It should fix the crash on startup for 32-bit Mac that was in beta 4.
About Ben Supnik
Ben is a software engineer who works on X-Plane; he spends most of his days drinking coffee and swearing at the computer -- sometimes at the same time.
Just wanted give you and the team my deepest appreciation and thanks for all your hard work on X-Plane.
Keep it up guys
Hi Ben, news about your new PC? I hope you bought the best on the road… maybe with two GPUs in SLI/Crossfire so you can elaborate some optimizations for such configurations in a future release of X-Plane? 😛 :)))
It’s being put together now. I constrained myself to a standard one-GPU i5 system; my goal is to be able to see X-Plane run as someone without infinite budget might see it; if it runs well on that system it will do better on a better one.
This needs a Like button (ugh!) — I’d press one here.
Out of curiousity, which graphics card did you plump for in the end?
None – I already have, um…an 8800 (Mac), an HD4850 (Mac), an HD 6900, HD 7970, HD 7950 (Mac), GF580, and GF680. Basically I accumulate them as we hit driver issues, performance problems, etc. I think there might be older ones but they’re below v10 specs. I leave my case open so I can swap cards faster, and I’d be lying if I said my son never tried to crawl in there while the computer was on.
(My wife: is the new computer going to have a fourth wall? Me: the current computer has one! My wife: then how did Gabe get in there? Me: well, it’s not attached…look, there it is behind the couch.)
Since it’s gone a bit personal…have you ever fired up X-Plane just to fly for few hours? Of course I mean with no development involvement! Just for fun!
In the last year or so, the only free flight I’ve done has been flying the Baron around so my son can look for trains. Unfortunately, Alex turned the train density down (relative to v9) to make things more realistic, so it takes a while to find them — the little guy gets impatient!
Before I worked for LR I used to fly and control on VATSIM on a regular basis, but these days I’m lucky to find time to breath.
Ben,
You mention that “Alex turned the train density down (relative to v9) to make things more realistic”.
Just curious. As the lead Xplane coder/developer, I *thought* that you would be able to tweak that variable, or change the formula to make the density even higher than v9 if you wanted to. Is there some reason that makes it a hassle to tweak that parameter?
I guess it could just be a matter of time… maybe its time consuming to tweak that and then recompile for a one-off personal version?
Again, just curious 🙂
Just a side note: it always cracks me up when I’m flying low and I see a police car in hot pursuit. Or a train 🙂 The things that only show up less frequently are pretty darn cool.
I could maintain a special road library to put trains everywhere for my son – it’s not a crazy idea. But usually I’m just booting up a dev copy to entertain him, so I consider myself lucky if the scenery isn’t purple and totally corrupted.
Isn’t Austin the lead coder? I thought he did flight model and Ben did graphics.
Austin is “fearless leader!” And he does do the FM, and I do most of the graphics -programming-.
But the train density is part of the road art asset file, so Alex (the autogen artist) controls the train density.
I play the game with a Xeon E5-2687w 16Core @ 3.6 GHz and two Titan Blacks 1328Mhz Core. However, I think that the CPU Usage could be a bit better. The load distribution is restricted too much on individual cores. My FPS are around 35 fps with extreme settings.
Please! It is _not_ a game. It is a highly advanced complex numeric simulation!
At least, that’s what Andy Goldstein told me as an excuse for why you can have it open at work.
I’m sure he wasn’t being HACASTIC (Highly Advanced Computer Aircraft Simulator That Is Complex).
I think X-Plane is a program where you really have to think about the division between game and simulator. I saw a really interesting post on a blog talking about this. Personally, I think that given the accuracy, FAA certification, absence of things like achievements, and commercial usage of it, it can’t really be called a game. Out of curiosity, Ben, what is your opinion on this?
I think we’re both, because X-Plane is used by different users in very different ways. To a VATSIM pilot, X-Plane is perhaps related to ‘sim city’ and other big simulation games, or maybe the wide-scale multiplayer games. But to a pilot practicing IFR approaches, it’s a training tool, and to an aeronautical engineer, it’s a rapid prototyping tool.
It does not really matter whether it is a simulator, a game or a complex application. If optimization is requires, it must be improved.
A Xeon processor is also nothing for gaming but rather for specific applications, but you can use it for both!
Please improve the CPU Usage..
