A number of users have reported “ghosting” with NVidia Windows hardware and X-Plane 10. The artifact typically looks like this:
What you’re seeing there is the scene from last frame being left around where the sky was supposed to be drawn, but was not. As the camera moves, we get a trail of artifacts.
For a few days I couldn’t see this bug on my own system, and this afternoon I tried to reproduce it based a report from a user with the same hardware as my development machine. So after a bunch of failed tries and scratching my head at the German version of the NVidia control panel, I was overjoyed to see this:
I mean, how cool is that! That could be our new startup screen! It’s like a giant 737 is going to pop up out of the screen and eat us all. (Hint: if you are in the pit of a 747 and an airplane appears over the horizon that looks bigger than you from 20 miles away: run!)
It appears that this artifact is caused by turning on full screen anti-aliasing in the Nvidia control panel (with “override application settings”) but not in X-Plane. My work-around: use “application controls” for the control panel and set FSAA in X-Plane itself.
Here’s another fun one:
This shows up with moderate global shadowing. This shows up on the 285.62 NVidia drivers; the 280.62 and (for the very brave) 290.36 drivers don’t have this problem.
I don’t think there’s a moral of the story here; we’re still working through bugs, but I did find the bottom of my in-box, which I hope is an indication that the patches are helping at least some users. There are a lot of different card/driver/OS combos, so working through all the combinations (as Windows X1000-users are finding) will take some time.
A number of third party authors (bravely) promised X-Plane 10 updates to their airplanes. And I believe that a tune-up to be X-Plane 10 compatible isn’t going to represent a lot of man hours.
That is, unless you try to do this job now.
I have a number of open bugs where version 9 airplanes don’t load quite right in X-Plane 10. If you have an X-Plane 9 airplane and you try to work around these bugs, a few things will happen:
- You will only be able to work around some of the bugs, as others are pretty hard-baked into the sim.
- When I actually fix the bugs (in the next weeks) your airplane will be “broken” yet again, since “fixing” the bugs now means trying to make a right with two wrongs.
So third party authors: please do file bugs if you haven’t already, and give us a little time to work through them. Please do not try to work around these bugs, only to have your airplane become “re-broken” when we get the sim corrected.
And users: please be patient with your third party airplane authors. They can’t make their plane v10 compatible until we fix some bugs, and if they try they’re just going to get thrashed.
There are some things that do need to be reworked for version 10, particularly for HDR mode. But a lot of the reports I get are just things that are funky in the sim.
How to File an Airplane Bug
Since I am getting deluged with bug reports, support requests, questions, etc. I want to describe the best way to get an airplane compatibility bug to us. By following these guidelines, you’ll make it easier for us to kill off compatibility bugs fast.
- Please file the bug only once. If you have filed the bug and haven’t heard that it’s fixed, you do not need to tell us in every new beta that it is still broken.
- File bugs via http://dev.x-plane.com/support/bugreport.html. We can route this form to whomever we think is best suited to handle the bugs. Please do not just email the last person you conversed with directly.
- Please only file bugs if an airplane looks different in the latest X-Plane 10 build and X-Plane version 9.70. X-Plane 9.70 is the version 9 release that we are targeting – no older version!
- Please get us reproduction materials – preferably a complete ACF pack, and preferably a cut down one if it can be simplified.
- Send us the v9 .acf file, before any modifications. We want to see what your customers would have seen if they just tried to use the plane. If you send us a version resaved in X-Plane 10, we don’t know what happened.
- Please provide illustrations of how the plane should look in version 9 vs how it does look in version 10. We need a reference point.
- Please try to keep reproduction steps as short as possible. If we have to make a 2 hours flight with 400 waypoints to see a bug, that’s a time sink for us.
A number of you have already sent us good bug reports – we will get to them as quick as I can. If all goes well tonight my fires will be out and I’ll be able to jump into this shortly.
If I could have a nickel for every email I see from a user who says “I have installed X-Plane from scratch 6 times, and it still does not work”, well, I’d have enough money to buy more servers to handle the download bandwidth.
If your copy of the X-Plane 10 demo is not working, please do not do a full reinstall. It will not help.
