Doesn't look like DirectX 10 and Vista will save the day FSX :: Archived

[Adrian_Wainer]

Doesn't look like Directx 10 and Vista will save the day for FSX

forums.avsim.net/dcboa...1837&page=


Best and Warm Regards
Adrian Wainer

[Mechy]

What needs to be saved??? As far as I'm concerned it's a great looking and running program that runs at low fps. It hasn't crashed on me, I don't have any stutters, the ground isn't blocky and this is right out of the box. Once the third party boys figure it out, it's even going to be better.

Besides, I don't want a program that is going to be dated and worthless in a year. If everyone had killer 'fps' with it now, how good would it be in a year. This game has always been built with several years of use in mind. The same boys over there at Avsim who are crying about FSX are probably the same ones who were crying about FS9. I don't know about the rest of you but I'm just going to enjoy it and look forward to the addons!

[Adrian_Wainer]

Mechy wrote

This game has always been built with several years of use in mind.

Well why then does it not use dual cores effectively?

Best and Warm Regards
Adrian Wainer

[Shades]

Think you'll probably find it's the system set-ups rather than the hardware in them that's dragging things down.
There may be a patch due as well.
In the meantime, Stoopy made a very good and thorough explanation of ways to tweak/improve your hardwares' performance (it's the first sticky in the section) over in CFS3. Obviously it's tailored to CFS3, but you'll find a lot of it relates to other games, specifically Flight Simulators, and is just as applicable.
It explains why low frame rates are achieved and how to improve them in several areas.

[Kitform]

- Adrian_Wainer

Doesn't look like Directx 10 and Vista will save the day for FSX

He's gotta be doing something wrong, I run FSX at 1920x1200 and with sliders set to high, I get good frame rates and my system is inferior to his. (3DMark06 of 8,548) with DX9c

[JG300-Stoopy]

Amen, Mechy!!!!!

Adrian.....hey bud! Did you miss the post at AVSIM by Phil Taylor, ACES program development lead? He tried to explain, very comprehensively and very politely I thought, why FSX is not written to take direct advantage of dual core CPU's as a multithreaded application. To summarize, two very good reasons: The lead time incolved in makign design/architectural desicions, and the intense work involved in exact process timing to ensure processes stay in synch. In other words, the threads managing the aircraft dynamics, the world dynamics, the weather dynamics, the scenery dynamics, etc etc must all be in exact synch or you get trees moving around slightly, an aircraft that thinks it landed when it appears to still be above the ground, etc. Imagine the howling of the user base if we had those kinds of problems instead. AND imagine all the small things that could have gotten "broken" in such a redesign process....and then imagine the additional delays.

And let's not forget that dual core technology came along to be proven only AFTER the FSX effort was already underway. So now the decision should be to scrap the months of effort on top of the associated longer development time and risks mentioned above? As a longtime FS customer I THANK the development team for sticking with their decision....it was right!

It's also very relevant to this discussion because Mr. Taylor did imply, strongly, that their team is "looking at what can be done" to give some relief to dual-core users, and that he woudl be back to report more around or shortly after the Thanksgiving timeframe, I wouldn't start advertising that a patch is coming from that statement, but take it any way you want it. This is positive stuff, and shows the commitment to support and quality does exist, IMHO.

There was also a revealing (and sadly typical) reference to Marketing having more to do with the state in which the product shipped than the ACES developers and testers did...in other words, and this is just like a Vista discussion we had here a while back, the project timeline and milestones rule all, regardless of quality, to some people. It's another illustration of why product delays are inevitably a GOOD thing for the users.

