Basic Feature Overview for SMP V4

[Sethos]

5 minutes ago, joomie said:

As promised by settings. You find all information here:

http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/topic/108835-performance-question-stuttering-for-experts/&do=findComment&comment=1071473

 

First off, most of those Nvidia Control Panel settings simply don't work with X-Plane, due to it being OpenGL. Power management mode, multi-display and threaded optimization is the only ones that really work.

Secondly, you should turn off Extended DSF. Takes a huge toll on your system.

Edited December 3, 2016 by Sethos

[joomie]

Just now, Sethos said:

First off, most of those Nvidia control panels simply don't work with X-Plane, due to it being OpenGL. Secondly, you should turn off Extended DSF. Takes a huge toll on your system.

Well, one finds plenty descriptions on how to setup the stuff using NVidia's control panel having been written by quite experienced XP community members.

To set threaded optimization to off is one of the very very important settings you have to make there! There is a big performance difference which can be seen, when you toggle that settings. This is also confirmed by many other users.

What does extended dsf mean? This setting isn't available anymore when using XP11, is it?

[Sethos]

1 minute ago, joomie said:

Well, one finds plenty descriptions on how to setup the stuff using NVidia's control panel having been written by quite experienced XP community members.

To set threaded optimization to off is one of the very very important settings you have to make there! There is a big performance difference which can be seen, when you toggle that settings. This is also confirmed by many other users.

What does extended dsf mean? This setting isn't available anymore when using XP11, is it?

Well, I can tell you, they aren't very experienced if they recommend those settings  It's all snake oil, probably brought on by years of FSX / P3D use. And yes, the three settings I mentioned are the only ones working and they are all recommended. Threaded Optimisation 'off' makes a huge difference. You are better off resetting that profile. 

Extended DSF means it loads additional tiles around you. Instead of 3x2 tiles, it now loads 4x3 tiles, which increases load times, decreases performance and worst of all, can add a lot of stuttering, especially when it draws new titles. In some cases I would see a 60-70% performance hit.

Not sure if it's permanently removed from X-Plane 11 or it's one of those settings that will make its return, alongside more fine-grain control over scenery options etc. but it appears that X-Plane 11 handles distant scenery much better. Flying at high altitudes in X-Plane 10, without extended DSF, out of the box, would give you some big nasty brown splodges in the distant. X-Plane 11 seems to do a much better blend, so I don't think extended DSF will be necessary.

[StrelnikovD]

45 minutes ago, joomie said:

By the way, is there anybody who got FS Global Real Weather working together with SMP and XP11?

Now FSGRW 1.7 build 40 not compatible in XP11 ! AWFULLY Wait FSGRW 1.8 for X11

[Sethos]

6 minutes ago, StrelnikovD said:

Now FSGRW 1.7 build 40 not compatible in XP11 ! AWFULLY Wait FSGRW 1.8 for X11

Wait, really? Dammit. 

[joomie]

The developer of FSGRW replied this:

http://fsgrw.freeforums.org/fs-global-real-weather-latest-doen-t-work-with-x-plane-11-t590.html

[Sethos]

Guess we'll just have to wait. Has X-Plane's own engine been improved? I remember it had some weird turbulence responses in X-Plane 10.

[Cameron]

4 hours ago, Sethos said:

But seriously, it's looking good. My question is, will you be modifying the current haze values of X-Plane 11? I find them to be a bit much at dusk / dawn, so I was wondering if SMP would be modifying them as part of its weather depiction? 

It's worth investigating. For the moment we are taking in all feedback from our beta test group and being very open to change. The end result will be a product we feel exceeds all previous releases and makes our customers happy.

We are certainly not rushing this one. It needs to be done mostly right, and at the same time we need to balance X-Plane 11. I have a feeling Laminar is hearing about the values you speak of and may make changes by the time we are in RC stages for XP 11.

[Sethos]

23 minutes ago, Cameron said:

It's worth investigating. For the moment we are taking in all feedback from our beta test group and being very open to change. The end result will be a product we feel exceeds all previous releases and makes our customers happy.

We are certainly not rushing this one. It needs to be done mostly right, and at the same time we need to balance X-Plane 11. I have a feeling Laminar is hearing about the values you speak of and may make changes by the time we are in RC stages for XP 11.

