DCS Newsletter 24th February 2023 - Mossie Livery competition | ARC-210 News | New Campaigns

[BIGNEWY]

DCS Newsletter 24th February 2023 - Mossie Livery competition | ARC-210 News | New Campaigns
 

Dear Fighter Pilots, Partners and Friends,

Since the release of the DCS: Mosquito FB VI, community members have been hard at work creating many outstanding liveries for this iconic warbird. The Mossie Livery Competition starts today and runs until the 24th of March, 2023. Enter and potentially win an Eagle Dynamics module of your choice.

The final Key Feature of the DCS: A-10C II Tank Killer is the inclusion of the ARC-210 radio. The radio will be fully compatible with the Voice Chat system. Please read the details below and expect it in the next Open Beta update.

The next Open Beta will also introduce three new campaigns; the DCS: Mosquito FB VI V for Victory campaign by Reflected Simulations, the DCS: AV-8B Kerman campaign by Ground Pounder Sim, and the DCS: F/A-18C Inherent Resolve campaign by Looking Glass.

https://bit.ly/3YWTr3B

[Dragon1-1]

No bombshells in this one, but I like that we're finally getting the ARC-210. Nice to see V for Victory coming out, too.

[Beirut]

35 minutes ago, Dragon1-1 said:

No bombshells in this one,  . . . 

 

Maybe that means they're preoccupied with The Big Update for next week. 

[Dragon1-1]

I'll be quite impressed if the update in question actually drops as planned.  That said, I'm sure there'll be more than that, they just don't want to spoil the surprise.

[Daerchanar]

Quite underwhelming. Not a mention of MT or Vulkan.

[Mogster]

Can we have a clean display panel on the ARC-210 please. That dirt build up would drive me crazy if that was my daily driver aircraft in rl….  

[St4rgun]

The ARC-210 radio is a long awaited feature, thanks ED!

According to the core: it seems that after some of us mentioned that having some regular report on the progress of core development in the newsletter would be awesome they decided to intentionally not even mention it with a single word, never, ever. Really strange. If this behaviour's purpose to raise the "surprise" factor when the new EDGE will finally arrive then all right, do it. Otherwise it's now becoming really irritating.

I never understood why ED's so uncommunicative when the topic is MT, DLSS, Vulkan or other core features which affect all players (VR performance, clouds, dynamic campaign etc.).

Anyway, looking for the next wednesday with high hopes.

[sthompson]

7 hours ago, St4rgun said:

Otherwise it's now becoming really irritating.

Not nearly as irritating as all the complaining on this forum about ED's communications.

Edited February 26, 2023 by sthompson
fixed a typo

[Dragon1-1]

It's quite possible they don't know if it's going to be in this update or not. They might have to delay it, if there's any unexpected problem incoming, so they don't want to get our hopes up. Particularly since they've had front row seats to what happens when you get peoples' hopes up and then fail to deliver.

[rob10]

2 hours ago, St4rgun said:

I never understood why ED's so uncommunicative when the topic is MT, DLSS, Vulkan or other core features which affect all players (VR performance, clouds, dynamic campaign etc.).

This is beating a dead horse, but what would you like them to say?  "We're 96% done MT, but realize that the last 4% will take 30% of our total development time for it"?  "We've added another 10,000 line of code since our last update"?  Both could be completely accurate answers that would be completely meaningless, and in the case of the 1st one there will be a vocal number of posters who will assume 96% means it's almost here and ignore the 2nd part that means it might be 8-12 months away.  I doubt there's much they could say that would be meaningful until it's done and coming out in the next patch.  If they just say "We're making good progress" occasionally they get exactly what you posted.

[Silver_Dragon]

15 hours ago, Daerchanar said:

Quite underwhelming. Not a mention of MT or Vulkan.

 

2 hours ago, St4rgun said:

The ARC-210 radio is a long awaited feature, thanks ED!

According to the core: it seems that after some of us mentioned that having some regular report on the progress of core development in the newsletter would be awesome they decided to intentionally not even mention it with a single word, never, ever. Really strange. If this behaviour's purpose to raise the "surprise" factor when the new EDGE will finally arrive then all right, do it. Otherwise it's now becoming really irritating.

I never understood why ED's so uncommunicative when the topic is MT, DLSS, Vulkan or other core features which affect all players (VR performance, clouds, dynamic campaign etc.).