There are a lot of people making assumptions about how easy it shoud be to take a legacy software architecture and covert it into a mutithreaded app for dual-core, as if waving a magic wand and it shall be done. I don't talk about my own real-world gig but rest assured it's deep in the real-time software and firmware realm, having to do with some extremely fast industrial automation equipment for a very very large organization, with 26 years years as a developer in several languages ranging from Assembler to C++ under my belt, and am now a program manager myself for an extensive base of mission-critical equipment. I appreciate what the ACES team considereed and am absolutey appalled by every Tom, Dick and Harry (or self-important IT guy...no offense to any IT professionals around here) who claims MS creates "bloated code"...when they haven't even SEEN one bit of the code! It's as sad, and as ignorant, as the big ol' WAV file that went around a few months ago by that dude (steve somethingorother) who, while obviously overloaded on some kind of pain medication, went on a big ol' rant about FSX after his experience as a BETA tester....if I remember right, he even went on about CFS3 being written in "Windows XP Code"....as if there's really such a thing, LMAO! It's an O/S, not a development language (and strangely CFS3 also worked just fine on my old PC running Windows 2000 O/S). Some people's kids, you know....??

Sorry about my own rant here. but folks just don't get it that this is supposed to be fun, a hobby, meaning an optional way to spend your time, and there is NO LAW that says any of us HAVE to buy it and run it. It's odd too, that those folks who are constantly griping that FS9 is better aren't spending their time flying FS9 but instead are spending a considerable amount of time and effort bashing FSX. Wonder if they're really just members of the X-Plane sales staff?

As someone who now no longer is allowed to do any development work due to a changed job description (and a GREAT team of people who are really good at it anyway) I don't even dare call myself a developer any more, despite all the years and projects and languages. But it's getting to where anyone who does a most basic repaint and uploads it then claims themselves to be a "developer" and thus qualified to perform a blindfolded code review by merely looking at an FPS counter.

Gotta admit the demo is gettin' old even though it runs like a striped-@ss ape on my rig now....I hope AVSIM gets those promo copies of FSX from MS soon and it arrives on the doorstep in a coupla weeks.....can't WAIT to have some fun with the rest of ya's!

I mean it IS fun, right? And it's all ABOUT fun, right? Or why else are we all here in our spare time...we're not nuts, are we?

[Shades]

- JG300-Stoopy

it runs like a striped-@ss ape on my rig now

There's no way you can tell me that's legitimate!

[JG300-Stoopy]

Well, it's maybe a dated benchmarking technique, you're right! But I done seen me one of those things once and MAN can they haul butt!



(Maybe I shoulda qualified my statement as saying "with sliders in mid position and with some basic tweaks").

[JG300-Stoopy]

Here is an absolutely brilliant discussion largely between three very experienced and informed people on the subjext of multi-core support as specifically relates to FSX. It's also pleasantly devoid of any negative, useless comments from the bashers in the peanut gallery.

http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=121&topic_id=372401&mode=full

And definitely take their word for it...I'm an old-style non-thread-aware programmer, but it's clear these gents are quite savvy on the subject (two of them particularly).

When done reading, take a flight and enjoy FSX and be happy we have it now instead of another year or two from now....and in the meantime, a very large company with some brilliant programmers and resources is also working the issue, no doubt.

[Mechy]

Good read Stoopy .... Funny thing is if you read the forums over there they still talk about the frustration of having a duel core and it not taking full advantage in FSX .... I have a duel core and find it an exciting time of what's coming next.

Here is an example of what they can do now with a quad core :
www.youtube.com/watch?...qoWKNbA&NR
what people have to realize here is that this is probably a more scripted type game then FSX is but this new technology is going to open up a whole new world of computing.

And who knows, microsoft may come out with some patch to take advantage of multicore proc. .... but if they don't FSX should still make you happy right out of the box. Problem is, I think, sometimes people forget when they first purchased FS9 ... they only talk about it as it is today, what I mean is at the end of it's run. Where the hardware has surpassed the software and anything you add on runs super. In a few years FSX will be the greatest thing and FSXI will be terrible, incomplete and the worst software ever made !!!

