tommers
Fuck it, it's fine.
The Apple Mac - workhorse of the proletariat.
Next Microsoft flight simulator looks astonishing
- Thread starter Steel Icarus
- Start date
The Apple Mac - workhorse of the proletariat.
teuchter
je suis teuchter
It's more that people with high spec macs usually have them for serious work purposes while people with high spec PCs just use them for gaming and things, and put coloured LEDs in them and so on.
ruffneck23
front left
you dont need to have an expensive pc , I use shadow pay 1£4.99 for a month for a fully fledged high end windows pc, using xbox game pass for £10.99 a month and have got the new flight sim working.
elbows
Well-Known Member
As usual its a lot to do with how much you are demanding in terms of visual quality and framerate as to what sort of CPU and GPU you can get away with.
If the visuals are the main attraction for you then its hard to get the best out of it without silly hardware. eg If the volumetric cloud quality matters to you a lot (it does me) then its an expensive business for sure.
I would dearly love to have ditched PCs and Windows completely years ago, but even when throwing money at external GPUs it is extremely difficult to achieve high end realtime 3D graphics with available mac hardware. Hard to get beyond uninspiring mid-range performance. I'm left looking years into the future for hope on that front, eg after years of their own ARM silicon development for their macos machines it is possible they could become competitive on that front. And the hackintosh approach to this stuff took a knock due to the current nvidia driver situation for macos beyond High Sierra.
If the visuals are the main attraction for you then its hard to get the best out of it without silly hardware. eg If the volumetric cloud quality matters to you a lot (it does me) then its an expensive business for sure.
I would dearly love to have ditched PCs and Windows completely years ago, but even when throwing money at external GPUs it is extremely difficult to achieve high end realtime 3D graphics with available mac hardware. Hard to get beyond uninspiring mid-range performance. I'm left looking years into the future for hope on that front, eg after years of their own ARM silicon development for their macos machines it is possible they could become competitive on that front. And the hackintosh approach to this stuff took a knock due to the current nvidia driver situation for macos beyond High Sierra.
steveseagull
Well-Known Member
OOOf
elbows
Well-Known Member
ORBX are claiming it was a technical issue that they will fix.
orbxsystems.com
Orbx Community and Support Forums
orbxsystems.com
You don’t buy a Mac to play games. In fact I’m not sure why anyone would want one at all nowadays but you’d definitely not be playing a game with Microsoft in the title on one.
As if looking at Tower Bridge under a microscope is what happens in flight conditions. They should have known that ‘influencers’ would have been all over it though to boost their ratings.
There’s fuck all wrong with it if used correctly. Tower Bridge looks a bit shit which they are fixing.
elbows
Well-Known Member
I'm sorry but the developers of the sim set the standard for what people could expect, and no 3rd party developer should be charging people for add-ons that are out of step with the built in standard of visuals at close range. This game caters for a broader set of norms and expectations than your personal standards for how close people should be getting to stuff in a flight sim cover.
Jesus. Have you just started simming right now?
Prior to this release of MSFS2020 I was simming over the UK in VR using XP11 and Orbx add ons and it was the most astonishing thing I’ve ever seen. ‘Real’ is a bit of a stretch but it felt like I was in a 3D movie yet able to control it. You’ll understand what I mean when VR comes to MSFS2020. There was problems of course, but you weigh up all that stuff with the experience. Perfect is impossible but we’re actually getting close.
Ive been simming, on and off, since the release of MSX in 2006 and honestly those new to this who are moaning never knew they lived. Wait until you get VR and you will absolutely agree with what I say. You will also overlook some issues because if everything is absolutely perfect, the performance isn’t there yet with modern hardware. But it will be.
elbows
Well-Known Member
I feel like we are talking at cross purposes. This wont be my first VR headset, and I have been developing stuff using game engines like Unity for 10 years.
I dont know how our wires got crossed. People are complaining because the Orbx London pack is not of the quality they expect from Orbx or from this particular flight sim. Due to the standards set with Orbx in their other products, and by this particular sim, which is excellent.
With my developer hat on, there are some possible technical reasons why something unexpected could have happened to the quality of this pack. Something might have got messed up with compression or any LOD system that might exist to swap models and textures out for lower quality versions when the camera is at a greater distance from them. Or it might not be a technical issue and they just tried to get away with stuff that was below expectations and their usual modern standards.
I dont know how our wires got crossed. People are complaining because the Orbx London pack is not of the quality they expect from Orbx or from this particular flight sim. Due to the standards set with Orbx in their other products, and by this particular sim, which is excellent.
With my developer hat on, there are some possible technical reasons why something unexpected could have happened to the quality of this pack. Something might have got messed up with compression or any LOD system that might exist to swap models and textures out for lower quality versions when the camera is at a greater distance from them. Or it might not be a technical issue and they just tried to get away with stuff that was below expectations and their usual modern standards.
I think they worried that making the models too high poly or detailed would affect the performance of the sim. Obviously it has been thrown back in their face but Central London is an area that will affect performance. This was also an issue in XP11 until they switched to the new Vulcan update of their engine.
I should say that although the complaints are probably correct I feel it damages a niche company who are the best in the business of improving scenery in flight simulators and as such folk should cut them some slack.
I’ve bought it (there was no discount for it but there was for London City and Leeds Bradford airports) and that is why I was shocked by the complaints. Then I saw the video. But I’m just seeing it whilst flying along the Thames, not through a microscope. And it all looks fine doing it like that. Maybe the same people complaining about the lack of poly count and res on some models will be the same ones complaining about reduced performance once it’s fixed. In fact, it will be.
