cheaper to develop but it makes the app more expensive (in developer time) to develop. For AAA games like Battlefield they can easily afford that – but the top-tier games are unusual (in the universe of all OpenGL apps) in terms of having man-power.

At this point we are not held back by OpenGL; rather there is work I am in the middle of doing to more effectively use OpenGL. Once we use OpenGL most efficiently then we can re-measure performance, see how much overhead (if any) OpenGL is costing us, and decide what to do next.

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By: Ben Supnik

Thu, 27 Feb 2014 18:02:41 +0000

By: Benoit Richard

Thu, 27 Feb 2014 16:43:35 +0000

Hi Ben, I tried to update to the Catalyst Beta drivers you mentioned and a strange situation has occurred. When I load X-Plane 10.25 on my Windows 7-64bit system, everything looks normal until I go inside the cockpit (Ramzzess 777 Worldliner Professional). My 3 screens (Eyefinity) slowly fade to Blue!
If I go outside the plane, everything looks fine…

I will try to uninstall and reinstall the beta drivers and if the problem persists, I will revert back to Catalyst 13.9

Thanks,
Benoit

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By: Filippo

Thu, 27 Feb 2014 10:14:19 +0000

Speaking about drivers, the recent introduction of the Mantle API by AMD has raised some fuss, and it looks like more and more developers actually back the possibility to interact with graphics hardware at a lower level, so to reduce, if not eliminate, the API / Driver overhead. And, as a consequence of this new trend, it looks like future revisions of the mayor graphics APIs will allow more low-level access to the GPU features.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/directx-direct3d-opengl-mantle,26167.html

Does LR have some opinion on this? Could a future version of X-Plane benefit from such enhancements?

Best regards,
Filippo

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By: Chris

Wed, 26 Feb 2014 22:35:32 +0000

I just filed a bug for this issue. For users reading this, you can work around it by un-checking Atmospheric Scattering in your render settings.

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