That sounds great. It's not a showstopper by any means but a bit of tweaking would be nice. But, LR might indeed be changing it. Seems like a general mention from a lot of users.

The way you worded that last part about RC for X-Plane 11, will your initial release will be X-Plane 10 only? or will the release be compatible with both, with the footnote that the X-Plane 11 version isn't final? I certainly wouldn't mind trying it out on an 'early access / paid beta' sort-of stage.

Edited December 3, 2016 by Sethos

[Cameron]

Just now, Sethos said:

The way you worded that last part about RC for X-Plane 11, will your initial release will be X-Plane 10 only? or will the release be compatible with both, with the footnote that the X-Plane 11 version isn't final?

We are fully compatible with X-Plane 11 already. Laminar provided us some early access in the SMP 4 development phase to get a head start on that, so on day one of release we will be both X-Plane 10 and 11 compatible. There is code in SkyMaxx Pro v4 which will auto-detect which version of X-Plane you are using and apply the appropriate code within the plugin to that platform.

[Sethos]

6 minutes ago, Cameron said:

We are fully compatible with X-Plane 11 already. Laminar provided us some early access in the SMP 4 development phase to get a head start on that, so on day one of release we will be both X-Plane 10 and 11 compatible. There is code in SkyMaxx Pro v4 which will auto-detect which version of X-Plane you are using and apply the appropriate code within the plugin to that platform.

Oh okay, that's good to hear. Thanks for the quick answers.

I shall withdraw and await the release of SMP4 this weekend ... it's this weekend, right Cameron? right?  

Edited December 3, 2016 by Sethos

[BaBene]

Out of curiosity, what exactly do you mean with "allow clouds to be drawn across an area of up to 320 km."? Did you mean km² (I hope not ;)), in a radius/diameter of up to 320 km around the plane or in a square of 320 km x 320 km? The major issue I have with SMP v3 at the moment is the cloud draw distance. Looking forward to SMP v4 improvements on that front!

[sundog]

I should have said distance, not area. It's an area with a diameter of 320km.

 

[joomie]

3 hours ago, sundog said:

I should have said distance, not area. It's an area with a diameter of 320km.

 

resulting in a distance of 160km from the aircraft :-)

[MercuryMat]

Haha, in the screenshots the rain seems a nuclear fallout, but I suppose this are only sun reflections, may be too many?!?!

By the way, after xEnviro big fail on pricing and not clear policies for future development I'll look forward this new version of SMP. Hope to see sparks in stable configurations of XP10. I'ts nice for XP11, but I suppose it will need some time to be really stable for this new platform.

[sundog]

The first beta of SMP4 did have issues with the lighting of rain / sleet / snow, and that's what you're seeing there. They've since been fixed.

[BaBene]

On 12/4/2016 at 3:39 PM, sundog said:

I should have said distance, not area. It's an area with a diameter of 320km.

 

I believe you mean a square area with an edge length of 320km. You might want to consider changing your advertisement images then, it is somehow misleading. Putting the word "double" and the edge length (instead of the area what you actually mean) there might confuse some people. Some customers might believe that they get double the cloud draw distance from their aircraft, while they actually are getting 41% more. My biggest point of criticism with SMP v3 is the cloud draw distance, especially noticeable when flying on high altitudes. A good setting for me while still maintaining an acceptable frame rate is 10,000 km², thus I can expect ~40km "more" draw distance with SMP v4? 

/EDIT Any chance of getting a time lapse video of a mid haul airliner flight of SMP v4 before you release it? This would be more than awesome, and i think I'm not the only one that is curious to see how SMP v4 performs on a "real" flight

Edited December 5, 2016 by BaBene

[donoscar]

 

2 hours ago, sundog said:

 

 

30 minutes ago, BaBene said:

I believe you mean a square area with an edge length of 320km. You might want to consider changing your advertisement images then, it is somehow misleading. Putting the word "double" and the edge length (instead of the area what you actually mean) there might confuse some people. Some customers might believe that they get double the cloud draw distance from their aircraft, while they actually are getting 41% more. My biggest point of criticism with SMP v3 is the cloud draw distance, especially noticeable when flying on high altitudes. A good setting for me while still maintaining an acceptable frame rate is 10,000 km², thus I can expect ~40km "more" draw distance with SMP v4? 

