Quote:Well itīs not only FSX. FS in general has some features
that are extremly slow compared to other games. Especially
clouds and autogen is a real fps killer in FS.
I was really hoping they would rewrite those features for FSX. Other games
that use similar engines like Oblivion or Just Cause
can easily display a dense forrest (even with grass and
animated wildlife)
or volumetric clouds
without going from 30fps to 4fps (this is what FSX does when I turn on autogen at lowest possible settings).
In both cases (clouds and autogen) it absolutely doesnīt matter if you can move through the whole world or just 4000qm (like in "just cause") because those features
are generated on the fly and donīt require thousends of static coordinates to be loaded like non-autogen static geometry.
Now just take a look at these pictures. They are all from the Game "Just Cause" The game runs on my machine absolutely smooth.. with approximately the same graphic settings that were used in these screenshots.
To compare this game with FSX... You can also fly airplanes (also fast airplanes) You have real volumetric clouds unlike FSX (in FSX a plane does not "disapear" behind clouds
if you look from the outside). You have a view distance of 30 miles.
You have water reflections like in FSX even with depth mapping (not supported by FSX) and next to all of these features.. you also have a complete engine running in the background that needs to handle the AI Characters, Cars
that have physics applied to it. A lot of random events and so on. Below the line the game has to calculate a lot of more things than a flightsim has to... but is still way faster.
Here some screeshots from an external site.
http://media.insidegamer.nl/screenshots/public/8497/73581.jpghttp://media.insidegamer.nl/screenshots/public/2713/42971.jpghttp://media.insidegamer.nl/screenshots/public/2713/42980.jpghttp://media.insidegamer.nl/screenshots/public/2713/42978.jpghttp://media.insidegamer.nl/screenshots/public/2713/42975.jpgNow how can it be... this runs smooth on my machine while FSX runs with 5 fps blurred textures and just some hundreds trees ? Itīs not a problem of DX10 compatibility
or the fact that flightsim can display the whole world.
Some parts of FSX are either damn bad programmed
or just outdated !!
Itīs probabely not the case that MS has bad programmers. As far as I can judge some parts are just old and do not use nowadays technology. If the clouds
would be completely based on Hardware Shaders I bet they would be 10 times faster.
But it would need a complete rewrite to solve these problems... wich means it would cost a lot more money.
A lot of software that exists for quite some time has
these problems. 3dsmax for example.. is by far the worst performing 3d software out there.I tīs core that old that
some parts are not even accessible for the developers any more (like the "gradient ramp" material for example).
And I think we have the same problems with MS Flightsim.
I hoped especially these two parts (autogen and clouds)
would be reworked in FSX.. but I didnīreally expect it.
So Iīm still looking forward for my new computer that hopefully then will be able to display all these stuff !!
For me thereīs no big difference when I compare FSX with the launch of FS2004.
For my taste the hardware requirements for an MS Flightsim product are way to high on release.
I have some development knowledge, as well as game programming knowledge (including 3D programming, usage of Direct 3D, etc...).
I had a look to your screens... yes it looks beautifull, but sorry, the amount of details is much lower than what is actually displayed on a normal FSX scene.
Sure you have some magnificent trees right in fron of you... but what about the trees 100m away from you ? Ever heard about "Level of Detail" ? The trees away from you are much simplified, but you can't see it, you don't need to see it.
The screenshot in the forest is very detailled as well.... drawing distance = 200m, though...
The is a post out there that talks about replacement textures for the ground autogen. There we get precise numbers: default FSX autogen textures (for example, for one particulat type of tree) is 1024x1024 and weight is 600 kb ?
FS9 was smoooooooooth.... with its 512x512 - 20 kb textures. One must keep in mind that the textures of FSX are too heavy. The DTX5 format is the reason of course. Textures are bigger, heavier, so you need more ressources to display them.
When it comes to the rest of the game engine, don't underestimate the amount of ressource for AI traffic, meteo, ATC, flight model, gauges, scenery loading etc...
I can't believe how many
EDIT: Errr, where is the rest of my post ???
Anyway, the final sentence was: I can't believe how many people are amazed by the ressources needed by FSX.
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