(Split) A DCS performance discussion

[mooshim]

I just read this whole thread...understood very little...:(

 

I think I'm going to go lie down.

[nomdeplume]

I'm mainly concerned that the quality of the effect is disproportionate to its importance.

 

Most of these things I put down to a case of "someone felt like doing it". For example, why have certain models been updated lately? Conspiracy theories abound, but my suspicion is that in a lot of cases it's simply because someone felt like doing it. That someone may or may not be part of the development team itself. Not everything is the result of a high-level management decision to devote X% of their resources to a particular thing. This I think would be especially true in a simulation of this scope with a fairly small team.

 

There's essentially an unlimited number of small details that could be added to the sim. The fact that a tiny number of those details have been isn't really indicative of misguided priorities or anything of that nature.

 

If this is indeed a "negligible bit of processing", why do we not see many physics effects of this quality elsewhere in DCS?

I'm not really sure what you mean by this. My previous post was mostly to say that I believe what you're seeing in the shells gives the impression of some pretty spectacular physics, but is really pretty simplistic.

 

I don't know about you, but just about every mission I fly has various things being fired by various AI at various other AI, and that often includes cannons that spit out shells like they're going out of fashion. I've never seen a framerate rate that coincides with it. That's what I'm basing my assumptions here on: it seems like it really does take a negligible amount of additional processing, even if it does look like it'd be expensive.

 

What if, for example, this sort of mass-physics simulation was employed in weapon impacts and aircraft crashes?

I'd argue the weapon impacts have pretty much exactly the same 'mass-physics simulation' as these shells do...

 

Not sure what you mean by aircraft crashes. One of the things I like about the DCS series is that when I **** up a landing, I can see exactly how much I ****ed it up. Bent landing gear, etc. Seems like there's quite a bit of physics going on there.

 

If you mean in terms of aircraft bits being scattered around and visible results of clanging into things, that's a massive amount of work. You may as well gripe that they added the cockpit boarding ladder in one of the patches instead of a dynamic campaign, as if they're somehow comparable pieces of work and the absence of the ladder would've given them time to implement a dynamic campaign system. Separating aircraft into umpteen recognisable component parts that can be strewn around the landscape requires much more effort than having a few hundred identical shell casings falling to the ground. Let alone actually linking a more detailed graphical damage model to actual system failures.

 

If the game engine(and a computer of the recommended requirements) can handle calculating ballistics/collisions for both falling shells AND realistic explosions, then great.

 

But if I had to choose one, it would certainly be the latter - and I suspect the people making the 'cool videos' agree.

But again, I doubt there was some high-level meeting where they said "okay, we've got 3 days of programmer/artist time to use up, shall we a) improve explosions, b) improve physics or c) model falling shells?". Maybe improving the explosions are on the roadmap, but it's either a big piece of work and there's higher priority things, or it may be dependent on some other engine upgrade work which has yet to take place. Or maybe just nobody happens to have a bee in their bonnett about the explosion effects, or if they have, they haven't been able to create a substantial improvement without excessive adverse effects. Not every expenditure of programmer/artist effort results in something usable.

 

That said, the smoke effects received a big upgrade with DCS Warthog; and I think it was actually toned down from the betas due to performance issues. There's also been changes to the burning effect. So, some effort was done in this area already.

 

Also keep in mind that there's often things being addressed which aren't visible to us, or not obvious. You mentioned the terrain, so it's probably worth reflecting that ED/TFC decided to pull the Nevada terrain that was already looking pretty promising in the beta so they could spend over a year completely redoing it with a new terrain engine. If that doesn't scream "we care about improving the terrain quality" I don't know what does.

[EtherealN]

1.) Shells (~5000 polygons)

2.) Terrain (~2 polygons)

 

Shell casings are only drawn when you look at them, and they'll only be in high detail when you are actually right there standing them in the face.

 

The fact that you can see a level of detail when close does NOT mean that this level of detail is there when you are zoome out or looking somewhere else. ;)

 

I don't know for sure, but I actually doubt there's "proper" ballistics calculations being done for casings as well - at least if you mean in the same way as is done for weapon rounds. It might look pretty, but looking pretty does not mean it's a heavy computation - it just means someone took the time to arrange some eyecandy.

[Havok]

Focus should be on your system, not the software. While feedback both positive and negative is needed to push things along, most posts, complaints and such rarely have a positive outcome, ecspecially for the PC owner with the probs.

 

Most solutions given are unfortunately, ( and no offense to anyone, people just want to help ) focused on 'tweaking' one thing/area when you probably should step back, look at cpu / drive / network / gfx / OS and such. Fixing one area will generally not get you optimum performance, you need to tweak and test and move to the next bottleneck.

 

Ive been getting 25-30 FPS for years, no matter what I seemed to do, trying this and trying that, compliling lists, saving cfg's / ini's, upgrading to this and that, always getting hi end products and expecting miracles.

 

Biggest impact Ive seen, finally getting over 60 FPS with max settings, is adding SSD drive, using RunWithAffinity @ http://www.wieldraaijer.nl/ ,

TweakPrefetch.exe @ @http://exilesofthardware.blogspot.com/2009/09/tweakprefetch.html , limiting addons.

 

While SSD's are pricey and for some, not an option at this time, you will at some point need to change your HDD and should opt for the SSD, even if it means waiting an extra paycheck to do so. The impact of SSD's are like adding HiPerf RAM to a system running with 512MB. The performance increase is amazing, but you need to do your homework in picking the right drive & controller and know how to care for it to ensure max life and performance.

 

Keeping services to a minimum ( www.blackviper.com / see services for what you can shutdown and what not to ) and which other programs needed for the system to run also have an effect, of course.

 

SysInternals by some MS tech specialists offer tools that run in RAM, no install necessary ( http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb842062 ) in particular tcpview.exe which gives an overview of what is eating your bandwidth, you will probably be shocked to see all the programs running that you have not been aware of. These should be block via a firewall or preferences to that software.

 

Most programs install with the 'Auto check for updates ' feature enabled as we blast thru installs and tell ourselves we always want the updated version, of course. But updates dont always mean improvement, and if your windows is set to auto update, you should turn them off unless you actually take a little time to check what you are installing. Also, blindly downloading updates that you might not need or even have the software it is patching as some windows patches do, fill your drive, and as it fills, data is written further and further outwards and spread out, and fragmented.

 

But if I can double my FPS, so can anyone else, and except for the SSD, other options are available to help you optimize your system for free. Focus should be on your PC, not the software dev's, unless its a bug, as you can see many others around that are getting great FPS...FC/LO/DCS is a much better rounded package than any others out there, theres a ton of info for your system to process and you have to have a decent system to run a Black Sea Region size battlefield, with multiple hi speed aircraft and helos, ground and sea units, competing against players all over the world, firing missles, cannons, dropping bombs, weather effects and so on...

 

And although for some, $30-40 dollars is difficult, the price for what you get and hours of replayability, direct contact with the dev's, patches and addons / documentation, is the best money you'll spend and finding another product that gives you such bang for the buck, would make for a very short list.