/EDIT Any chance of getting a time lapse video of a mid haul airliner flight of SMP v4 before you release it? This would be more than awesome, and i think I'm not the only one that is curious to see how SMP v4 performs on a "real" flight

yes, please elaborate, you guys, or maybe my good old friend {A=d²Pi/4} got me completely confused now... 

Edited December 5, 2016 by donoscar

[sundog]

You're right, it could be worded more clearly. But it's certainly not our intent to misrepresent anything. The area covered by clouds has doubled, not the radius of the coverage. SMP4 covers an square area surrounding you (although we round off the corners when drawing it) of 320km on each side if you crank up our cloud draw area slider all the way. The maximum area covered is therefore about 100,000 square kilometers.

We think more about area because that's what impacts the number of clouds we have to draw, and therefore drives performance. Doubling the area means we've figured out how to draw twice as many clouds as before.

If I really wanted to make it sound big, I could say it covers 100 billion square meters!

At the end of the day, it looks pretty expansive at 30,000 feet, which is what matters. And it's not trickery - you'll see individual clouds form at the horizon that you can fly toward seamlessly.

 

[Defiance_co]

Great reply Frank

I'm still enjoying as always v3 in xp11 (but of course v4 would do nicely (in the visa advert voice))

The crep setting helps some visuals i've found in xp11 using v3, never touched them before, but obviously if included in v4 then i'll be all over the settings lol

Thanks

Have Fun

Tony

 

 

[joomie]

Hi!

 

It's good to hear, that the area of clouds will be bigger.

But much more of importance is, that the redrawing of the refreshed weather will not result into very strong FPS decreases anymore.

I use the a high performance rig (see below) and used to have the settings listed below in XP10.51 which gave me an average of approx. 40-60 FPS.

But always, when the METAR file has been changed by FS Global Real Weather the FPS dropped down to a single digit of 1-9 FPS for seconds.

This is not acceptable and I uninstalled SMP 3.1 by now. There is a need, to solve that. Probably by redrawing the new weather step by step and not in one big run.

My rig:

Win 10 (64bit), Intel Core i7 6700K@4.6 GHz, Overclocked NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080, 32GB RAM, 1.25 TB SSD, SAMSUNG SUHD 55'' TV@3840x2160

My settings I used in XP10.51:

[Denco]

On 12/3/2016 at 2:25 PM, Sethos said:

Well, I can tell you, they aren't very experienced if they recommend those settings  It's all snake oil, probably brought on by years of FSX / P3D use. And yes, the three settings I mentioned are the only ones working and they are all recommended. Threaded Optimisation 'off' makes a huge difference. You are better off resetting that profile. 

Extended DSF means it loads additional tiles around you. Instead of 3x2 tiles, it now loads 4x3 tiles, which increases load times, decreases performance and worst of all, can add a lot of stuttering, especially when it draws new titles. In some cases I would see a 60-70% performance hit.

Not sure if it's permanently removed from X-Plane 11 or it's one of those settings that will make its return, alongside more fine-grain control over scenery options etc. but it appears that X-Plane 11 handles distant scenery much better. Flying at high altitudes in X-Plane 10, without extended DSF, out of the box, would give you some big nasty brown splodges in the distant. X-Plane 11 seems to do a much better blend, so I don't think extended DSF will be necessary.

 

Extended DSF is always enabled in XP11 and it doesn't cause any problems. I don't experience any fps issues with the pb1 like I did with DSF on in XP10

[sundog]

Joomie, we're going off topic here. If you want to dig deeper into the issues you're having with FSGRW let's open up a support thread on it. We'll need to see your log.txt.

I did just run a test with the latest version of FSGRW here with XP10, SMP4, and RWC. It only took between 1/10 and 2/10 of a second to parse the new metar files when FSGRW dropped them for me. With "never change visible weather" on, you shouldn't be seeing any redrawing of the clouds when that happens. If you do, then something else is going on that we need to identify.

[joomie]

The only performance problems I experienced where exactly at that moment when SMP redrawed the clouds.

I made so many measurements and tunings at uninstalled SMP at the end. Since then I had no more FPS drops like described above.

Hence, I really hope that the developers are aware of that bis performance issue. I mean my rig is quite well equipped, isn't it?

[joomie]

Alright, sorry for that.

Regarding your question (Log.txt) find my thread here:

http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/topic/108835-performance-question-stuttering-for-experts/#comment-1071153