Simviation Forum - System requirement estimates

Reply #15 - Apr 10^th, 2011 at 2:40pm

Daube Offline
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Rocket_Bird wrote on Apr 8^th, 2011 at 9:18pm:

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First, there are not so many games that simulate things that are as complex as in FS9 or FSX. Most "normal" games are just focused on graphics, the CPUs don't have much to do. Also, "normal" games are not as dynamic as our sims, thus there is much more room for optimizations and power saving.

Thanks for the response.

I understand the whole complexity issue here. What makes me itch though is whether the optimization can be improved on and whether if there are some other way that a sim like this could possibly be more fitted for hardware of today instead of hardware half a decade later.

Is pre-rendering and state-of-the-art hardware really the only two solutions?

I'll give you a concrete example. A bit extreme for a comparison, but that will show you the principles.

Let's consider an old style Doom-like game, where you go through corridors and visit various rooms, ok ? The rooms are expensive to draw, in terms of performance, for the video card. So we want to avoid drawing "unnecessary" rooms.

One of the major optimizations, in this case, is to consider "where you can see what". Let's say there are three rooms, but when you're in the third one, you cannot see the two others because the corridor makes a corner, or something like that, preventing you to see. In that case, you don't need to draw the other rooms. So when you build the "map", the scenery, you place a logic check that prevents the computer to draw those rooms because they are not visible by the player when he is in there. This way you save a lot of power, thus you get smooth FPS.

Now, we have defined a logic here. We know how the structure of the corridors are so we define, once for all, the various logic checks that will save power. Unfortunately, in a dynamic world, this is not exactely possible anymore, because you don't know how much corridors there are, nor their shape, how much rooms, you cannot predict anything. That means that the nice little tricks we used before are gone.

This is the kind of problematic you'll face in a "dynamic" scenery. Of course, what I wrote above is not 100% correct but it will give you a very basic idea on why fixed-scenery games can usually display much nicer visuals than dynamic-scenery games.

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Reply #16 - Apr 13^th, 2011 at 2:54pm

markag Offline
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I would be interested to see if they offload some of the CPU load to the GPU. I'm thinking with the power of todays graphics cards, especially Nvidia with thier high count of cuda cores, why can't some of the calculations be moved from the CPU to the graphics card. Combine that with better milti-threaded implementation and you could better utilize the existing hardware.

GPUs are starting to move beyond just 3D rendering. You already see it with video processing and PhysX calculations outisde of flight sim world. Why not incorportate those types of tweaks and optimizations to save processor cycles for the truley important things. Offload that workload to the GPU is what I say.

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Reply #17 - Apr 15^th, 2011 at 12:34pm

Rocket_Bird Offline
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markag wrote on Apr 13^th, 2011 at 2:54pm:

I would be interested to see if they offload some of the CPU load to the GPU. I'm thinking with the power of todays graphics cards, especially Nvidia with thier high count of cuda cores, why can't some of the calculations be moved from the CPU to the graphics card. Combine that with better milti-threaded implementation and you could better utilize the existing hardware.

GPUs are starting to move beyond just 3D rendering. You already see it with video processing and PhysX calculations outisde of flight sim world. Why not incorportate those types of tweaks and optimizations to save processor cycles for the truley important things. Offload that workload to the GPU is what I say.

I was wondering that myself though never suggested it explicitly. Given the fact that my video card doesn't even go full-load (when its more than capable of doing) with FSX while the sim chugs along with the CPU being the sole variable that drives fps, I can't help but wonder.

I get the work load thing and the difference between this and say, a first person shooter. But really, at some point, I think there should be a way to optimize this further instead of making the CPU the limiting factor.

I may be in denial, I admit that, but with technology these days, there has to be a better way.

Cheers,
RB

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Reply #18 - Apr 18^th, 2011 at 6:29pm

markag Offline
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The way nvidia has positioned themselves with the Fermi graphics cards shows that they expect the graphics cards to be doing more processing in the future. You already see how video encoding has moved from the CPU to the GPU, and that has really improved performance. Why can't some of these processing threads be moved off CPU. And now with the sandy bridge intel chips, on-chip PCI Express controller streamlines the connection between graphics and CPU. Granted, not everyone runs the latest intel and nvidia cards, but the technology is there waiting to be used. Why not take advantage of it.

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Reply #19 - Apr 18^th, 2011 at 6:56pm

Strawberry Yogurt Offline
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That's what I'm saying. They delivered FSX, it's great, but you need a supercomputer! Grin

MS Flight looks better, like a LOT better, and they've made a promise. They don't deliver, it don't sell. Wink

_{Let's just hope they do what they say, okay?}

I went outside once. The graphics weren't all that great.

Burn the land and boil the sea, you can't take the sky from me.

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Reply #20 - May 2^nd, 2011 at 7:31pm

New Light Offline
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Quote:

They don't deliver, it don't sell.

Yeah, but a bunch of folks are going to buy it at a premium price the day it comes to market. Unless you are one who learned the hard lessons from the debacle of FSX, I would imagine that there will still be quite a few folks that do buy it right away. I'm going to sit and wait for 1.5 - 2 years before I buy.

Quote:

They delivered FSX, it's great, but you need a supercomputer!

Even if I'm hearing of good early results - most of those folks will have higher computer skills than I ever hope to have and have deeper pockets than the average Joe. After 18 - 24 months is about the time that technology becomes better, more available and the price goes down fairly drastically.

I bought FSX the day it came out along with a new computer just to use FSX. Long story short, the first two computers went back to the store. Computers 3 & 4 went over my 3rd floor balcony with smashing results. #5 was taken to the range and was shot with an M4, shotgun slugs, got shot twice using a 37mm grenade launcher loaded with flechette rounds to get the ever-spreading parts and pieces. Then, for good measure, I switched back to my shotgun and used a dragons breath round to burn the little bit that was left at that point.

Ahh, so, like I said, I think I'll wait awhile to get into Flight. My stock i7 920 (#6) runs the single engine aircraft that I "fly" in FSX just fine.

Oh, and, not being to much of a techie, my guess for the specs to use Flight (with good, smooth flyability - NOT screenshots, anyone can do that)

8 core processor @ 6+ GHz
clock speed of 1500+
24+ Gs memory
4Gs vid card (capable of 2560 x 1920 resolution)
10K+ rpm hard drive
monitor (native 2560 x 1920 resolution)

Semper Fi,

Dave

« Last Edit: May 5^th, 2011 at 9:17pm by New Light »

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