Mirrorred Reflections in Prepar3d v2.0?
- Thread starter wallydog
- Start date
Dino Cattaneo
Charter Member
I cannot confirm that.
Prepar3d v2 will introduce (optional) changes in the .mdl structure (and therefore model built with its compiler may not work in FSX). I do not remember seeing that, but that does not necessarily mean they are not there.
What you will surely have (that FSX does not):
- 3D water (even with legacy scenery), waves height is dependant on the wind apparently. Water apparently has refractive effects too... but it is unnoticeable from the air and I have not tried water vehicles.
- blooming (very well implemented IMHO)
- HDR (very well implemented too...a little slow maybe?)
- Shadowing (Ownship, Simobjects, terrain, vegetation, buildings, scenery can individually set to cast and/or receive shadows - this includes Autogen objects!)
- Tessellation
- Geometry instancing, including particle effects
- Volumetric fog (& clouds which change their "shading" depending on the position of the sun!)
- Better control of AA, including FXAA
- Plus some options which were present in FSX but were not available in the menus and required tinkering with the CFGs (wide aspect ratio, 4096x4096 texturing, LOD increase up to 6.5)
On my 660Ti, performance is quite good. Definitely smoother in the vast majority of the situations.
The only complaint is that, due to hard disk loading times I assume, loading very large photosceneries is still super-slow...and fast-flying over them can still cause the dreaded blurries.
IMHO, at least from the graphics engine perpective, I am super happy.
Prepar3d v2 will introduce (optional) changes in the .mdl structure (and therefore model built with its compiler may not work in FSX). I do not remember seeing that, but that does not necessarily mean they are not there.
What you will surely have (that FSX does not):
- 3D water (even with legacy scenery), waves height is dependant on the wind apparently. Water apparently has refractive effects too... but it is unnoticeable from the air and I have not tried water vehicles.
- blooming (very well implemented IMHO)
- HDR (very well implemented too...a little slow maybe?)
- Shadowing (Ownship, Simobjects, terrain, vegetation, buildings, scenery can individually set to cast and/or receive shadows - this includes Autogen objects!)
- Tessellation
- Geometry instancing, including particle effects
- Volumetric fog (& clouds which change their "shading" depending on the position of the sun!)
- Better control of AA, including FXAA
- Plus some options which were present in FSX but were not available in the menus and required tinkering with the CFGs (wide aspect ratio, 4096x4096 texturing, LOD increase up to 6.5)
On my 660Ti, performance is quite good. Definitely smoother in the vast majority of the situations.
The only complaint is that, due to hard disk loading times I assume, loading very large photosceneries is still super-slow...and fast-flying over them can still cause the dreaded blurries.
IMHO, at least from the graphics engine perpective, I am super happy.
Daube
SOH-CM-2024
Thanks for that detailled feedback.
I'm not so happy about that "dreaded blurries" remark, though.
I mean: this was THE MAIN problem of FSX, preventing us to use military jets as they should.... If P3D still doesn't allow us to fly fast at low altitude, this is a major dissappointment, to say the least. :/
I'm not so happy about that "dreaded blurries" remark, though.
I mean: this was THE MAIN problem of FSX, preventing us to use military jets as they should.... If P3D still doesn't allow us to fly fast at low altitude, this is a major dissappointment, to say the least. :/
They actually worked hard to keep blurries from happening.
For instance, they had us slew, full speed, across a stock landscape to show us how it remains crisp, non-blurred. Perhaps intense scenery (photo real, etc) will not do that, but stock scenery now runs super fast due to their new use of handling scenery and scenery mesh through the GPU instead of the CPU. Scenery is cached in the GPU VRam now. Its been really nice and smooth for me. You'll see when its launched.
Because its still 32bit, we still have limitations, but less now.
TuFun
Charter Member
Could the blurries be based on the amount of vram a vcard can process? I have 1GB, but vcard can go up to 6GB's (Titan).
Dino Cattaneo
Charter Member
Well, I did not want to scare anyone with the blurries statement....but the situation on my system (i7 920, Win 7, GeForce 660Ti) is as follows:
- if you use "Landclass" scenery (i.e. default or ORBX like) the situation is MUCH better than FSX. DX11 instancing, for one, does its job wonderfully here.
- if you use very large photoreal sceneries is it is better than FSX, but not that much. BUT rather than a problem of the engine itself, it is IMHO, a problem of "bandwidth" and data access. I am flying over the full state of California (fotoreal from BlueSky) and... well, it is a 60 Gb scenery. My hard disks are old. My processor is not fast. etc. So, rather than a problem of the engine, in my case, it is a problem of hardware.
Make no mistake - I think that Lockheed Martin delivered a MUCH better graphical engine.
- if you use "Landclass" scenery (i.e. default or ORBX like) the situation is MUCH better than FSX. DX11 instancing, for one, does its job wonderfully here.
- if you use very large photoreal sceneries is it is better than FSX, but not that much. BUT rather than a problem of the engine itself, it is IMHO, a problem of "bandwidth" and data access. I am flying over the full state of California (fotoreal from BlueSky) and... well, it is a 60 Gb scenery. My hard disks are old. My processor is not fast. etc. So, rather than a problem of the engine, in my case, it is a problem of hardware.
Make no mistake - I think that Lockheed Martin delivered a MUCH better graphical engine.
Dino Cattaneo
Charter Member
Also, apparently, Mirrored Reflections are apparently not supported per se... but (apparently) you can implement render-to-texture viewpoints of custom cameras.
This means, for example, that you can set a camera to look backward, and render its viewpoint as texture for the mirrors in the cockpit...
This means, for example, that you can set a camera to look backward, and render its viewpoint as texture for the mirrors in the cockpit...
I was just fixing to say just that, Dino. I finally remembered some details from a post Wes had made some few months ago in one of the threads at AVSIM.
In effect, this is pretty much the same method that is used by SCS in their Prisim3d engine for ETS2. They have an interesting method of setting the frustrum of the "mirror" such that whenever it's not in view, the rendering stops. That's necessary since there can be as many as six "mirrors" in view at the same time depending on the user's FOV in the truck's interior.
TuFun
Charter Member
My setup is AMD 965 @ 3.9GHz, ATI 5850 1GB vcard and no blurries in FSX set at 25 fps. But don't usually fly supersonic. Should do well in P3D2. Downloading some BlueSky (9) panels of central California to test fps.
Also, I have a new Raptor drive (500GB) 10,000rpm for P3D2.
Also, I have a new Raptor drive (500GB) 10,000rpm for P3D2.
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Dino Cattaneo
Charter Member
As for the Render to Texture... in addition of being used as mirrors, they actually may serve to a lot of purposes. In theory, for example, TFLIR and DAS system of the F-35 can be now emulated even without Tacpack and simultaneously...
Daube
SOH-CM-2024
Thanks again for these clarifications.
It is clear that the P3D graphic engine outperforms the FSX one. I was just a bit too optimistic about it, and your description just brought back a bit of realism to me.
In any case, I'm really curious to see what will happen on my hardware.
Most likely, they use a similar technique that the VRS Tacpack. The TacPack allowed us, for the very first time in the history of FS, to get a working MFD video camera in the virtual cockpit.
Such a camera, displayed on the mirrors, would have done the job as well.
P3D surely has implemented a yet more efficient way to do that.
SkippyBing
Charter Member
Oddly enough you can do that in P3D 1.4 using render to texture, the only issue was that you had to open the camera view that you wanted to render as a new window before it would start rendering on the VC mesh. I managed to get a rear view mirror working with it but at the time there was quite an FPS hit on my machine.