It’s great that we can break out avionics like the Garmin panels to another screen. But currently, it’s a massive performance killer. I can run the sim at 35-ish fps most of the time, dipping below 30 in busier areas, and dropping to low 20s when in the “hot spots” like KLAX, JKFK, etc.
I would love to be able to break out both of my Garmin panels to another screen in front of me, but each control I break out costs 5-10 fps of performance in the main sim window. If I bring over only the PFD, I’m chopping along at an unsteady mid 20 rate. Breaking out a second windows turns the sim into a low to mid teen fps slide show, which is unflyable.
The ability to break out avionics windows is great, but as it stands, this feature is utterly useless if it degrades performance to the degree it does.
I really think that once an instrument is “broken out”, it should no longer appear in the plane’s cockpit. Those Garmin displays chew up a lot of processing power to render. With the current setup, they’re being rendered twice. You don’t need it on the panel in the plane’s cockpit if you have it broken out to another monitor in front of you.
On a side note, panels like ATC and VFR map and such can be broken out as well. When they’re out of the window, they give me a 3-5 fps hit each. Not great, but not horrible either. But they’re not rendered twice, which is probably why they’re not as ‘expensive’ in terms of processing cycles.
That there is any hit at all from undocking a UI text window like this just reeks of shoddy, sloppy design. I thought it would be great to break out some toolbar windows to my second monitor, especially ATC. Nooope, significant hit on the fps. It’s got to be a train wreck of tangled wires and hurriedly jammed together parts under the hood of this thing.
Yup. Most people are at best seeing about 30 - 40 fps. That 5 fps is a 12-17% frame hit for breaking it the ATC window. That just isn’t right.
. Don’t forget to add your vote to the top of this past !
Be aware that if you have limited your framerate in nvidia settings, nvidia will divide the available fps evenly between the windows. So popping out a window when limited on 30fps, each window will receive 15 fps.
Yeah, that’s not it. I have no frame rate or refresh rate constraints, either globally or for the application. And I don’t have locked frame rate in the sim either. Never have. And it’s always been this way.
And I understand that frame rate gets divided up between active windows. If you can’t push more than 30 frames consistently (which even people with 10th gen i9 and Ryzen 5000 series paired with RTX 3000 struggle with), what you get is still divided up…
Guys, I feel your pain. I have been wanting to get my proper FSX cockpit operational.
That said, let’s not assume that the designers are sloppy or that the software is a train wreck because a feature, that they have told us is not there, doesn’t work as well as we want.
The reason I have not pulled out the old cockpit is that MSFS is currently NOT designed to work that way. The undocking of glass displays does NOT mean that they are meant to run on another monitor, under a hierarchy that does NOT support multiple monitors.
The developers have told us that the tools to allow for home panel layout and multi monitors are coming. They are well down the road, but coming. I know this is a frustration for many of us that have $1000’s in hardware rotting in a corner. But, trust me when I say, far more frustration is to be had by trying to force the sim to do things that it does not yet natively support.
Chill use what the developers have given us until they get caught up to where WE want them to be.
I just wanted to make sure that there’s a thread here to vote on so that there’s visibility on this issue at the Asobo level. We’ve seen how a high number of community votes lights a fire under their asses. If no one is asking for it via votes, it tends to drop off the radar as it’s deemed unimportant by the community.
I’m not talking about a feature that hasn’t been implemented. I’m talking about undocking the ATC menu window. There’s no reason this needs to cause a hit on the simulator’s performance, but it does because of poor design choices. I do 3D UI design and development as my job, so the flaws in others’ work become quite obvious when I see stuff like this. There’s a lot of this rattling around in the app, but some other sloppy stuff I can think of off the top of my head:
Running the GPU full out on simple menu screens because there’s no refresh rate limit
The text getting stretched badly on different aspect ratios (was later fixed I think?)
Badly sized and positioned icons that made it into a release build (later fixed)
This isn’t deal breaking stuff of course, but it does show a general lack of care in craftsmanship. I don’t think the devs are necessarily bad or incompetent. They’re probably just racing at break neck speed to implement stuff, running roughshod over the QA, or maybe even trying to maintain XBox compatibility at the cost of the WIndows UI experience. That doesn’t mean they should be totally excused from criticism of their work, however.
