SkyMaxx Pro v3.2 Has Been Released!

[sundog]

11 hours ago, Sweet19blue said:

f you just look at famous Osama Youtube video, he did the last one about 3.2 version. At the end, you can see him trying out the cloud visibility setting without any visual changes (from high altitude, above the clouds). The covered area does not increased.

I haven't seen this "famous video", but I would guess that the cloud draw distance is being limited by the actual visibility in the weather settings. Clouds will draw to the extent of the cloud draw area set, or to the visibility distance specified by X-Plane, whichever is lower. That's not a bug.

As for performance issues - if you've increased the default cloud draw area setting, you need to find a balance for your system and the weather you're flying in vs. the performance you want. SkyMaxx Pro 3.2 is the fastest, most efficient version we've released. We hear you that you want even more, and are always looking for ways to push current hardware even harder.

Edited June 15, 2016 by sundog

[Cameron]

5 hours ago, Tchou said:

But a 980ti is capable

He does not have a TI variant.

[gcharrie]

 

please see next topic for text :-) something went wrong when posting

Edited June 15, 2016 by gcharrie

[gcharrie]

NOTE : sorry : posted my previous post with just images, here the text :

 

Hi all,

Following the answers from my previous post, I did a new test : reduce the x-plane settings to find the best settings :

- x-plane settings to MINIMUM (using the provided button) and reboot (see settings screenshot in this topic)

- DISABLING  all custom sceneries (except SCENERY_PACK Custom Scenery/Global Airports/)

- setting nvidia driver options to default except Threaded optimisation to disabled - Lastest Driver version.

- using FSGRW to reload the conditions with 5 clouds layers (see my previous posts)

- same situation : CYVR, IXEG, taking off from 8R, and climbing straight

- skymaxx pro and RWC to 'Auto'

- my system : intel i7 2600K - 3.4Gz - NVIDIA GeForce GTX980 - 32Gb - windows 7 64b (note : removed the CPU overclocking few days ago)

 

At takeoff FPS is good (above 30) and during climb it progessively decreases to 10FPS and then after a bigger freeze FPS is 3 => issue reproduced with LOW x-plane settings.

 

X-plane is not able to correctly display a cloud area of 17000 with 5 layers (with an important coverage).

There is a big bottleneck somewhere in x-plane and RWC/SMP 

 

notes :

- When cloud area is set at 10000 or less no FPS issue.

- With less cloud layers (for example 3 manually set with broken coverage), and then baron plane (same place, same x-plane settings to minimum), I still have a drop from 35 to 15FPS.

 

I perfectly understand that drawing so many 3d clouds is cpu or gpu intensive, that we must lower our settings to get a good balance.... but here, the x-plane settings are set to MINIMUM  (giving graphics from the 90s) and skymaxpro is not set to max.

I respect the product and the RWC dev team (that listens community and try to improve things), but there is clearly something wrong, either a bug or things that SMP/RWC can do and allows to do (hight layers, area, ...) that x-plane can't do.

[Tchou]

5 hours ago, Cameron said:

He does not have a TI variant.

Yes but I have...  And since one of the most powerfull Graphics card (setting aside the 1080 which seems to not bring much more power to x-plane)  on the market cannot do it, I guess it could only be worse for people with a less powerfull card. 

Edited June 15, 2016 by Tchou

[sundog]

If your expectations are to have 5 layers of dense clouds generated by FSGRW, with detailed, individual clouds extending all the way to the horizon without impacting your framerates - your expectations are simply too high for what current hardware can do. You are correct that there is no computer on the market that can handle a worst-case scenario of weather with the cloud draw area cranked up without dropping some frames.

You must find the right balance between cloud draw area, your system's capabilities (both GPU and CPU), the weather you're flying in, and the performance compromises you are willing to make.

[gcharrie]

6 hours ago, sundog said:

If your expectations are to have 5 layers of dense clouds generated by FSGRW, with detailed, individual clouds extending all the way to the horizon without impacting your framerates - your expectations are simply too high for what current hardware can do. You are correct that there is no computer on the market that can handle a worst-case scenario of weather with the cloud draw area cranked up without dropping some frames.

I don't "expect" or look for this type of weather situation ;-)  :

I like to fly in CYVR area and recently I had bad FPS there (otherwise FPS is good with SMP/RWC) : I tried to find why and my conclusion is that FSGRW depicts 5 layers and RWC allows up to 6. This is a heavy situation that is probably not so common when we fly (or other people use other weather injector that don't generate so many layers).

Neither FSGRW nor RWC give the option to limit the number of layers or give an option that would reduce the load (we have only cloud coverage in RWC).

 

Having less layers or less complex cloud patern is ok for me. I'm not looking for the perfect look. I was just trying to understand why I had such a FPS loss at that time in this area.

 

Having more options in SMP/RWC to try to limit these heavy depiction case would be nice :  for example limit the number of layers (by carrefely choosing the ones to keep ) or the cloud complexity (I understand that RWC draws more clouds that SMP alone).

Well, for the moment, I keep RWC because I love this product and the last version brings lots of things.... just reduced the cloud area coverage....

[sundog]

8 hours ago, gcharrie said:

I don't "expect" or look for this type of weather situation ;-)  :

Hey, sorry if I sounded snippy there. I'm traveling and so my responses are a bit terse. The idea of trading off vertical column complexity vs. area covered is an interesting one.

[Denco]

17 hours ago, sundog said:

You are correct that there is no computer on the market that can handle a worst-case scenario of weather with the cloud draw area cranked up without dropping some frames.

This got me thinking the other day. Why does Xplane even bother with 3D clouds that are too performance hungry? If we look at FSX and P3D with REX textures the illusion is good enough to not be bothered by them being 2D. And even those clouds can eat tons of fps.

Edited June 16, 2016 by Denco

[Sweet19blue]

Can we imagine something like nice 3d clouds around and close to the airplane, and fake light 2d or 3d clouds that may fill the gap between the detailed cloud area and the horizon line?

Pierre

[Cameron]

4 hours ago, Sweet19blue said:

Can we imagine something like nice 3d clouds around and close to the airplane, and fake light 2d or 3d clouds that may fill the gap between the detailed cloud area and the horizon line?

Pierre

SkyMaxx Pro already does this.

[Sweet19blue]

ok then that is not what I see in my game. Could you please show a screenshot at say FL350 of this effect? You may try overhead Geneva, the weather is quite crapy today.

Pierre

[ChinNoobonic]

For me, I have black clouds at dawn. Between 4-6AM. Anyone else experiencing this?