Performance...

[Purg]

Perhaps I am mistaken. I have two Rapter HDD, one has Vista on it the other does not. No RAID config, just two HDD's. I assumed the second was slave to the Vista. If not, could there still could be a speed issue if I install the software on the non Vista HDD, right??

 

Assuming you're running your swap file on the same drive as your OS, you'll likely get better performance running the sim off the HDD that your OS isn't installed on.

 

However, BS doesn't seem particularly I/O intensive during a mission and for a sim, its memory footprint seems small in comparison to other sims so the performance boost could well be negligable.

 

Slave is a PATA term where you'd daisy chain 2 devices to a single port (master/slave) and the devices would have to be configured so the port knew which device was which. No such issue with SATA.

[Purg]

yeah, the graphics in the game are dated comparing to today's titles.

but we love dcs for what it is, not what it looks like.

and to that, ED must improve multicore support.

after all, almost everyone is playing this on a dual or quad core.

 

Compared to other titles, absolutely. Compared to other sims, it's lightyears ahead of anything else I own.

 

Possibly for nostalgic reasons, I went ahead and re-installed LOMAC and IL2-1946 - ugly. I remember 1946 being a reasonably pretty looking sim but due to BS, it feels like I'm simming inside a roadrunner cartoon.

[aledmb]

Compared to other titles, absolutely. Compared to other sims,

it's lightyears ahead of anything else I own.

 

yeah, i'm not saying it's graphics don't look good. they do.

but you know what i was trying to say. bs is nothing in terms

of graphics compared to crysis, for example. my machine runs

crysis at max settings 1680x1050 at ~40 fps. it drops to ~30

or ~25 sometimes, but only on huge and intensive effects

scenes.

 

black shark does not have such geometry, hi-res textures and

special effects as crysis does, so i thought it would be a matter

of fine tunning their engine. it would be great if the game could

support more than 2 cores and maybe sli in the long run.

 

do you know if it uses physx?

[Purg]

yeah, i'm not saying it's graphics don't look good. they do.

but you know what i was trying to say. bs is nothing in terms

of graphics compared to crysis, for example. my machine runs

crysis at max settings 1680x1050 at ~40 fps. it drops to ~30

or ~25 sometimes, but only on huge and intensive effects

scenes.

 

black shark does not have such geometry, hi-res textures and

special effects as crysis does, so i thought it would be a matter

of fine tunning their engine. it would be great if the game could

support more than 2 cores and maybe sli in the long run.

 

do you know if it uses physx?

 

No idea if it uses PhysX.

 

You just have to look at what both games are modelling under the hood to know why Crysis looks a whole lot prettier than BS.

 

If CPU cycles were unlimited, BS could look just as pretty as Crysis - the difference between the two is emphasis. If you developed a game engine for an FPS that looked like BS in today's market, it would rot on the shelf.

 

More CPU cycles are spent making the engine look pretty in Crysis as there's not much else happening under the hood. BS is modelling a complex flight model, atmospheric conditions, weapons and detection systems that far outweighs that of Crysis (it also can't help having a completely clickable and functioning 3D cockpit supporting 6DOF on the frame counter). CPU cycles in BS are therefore dedicated to modelling these things first.

 

Then compare the size of the respective theatres. If the same game engine were running both, you'd have to wait for the map to reload every couple of minutes of flying time in the KA50 when on ingress. It's just not realistic on today's hardware to expect the same level of graphic detail between an FPS and a combat flight sim.

 

Multicore support, I agree (though the Vista kludge does net me some decent gains on my quadcore) but I believe this is slated in an upcoming version. SLI, pointless - it's not maxxing out one video card as the sim is CPU bound, not graphics bound.

[aledmb]

It's just not realistic on today's hardware to expect the same

level of graphic detail between an FPS and a combat flight sim.

 

right, i know it wouldn't be feasible to make it prettier, but as

it's cpu bound, it should support more than 2 cores.

 

as you say, it's probably coming soon.

 

thanks for your replies!

[Icarus2]

right, i know it wouldn't be feasible to make it prettier, but as

it's cpu bound, it should support more than 2 cores.

 

as you say, it's probably coming soon.

 

thanks for your replies!

 

And if its so CPU bound and light on the GPU that you only need one vid card to max it out, why not have the option to beef it up if you have SLI?

[Purg]

And if its so CPU bound and light on the GPU that you only need one vid card to max it out, why not have the option to beef it up if you have SLI?

 

Because the bottleneck is the CPU not the GPU. We're not at the point where it's complete bus mastering and that anything and everything to do with graphics is done solely on the GPU, it's not. While the image is being rendered on the GPU, it can only render what the CPU is telling it to. Therefore, if the CPU is maxxed out, there's a limit to what it can tell the GPU to do. Making it prettier still burns CPU cycles.

[Icarus2]

Because the bottleneck is the CPU not the GPU. We're not at the point where it's complete bus mastering and that anything and everything to do with graphics is done solely on the GPU, it's not. While the image is being rendered on the GPU, it can only render what the CPU is telling it to. Therefore, if the CPU is maxxed out, there's a limit to what it can tell the GPU to do. Making it prettier still burns CPU cycles.

