Microsoft Flight Simulator maps entire globe with AI • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft Flight Simulator maps entire globe with AI

#101

Post by danielrpa » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 12:54 PM UTC

tpmx wrote: post #10

Before anyone gets excited and goes to buy the game outright: First: Please consider trying out the game via the Xbox Game Pass for PC program instead. $5/month, $1 for the first month instead of buying it outright. Do remember to cancel. Thank me later. Second: The whole download/install experience is a trip. You need to download about ~90 GB of data (no problem!). However, the downloader is abysmal. It's not optimi…

Maybe you are new to the Flight Simulation scene. This is the game that FS fans have been waiting for over 10 years. Yes, it has problems but we're talking about absolutely groundbreaking technology that didn't settle for incremental improvements. There are very few games, if any, that look like FS2020 with full detail on. It absolutely blew me away to fly over my home town and point to my high school, malls and other recognizable parts of town.

Please don't listen to the parent and go support this new technology. This is a game that needs more funding that many startups quoted and even celebrated on Hacker News. This is revolutionary stuff and, despite the glitches, I was able to have a blast with it even in my modest Core i5 with a $150 GPU. It literally brought tears to my eyes.

Re: Microsoft Flight Simulator maps entire globe with AI

#102

Post by joezydeco » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 1:30 PM UTC

g_p wrote: post #98

tpmx wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The product was literally built backwards. Yes, exactly. I't infuriating. I hope there is a strong enough enough backlash to get Microsoft to spend 50% more than they intended to, to fix the product so that it matches what they sold it for.

It also seems the menus were designed by designers that had no "performance budget" cap - looking at performance, the menus only hit a sensible FPS when on the loading screen. The sheer amount of animation and transparency in the main menu seems to be the cause of poor performance and GPU fans resembling jet engines, and totally needlessly at that! I can't see anything else bottlenecking the system elsewhere on perfo…

The hangar animation behind the main menu is a big part of that GPU hit.

Re: Microsoft Flight Simulator maps entire globe with AI

#103

Post by ohgodplsno » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 1:42 PM UTC

g_p wrote: post #87

garaetjjte wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>complete lack of visual feedback you've actually launched FS... It's at least 30 seconds on a fast SSD Eh, splash screen wouldn't hurt but I'm surprised that anybody is strongly bothered by that. Maybe even it is caused by some DRM-silliness. >One major issue is that sitting in the menu seems to use 100% GPU. Without vsync? I guess its shifts from being more GPU-bound to more CPU-bound when running simulation proper…

> Without vsync? I guess its shifts from being more GPU-bound to more CPU-bound when running simulation proper, thus changing load percentages. Yes, without vsync, idling in the main menu uses 100% GPU in task manager. GPU fan confirms this. Clearly a bug, as nothing in the menu looks to me to tax the GPU in even the slightest. > Vsync delays game loop to next screen refresh, so excluding these newfangled Freesync/Gs…

>es, without vsync, idling in the main menu uses 100% GPU in task manager. GPU fan confirms this. Clearly a bug, as nothing in the menu looks to me to tax the GPU in even the slightest.

"I told my GPU to work as hard as possible and it did so! The game is so poorly optimised".

That's kind of the point of Vsync. Not rendering unnecessary frames.

Re: Microsoft Flight Simulator maps entire globe with AI

#104

Post by dweekly » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 5:38 PM UTC

bitxbit wrote: post #2

How long would it take to model out the entire world in reasonable detail? Something similar to open world games such as GTA V?

Generally speaking, mapping out an area in high quality requires imagery that was captured not only relatively close to the subject (flying at a few thousand feet vs on orbit) as well as capturing objects from multiple oblique angles. This requires intensively flying a "waffle fries" pattern over a subject area of interest with a plane with a bunch of cameras on it pointing in multiple direction. E.g. https://www.sanborn.com/oblique-imagery/

So - many orders of magnitude more expensive than just capturing satellite imagery.

Re: Microsoft Flight Simulator maps entire globe with AI

#105

Post by g_p » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 11:30 PM UTC

ohgodplsno wrote: post #103

g_p wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Without vsync? I guess its shifts from being more GPU-bound to more CPU-bound when running simulation proper, thus changing load percentages. Yes, without vsync, idling in the main menu uses 100% GPU in task manager. GPU fan confirms this. Clearly a bug, as nothing in the menu looks to me to tax the GPU in even the slightest. > Vsync delays game loop to next screen refresh, so excluding these newfangled Freesync/Gs…

>es, without vsync, idling in the main menu uses 100% GPU in task manager. GPU fan confirms this. Clearly a bug, as nothing in the menu looks to me to tax the GPU in even the slightest. "I told my GPU to work as hard as possible and it did so! The game is so poorly optimised". That's kind of the point of Vsync. Not rendering unnecessary frames.

Was meaning from the perspective of "I'm viewing a menu, this shouldn't max the GPU out". From another comment it does seem the video running in the background is being rendered in realtime, and maxing out the GPU.

I am not sure vsync would help in the menu, since the FPS is sitting below 60 in any case. Otherwise I'd agree with you that vsync should be turned on. It seems for FS that vsync is generally causing more issues than not at this point.

Re: Microsoft Flight Simulator maps entire globe with AI

#106

Post by g_p » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 11:33 PM UTC

joezydeco wrote: post #102

g_p wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also seems the menus were designed by designers that had no "performance budget" cap - looking at performance, the menus only hit a sensible FPS when on the loading screen. The sheer amount of animation and transparency in the main menu seems to be the cause of poor performance and GPU fans resembling jet engines, and totally needlessly at that! I can't see anything else bottlenecking the system elsewhere on perfo…

The hangar animation behind the main menu is a big part of that GPU hit.

That's the same conclusion I reached here. I also think when you pause (i.e. hit escape, not talking live pause where the sim keeps running), the game continues to render the full scene in the background, even though there's content in front. This just feels wasteful to me - the power delta on my GPU between active and idle is something like 100 W!

The intro sequence is a pre-rendered video - I reckon if Asobo used a pre-rendered hangar video, they could swap that out in a patch and nobody would notice or care, but it would knock GPU utilisation to < 5%.