Hi Patrick,
You took my previous comment too seriously. I’m not sure where to begin with your post. I think it is important to improve frame-rate, but I think we need to do this by making the code faster, not by further optimizing for 16-core machines. Almost none of our users actually have 16-core hardware because it is so much more expensive than 4-8 core hardware. But “make the fps higher” is a valid request I think.
Patrick,
As far as I can tell from my research (and please correct me if I’m wrong), the reason that X-Plane can only really utilize one core is that the biggest bottleneck is the graphics rendering, and that doesn’t support multi-threading. Ben, I hope that you are allowed to run X-Plane at work! That makes sense about the different users (though probably everyone is a little of both, there are probably a lot of pilots using X-Plane for training who do a leisurely flight for fun from time to time). I agree about optimization for 16 cores! It makes a lot more sense to improve the code in ways that helps everyone (or nearly everyone) than to work on optimizations for specific setups that most people don’t have access to. But, things like allowing each AI aircraft to run on a separate core are probably the best way to optimize for multi-core, since it can help a user with 2 cores or 20. Also, is there any more word about the atmospheric scattering settings in 10.30? I read that Pascal from Avsim was in contact with you about working on the default settings, did those get accepted? Any more word on the state of the view, cloud, and fog related code as it pertains to 10.30? Sorry for the long comment!
I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I think changes to scattering are going to be pushed out to a later patch – they’re not done yet.
Patrick,
A thing must always be kept in mind, that is, not any software can be optimized to efficiently run on an arbitrarily large number of cores. Parallelizing the execution of a task does not come for free, it is often impractical and sometimes totally impossible, depending on what you want to do.
A piece of code can be spawn among several independent threads as long as the task assigned to each thread does not depend on the result of tasks assigned to other threads. If this rule is broken, then you get dependencies, that is, some cores must often interrupt their work while waiting for other cores to complete their duties.
Unfortunately, the kinds of tasks that are (almost) dependency-free are not that many (audio/video coding and databases, just to mention two examples); in the vast majority of cases, some specific parts of the work an application does can be parallelized, while the others are affected by dependencies and therefore will never be multicore-friendly.
To my knowledge, X-Plane has been enhanced to take advantage of multithreading for a while now, so I can suppose that if there was still room for big improvements without disrupting the current code base, Ben & Co. would have already put their hands on it and optimized it. So, either there are still big potential improvements but at the cost of a large overhaul of the current code, or the parallelizable parts have already been parallelized and further improvements, if any, would be marginal.
If I understood well the current status of the evolution of X-Plane, rather than spending further efforts in trying to multi-thread other parts of the code, LR found better potential improvements in optimizing the usage of the graphics hardware through improvements in how OpenGL is used. Am I right?
Regards,
Filippo
There is still optimization to be had, including, possibly finding ways to use multiple cores to improve CPU render time. (Fixing CPU use on render is not easy because it’s not a naively parallel problem – the “easy parallelism” tasks have been on the GPU since the Geforce 256 over a decade ago.)
But one of the first remaining frame-rate optimization I’m going for on the CPU won’t be to use more cores – just to make the engine more efficient by using constant buffers. We won’t get there in 1030 (but we made some progress toward it in 1030) but we may get there within the v10 run.
b5 BIG UPDATE 🙂 jk
I just want to know what the “ideal” machine is. I’d save up and buy it. Currently I’m i7 with 16GB memory, and Nvidia 560Ti.
So what are your IDEALS? 😉
There is no ideal machine for everyone. It all depends on what you expect from your simulator (systems simulation, VFR flights with tons of objects and orthos, multi-screen setup with extreme resolution etc). Your machine is quite performant with a slightly outdated GPU. A better one would enable you increase certain rendering settings and thus improve graphics. Which one you should get depends entirely on your budget. More GPU Power gives you more eye candy – to a certain point from where you get into CPU limitation again. To confuse you even more it should be mentioned that some rendering settings are more CPU dependent (i.e. objects), some more GPU (FSAA) and some depend on both. Ben wrote a lot about this in his posts and there´s tons of information on this topic in the forums.
But to cut it short: A better GPU like a GTX770 would certainly enable you to increase settings like texture quality, FSAA, global lighting etc. Overclocking your i7 will also directly increase performance and is very easy these days.
