Performance Anxiety
Not mine, but FSX of course...
The number of posts regarding FSX performance is staggering, but not particularly surprising. Unlike console systems, PC's come in a lot of different flavors and the number of hardware and driver combinations is practically infinite. This is the bane of PC development.
I am at a loss for why some users had good FSX performance in a demo or in the beta and poor performance in the release. I am also at a loss why one user with a super system will have worse performance than a user with a system that is a few years old (although I'm guessing their "sliders" are not set the same). I did read a thread from a user that has a fantastic system running a beta of Vista but has poor performance with FSX. I'm no Vista expert, but I have to wonder how much of that particular problem has to do with driver issues as I know some of the Vista video drivers had issues a month ago. As I've mentioned many times I'm running on a XPS Gen 2 laptop that is well over a year old and my perf isn't that bad (although it is if I crank everything up). We used a desktop machine recently that is much more powerful than my laptop for some video capture and we were looking at each other wondering why we weren't getting more fps. So a lot of this is a mystery to us non-devs, and we share in the frustration as well.
So what are we doing about it you ask? Well we aren't having all-team meetings to discuss performance, but we are reading the forums and looking at what users are doing to try and improve performance. If there is a good solution out there we are going to look at what is going on "under the covers" and see what we can do to improve things. We are looking into improving multi-core processing, and of course working toward the DX10 update. I personally am not involved in any of this work, I just know that it's going on around me. I have great confidence in the team that we will be able to improve some things for some hardware configurations, but I'm not sure much can be done for older hardware, lack of ram, and sliders set beyond what their system is capable of. I should also say that the DX10 update is the only planned code update that I know of, so I have to assume that any perf gains we make internally will have to wait until that release. Any release is a non-trivial event in our studio, so it would be a big deal to release anything earlier than the DX10 update. But who knows, stranger things have happened...
A couple other bits of information I've heard over the past few months you may find interesting. In order to move FSX nearer to the cutting edge of game graphics we felt we had to move to shader 2.0 support at least (wanted to do more). This decision is a significant factor in frame rates being lower for FSX than what you would have thought we would have based on FS2004 technology. Many aspects of the rendered image on your screen are running through a shader even though it may not seem like it. If we had built FSX without this shader support, we would have higher frame rates but we would be much farther behind the times for the general gaming industry. Our requirement to support backward compatibility for aircraft and other content is holding us back from fully taking advantage of everything a modern graphics card has to offer. IF we were to do what nearly every other cutting edge game does and create a one-off engine with no backward compatibility, we could tax the video cards more heavily. I'm sure the community that invests in add-ons (and creates add-ons) would implode if we did that (and none of us want that to happen). Comparing a game without backward compatibility requirements is an apples and oranges comparison. Better multi-core support was seriously considered but the risks associated with taking that route were too great to dive into when trying to finish the product. For us we had to get the product stable for shipping and trying to debug such a complex product on multi-core would have de-stabilized all of our efforts and pushed out the release date an unknown period of time. Business realities which few users probably understand or respect forced our hand on that one. Maybe we can make progress on that front now that we have shipped. Lastly, if I understand it correctly, because we provide full multi-monitor support, we cannot support all of what SLI has to offer. I think a dev would have to elaborate more on this to actually be useful information...
Flight simulations are the only entertainment product that I know of which require open and unrestricted sight lines out to the world. Comparisons are constantly being made to first person shooters which have incredible frame rates and amazingly rich environments. I'm as impressed with them as the next guy, but they cannot render a realistically scaled and open representation of the Earth. If any of them actually can do that and do it in a way where I can go anywhere on the planet seamlessly, then I would like to see it. And if they can do it with frame rates users often quote with great enthusiasm, then we won't be in business for very long.
Of course not being a dev, I may have gotten some of this wrong (although I don't think so) and considering there aren't very many FS team members blogging, and I will encourage them to blog through me if they want to get information out to users, or to post directly on a community forum. As we build out our own website I expect we will have a direct avenue for sharing information through it as well. When we have solutions we will try to get the information out as quickly as we can.
Comments
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
The question of how FSX your PC's capabilities is addressed in an article on our new website which will be launched sometime soon. I'll let that article do the work.Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Re: Backward compatibility I think this is both the bane and salvation of FSX. While it has held up the transition to a better performance level of the simulator, it has also increased marketability (people aren't willing to give up all of their FS9 addons) and the similarity has made it possible for people to find quick patches to enhance performance. The product hasn't even been released yet, and some of the lead people have already determined fixes for the autogen problem. I think we'll be just fine with FSX as more developers continue to tweak it, but also think it needs to be the last of the "backward compatible" series, if that is what is holding things back. When you have the chance, I would be interested in any information you can share about how FSX determines the default settings for an individual computer. There seem to be 3 main factors, CPU, GPU, and memory....how do each of those fall in to determining performance?Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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January 01, 2003
Thanks, Paul for a thoughtful and informative perspective.Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Hi Paul, when DX10 update is planned(+ -)?!? Thanks FabioAnonymous
January 01, 2003
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January 01, 2003
As a payware developer, I would personally have no probelm if you dropped the backward compatibility for the next release, so you could have free reign on how you want to design the product for the next few years. I can understand when people are parting cash for addons but freeware people complain about it too, no one complained when battlefield 1942 mods wouldn't be compatible with battlefield 2, thats life - somethings have to happen to see advancment. You guys have done great work on the current engine though and I look foward to picking up my copy as soon as its available to get tinkering.Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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January 01, 2003
I have discovered something on my system and I am curious as to why it is happening. In FS9 when I compare the ctrl-z displayed FPS to the real FPS it is really close. In FSX when I compare the ctrl-z displayed FPS to the real FPS it is about half. This explains to me why 15 FPS still feels smooth. It could be comforting to those paying big bucks for fast systems that the FPS counter is displaying half their actual frame rate. Here are two screen shots that show this. The FS9 version shows 50.3 ctrl-z and 54 (ATI Tray Tools) in the upper right corner. The FSX version shows 16.2 ctrl-z and 30 in the upper right corner: http://bruceatkinson.com/images/fs9_fps.jpg http://bruceatkinson.com/images/fsx_fps.jpg BruceAnonymous
January 01, 2003
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