 

So what can cause low framerates when your GPU, RAM and CPU are not maxed out? I've seen that before.

[Purg]

So what can cause low framerates when your GPU, RAM and CPU are not maxed out? I've seen that before.

 

Beyond my expertise. You'd have to know a whole lot more of how the sim is coded, how Vista gets a boost where XP doesn't and the raw data of the utilisation of the sim on your PC to even come close to answering what's going on.

 

When I first start a mission (and I chose Battle single mission as an example) DCS is running on a single core at 100% utilisation while the sim is paused. If I then tab out and change the affinity to all 4 of my cores, I get an instant ~15fps boost. Therefore it's obvious that the engine isn't being GPU limited but CPU limited. Throw a faster processor, change nothing else and the FPS will rise even more.

 

Now, how Vista is handling those threads within DCS is a mystery to me (there were 22 threads running under DCS.exe when I checked during battle and have seen as little at 18 ) Theoretically, each thread can run on any 4 of my cores. I can't explain why the kludge works for Vista and not XP though. I'm a hardware guy, predominantly server and storage and only dabble in OS and software on the side.

 

Most of the time core 3 on my box gets the most workout when I spread the affinity across all 4 cores and will peg upwards of 90%. Now, whatever thread(s) are on that core are again bound by the limit of the CPU and regardless of whether the other cores are relatively idle, you've again hit a bottleneck. A thread can be as simple as an I/O request from the sim to disk or the whole guts of the sim, depends largely on the code. If you were to look at CPU utilisation as a whole, it wouldn't show a maxxed CPU but if you split it by cores, at least 1 core may be running near max - hence, your ceiling performance wise has been reached even though you have 3 cores worth of CPU cycles relatively idle.

 

Then there's the engine itself, the inner workings that I'm not privvy too. Take FSX as an example, you can limit the FPS so that the engine can devote more CPU cycles to other things (like drawing distance, buildings, AI aircraft, etc). Perhaps DCS is limiting CPU dedicated to FPS in this way so that it has left over CPU cycles for the flight model for instance.

[d0ppler]

I got 10 more frames per sec when reducing anti aliasing from 8 to 4, so it's not only the CPU dependant..

[aledmb]

I got 10 more frames per sec when reducing anti aliasing from 8 to 4, so it's not only the CPU dependant..

 

without anti-aliasing or with 16x quality anti-aliasing applied,

i get the same fps. i think this is sad. never seen this happen before.

 

i think the software makes bad use of cpu/gpu combination. i think

it's delegating a lot of work to the cpu (including graphics).

 

that would explain my anti-aliasing issue.

 

EDIT: i'm thinking i think too much.

[Purg]

I got 10 more frames per sec when reducing anti aliasing from 8 to 4, so it's not only the CPU dependant..

 

Of course it's also video dependant if you're asking your video card to render a scene that's more than it's capable of - antialiasing is done solely on the video card and is independant of DCS so the DCS engine doesn't handle the anti-aliasing.

 

I'm just talking in terms of plain DCS.

[Purg]

without anti-aliasing or with 16x quality anti-aliasing applied,

i get the same fps. i think this is sad. never seen this happen before.

 

i think the software makes bad use of cpu/gpu combination. i think

it's delegating a lot of work to the cpu (including graphics).

 

that would explain my anti-aliasing issue.

 

EDIT: i'm thinking i think too much.

 

Just as I keep telling you, your performance is CPU bound, not video bound. Your card obviously can render the scenes with anti-aliasing at 16x which tells me that your video card clearly has more than enough horsepower to handle what DCS is asking of it plus some left over. I see this on every single sim that I own.

 

If the CPU was largely responsible for your video output you would be lucky to get 1 FPS. Run some of the Futuremark benchmarks and compare the results when a scene is rendered by your graphics card as opposed to when it's rendered by the CPU. Also take note of the quality of each scene, not only is it a fraction of the speed, it looks horrible in comparison.

[aledmb]

well, then lets just hope ED patches DCS as soon as possible. :)

[Vortex]

Patches for what??? Despite them both being number crunchers, Video cards are and CPU's are very different.

[aledmb]

Patches for what??? Despite them both being number crunchers,

Video cards are and CPU's are very different.

 

sorry Vortex, i don't understand what you're saying with "Video cards

are and CPU's are very different".

 

Patches for what???

 

well, i would say that, nowadays, the lack of multicore support is a bug,

especially in simulators. this alone justifies ED releasing a patch for DCS.

 

some other things to include in a possible patch might be the correcting

of sound glitches (discussed elsewhere) and the switching to and from

the desktop while loading the game engine (discussed elsewhere, too).

 

surely, i can wait for that, but it needs to be done.

:thumbup:

[beers]

Hello all,

 

My system is a P4 3GHz (which seems to have 2 cores, but somewhere I got the impression it was divided into "virtual cores"), 2GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GS (old AGP style), and I'm running Win XP Pro SP3.

