Jeremy Miller tweets (Senior Programmer at ISI)

gosh I can't disagree with you here there is a crowd out there that seems to put these things right up on the priority list,
I don't see a high amount difference ( apart from small jazzy effects ), dx9 always seems to run better for me too ( higher fps )
in the tests I've done (with a gtx Titan ), I don't like things like blur so maybe I'm in the minority I like good visuals but will not compromise more important things (important to me) for them.

 

Are you implying you *want* those sorts of people to come to RF2?

 

The sim racing crowd in general is overly critical and somewhat "bandwagon-ish". IL-2 BoS was just "pre released" and it's dx9. If there were any complaints or negative comments about it being dx9 there weren't enough to notice.

 

Yes. I welcome any and all people to the rF2/sim racing community.

 

Out of curiosity, what are the changes to the tyre's contact patch exactly?

Cheers

 

DX11 is better at hyperthreading, so if you have a multiple core processor (dual or quad usually), it'll run better with DX11. DX11 also supports tessellation, and there's a good chance the overall load on the computer will be lesser while doing the same thing. So what's wrong with it especially if it doesn't degrade from the current experience? It's equivalent to being stuck on Windows XP and denying the move to 7. Vista = DX10 in this argument if desired .

It's always a similar crowd spitting fire against the possibility of laying the groundwork for DX11 (or 12). The arguments are tiring, elitist, and on occasion fanboyist. The game won't look better unless it's developed to take advantage of the tech, there is a good chance it could still perform the very same way but be less of a load on the computer. Having rF2 running on DX11 with optimizations could be quite sweet. How that is a bad thing is beyond me.

 

I agree with this. I've worked in I.T. for over 25 years and I know the masses don't understand the details at all. It is like dealing with managers or executives - in their mind they deduce 9 is less than 11 and this equals inferior product - regardless of if it has any truth.

I don't work for ISI, and I am not suggesting any course of action. The above is opinion only.

 

Isn't good to promote the tec progress in general ? We also had better not built airbags in cars because it might not save everybodys life ?

If there was no title as pcars the technology and graphics would not be as currently and many would be unemployed in this area, starting with MS the hardware industry up to game developer.

Wouldn't ISI develope the physic engine and expand it's features, accuracy, etc........... with the second version we where not here and would still use the old tec. It's nonsense to rest when it actually is necessary to move on in my opinion. I'm not saying rf2 needs it, but it wouldn't hurt the popularity.

 

the titles I've mistakenly brought in the past that have been dx11 I've always been disappointed with
( AC / code masters stuff ) I think the software house has put a lot of resource into graphics & everything else seems to have suffered

-or is it a PC can only process so much so it's a balancing act for a software house & in the case of jazzy graphics most cpu/gpu resource is going there?

if rf2 sudden became full dx11 I'd keep most effects of anyhow & what's left I doubt I'd notice when driving around a track.

Iracing introduced some dx11 I think just to hush the people that went on about it (it worked) , but it really dosn't look any different and many including me don't use the blur effects as they prefer fps

p.s maybe things will change with AC -it does feel better than it use too but I still don't use it.
the only thing I like with AC (&the dx11 in that title) is the realistic glow of backfires but that's a very small thing

 

You know what - lets roll back to dx7 now we are at it. Dx9 is Way too shiny for my taste anyway. And I dont really want to play with ppl above dx8. And btw whats this with no xp support???

I have to admit sometimes i Think i Can hear dinosaurs roaring in here :-D

 

Jeremy Miller
Working on unstable build right now. Thunderstorms are making it a challenge.

 

But none of those reasons you gave as to why you don't play those games have to do with DX11...they only have to do with the physics/feel. So, you're really not making any point against DX11. You're associating DX11 with disappointing games, you're not actually following cause->effect reasoning.

 

The only real points I see against dx11 are compatibility and development time. Now compatibility is out of the way, only question left would be if rF2 will benefit enough to justify the time it needs to be implemented.

Good news, fingers crossed

 

no your right I'm not making any point against dx11 at all, but I'm not really concerned either way.
if ISI were to give us the option of say another couple of track instantly or dx11 I'd choose the tracks though
dx11 isn't really significant to me at all.
Those other titles (dx11) seem to lack depth in the physics & ffb department it may be nothing to do with dx11 but sometimes I wonder if dx11 with all the effects etc take a lot of resource so the software devs have to play a balancing act between physics based calculations and visual complexity (even when visual settings down there's little plus on the "feel") so reduce physics based dev time in favour of visuals (also knowing that this would help the title sell etc)of cause this may not be the case though.

minus certain effects like blur / glows & some transparency dx9 seems just as nice anyhow

could be because I keep multi threading off on my CPU (some one mentioned few posts ago thanks) that maybe some performance boost coudl happend through taking advantage of multi threading , this aside performance has always been slightly worse for me in dx11. so these things dosnt make me bothered for it either way.

rf2 graphics can be a tad clunky but I don't believe this is a fault of dx9

just my opinion of course etc -I didn't realise some liked dx11 so much

 

Yup. Good thing the people that make cars, tracks and sounds can remain working on their specific areas and don't have to worry about programming or coding anything .