You can run the X-Plane updater at any time. The X-Plane 10 updater checks every single file in the install and replaces any file that isn’t exactly what it should be. When the updater is done, you basically have a clean install, but at a fraction of the download.
The demo servers are starting to show lower load – please don’t re-download and kill the servers all over again.
Posted in News
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Ben Supnik |
Hint: not the comments section of this blog. If you have not filed a bug but did write a comment, please do not assume that we know about it.
You can email tech support here: info@x-plane.com.
You can file bugs here: http://dev.x-plane.com/support/bugreport.html
If you file a bug an do not hear back from us immediately, please be patient; I am back-logged with reports right now, so if it is going to my part of the code, it’ll be a bit of a wait.
I will post more on reporting airplane compatibility bugs later today.
***EDIT*** Chris says: Please do not email Austin, Ben or Me directly unless we ask you to…Even if we’ve asked you to do so for a bug in the past, please do not email us directly for a new bug. Bugs need to go through our support channel. Ben wakes up to over 100 emails each morning…I can only imagine what kinds of emails Austin gets. This takes away precious development time.
You can update via the about box or the updater application. If you update from the about box, the updater app may already be in your X-Plane folder, ready to use.
This build should hopefully fix any crashes and colored-triangle artifacts introduced by 10.02 beta 1; the smoke puff performance optimization wasn’t my best work.
Also your airplanes may have engines again, which is nice for flying, I’m told.
If you are getting a crash in 10.02 beta 2 but did not get a crash in 10.0, please file a bug ASAP! (If you always get a crash, file a bug if you haven’t; we’re working through them. But I definitely don’t want to go backward in terms of hardware support with the betas.)
Note: the torrent is still 10.02 beta 1, so you’ll want to run a quick update on it. I’ll recut the torrent periodically, but I think it probably works better for everyone if the torrent can build up a bunch of seeders.
Austin just posted an announcement. The short version: we have the first patch to X-Plane 10. You can read more about how to get the patch here. A few key points:
- You don’t have to re-download the whole sim! You can simply run an update, which will get only the changed files. Less than 150 MB, I think.
- If you can’t run X-Plane 10 because the app isn’t getting along with your graphics card, you can still update – just run the updater directly.
- We have posted a new torrent – zipped, so it should be smaller, have correct permissions, and not drive µTorrent nutty with too many files.
Compatibility With Graphic Cards
I’ll try to post on-going status updates with regards to graphics card support; I’ve posted a chart on the wiki. If you have gotten one of the cards for which the status is “unknown” to work, please post a comment.
The two cases that I believe we have fixed for the 10.02 patch are Intel HD integrated graphics and Radeon X1000 series GPUs – both were not functioning due to bugs in X-Plane (which were revealed by the particular capabilities of these cards).
I was surprised by how many reports of Intel HD graphics crashes we got but in hind sight it makes sense: everyone with a Core i3/i5/i7 chip has one of these GPUs, since it is built into the chip. In some cases, users were running on the Intel GPU despite also having a real GPU, so even with the crash fix, those users will need to figure out how to change their default GPU. (For a desktop this is usual a BIOS operation – for a laptop it’s usually black magic.)
I still have at least six different GPU crash cases that I am investigating, so there’s a lot of compatibility work to do.
The other major compatibility problem I am hearing about is just a slew of reports of weird stuff with NVidia GeForce cards. Graphic artifacts, hangs, screen corruption, two copies of the app – you name it. It’s going to take a while to figure out what’s going on.
Framerate and Performance
We put out X-Plane 10.02 to fix a few crash problems and cases of graphic corruption; there are only a few performance tweaks along for the ride. The majority of performance work is still to come. You may get a few fps back with AI planes, or if you have a Mac NVidia GPU.
A few notes about the torrent.
First: the torrent contains a single FranceVFR custom DSF that is not present in the regular demo install. This file is due to a mistake made by me while building the torrent; the FranceVFR team sent me the file to test v10 compatibility and I stupidly used the same version of X-Plane to build the torrent. My gravest apologies to the FranceVFR team for not being more careful with their IP.