And you sound like the kind of person who understands that balancing act.
alsoknownas
some bloke
.
Don’t be shy. Honestly it’s mostly amazing. Trying to configure controllers is a cunt unless you’re using an Xbox controller. That is bad for a simulator. But obviously they see a casual market.
elbows
Well-Known Member
I know enough to know that I dont know enough about the specifics on this one. I dont know how far the performance bottlenecks with this sim are influenced by tech factors relating to these mesh models, I dont know what sort of Level of Detail (LOD) system has been used in this game engine. Because normally an LOD system is exactly what would be used to get the best of both worlds out of these things, where low-detail models are used when things are at a greater distance, for performance reasons, but the detail people want is there if you get close because at a certain camera point it automatically swaps out the low-detail model/textures for a higher quality one, and then vica versa when travelling away from said model.
The London pack is not currently in a state that lets me properly evaluate these things, but if I did a detailed performance comparison of the situation before and after they fix the quality issues then that may offer some strong clues.
Hell I am blathering on about this and I havent even flown around a city that has proper hand-crafted models yet! So probably as I study this more in future I will have something else to say, but it might bore everyone. I might do it anyway!
Hmm. But you did say that you were originally getting a VR headset to do a project of your own. By which I undertook the understanding that you understood the balancing act of the experience vs the capability.
We still have to do that. In fact we always will have to.
alsoknownas
some bloke
My experience with VR (admittedly OR Dev Kit 2), and listening a bit to Carmack (boo, hiss!), lead me to believe that it is best for generating experiential presence, rather than trying to hone in on graphical detail.
I can't remember the details now, but I think all of the graphical requirements are quadrupled by the demands of VR. You need super fast refresh rates and overlapping areas of resolve (where the two eyes cross), etc. so the system doesn't usually end up resolving super high-fidelity graphics anyway.
I can't remember the details now, but I think all of the graphical requirements are quadrupled by the demands of VR. You need super fast refresh rates and overlapping areas of resolve (where the two eyes cross), etc. so the system doesn't usually end up resolving super high-fidelity graphics anyway.
sim667
All aboard the 303 bus.
I'd want another mac for mac osx. We use windows machines at work and I take my own mac in as windows is frankly unusable. Only reason I'd be tempted by a PC is to play this, but I'm thinking about getting a shadow tech one.
Shadow Cloud Computing
Cloud Gaming turns your devices into a powerful high-end gaming PC. Choose the gaming setup to stream your video games
shadow.tech
I'd want another mac for mac osx. We use windows machines at work and I take my own mac in as windows is frankly unusable. Only reason I'd be tempted by a PC is to play this, but I'm thinking about getting a shadow tech one.
Shadow Cloud Computing
Cloud Gaming turns your devices into a powerful high-end gaming PC. Choose the gaming setup to stream your video games
Everything is going to be cloud based eventually I think. The big issue is how absolutely shit the UK internet service is. That’s the bottle neck. Until that works there’s zero point in these amazing services.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Yes but I really wasnt expecting that particular angle to come up in regards the Orbx story because I thought it was a simple tale of a cockup or unacceptable last-decade graphics quality rather than a clear demonstration that these sorts of graphics add-ons for this particular sim need to be below a certain quality for performance reasons.
VR perfornamce is a different issue. I cant judge that till that mode is available, but given how much this sim can already use CPUs and GPUs when running at Ultra settings, I know that I will end up having to lower some settings or drooling over the next high-end nvidia card thats announced. Whatever compromises are required for VR mode need not affect the game beyond the VR mode.
Maybe we can continue this strand of covnversation once the updated Orbx pack is available and then again once VR is available for this sim.
Once VR support is online you simply won’t care. It is the best experience of anything you’ve ever seen in your life. For sure it can be improved. But honestly, you’ll be too marvelled to even think of it.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Years went by and the resolutions that were deemed practical increased by virtue of several optimisations on the coding, graphics rendering side of things, and by the inevitable increase in higher end CPU and GPU performance.
The first gen and pre-consumer first gen dev kits had pretty bad screen resolutions, screen door effects, glare and less than optimal lenses compared to todays offerings. We are firmly into the territory where all sorts of visual detail can be represented and seen clearly in VR, at least in terms of what the headsets can deliver. Challenges still remain as to whether such levels of visual quality can be rendered quickly enough to provide the framerate VR requires by any particular PC with any particular game title. That hasnt stopped VR resolutions from going from the paltry 960x1080 res for each eye of the DK2, through to the 1080x1200 per eye offered at consumer launch, and on to the 1440x1600 per eye at a higher framerate that the Valve Index offers, and the 2160x2160 that I have in store for me when the HP Reverb G2 arrives.
Last edited:
elbows
Well-Known Member
I wont be able to reobtain the original VR sense of wonder including 'wow I actually feel like I've been somewhere else' because that experience isnt new to me these days.
The wow factors that will still be fresh for me are hopefully to be found in future from having a VR headset resolution that mean I dont get distracted by blurry text and detail, obvious pixels etc. And crucially from having the right titles to play, which is of course where this flight simulator comes into the equation. I know it will be still able to wow me even if things like the volumetric cloud detail and other graphics quality settings have to be toned down a lot in order to achieve the right framerate for VR.
Fair points but you are speculating. Honestly my time in VR with XP11 and Orbx are the finest experiences I’ve ever had. It’s impossible to describe actually.