 

Excerpts from Lockheed Martin on simulation and the move to DX11:

"The biggest benefit to this is that now Prepar3D is able to better take advantage of modern graphics hardware. In a nutshell, upgrading your graphics card will now increase either your performance or the fidelity of what you are able to see in the simulation. It also allows us to implement new and modern rendering features."

Other advantages of DX11 over DX9:

1) Object Instancing

Instancing allows the rendering system to have graphics cards draw multiple copies of the same object at once.

2) Tessellated Terrain on the Graphics Card

This allows two very noticeable differences, the ability for fully dynamic day and night cycles, and greatly improved terrain paging performance. With the terrain lighting now able to be done dynamically on the card, shadows and lightng are updated in real-tme, whereas previous shadows and lightng had to be baked into the textures and reloaded as the time of day changed.

3) Multi-Threading Support

Multi-threading essentially allows more work to be done on background threads as opposed to the main processing thread. We are now able to do optmization in parallel on background threads, as well as perform shader compilation on background threads which in addition to the tessellated terrain helps to greatly reduce those stutters so many people were seeing in the legacy engine as the CPU tried to page in all that terrain and all those textures.

4) GPU Particle and Effect System

Effects are now simulated on the graphics card.

5) Real-Time Shadows and Lighting

Support for fully dynamic variance cascaded shadow maps.
... the terrain being able to receive and cast shadows in real-time, as well as day and night and weather support. Seeing the moon or lightning affect the shadows in the virtual cockpit really adds to the immersion.

6) Volumetric Fog

This greatly improves the appearance ...

While these are only a few of the highlights of moving the legacy rendering engine to DirectX11, upgrading the platform so that it can scale to take advantage of modern graphics hardware is a big milestone for the platform, and one we are very excited about.

 

Remember, ISI haven't said they won't update from DX9 .... just not to DX11. When DX12 and 13 etc come along you might get the update you want.

 

The biggest benefit by far was going 64-bit. We got that but everyone is all "meh, gimme DX 11".

Crazy.

 

You dont know much what you are talking about do you.

1. Object instancing is trully a good thing, i will give you that

2. Tessellated Terrain has nothing to do with dynaming shadows or lighting or Ambient ocllusion, Tessalation is height map based change of the mesh done in real-time. So you can make stone wall actually shaped with each stone so long as you adjust height map to that. It is very HW demanding and in Sim racing not very usefull. Tessalation is usually regulated by some sort of settings f.e. in graphics menu or by developers. Usually is only rendered within very short radius from the player, causing very obvious seam of where the radius has reached and where it has not.
If other Sims use multiple baked AOs according to time of day, i dont know, but ISI and rf2 does not. In rF2 Time of Day is always ongoing process and the sun is always on the move, transactions between day and night happen smoothly and without interruptions. The only two parameters needed are Starting time and speed of Suns travel.

3. Yes this is a good thing

4. Not too important in Sim racing, the only Particle effects you will see are smoking tyres, dirt and burning engine. The only case when it could actually be usefully is rain spray

5. This is like DX 7 thing or something, rF2 has that. Take any car, go to practise in night and go around some Omni light, see what it does to shadows. The limitation is how many light sources can cast shadows at once, how many can produce specularity and so on. Those are limitations set by Developerts in sake of performance, but i assume that DX9 is more limited in this than DX11

6. Volumetric Fog is a very good thing, but again not so much for racing sims. rf2 has feature that is called air thickness, which is basically a fog that gets thicker with distance, so the distant mountains have this blueish fogish look to them as in real life. This is a dynamic parameter you can find in rf2s HDR, it changes with weather, time of day and even with location, as every location has a differend default value of this. Loch Drummond has higher air thickess than Silverstone.

DX9 Offers everything that a Racing sim could need. It is down to the graphical engine and shaders how do they calculate the final render. And also down to the graphical assets. The new Indy Car looks fantastic, i find it looking better than AC cars, it is simply more realistically looking car. Most of the modders dont know how to work with colors So they oversaturate them, or over brighten/darken them. Modern game engines do not render the colors the way they are on the texture, they have thresholds of how much saturated the colors can get, this is to prevent ingame oversaturation that is quite common in rf2 with amateur contenct because people simply dont know that when they want this poisonious orange color, they need to tweak it in game, not in their Microsoft painting

 

@MikeeCZ

Those words are not mine. They are an exact quote from a Lockheed Martin document by their sim engineers. I suspect they know what they're talking about. The full document is much more detailed than the extracts I posted.

My personal feelings are that multi-threading support and off-loading to the GPU are reasons enough for DX11. Don't forget, when DX9 was introduced in the last (early?) century, 256mb on the card was considered huge. Taking full advantage of modern hardware as efficiently as possible is a good thing.

Disclaimer: I am not a graphics programmer. Not any need in my line of work.