15Yr Anniversary Q&A: Answering 'Performance' in DCS

[AJaromir]

I like the Vulkan is developed. Vulkan is multi-platform compatibile which could make the game in future natively compatibile with other operating systems.

Edited April 5 by AJaromir

[Maybe]

12 minutes ago, NineLine said:

Please try and talk about what was in the video. More videos to come and more subjects to be covered. Thanks.

Apologies if you were planning to cover server/mission side performance and AI in another video later on.
It might be helpful to have a schedule/prospectus for all the upcoming topics so that people don't worry that the video they just watched represents a missed opportunity to cover a topic.
Unless there already is one posted somewhere?

[BIGNEWY]

3 minutes ago, Maybe said:

Apologies if you were planning to cover server/mission side performance and AI in another video later on.
It might be helpful to have a schedule/prospectus for all the upcoming topics so that people don't worry that the video they just watched represents a missed opportunity to cover a topic.
Unless there already is one posted somewhere?

AI will be addressed in a separate video in the future

thank you 

[AJaromir]

Matt Wagner is the Icon of the DCS:World. Also there would be interesting to cooperate with Andrei Celeste.

[Andrei]

When I heard "Vulcan" and "multiplatform" that has raised an eyebrow. Are we talking Xbox / Playstation with a version of Flaming Cliffs?

[AJaromir]

1 minute ago, Andrei said:

When I heard "Vulcan" and "multiplatform" that has raised an eyebrow. Are we talking Xbox / Playstation with a version of Flaming Cliffs?

They talk about Vulkan as the new graphic platform.

Quote

....We're working on Vulkan, but this will give us the platform to expand from rather than an immediate boost,....

 

Edited April 5 by AJaromir

[DigitalEngine]

On 3/5/2024 at 6:12 AM, [ED] Makr said:

and Vulkan will (in future 2-3 years)

Is @Wags indicating it will be 2-3 more years before we see the Vulkan API in DCS World?

Edited April 5 by DigitalEngine

[ColinM9991]

42 minutes ago, Maybe said:

It might be helpful to have a schedule/prospectus for all the upcoming topics so that people don't worry that the video they just watched represents a missed opportunity to cover a topic.

Sorry, another one from me just dumping some thoughts. This is a good idea. It'd be great to see a schedule at some point.

Given the main post says

Quote

we will steadily answer all of your 1900+ questions

and this video answers 14 of those questions, presuming these will be released on a weekly or bi-weekly basis to coincide with newsletters at or around 14-20 questions per video, that's around 2-4 years before we get all answers. Is it even worth answering questions at that point since they'll be made redundant in the way of updates? Is the intention here to release updates first and then answer related questions as a means of marketing those changes?

Having at least some guidance around what the video release cadence is would be valuable info as all we currently have to go on is "X will be covered in another video".

Collating the questions and answers in a PDF would be a great way to get all the info out at once while the videos by Wags could supplement that with more of a personal touch.

[rob10]

46 minutes ago, DigitalEngine said:

Is @Wags indicating it will be 2-3 more years before we see the Vulkan API in DCS World?

The way I read that is that Vulkan may arrive sooner, BUT to see the benefits of it may be 2-3 years as things get changed to use it effectively.  ED have stated a number of times already (over a long period) that Vulkan IS NOT going to be an instant silver bullet for performance, but there are lots of people on the forums that seem to overlook this and are convinced it's going to have an immediate and massive impact.

[Tom P]

I wouldn't mind if this was a monthly series. 

[AJaromir]

16 minutes ago, rob10 said:

The way I read that is that Vulkan may arrive sooner, BUT to see the benefits of it may be 2-3 years as things get changed to use it effectively.  ED have stated a number of times already (over a long period) that Vulkan IS NOT going to be an instant silver bullet for performance, but there are lots of people on the forums that seem to overlook this and are convinced it's going to have an immediate and massive impact.

Yes, because peeple see it works in many other games. But DCS:W is not like other games. It is huge game in huge playground and graphics is relatively small part of it. If some game is already well optimised, change of API would not provide miracles.

Edited April 5 by AJaromir

[BIGNEWY]

1 hour ago, DigitalEngine said:

Is @Wags indicating it will be 2-3 more years before we see the Vulkan API in DCS World?

 

He said not this year. Please bear that in mind. 

thank you 

1 hour ago, Andrei said:

When I heard "Vulcan" and "multiplatform" that has raised an eyebrow. Are we talking Xbox / Playstation with a version of Flaming Cliffs?

Perhaps, but iOS and Linux would be more accurate

thank you

[NineLine]

3 hours ago, dutchili said:

Can you try and make the answers more concrete?
'working on it' -> planned for May
'performance improvement' -> the number of calculations will be reduced by 10%. FPS effect depends on your system. We tested with .... and resulted in xyz FPS
'system dependent' -> we've accomplish a constant 90+ fps on instant mission 'performance test' with an i9 ....RTX ....
(a test mission would be great for the community to test if they have local issues, if you provide a reference performance. This also ensures that you can do performance regression testing_

We are as accurate as we can be given that these items are in development and we don't have a magic ball to know all items that would affect timelines. We wanted to provide you insight of what we are working on, but please understand that this is very much development. Kind Regards. 

[ColinM9991]

9 minutes ago, BIGNEWY said:

iOS

Apple phones?