If I´m wrong with anything technical, please correct me Ben 😉
No that’s pretty accurate – you can almost always use “more GPU” up by having a mix of bigger screen and more anti-aliasing. Since users sometimes like to run with crazy screens (3x 1440p x 16x FSAA) you can use a big GPU. Of course if you don’t have a huge screen, you might not need it.
For CPU, once you get 4-8 cores, more cores doesn’t help. And generally pure throughput is more important than more cores.
The problem is that our amount of multi-core usage depends a lot on what you do. Fly with AI? More cores. Fly with VATSIM – don’t need ’em. Fly with a lot of autogen and wxr? More cores. Fly without ’em….don’t need ’em.
I think of the i5 and i7 as good target CPUs, e.g. we should run well with 4 cores, and we should ideally take advantage of 8 virtual cores. So to the extent that we could push the cores on an i5 harder, I would like to get the rendering engine to scale a bit more. But to me dual-socket designs (which get you to the 12-16 virtual core count) aren’t target – there’s a big jump in hw prices to get that stuff, so if we saturated an i7 but dual Xeons were bored, I wouldn’t be looking to improve core use as my primary way to improve fps.
Hi Ben, I really appreciate your effort in each x-plane patch, especially now, that you are working in the clouds/fog. I saw in the patch notes an item about consistent cloud heights and bases and with correct coverage for IFR practicing, but at the moment, when I put a overcast layer or stratus layer I can see the ground beyond the cloud holes. Is there something in the way like an infinite horizontal surface or a vertical fog that block the vision to ground or I must increase the rate of clouds on rendering settings?
I have wondered about this myself for IFR work. I would love to see a solid overcast layer that extends to the horizon (not limited by cloud draw distance). SkyMaxx Pro kind of has this option, but you must choose the lowest quality overcast setting to get it. Would be cool if you could combine good quality 3D clouds near the aircraft with a solid layer that extends farther out (perhaps this layer could be just a 2D texture blanket you see when above or below it).
I have to ask at some point, is the new GPS supposed to be placed in any of the stock aircraft with a high enough resolution to show anything but the low-res COM fallback display? I’ve been trying the stock planes, but the cockpits are very very low-res to the point where even the analog instruments become hard to read (I actually filed a bug ticket about that before) so there’s only the pop-up to actually use any of the new functionality.
I think we’ll have the Garmin in at full res for the 172, baron and kingair by the end of beta.
Just wanted give you and the team my deepest appreciation and thanks for all your hard work on X-Plane.
Keep it up guys
Hi Ben, news about your new PC? I hope you bought the best on the road… maybe with two GPUs in SLI/Crossfire so you can elaborate some optimizations for such configurations in a future release of X-Plane? 😛 :)))
It’s being put together now. I constrained myself to a standard one-GPU i5 system; my goal is to be able to see X-Plane run as someone without infinite budget might see it; if it runs well on that system it will do better on a better one.
This needs a Like button (ugh!) — I’d press one here.
Out of curiousity, which graphics card did you plump for in the end?
None – I already have, um…an 8800 (Mac), an HD4850 (Mac), an HD 6900, HD 7970, HD 7950 (Mac), GF580, and GF680. Basically I accumulate them as we hit driver issues, performance problems, etc. I think there might be older ones but they’re below v10 specs. I leave my case open so I can swap cards faster, and I’d be lying if I said my son never tried to crawl in there while the computer was on.
(My wife: is the new computer going to have a fourth wall? Me: the current computer has one! My wife: then how did Gabe get in there? Me: well, it’s not attached…look, there it is behind the couch.)
Since it’s gone a bit personal…have you ever fired up X-Plane just to fly for few hours? Of course I mean with no development involvement! Just for fun!
In the last year or so, the only free flight I’ve done has been flying the Baron around so my son can look for trains. Unfortunately, Alex turned the train density down (relative to v9) to make things more realistic, so it takes a while to find them — the little guy gets impatient!
Before I worked for LR I used to fly and control on VATSIM on a regular basis, but these days I’m lucky to find time to breath.
Ben,
You mention that “Alex turned the train density down (relative to v9) to make things more realistic”.
Just curious. As the lead Xplane coder/developer, I *thought* that you would be able to tweak that variable, or change the formula to make the density even higher than v9 if you wanted to. Is there some reason that makes it a hassle to tweak that parameter?
I guess it could just be a matter of time… maybe its time consuming to tweak that and then recompile for a one-off personal version?