Second: if you can’t execute the apps on OS X or Linux, it’s because the permissions are not set correctly. I have no idea why that happened – the permissions are correct in the source files. There are two ways to fix this:
- The easy way: delete the apps, then run the X-Plane 10 updater for Mac, Win, or Linux. By deleting the apps first you’ll get new ones from the net with correct permissions. Or
- The
nerdymanly way: chmod u+x X-Plane.app/Contents/MacOS/X-Plane in the terminal from the X-Plane demo directory.
This will fix the app bouncing and then disappearing.
Third: for some reason the torrent won’t finish on some torrent clients. I have no idea what that’s about, the solution to all three problems for the next patch is: I’ll build a new torrent and zip it into one big file.
Posted in News
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Ben Supnik |
Happy Thanksgiving! X-Plane 10 is now out the door, and over the next few weeks I’ll post on a number of topics. But for tonight: that burning smell is our five download servers pushing 100 mbit each and not even coming close to meeting the demand for X-Plane 10 demos.
We are working on this now, and over the next few days we will get more servers into the pool. But first we are going to analyze traffic and try to find the most efficient way to deploy our available bandwidth given such high demand. Hopefully over the next few days we’ll be able to improve overall demo download times.
The demo is 2 GB and a lot of you have fast pipes, so it’s going to be slow going for a bit no matter how many servers we throw at the problem. If you can run BitTorrent, you may want to give it a try, but we are definitely working to make a straight demo-download a viable option.
Posted in News
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Ben Supnik |
As X-Plane 10 gets closer to shipping, we’re getting a better idea of what its performance characteristics are going to be. This will be the first of several posts on hardware and X-Plane 10. Spoiler alert: the buying advice I can give is at best fairly vague and obvious (don’t buy an old piece of junk DirectX 7.1 graphics card for $29) – once the sim ships and people start posting real performance comparisons, I suspect community data will be a much richer source of information for planning a new system (or a system upgrade). Please don’t ask whether your particular graphics card will work well with X-Plane 10.
Last week I had a chance to bring X-Plane 10 to ATI and run the sim on a few different modern GPUs. It’s the Mac team that is nearby, but ATI’s mac drivers are of a quality such that platform isn’t really an issue.
We ran X-Plane on a current-generation Mac Pro with a single Radeon HD 5870, driving a 2560 x 1440 display. The 5870 is a very solid card – to do better you have to spend a lot of money.
Here’s what we found. Bear in mind that the art asset set is still a partially completed one, and the shaders are still being debugged and optimized, so anything could change in both directions.
Geometry: How Much Stuff Can You See?
First: geometry and 3-d.
- I could turn up almost everything that creates geometry. To keep fps smooth I had to turn down something one notch – either world LOD, visibility, or autogen density – but only one notch. This is a big step forward from X-Plane 9. (But also remember this is a current generation CPU.)
- Shadows took a big bite out of the geometry budget – basically the sim has to draw geometry again to build the shadows, amplifying the cost of your objects and trees. Current generation hardware simply doesn’t have enough kick to max shadows out and max all of the 3-d out. Not yet.*
- PCIe 16x matters – we saw a significant reduction in performance on the newer 8x PCIe Thunderbolt Mac laptops. You definitely want PCIe 16x!
Geometry in X-Plane 10 is a little bit different from X-Plane 9 – it can be bottlenecked not only by your CPU, but also by PCIe bus bandwidth. Because CPU use is more efficient in version 10, we sometimes get stuck when there isn’t enough bandwidth to transfer geometry from the CPU to GPU.**
(Please note that the fast path for geometry in X-Plane 10 requires OBJs to be stripped of most attributes; if you load a version 9 DSF and put objects on insane, you’ll get high CPU use and low fps because the objects are going to hit the slow code path. The autogen in X-Plane 10 is being completely redone, so it should all hit the fast path.)
Hardware Advice: Make sure you have your video card in a PCIe x16 slot!
The new Thunderbolt Mac laptops have only 8x PCIe to their discrete GPUs; this may turn out to be the limiting factor for X-Plane.
Pixels: How Much Do Effects Cost?