[BIGNEWY]

7 minutes ago, ColinM9991 said:

Apple phones?

( not sure is serious ) but no  

[ColinM9991]

1 minute ago, BIGNEWY said:

( not sure is serious ) but no  

iOS is Apple's phone based OS, did you mean macOS?

[BIGNEWY]

10 minutes ago, ColinM9991 said:

iOS is Apple's phone based OS, did you mean macOS?

true, Mac OS is the one, blame my old windows pc brain  

[ColinM9991]

2 minutes ago, BIGNEWY said:

true, Mac OS is the one, blame my old windows pc brain  

MS-DOS confirmed

[Scatlet-565]

It's great to hear that the logic layer is getting looked at for MT support. Is there more work going into making said layer more efficient in general? In particular for high population servers. I'm not a software engineer but to me it seems wasteful for (and this is merely my assumption of how the system works) each client to need to run logic for every active unit on the map. Could the majority of this work be handled by the server and packeted to clients within a certain range for example?

The Grayflag servers have developed their own bespoke bubble spawning logic that greatly saves on unnecessary active units. Perhaps that's a good place to start?

[Raven (Elysian Angel)]

41 minutes ago, Scatlet-565 said:

bubble spawning logic

One way or another, streaming technology seems to be the future (as it's used more and more in multiple game genres).

I highly doubt people at ED haven’t figured out yet how they are going to do something similar, but it probably requires Vulkan so modern CPUs can be utilised optimally.

[Fiztex]

I really like the idea of Q&A, but in my opinion implementation could have been better for the chosen platform (YT). We get that people ask the same question over and over again in a slightly different form without bothering to check if it was already asked or not (and I get it can be really annoying, I'm working myself in a customer-facing QA and deal with this every day), but showing that so literally in a video is not doing anyone a favour. To me it felt like downplaying questions which obviously have some valid complaints in their essence, and I honestly don't think your goal was to publicly downplay those, but you kind of did. One of main rules of PR - never downplay complaints. Imagine yourself being a 5yo boy and Wags being your first kindergarten teacher explaining you that DLSS is already there while you are still asking for it. Video starts OK but further on as questions get overlapped a lot you start to get this feeling. I get that "DLSS is here" was supposed to be a joke, but there is just too much tension in whole performance situation right now to joke about it. You get to carefully joke only when you are sure you defused the situation, but are you sure you actually did? Just check the most liked comment in this thread.

And as for the format itself, in my opinion, instead of a current format you could have shown those questions quickly on the screen, summarised them all in 3-4 sentences and just elaborated on your plans, and I'm pretty sure everyone of those who asked them would have thought you answered their question. Video editing is a powerful tool to make this actually enjoyable to watch and cover more ground. Right now this looks more like a radio podcast designed to listen without watching, and that is not what most of people expect from a YT video.

Edited April 6 by Fiztex

[Beeker]

Good evening Wags!

As part of the DIY force feedback and motion sim community, I have some questions about ED's force feedback implementation.  Are we using HID PID, Windows HID, Windows.Gaming.Input.ForceFeedback?  Is there a standard maintained across all modules? Some of us are experiencing discontinuities between modules regarding control axis direction and force feedback direction, as well as some strange behavior from the force trim function on rotary wing aircraft.  Any insight you have on how to better develop hardware specifically for DCS would be greatly appreciated.

 

 

Thanks,

BV

[shastasm]

Always love the post and the work by ED and the continuous improvements with DCS. Always love to hear from Wags.  I have few suggested improvements for your consideration.  

One improvement that I would love, as I often play in single player and use of the Liberation Dynamic Campaign tool, is better AI communication and behavior.  In truth, AI behavior communication can be very annoying and kill immersiveness (new word :)).  For instance, in a package of 2 or more, my wingman will call out every ground and air contact within a 200 mile radius and will ignore my commands until they are done (20 minutes sometimes with the number of units). 

Another suggested improvement is better Tower/Ground/Approach/Departure communication with AI communication from other flights on the same channel.  

Set better constraints for your flight to stick with the package.  For instance, when directed to engage bandits or ground targets, they often will pursue or engage targets many miles from your package and fly over SAM sites, run out of fuel, or strafe airplanes on the ground.  

Last one...ability to set package flights bingo fuel settings as AI often call out bingo fuel, the 30 seconds later eject.   

[machinegunkenny]

suti1979

Could you make more effort to finish multithreading? It's unusable for me and most of my friends. (my setup: i9 12900, 3060Ti) Unusable: laggs, freezes, slow, no improvement on fps at all.

Please, report the bugs and provide tracks. We need to understand in details what is going on for you. Because a lot of people received the improvement of the performance. We would like to focus on your cases.

 

Hello Suti1979,

The fix is to turn off parked cores. 

I to have this processor but with an RTX3080, 32gb DDR5 on nvme gen 3. Had horrible performance until I did this.

Hope it helps someone  o7

 

Edited April 5 by machinegunkenny

[Aspen20]

Personally I'm a bit disappointed in this Q&A, there isn't much actual news and it summarizes to

Vulkan in 2-3 years which will enable other performance improvements

DLSS being updated

FSR if it works with Vulkan

Logic thread of DCS MT is being enhanced.

 

Not much that wasn't already announced in previous DCS Newsletters. Hoping for a Q&A next time with more real info. A step in the right direction at leas.=t.

Edited April 5 by Aspen20