Anyway, looking for the next wednesday with high hopes.

ED was put info on your newsletter about that features on January 2023.... and more...

Quote

 

Multithreading
Multithreading has been one of our primary efforts to improve DCS performance, and it is currently in closed beta testing. Initially two threads (graphical and logical) will be implemented, and once the technology is stable and mature, we plan to expand this number. Large and complex missions, both single player and server based as well as the upcoming dynamic campaigns, will see the most significant performance enhancements. 

Our render graph was written from scratch along with many other subsystems. We now benefit from parallel rendering that schedules inter-dependent rendering tasks in a correct and optimal order (e.g., mirror reflections first, then mirrors while running other independent draw calls in parallel), frame graph, graphic scenes, scene renderer, and scene manager. We unified all other graphic subsystems that permit node embedding in the render graph. This allows us to rapidly experiment with new graphic pipelines and enhance efficiency. The introduction of our render graph will improve DCS efficiency and deliver optimal performance with modern graphics APIs such as Vulkan.

 

Vulkan API
Implementation of the Vulkan API continues in parallel with the multithreading effort. Our Vulkan renderer is integrated with the new render graph, and it benefits from multithreading by using render graph mechanics of background loading of textures and geometry, rendering objects in parallel, terrain streaming, etc. As a result, many rendering tasks submitted to the graphics card will no longer need to wait for each other and hence be processed simultaneously.

In our endeavor to unify DirectX and Vulkan renderers, we have developed a mod state where both backends produce identical results. We now have two fully compatible implementations that run under the same API. This means that all our applied graphics modules (the code that renders our skies, clouds, models, effects, etc.) will work the same way on both renderers. To achieve this, we ensured that all our shaders could be converted into Vulkan format in addition to implementing a shader converter available from within DCS permitting to compile any shader on the fly. It is interesting to note that the shader conversion has taken an inordinately large amount of time.

The main achievement in 2022 is that DCS now works under Vulkan producing the same visuals as under DirectX. This result is fully ‘transparent’ for our graphics programmers, allowing them to write the same code for both platforms without the need to have separate code paths for Vulkan and DirectX11 and beyond.

The next step is to provide our graphics programmers with the new Vulkan features compared to DirectX 11. These include new types of shaders (as per Shader Model 6 and further), ray tracing, some advanced rendering techniques, such as GPU driven rendering, and similar.

 

DLSS
Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) 2.0 is coming to DCS this year. DLSS is a family of real-time deep learning image enhancement and upscaling technologies for RTX 20, 30 and 40 series Nvidia graphics cards. The goal of this technology is to allow most of the graphics pipeline to run at a lower resolution for increased performance, and then infer a higher resolution image from this that contains the same level of detail as if the image had been rendered at this higher resolution. This allows for higher graphical settings and/or frame rates for a given output resolution, depending on user preference. 

In addition to DLSS, Nvidia Image Scaling (NIS) will also be available. NIS is a scaling and sharpening tool with an algorithm that uses a 6-tap filter with 4 directional scaling and adaptive sharpening filters to boost performance. This is best used for non-RTX Nvidia graphics cards that do not support DLSS.

Following the completion of DLSS/NIS, we will investigate Fidelity FX Super Resolution (FSR) for AMD GPUs.
...

Weather
Building upon the weather enhancements that were introduced with DCS 2.7, we have been further developing weather to include moving clouds and towering cumulus clouds and more sophisticated atmospheric phenomena. New fog and dust storms are being developed that are integral parts of the volumetric cloud system. The old DCS fog is a separate system that is calculated for a flat earth. It does not consider shadows from the terrain and clouds, so it has limitations. The new fog will be computed for a spherical earth and takes shadows into account. We also plan to optimize the volumetric clouds and increase their basic quality. A separate and complex project currently in development is the dynamic cloud generator which will then need to be integrated with the dynamic weather systems of low/high pressure systems and new/evolving cloud types. 

A later task, once the foundation is complete, will be to provide AI line of sight blocking in addition to light direction/scattering visibility limitations for AI.

.....

Eagle Dynamics Dynamic Campaigns Engine (EDDCE)
2022 saw the completion of all major engineering components of the EDDCE. In 2023 we continue development and testing and making improvements to these components as well as adding new features where needed. We are also enhancing the mechanics in the campaign editor to avoid issues that may arise when the EDDCE is used for different maps. The next big tasks include transferring mission data between player and AI pilots and creating a specific graphic user interface. 

