Comments on: Extended DSFs in X-Plane 10.40

By: deetee

deetee — Wed, 25 Mar 2015 17:01:15 +0000

Very much looking forward to this, I hope there will be an early 10.40 beta so people can test for themselves different ram/scenery scenarios. What a great improvement, many thanks.

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Mon, 23 Mar 2015 17:19:32 +0000

In reply to Alexander Colka. I don't know - I would expect it will work with 8 GB but it depends on what else you run (e.g. 3rd party airplane, other add-ons, XSquawkBox, texture res setting).

By: Alexander Colka

Alexander Colka — Mon, 23 Mar 2015 16:48:52 +0000

In reply to Ben Supnik. So what would be the bare minimum ammount of RAM required for the extended DSF sitched on with the standard mesh of the Global Scenery? I only have 8 gb of system RAM with a GTX 660 with 2 gb of VRAM. Thanks!

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Mon, 23 Mar 2015 13:46:01 +0000

In reply to Alex D..

Yes – “extended DSFs” is _optional_.

It is optional because some users would have to DROP the UHD meshes if they use it, and I don’t want to force anyone into a hardware upgrade in a free update.

Sorry if this wasn’t clear from the beginning – maybe I forgot to write this in the post? 🙁

By: Alex D.

Alex D. — Mon, 23 Mar 2015 13:30:09 +0000

Hi Ben, this is a good news but like anothers user i llitle concerned about the impact this may have in performance of the sim.

Could make a configuration option choosable from the Render Setings to enable or disable this? This could help users having who have a small / medium system. or mayble can be directly involved with the option “world detail distance” ?

Generally the screen and the idea are very well.
Thank you!

By: mlau

mlau — Mon, 23 Mar 2015 10:08:54 +0000

In reply to Andras Fabian. The UHD meshes don't take that much RAM anyway, with w2xp max details flying at 7000ft around the alps, ram usage hovers around 12GB.

By: Stephen Dutton

Stephen Dutton — Mon, 23 Mar 2015 02:04:30 +0000

From the moment of my entrance to X-Plane (mid-v9) the restriction of visual dsf’s was my main concern, and yes I have shouted loudly in this area because I thought it was the biggest turnoff for current and new users for the simulator. Certainly it is the biggest visual issue for the long haulers. I understand how the X-Plane scenery system works, but I couldn’t understand that once above 13,000ft or certainly 25,000ft my frame rate is in the 50’s bracket but the visual imagery was so average.
I do like Ben Supnik, do not like changing my resolution settings just to compensate for the differences in altitude. but as the ground requirement restrictions are minimal above that certain line of altitude then why can’t the system just adjust for that?

Hopefully here in 10.40 is at least a big part of that restriction is now lifted, and no doubt this which is the one of the biggest turnoffs to the simulator will make X-Plane a much more mature simulator than it looked before SD

By: Steve

Steve — Sun, 22 Mar 2015 23:52:02 +0000

In reply to Ben Supnik. Fair enough. I promise not to tell anyone you told me, and my lips are sealed! Thanks. Enjoy the German brewskies!

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Sun, 22 Mar 2015 22:10:54 +0000

In reply to Alistair Brown.

I do have a bug filed to try to calibrate the lights better at some point.

I am _not_ in favor of user control over the lights…my personal view is that X-Plane already has way too many rendering settings, and it’s my job to make X-Plane look good, always. If X-Plane isn’t doing that, I need to fix X-Plane, rather than add a rendering setting that 3% of users will understand and 97% will set randomly.

If you’re on this blog commenting on these things, you might be in the 3%. You can always hack up settings.txt if you -really- want to take the red pill and see how far down the rabbit hole goes… 🙂

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Sun, 22 Mar 2015 22:08:36 +0000

In reply to Steve.

I’m not supposed to go around talking about 10.xx vs some future version of X-plane whose number is larger than 10, but I am pretty sure that tessellation is not coming in the v10 run.

For now the ‘more DSFs’ trick is the only card we can play in the short term. Honestly, we would have played it before but we needed to get to 64-bit to be able to have that many DSFs in memory at once. We’ve intended more DSFs since 10.0 and we prototyped the scenery with it to see what it would look like.