Low FPS in TV of Ka-50

[Legolasindar]

In the videos I've seen the TV display has a refresh lower than the rest of the simulation. Being a CRT monitor, which makes the screen, I find it strange that in reality the same thing happens. Is this a shortcoming or bug, that solution over time, or I am wrong and actually screen TV Ka-50 has so few FPS.

 

Sorry for my english.

[- Piloto da Morte -]

i think this is some problems that need be fixing... but look this video of Ah-64, appears that monitor work in real time...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xT0uc5m9bFk

[arneh]

If having the TV at a lower frame rate gives the rest of the sim better frame rate then I think it's totally worth it.

 

The TV has to do a independent rendering, so if it was going to do it at the same detail and frame rate as the main view then that would pretty much halve the frame rates everytime the TV was turned on. Everything which reduces that impact is good in my eyes, and running the TV at lower frame rates seems like an acceptable solution to me.

[gl33k]

 

The TV has to do a independent rendering, so if it was going to do it at the same detail and frame rate as the main view then that would pretty much halve the frame rates everytime the TV was turned on. Everything which reduces that impact is good in my eyes, and running the TV at lower frame rates seems like an acceptable solution to me.

 

and that's exactly what we have yet with flamming cliff. i lost 50% of my framerate with TV on. at 50fps, it 's not so bad. but over a large town , barely 30fps, it crawl to 12 15 , making game unlpayble.

 

ED should look about multithreading stuff. we have quadcore today ...

[Boberro]

Agree, when I turn on TV I lost maybe not 50% of framerate but about 30-40 percent. Isn't it a little strange? TV has poor quality of image, also is Black-White colors, so why it is big FPS drop?

 

Yeah multithreading would be cool, but it isn't even in first module Ka-50 ;]

[gl33k]

the reason it's so slow is bad technology choice. or knowledge.

on other side, some developpers are working on crappy games , but are ace in multithreading optimization. specially console developper ;)

 

the problem is located elsewhere for them :D

[arneh]

Agree, when I turn on TV I lost maybe not 50% of framerate but about 30-40 percent. Isn't it a little strange? TV has poor quality of image, also is Black-White colors, so why it is big FPS drop?

 

It's not like monochrome and poor image quality is going to make it any less framerate intensive. Basic rendering on computers is full colour and clear quality. To e.g. simulate a black/white TV it has to actively remove the colour, so it's more work than doing just a basic rendering. The same with adding effects to simulate a poor quality TV.

 

Warning: technical talk

And it's not as simple as just "letting the second core render TV". First of all, most of the rendering happens on the GFX card, so you would have to have dual-core or multiple GFX cards to see much improvement. Second the main rendering and TV-rendering still have to share a lot of data. Like the position/rotation/animation etc. of every unit it has to render must be the same for both views. This creates a bottleneck where both renderings must wait for the same code to update all of that. I'm sure there are lot's of possibilites for optimizing the rendering over several cores, but it's not as simple as just pushing it on the second core, and everything will run smooth.

End of tech talk

 

So in general I think letting the TV run at a lower frame rate is good compromise if it increases frame rates for the main view. It's not like you need as high FPS for the TV.

 

I actually experimented a little with this in EECH, but the problem was that it couldn't just do rendering every other frame, or the gaps between frames would be uneven, which would feel like stuttering frame rates, which is in many ways worse than low FPS. You need to find a way to split the work of one rendering evenly between two (or more) frames, and I didn't find an easy and reliable way of doing that. But if ED's managed it for Black Shark, then all the better for that sim :)

[arneh]

the reason it's so slow is bad technology choice. or knowledge.

 

OK, please inform me how to do a TV-rendering without it affecting framerates. I'm asking because I actually want to learn how to do it, if there really is a good, working solution for that.

[gl33k]

OK, please inform me how to do a TV-rendering without it affecting framerates. I'm asking because I actually want to learn how to do it, if there really is a good, working solution for that.

 

flight simulator use a server - client architecture in order to be able to set a multiview display. not sure if it's native , or a feature of a 3rd party plugin..