Again, just curious 🙂
Just a side note: it always cracks me up when I’m flying low and I see a police car in hot pursuit. Or a train 🙂 The things that only show up less frequently are pretty darn cool.
I could maintain a special road library to put trains everywhere for my son – it’s not a crazy idea. But usually I’m just booting up a dev copy to entertain him, so I consider myself lucky if the scenery isn’t purple and totally corrupted.
Isn’t Austin the lead coder? I thought he did flight model and Ben did graphics.
Austin is “fearless leader!” And he does do the FM, and I do most of the graphics -programming-.
But the train density is part of the road art asset file, so Alex (the autogen artist) controls the train density.
I play the game with a Xeon E5-2687w 16Core @ 3.6 GHz and two Titan Blacks 1328Mhz Core. However, I think that the CPU Usage could be a bit better. The load distribution is restricted too much on individual cores. My FPS are around 35 fps with extreme settings.
Please! It is _not_ a game. It is a highly advanced complex numeric simulation!
At least, that’s what Andy Goldstein told me as an excuse for why you can have it open at work.
I’m sure he wasn’t being HACASTIC (Highly Advanced Computer Aircraft Simulator That Is Complex).
I think X-Plane is a program where you really have to think about the division between game and simulator. I saw a really interesting post on a blog talking about this. Personally, I think that given the accuracy, FAA certification, absence of things like achievements, and commercial usage of it, it can’t really be called a game. Out of curiosity, Ben, what is your opinion on this?
I think we’re both, because X-Plane is used by different users in very different ways. To a VATSIM pilot, X-Plane is perhaps related to ‘sim city’ and other big simulation games, or maybe the wide-scale multiplayer games. But to a pilot practicing IFR approaches, it’s a training tool, and to an aeronautical engineer, it’s a rapid prototyping tool.
It does not really matter whether it is a simulator, a game or a complex application. If optimization is requires, it must be improved.
A Xeon processor is also nothing for gaming but rather for specific applications, but you can use it for both!
Please improve the CPU Usage..
Hi Patrick,
You took my previous comment too seriously. I’m not sure where to begin with your post. I think it is important to improve frame-rate, but I think we need to do this by making the code faster, not by further optimizing for 16-core machines. Almost none of our users actually have 16-core hardware because it is so much more expensive than 4-8 core hardware. But “make the fps higher” is a valid request I think.
Patrick,
As far as I can tell from my research (and please correct me if I’m wrong), the reason that X-Plane can only really utilize one core is that the biggest bottleneck is the graphics rendering, and that doesn’t support multi-threading. Ben, I hope that you are allowed to run X-Plane at work! That makes sense about the different users (though probably everyone is a little of both, there are probably a lot of pilots using X-Plane for training who do a leisurely flight for fun from time to time). I agree about optimization for 16 cores! It makes a lot more sense to improve the code in ways that helps everyone (or nearly everyone) than to work on optimizations for specific setups that most people don’t have access to. But, things like allowing each AI aircraft to run on a separate core are probably the best way to optimize for multi-core, since it can help a user with 2 cores or 20. Also, is there any more word about the atmospheric scattering settings in 10.30? I read that Pascal from Avsim was in contact with you about working on the default settings, did those get accepted? Any more word on the state of the view, cloud, and fog related code as it pertains to 10.30? Sorry for the long comment!
I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I think changes to scattering are going to be pushed out to a later patch – they’re not done yet.
Patrick,
A thing must always be kept in mind, that is, not any software can be optimized to efficiently run on an arbitrarily large number of cores. Parallelizing the execution of a task does not come for free, it is often impractical and sometimes totally impossible, depending on what you want to do.
A piece of code can be spawn among several independent threads as long as the task assigned to each thread does not depend on the result of tasks assigned to other threads. If this rule is broken, then you get dependencies, that is, some cores must often interrupt their work while waiting for other cores to complete their duties.
Unfortunately, the kinds of tasks that are (almost) dependency-free are not that many (audio/video coding and databases, just to mention two examples); in the vast majority of cases, some specific parts of the work an application does can be parallelized, while the others are affected by dependencies and therefore will never be multicore-friendly.
To my knowledge, X-Plane has been enhanced to take advantage of multithreading for a while now, so I can suppose that if there was still room for big improvements without disrupting the current code base, Ben & Co. would have already put their hands on it and optimized it. So, either there are still big potential improvements but at the cost of a large overhaul of the current code, or the parallelizable parts have already been parallelized and further improvements, if any, would be marginal.