How about shader effects? Some of the new effects in X-Plane 10 (atmospheric scattering, fade-out level of detail, FXAA, linear lighting, deferred rendering) use only pixel shading power on the GPU. We turned on pretty much every effect that isn’t CPU/bus based (that is, the GPU pixel effects) and found that we could run with all of them at 20-30 fps. Heck, we even turned on a few things that aren’t going to be ready for 10.0 but may come out during the version run.
This is pretty different from X-Plane 9. With X-Plane 9, you can turn on all of the GPU effects (there is really only one, “per pixel lighting”, crank 16x FSAA, run at 2560 x 1024 and get 27 fps on my older Radeon 4870. In other words, X-Plane can’t even keep a previous generation GPU busy at very high settings.
(To compare, the HD 5870 has double the shader cores and a 13% faster clock, so it is at least double the GPU of the 4870 for fill and shading. In other words, in the test system we used that machine would have run X-plane 9 at perhaps 45 fps when completely maxed out on a huge display.)
In other words, X-Plane 9 couldn’t max out a GPU; X-Plane 10 can.
If you’ve been using a “medium” tier car (e.g. a GTX 560 instead of a GTX 580, or a 5650 instead of a 5870), this is going to mean less “stuff” in X-Plane 10: less eye candy, or less resolution, or less fps. With X-Plane 9, a top-end video card would be bored; with X-Plane 10 it might have something to do. I think this may surprise some users who have been buying cheaper video cards and “getting away with it” for a while now.
Hardware Advice: if you want the highest quality visuals at a high resolution, get a full powered video card!
I still concur with Austin’s advice to the news list to buy the second most expensive video card. Looking up the price and stats of the Radeon 6970 vs 6950, you pay a 40% premium to get about 19% more fill-rate. More importantly, the HD 6990 is actually just two video cards jammed together using internal CrossFire, at over double the price of one card. But since X-Plane does not yet leverage CrossFire, you’re paying a lot of money and you won’t see a fill-rate improvement.
The one case where you might want to go really crazy is if you want to drive an insane number of pixels, e.g. multiple huge monitors. Your framerate is going to be inversely proportional to the number of pixels on screen, so if you are getting 30 fps with one 2560 x 1440 monitor, you’re going to get 15 fps if you try to run at 5120 x 1440 on two monitors.
Epilogue: Are We Winning?
Something to think about: is it good that X-Plane uses more GPU and less CPU? I think the answer is “yes” – and these performance results are the result of a steady process of modernizing our rendering engine.
You can max out X-plane 9 with a cheaper video card; not so with X-Plane 10. But this isn’t because X-Plane 10 is more of a pig; it is because X-Plane 10 provides new options (options you can turn off) that X-Plane 9 did not have. With X-Plane 9, it was as if we had decided for you to turn off advanced rendering settings, leaving your GPU idle.
I believe that it must be the goal of the X-Plane 10 rendering engine to scale, meaning X-Plane should be able to max out a very powerful system (and provide increased visual quality in doing so), but also be able to run on a less powerful system by backing off on rendering quality.
The Radeon HD 2600 has between 144 and 192 GFLOPS of computing power; the 5870 has 2720 GFLOPS – that’s at least 14 times more computing power between an older iMac (but still one that can run HDR mode if you’re a little crazy) and the current maxed out Mac Pro. (If you have the HD 2400 in your iMac, that gap widens to 68x!) It is in the face of that performance gap between the high and low end system that we are trying to make X-Plane as scalable as possible.
* PCIe 3.0 will be out one of these days – I don’t know when, and I haven’t had a chance to run X-Plane on such beastly hardware, but it is my hope that we’ll get additional shadowing performance via the increased geometry budget.
** Why not keep all of the geometry in VRAM? That’s a long sad story about the OpenGL API that we’ll have to save for another day.
At some point, someone made a fake twitter account claiming to be the official XPlane one. They used the username that would have been our first choice.
It took some time but Twitter has resolved this issue for us. Our new twitter account is now @XPlaneOfficial however you should not have to do anything. If you were previously following our old name, you should have been moved to the new name automatically.
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Chris Serio |