You can so have a 20 computer network , each one managing 1 different view. computer #2 could have 5fps, where the 19th other have 30fps.

you ask me to give you a way to do that in a viable way for BS or FC , i can't. but I KNOW some guy KNOW how do it .

SWAT4 on PC use a mini windows head camera for teammate view. this camera doesn't eat more than 10% of framerate. right it's not the same game, neither requirement, but i'm sure their way is more efficient than how ED did that.

 

and GPU wise, i'm pretty sure lockon doesn't push my card in its limit. texture wise , geometry wise, and shader wise ... my cpu is the bottleneck , or should i say the game code ?

 

performance isn't all about harware. software is involve too :smilewink:

intel , or few developper conference talk a lot about this rendering technique these time , mainly because multicore cpu are now mainstream.

 

ps: Fighter ops might be modularised. they talked about not throw our old computer ;)

Edited June 11, 2008 by gl33k

[arneh]

flight simulator use a server - client architecture in order to be able to set a multiview display. not sure if it's native , or a feature of a 3rd party plugin..

You can so have a 20 computer network , each one managing 1 different view. computer #2 could have 5fps, where the 19th other have 30fps.

you ask me to give you a way to do that in a viable way for BS or FC

 

Well, having networked PCs is a little more than just having multiple cores. That gives you multiple video cards, multiple memory, multiple harddrives etc.

If ED can make a second PC be used for TV-view that's fine, but I doubt it's going to help the majority of users.

 

And as I said, I'm sure there are lots of ways to optimize both rendering and other parts for multiple cores. But it's not an easy optimization. It takes a lot of work to optimize the code for that if it wasn't written with it in mind in the first place.

 

SWAT4 on PC use a mini windows head camera for teammate view. this camera doesn't eat more than 10% of framerate.

 

Interesting. But I would like to know how they did it.

[GGTharos]

The world and detail they render is much smaller.

[crime]

You can so have a 20 computer network

I think that a powerful home simulation system would consist of several networked PC's, each one specialized in a task. One for user input/ouput, another for physics simulation, another for graphics rendering and one more for AI, for example.

The network would go like crazy with all the data that needs to be shared. A theoretical model would be needed to calculate the increase of performance over a single computer (if any) to see if it's really worth or not, but intuitively it seems like it should be. Or maybe the network bandwidth isn't just big enough, don't know. But it probably would depend a lot on the simulation design. Maybe one designed from the ground up to run in a distributed system could work.

 

Flightgear allows to have a second computer calculating the flight model, but I've never been able to try it. I always have problems to run flightgear in the standard way.

[Force_Feedback]

Latency...

[nemises]

guess work here, but couldn't the TV screen be a texture sample from existing screen buffer? (well..at least, if the TV view intersected the regular view) .. kind of like a shader pass that uses existing buffer info to render a texture , rather that re-calculating a re-rendering with occlusion etc.. ?

 

Of course, that sort of shader interaction might be less cost effective than simply doing another render pass... I dunno...

 

But if not, then each buffer frame could be stored and used to generate the TV texture (maybe 1 frame in arrears)...

[RedTiger]

Is there an easier answer? The TV screen affects FPS in the same way adding cockpit mirrors does. Thats always been my take on it. You have an extra bit of terrain that the sim is having to render on top of what is showing out of the cockpit. How can that not lower the FPS a bit?

[tflash]

Having the ABRIS or TV screen and other instruments in separate windows would be nice; but I do not see how it would allow for better FPS. Anyway, in FSX, the more windows I open the less FPS I get.

 

Exporting instrument data through LUAscript for rendering on another PC is already possible and quite nice for the classic dial instruments (it has been done by third party). For the whole ABRIS system that would be to complex and should be done by ED itself. You would need the whole ABRIS display code running on the second PC, so that you just have to transmit the parameters. The TV-screen though, I would doubt you could do it that way. It would be way to slow to pass graphics data.

 

A more radical approach is that you develop it based on the multiplayer code. So in fact, you would run a copy of DCS:BS on both PC's, and start a multiplayer session. Instead of supporting multiple players, the software would support to run different views from the same player. You'ld be playing Lockon with 2 keyboards etc. ... still less difficult to manage than flying the real chopper I guess :D