[JG300-Stoopy]

That's absolutely spot-on, Mechy. Heck, even today, FS9 still continues to benefit from hardware upgrades. Case in point, my video card fan started making some noise 2 weeks ago, and over the weekend I saw that one store was having a special on 1Gig DDR RAM that my system takes. So long story short, I now have 3 Megs of RAM and a new ATI 1650 Pro vid card with 512MB on it, nothing special compared to what's out there I know, but it wasn't expensive either and it's a decent price/performance card for us highly prudent "married with kids" types.

Anyway yeah I'll admit I had FSX in mind when doing this but the whole system and especially FS9 benefited from it even further. Lately I've been getting heavy into recording and playing back formation aerobatics and when it replays 3 or 4 Decathlons roaring by with smoke on, it's been stutterville.....much better now.

Now, FS9 is even better, and this is 4 years after the release. Sheesh!

And when hasn't flight simming been an exercise in frustration with hardware and seeking upgrades. Compared to the old days - and I mean getting maybe 1 to 2 frames per sec back in the early 80's on the Commodore 64 with Sublogic flight sim (maybe Bushy can back me up here I think - seriously you could watch the screen update in synch with the second-hand on your watch during when landing at Meigs) we have it GREAT today.

The CPU architecture conversations are great and all, very interesting, but they miss out on the point that the performance of a system is the culmination of many fine details and bottlenecks and is best treated in like, a complete, systemic, like, holistic, approach, man, not just brute force in one or two components. I can't help but think that some people are just first-time upgraders or otherwise just outraged that the system specs being boasted about in their signatures are letting them down now.

[Adrian_Wainer]

Stoopy if it sounded like I was being critical of ACES/Microsoft for not makeing FSX tailored to exploit dual-cores, I wasn't, since I well know that there is a considerable time lag between commissioning a software product and its release and since Intel was expecting major leaps in processor performance but hit a brick wall and had to do a U-turn to multicore processors, it is not un-reasonable to assume that FSX might have been commissioned and designed in the expectation of a leap in processor speeds which never happened. Furthermore given the very great difficulties of makeing an application such as FSX utilize multicores and do so efficently it was not unreasonable for ACES/Microsoft to go down the the single processor route rather than multicore. All that said, the issue is that, in the present / near future, processor speeds have plateaued and FSX will not be speeded up by the next generation of processors which will be quadcore and therfore I would be dubious about FSX's ability to run faster in soon to be available machines.

Best and Warm Regards
Adrian Wainer

[Shades]

By the time Quad core is enhanced enough to run any games properly we will have a new type of processor biting at the heels of the kind we know currently, and it could make them appear positively prehistoric by comparison.
I would wait and see what's coming because we're about to take a leap into the unknown.

[JG300-Stoopy]

Oh hey, Adrian, dude....no worries. I went a little overboard in my diatribe there but it wasn't against you or anything. You were just passing along some discussion stuff. Sorry and hope you don't think I was yellin'....well, at you!

I've since learned to try to stay away from reading that place too much, it's too depressing....although I can't help but go there and check in, what with curiousity and also wondering WHEN the HECK they're gonna ship my copy!

Which I just found out they have received, according to the news today (the 20th). And their news page then says their shipping department is closed until the 27th "For the Thanksgiving Holidays" which is fine and all, but ....SEVEN days???......that's a helluva lotta turkey they must be eatin'! Man I can hear the grumbling on this one already!

So anyway I give it another 7 days after that to get here which means in about 2 weeks I wont be so snippy. Sorry bud!!

[401RCAF_Sly]

This multi core processor thing can ulimately only go one of two ways

Either it will expand to become a kinda matrix of processors processing a matrix of binary switches..... kinda like a fractal cube and evermore expanding..

Or

It may turn out that the undoubted inefficiency in having to split data send it to various processors, transport it back and re-assemble is a short term fillip until the next big thing (leap in performance)

I personally do not regard dual core as a pure performance enhancement its just sharing the load between two donkeys (or four)

within 2 years we should get a pointer and within 5 all this will be history


Have Fun

Sly