Josh: the bright light at dusk is going to be fixed in 11.01, but NOT the way this mod does it. I’ll post on this later.

What is your argument? Fly over KLAX, KSNA, or KLGA with broken clouds and then tell me about your frames.

Your video shows that anyone can tax the GPU simply by cranking up AA and resolution. It doesn’t show how bad performance is over autogen (probably because we can’t turn off AI) and in certain views above the clouds.

BTW there is a mod on the ORG site that fixes the lit up cockpit at dusk/dawn AND gives you shadows in the cockpit in dusk/dawn! 🙂

Please Ben, could you do implement this at some point (the shadow and lighting in VC). The darker cockpit and reverse shadows at dusk and dawn are STUNNING:

http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/36188-lua-environment-booster-xp11/

I’m also getting autogen lights through clouds.

Yyyyyep – that turns off shadows completely. Faster, but I’m not a fan of the trade-off…at some point I don’t like to see X-Plane 11 look like X-Plane 9. We do have some ideas that will make shadows significantly faster, at least, we hope.

I would _not_ call it a bug, but I would call it a good chance for performance optimization, so it was absolutely useful.

This might not be clear from my (sometimes ranty) tone in the discussions about settings, but if someone decides to “go tweak” x-plane via the art controls or settings.txt and finds that a certain tweak makes a huge difference, that _is_ interesting to us and we do take interest and pay attention to that feedback.

Sometimes these are things we would have found ourselves, sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes we can make the same tweak, sometimes we can’t because it has a side effect we can’t live with in the “general case” of the whole sim, and sometimes the tweak gives us ideas for changes in the engine.

So this means I helped finding a bug?? This make me happy! 🙂

Thank you brother Ben!

Ohhhh. I didn’t know that. Thanks guys, the game is already awesome now, if you do that it would be the best thing ever. Keep going, you are doing great.

Hi Denis,

We found this internally. On NVidia drivers with the threaded driver off, the glTexSubImage2D that pushes the new FFT ot the GPU has to do an expensive format conversion, and it’s taking 5 ms of frame time(!).

Weirdly this operation is lightning fast on OS X and AMD drivers. My guess is that NVidia figured that apps would run the threaded driver and the actual format conversion would be on their worker thread. Since AMD doesn’t use a parallel driver thread and Apple’s is almost never used, they probably either schedule a worker to just do the format conversion or use the GPU to do it. (On OS X it’s definitely on the CPU on a worker – dunno what AMD really does).

So…this is pretty easy for us to fix. We can change format convert on our worker thread, or change to a format that doesn’t require conversion, or even do all of the above and use a PBO to make everything async. Sidney found the problem and he’s going to see how much better he can make it.

Thanks for pointing this out! Unfortunately it’s only going to help NV Windows users. That’s a big win – that’s over a third of our paying users on one driver stack, and the biggest single segment, but AMD users need a perf win on the CPU more, and on AMD this isn’t costing us anything.