Please see our previous Newsletter for greater detail on the subject.

 

Edited February 25, 2023 by Silver_Dragon

[giullep]

seeing that for the first time Ed has given a date for the update (after a month), the people expect something particular and big...if it weren't like this it would perhaps be better to say it..I would expect MT...

[St4rgun]

8 hours ago, Silver_Dragon said:

 

ED was put info on your newsletter about that features on January 2023.... and more...

 

 

Oh, I forgot that, my bad. I really apologize. Actually I read newsletters occassionally, about 1 per year, that's why I possibly missed that one! That explains everything.

I really hope that the hard work of the development team will fruit a stellar new EDGE which we're all waiting for. Thanks for all the newly shared info on core status and feature details!

[Hotdognz]

I hope there's more to the patch than 3 campaigns and a radio, and anyway who uses the in-game voice chat its pretty much useless as it is, due to inconsistences in getting it to work across many people, we have tried several times with our Discord group, we always end up back at SRS.

[ironhard]

Regarding MT:

[Dragon1-1]

Wow, nice. Good to know even the good old 1080ti will get improvements.  Then again, this was kind of expected, seeing how bottlenecked DCS currently is.

[draconus]

57 minutes ago, Dragon1-1 said:

Good to know even the good old 1080ti will get improvements.

The card didn't get anything. It means he was CPU limited in DCS... with his HW, settings and mission.

[Dragon1-1]

It did. I fly 4K VR on a 1080ti, and currently, I'm getting about 20-40FPS if I don't go overboard with the settings. This is GPU-limited, as shown by OpenXR toolkit. As such, it's reasonable to assume that the 1080ti is currently unable to drive DCS. Therefore, an FPS improvement this good could only come from better utilization of the GPU, as well as CPU. Remember, multithreading doesn't come in a vacuum, they had to quite extensively refactor the existing code, and that is what helped, on top of removing the CPU bottleneck.

We say "multicore", but it's far from being just that. It's a rendering engine rework, and there's a lot to gain in that area.

[draconus]

24 minutes ago, Dragon1-1 said:

It did. I fly 4K VR on a 1080ti, and currently, I'm getting about 20-40FPS if I don't go overboard with the settings. This is GPU-limited, as shown by OpenXR toolkit. As such, it's reasonable to assume that the 1080ti is currently unable to drive DCS. Therefore, an FPS improvement this good could only come from better utilization of the GPU, as well as CPU. Remember, multithreading doesn't come in a vacuum, they had to quite extensively refactor the existing code, and that is what helped, on top of removing the CPU bottleneck.

We say "multicore", but it's far from being just that. It's a rendering engine rework, and there's a lot to gain in that area.

No, that's only your case with your HW, your settings and your mission. MT can only help for CPU limited cases and we were told exactly how ED is going to implement it in first stages.

Set graphics high, 4K with MSAAx4 and MT will do nothing for you, your card and your slideshow. Set graphics low, DP 0.5 and watch it skyrocket.

We don't know yet what exactly they did besides MT.

Edited March 3, 2023 by draconus

[edmuss]

Out of interest I uncapped the framerate and started up DCS in pancake with my VR settings.  At 1080p and my medium/high VR settings my 3080ti pulls 215fps in a purely GPU limited scenario (instant action BS3 take off on Syria). If indeed a 1080ti is pulling a delta of 60 to 200fps at 4k in any scenario then this is massive

[Dragon1-1]

3 hours ago, draconus said:

We don't know yet what exactly they did besides MT.

We do know that they did a lot (because they had to), and we do know that they rewrote several components to both work with MT, and to work better (they stated so in the report). You keep pretending they only did MT, with not other changes in code, as if this was even possible to do. You, like many other people complaining how long it takes, have no idea just how differently multithreaded programs work from singlethreaded ones. I fully expect to get good results, ED also said things to that effect.

[j9murphy]

My guess (and it's just that)... is that if you are:

CPU Bound, MT will help a lot

GPU bound with GPU utilization less than 100%, MT will help some 

GPU bound with GPU utilization at 100%, MT will help a little

lots of other variables though, as said above ED didnt just do MT, sounds like they messed with the rendering pipeline and other things which will have additional benefits beyond just what MT would give you.

Edited March 3, 2023 by j9murphy