Quoting: GBeeI don't think we're missing much with the ray-tracing, everything I've heard is that the difference is almost imperceptible while the performance impact is significant.

Now if only it would download just a bit faster.

I wasn't impressed with the Quake2 Demo NVidia had; the quality was far from being impressive and the performance - the models where still the old ones - was extremely bad! Wasn't even close to getting a solid 60fps @ 4K. So I won't expect anything good/improvement, just burning GPU power which could be used better for other stuff.

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Downloading... That's those times when I'm unhappy with my internet connection and want more bandwidth...

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Quoting: Kam7 months later, it's on sale, and no linux release :/

another 2 months later... again on sale.. but only a ps4 and xbox version announced... still no life-sign of a linux-version... steam-db reports a linux depot with "no size" ... :(

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Quoting: mylka

Quoting: stud68Still waiting........................

steam already shows linux and mac symbol

now the normal version with the symbols is gone and only the def shows with win only

hmm... already downloading for more than half an hour... nearly 3GB done... but still five and a half hours to go (according to steam client).... .... .. I hate waiting! When it wasn't available it was OK, but now that it's out...

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Quoting: iiari

Quoting: peta77What I got from previews is that they are doing some autogen-stuff from open-street-maps like X-Plane is doing it.. ...but it won't all over the globe

As I replied to someone earlier, they've released all the details on it. It will not be autogen based on open maps, but will be faithful representations based on streamed Bing Maps, 2 pedabytes of data worth, with algorithms deciding on 3D building representations based on Bing Maps appearance. And it WILL BE THE ENTIRE WORLD. Anything Bing Maps has done will be in the game. More populous areas will have higher detail maps and they'll do more customized maps of high use areas (Paris, NYC, etc). Want to know how good your favorite areas will be in MS2020? Check out how detailed the Bing Map is now.

Alpha hands on previews by journalists, who could on their own select anywhere in the world to fly (their hometown, where they work, where they went to college, landmarks, etc) were stunned at the level of 3D detail far in excess of anything in existence right now. They said it allows for true VFR flying now... And this is just the alpha. Looking forward to it!

So next MSFS sounds like an impressive flight sim. But having the map data source online definitely can be a problem, depending on your internet connection. So the should be having a good caching strategy or a prefetch functionality for it to be still usable even if you live in a region with bad internet. That's why I really like it that X-Plane is still available as a DVD box. Downloading the (U)HD meshes just has always been a big thing where my internet connection was "unavailable" for a couple of days. And even that still isn't enough to do real VFR in X-Plane. So it will be really interesting how good their strategy will perform. But, whatever the results will be, it surely will have an effect on the development road-map of X-Plane. I really hope they are able to keep up with the competition and can provide similar quality with the next big release as I definitely prefer to be using my Linux-PC.

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Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: ArdjeThe bigger question for the flight sim world is when does MS 2020 come out, which is the only title that will bring me back to Windows for gaming if it does not run on Wine/Proton and which looks bonkers amazing and which could make XP 11 somewhat irrelevant...

If all you care about is eye-candy then X-Plane might become "irrelevant", but X-Plane has always been the king of physics and flight dynamics.

But before you declare MS Flight Simulator 2020 the king of graphics, the trick is actually very simple: orthophotos, a trick that has been around for years, and you can add for free to X-Plane 11, assuming you have the time to generate them from publicly available satellite imagery resources, and the several terabytes of hard drive space to store them. My hunch is that MSFS 2020 will not store the considerable amounts of data on user's hard drives but will be an online-only title that will pull down the data only as needed.

And while orthophotos generally look good, they come with certain problems, such as textures sometimes being oddly stretched over surface geometry, "baked in" shadows that don't match the in-game lighting, dynamic roads not lining up with the photos so that you end up with oddities like cars driving through buildings, generated 3D structures that don't line up with the photos leading to flattened buildings, visible seams between photo textures where they don't perfectly line up, and so on. And, yes, every single one of these problems is visible in the MSFS 2020 trailer, but the deliberately fast-paced editing makes them hard to spot.