If I understood well the current status of the evolution of X-Plane, rather than spending further efforts in trying to multi-thread other parts of the code, LR found better potential improvements in optimizing the usage of the graphics hardware through improvements in how OpenGL is used. Am I right?
Regards,
Filippo
There is still optimization to be had, including, possibly finding ways to use multiple cores to improve CPU render time. (Fixing CPU use on render is not easy because it’s not a naively parallel problem – the “easy parallelism” tasks have been on the GPU since the Geforce 256 over a decade ago.)
But one of the first remaining frame-rate optimization I’m going for on the CPU won’t be to use more cores – just to make the engine more efficient by using constant buffers. We won’t get there in 1030 (but we made some progress toward it in 1030) but we may get there within the v10 run.
b5 BIG UPDATE 🙂 jk
I just want to know what the “ideal” machine is. I’d save up and buy it. Currently I’m i7 with 16GB memory, and Nvidia 560Ti.
So what are your IDEALS? 😉
There is no ideal machine for everyone. It all depends on what you expect from your simulator (systems simulation, VFR flights with tons of objects and orthos, multi-screen setup with extreme resolution etc). Your machine is quite performant with a slightly outdated GPU. A better one would enable you increase certain rendering settings and thus improve graphics. Which one you should get depends entirely on your budget. More GPU Power gives you more eye candy – to a certain point from where you get into CPU limitation again. To confuse you even more it should be mentioned that some rendering settings are more CPU dependent (i.e. objects), some more GPU (FSAA) and some depend on both. Ben wrote a lot about this in his posts and there´s tons of information on this topic in the forums.
But to cut it short: A better GPU like a GTX770 would certainly enable you to increase settings like texture quality, FSAA, global lighting etc. Overclocking your i7 will also directly increase performance and is very easy these days.
If I´m wrong with anything technical, please correct me Ben 😉
No that’s pretty accurate – you can almost always use “more GPU” up by having a mix of bigger screen and more anti-aliasing. Since users sometimes like to run with crazy screens (3x 1440p x 16x FSAA) you can use a big GPU. Of course if you don’t have a huge screen, you might not need it.
For CPU, once you get 4-8 cores, more cores doesn’t help. And generally pure throughput is more important than more cores.
The problem is that our amount of multi-core usage depends a lot on what you do. Fly with AI? More cores. Fly with VATSIM – don’t need ’em. Fly with a lot of autogen and wxr? More cores. Fly without ’em….don’t need ’em.
I think of the i5 and i7 as good target CPUs, e.g. we should run well with 4 cores, and we should ideally take advantage of 8 virtual cores. So to the extent that we could push the cores on an i5 harder, I would like to get the rendering engine to scale a bit more. But to me dual-socket designs (which get you to the 12-16 virtual core count) aren’t target – there’s a big jump in hw prices to get that stuff, so if we saturated an i7 but dual Xeons were bored, I wouldn’t be looking to improve core use as my primary way to improve fps.
Hi Ben, I really appreciate your effort in each x-plane patch, especially now, that you are working in the clouds/fog. I saw in the patch notes an item about consistent cloud heights and bases and with correct coverage for IFR practicing, but at the moment, when I put a overcast layer or stratus layer I can see the ground beyond the cloud holes. Is there something in the way like an infinite horizontal surface or a vertical fog that block the vision to ground or I must increase the rate of clouds on rendering settings?
I have wondered about this myself for IFR work. I would love to see a solid overcast layer that extends to the horizon (not limited by cloud draw distance). SkyMaxx Pro kind of has this option, but you must choose the lowest quality overcast setting to get it. Would be cool if you could combine good quality 3D clouds near the aircraft with a solid layer that extends farther out (perhaps this layer could be just a 2D texture blanket you see when above or below it).
I have to ask at some point, is the new GPS supposed to be placed in any of the stock aircraft with a high enough resolution to show anything but the low-res COM fallback display? I’ve been trying the stock planes, but the cockpits are very very low-res to the point where even the analog instruments become hard to read (I actually filed a bug ticket about that before) so there’s only the pop-up to actually use any of the new functionality.
I think we’ll have the Garmin in at full res for the 172, baron and kingair by the end of beta.