 

I've got DCS with all of the graphic settings at the lowest (and oh my, I am jealous of the screen shots I see everyone posting!) and I get OK FPS. Flying over the big air base it drops to single-digits, and over open/empty spaces i've seen 40 but normally it's around 25. So, when I get into battle every once in a while things just stop for a flash (normally followed immediately by an missle explosion filling my veiw).

 

So, I've got two questions for the community;

1) I think I am maxing the CPU and not even bothering the GPU. What graphic settings in the program are CPU or GPU related? What can I turn up without increasing the CPU load? ex, I expect distance and detail are CPU, water, heat shimmer are GPU ... ??

2) I understand that the program affinity doesn't help much with XP. I guess I'll believe you all, that XP doesn't give much bonus with this setting, but without it one of my cores is maxed out. Anyway, from what I read about Windows 7, it is going to run circles around Vista. I'd kiss a pig if it could give me a beta build of Win7 but it seems patience and luck are the only things that can really make that possible. So, anyone able to post a clean copy of the Win7 ISO? Anyone here using Win7 with DCS???

[Zembla]

sorry Vortex, i don't understand what you're saying with "Video cards

are and CPU's are very different".

 

The way videocards and CPU's handle arithmetics are different. It's one of the reasons why a lot of things like "folding" etc are done with your graphics card nowadays rather than with a CPU.

 

well, i would say that, nowadays, the lack of multicore support is a bug,

especially in simulators. this alone justifies ED releasing a patch for DCS.

 

The absence of a feature is not a bug. Also, Crossfire/SLI aren't exactly "multicore" in the sense that a Core 2 Duo processor is a multicore processor, AFAIK. What you're suggesting might well be an overhaul of the engine, which may come with new releases of later installments in the DCS series, but may just as well play second fiddle to recreating avionics/flight with authenticity. I know what I choose.

 

and the switching to and from

the desktop while loading the game engine (discussed elsewhere, too).

 

surely, i can wait for that, but it needs to be done.

:thumbup:

 

Why does that need to be fixed? I'd rather see them focus on something that's either really broken, or could stand a lot to improve, than waste their time on something that does pretty much exactly what it should.

 

-Z

[aledmb]

The way videocards and CPU's handle arithmetics are different. It's one of the reasons why a lot of things like "folding" etc are done with your graphics card nowadays rather than with a CPU.

 

The absence of a feature is not a bug. Also, Crossfire/SLI aren't exactly "multicore" in the sense that a Core 2 Duo processor is a multicore processor, AFAIK. What you're suggesting might well be an overhaul of the engine, which may come with new releases of later installments in the DCS series, but may just as well play second fiddle to recreating avionics/flight with authenticity. I know what I choose.

 

Why does that need to be fixed? I'd rather see them focus on something that's either really broken, or could stand a lot to improve, than waste their time on something that does pretty much exactly what it should.

 

-Z

 

ok man! fine..

maybe you understood what i'm asking.

several things make the game look as unfinished to me.

i'm done with all this complaining.

see ya!

[aledmb]

...So, anyone able to post a clean copy of the Win7 ISO?...

 

do i understand what your asking?

and how would you run windows 7 on your box?

[beers]

I'm not clear on the legality of the beta release of Win7, and i am NOT asking anyone to break any law. Far as I can tell, MS released it with some sort of timed license so eventually you'd have to purchase the full release, but in that idea, I don't know that the license for the beta of Win7 has any restrictions about relaying it to other people... I'd figure if I was in charge of the beta test that I'd want it in as many computers as possible, both for good testing and also for ensuring that all those computers would eventually have to purchase the full release.

 

As for "how would you run Windows 7 on your box?" um ... i'd install it? My gaming computer is just that, fun and games and I don't really care if I blow it up temporarially...

[aledmb]

My system is a P4 3GHz (which seems to have 2 cores, but

somewhere I got the impression it was divided into "virtual

cores"), 2GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GS (old AGP style),

and I'm running Win XP Pro SP3.

 

i mean why would you install windows 7?

just to see dcs fall down?

 

and does your specs allow you to?

[beers]

I am interested in Win7 because, from what I read, Microsoft has finally figured out that the operating system is supposed to be just that, the OS, and not everything to everyone. Reviews are saying that it runs faster in just about every area of testing. So, I'm guessing that the benefits one gets in Vista (for multi-core) will be the same or better with Win7. And if it's going to be released mid-2009, i'd rather just get Win7 over buying Vista (which I have avoided up to now for various small reasons) and then upgrading to the "better" Win7 later this year.

 

Specs... dunno, MS says their intention with Win7 is that anything that would run Vista can also do Win7... I mean, my box isn't very slow, I think I just need a better operating system to ease some of the problems?

[miguez]

Someone else reported in a separate thread that DCS: BS runs faster in their Windows 7 beta than it does in Vista.

[AlphaInfinity]

I wouldn't count on windows 7 this year. You can bet that Microsoft will be more cautious with the OS release this time. If they screw things up again, they will have to extend the support date for XP for another year or two...again.