What I got from previews is that they are doing some autogen-stuff from open-street-maps like X-Plane is doing it.. And that can be good-looking in some areas (if you fine-tune it), but it won't all over the globe (OSM data is not perfect, I do recall a couple of places where i.e. an automatically generated bridge would suddenly have a 20m step in the middle to match adjoining terrain heights). When looking at X-Plane's "home" terrain it also looks absolutely amazing, but that's not representative for the whole globe. So, as MSFS development doesn't have thousands of terrain "designers" I'd expect huge differences in quality between popular and other areas.

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As with all versions of the X series, there's lots of complaints from users and overhauls, improvements & significant fixes from the developers after the first release. So, is it something bad? Is the game bad? I think, you will have lots of trouble finding any other commerical product whose company is so much dedicated to their work, especially looking at how long they provide support / updates for their products. That's a real exception in the gaming business. So, from my point of view it was - and still is - worth supporting them (if you like that kind of games; and: no, I'm not getting paid by them, though it may sound like that). Although I'm usually buying the X games pretty early, I usually wait for some time / updates to let it mature before I seriously invest a huge amount of time. I'd consider each X-game like a good wine: it becomes better the older it gets.

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The numbers look quite impressive; makes me almost re-install/-download it to finish the remaining side-quests/achievements just to see how good it really has become...

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Quoting: iiari

Quoting: peta77That's some really exciting news as I was actually a little bit disappointed about the performance it has shown so far on an RTX2080ti @ 4K. It has used (according to nvidia-smi) less than 50% of my GPU and about two third of my CPU cores were just bored while having just 25fps! I hope with update 11.50 X-Plane will finally be able to fully (or at least a lot more) exploit my resources so the experience will be a lot smoother.

I would temper those expectations. They've already said people shouldn't expect an FPS boost with Vulkan. This is being done solely I think because of expiring OpenGL code and Mac requirements to use Metal. And your experience is totally typical, BTW. XP11 will bring even the tippist toppiest systems to their knees. It's because of all of this legacy code that pushes almost the entire sim through one core of the CPU, and the GPU doesn't matter all that much. So, again, sadly, your experience is typical.

One theory as to why MS 2020 will look and perform so much better is that it's a new, ground-up creation with contemporary code built around contemporary hardware and networking. I mean, all of our current sims are built around code that is 10-15 years old, or older. I wonder if, for a theoretical XP 12, they'll elect to start all over. I would imagine (maybe?) that the MS2020 announcement would have blown up any XP development roadmap, but maybe not...

Thanks for this miserable outlook.. That makes for a wonderful start for this weekend... :dizzy:

But the thing is, as vulkan provides more control to application developers, I was hoping they'll be able to decouple some processes, which could improve overall performance, as my system - GPU and CPU - is barely used at its full potential at the moment. But that of course depends on where the bottlenecks are...
Typically the physics stuff (CFD and FEA) - which is running on the CPU - has lots of potential for parallel processing, but

Quoting: Guest...
Unfortunately I would not expect a huge jump asyou're hoping for as I have been told that the X-Plane isn't multi-threaded...

makes me worry as, looking at CPU usage during runtime, this seems to be way too true. The only situation where there seems to be good multithreading, is when loading new terrain tiles....
But redesigning the kernel for that kind of stuff surely will take a while, so let's hope the best for future updates (like an amazing XP12 :D )...
The upcoming MSFS might be a motivation for Laminar Research, but companies always promise a lot to get supporters / pre-orders; let's see how much they actually release... Their alpha-version videos actually don't look much better than XP11's; but they still have almost exclusive support of hardware manufacturers for special flight-sim stuff, so that will surely put some pressure on X-Plane

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That's some really exciting news as I was actually a little bit disappointed about the performance it has shown so far on an RTX2080ti @ 4K. It has used (according to nvidia-smi) less than 50% of my GPU and about two third of my CPU cores were just bored while having just 25fps! I hope with update 11.50 X-Plane will finally be able to fully (or at least a lot more) exploit my resources so the experience will be a lot smoother.

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