If you are a UI designer and developer for a product of any size, then you are stuck with the decisions made by the Software Architect. If the Architect was making his decisions based on – I’m just spit-balling here – being able to run on the Xbox and VR headsets, then the base UI architecture would not have multi-monitor support and performance as an initial priority.
And if your development strategy and timeframe was dictated by Microsoft, their now-known, extremely aggressive time-to-market requirement would force the Architect into many “buy versus build” decisions. This is clearly what has happened in the sim’s case.
As a UI designer and developer, you should have been very curious about how the various UIs work in the sim. I would expect a software professional to investigate something in their field of expertise prior to publicly criticizing. And if that professional UI designer and developer had investigated it, I would expect their criticism to be aimed at the parties who are actually at fault for any undesirable UI behavior.
COHERENT GT
Coherent is a third party company that was chosen – by whom, we don’t know – for the virtual cockpit instrumentation. Simply stated, Coherent GT is a rendering engine that takes HTML, XML, JavaScript, and variables, and renders the bitmap that is displayed on the 3d instruments.
That is why the sim runs faster outside of the cockpit, why our frame rates took such a big hit earlier when flying the airliners and Garmin glass cockpit planes, why they still do, and why they gave us a cockpit refresh rate setting.
POP-OUT INSTRUMENT BEHAVIOR
Similar to the FPS hits when flying glass cockpits on high refresh rates, the same thing should be expected when duplicating instruments to a second monitor. The sim – and its Coherent GT engine – don’t currently know all you’re wanting to do is duplicate the bitmap that it’s already created for one of the cockpit displays. It doesn’t know that it doesn’t have to recalculate anything – load the main thread – in order to display the same bitmap twice (although perhaps at a different resolution and size).
UI ARCHITECTURE VERSUS UI DESIGN
So should we criticize the “design” – and I use that term specifically in the software development sense – or should we criticize Coherent? Or the party that chose Coherent GT for the cockpit instrument UI engine? And are we criticizing them for not being able to pop out instruments, or that popping them out CURRENTLY causes a bit FPS hit?
Failure to be ABLE to pop out an instrument would be an architectural failure. It is unfair to criticize BEING able to pop it out, but it running slow – as clearly the architecture supports the feature, and the UI design works, but it’s just kind of slow right now to put it on a second monitor. And remember, you don’t do that Xbox or in VR, so it’s really just a PC thing in the long run.
And are we criticizing the GPU load during a menu to really be poor UI design or architecture? Perhaps you can explain to us exactly WHAT the sim is doing during that time? I sure don’t know. I would assume it’s doing something useful, or the Coherent GT engine is doing something.
FAIR CRITIQUE
As Willis said, it is simply unproductive to state these hyperbolic claims of any part of the sim being “a train wreck, unusable, garbage…” – you know the rest. You treat the modders as higher beings, yet never miss an opportunity to disparage the talent, genius, and work ethic of those that brought us this sim in the first place. The self-proclaimed experts among you are not – because if you were, you would not be making these unknowledgeable, unprofessional statements.
Yes, it’s okay – and maybe our right as customers – to offer fair criticism of Microsoft and Asobo. But I would offer a couple of suggestions on how to go about that:
If you don’t know what you’re talking about, ask questions instead of spouting negative nonsense.
If you DO know what you’re talking about, throw it out there objectively for peer review to confirm that you have found a bug or have a valid opinion. There are likely plenty of others in the community that have more knowledge or experience than you, so why not start good discussions that might provide Asobo with some good opinions and feedback?
Don’t feed the trolls – good advice for any social media platform.
Don’t be a troll – don’t spread misinformation.
Help to educate – a lot of people come to forums like this to learn and grow. Encourage noobs and show them the right ways to learn. If you have expertise, answer legitimate questions to help them enjoy this hobby.
I worked in a shop with a dozen guys on a high speed trading platform, and we created a 3D UI to display and navigate large amounts of information. Getting the user’s requests to the exchange as fast as possible was paramount, so if the UI was causing a delay, we’d have to go in and fix that. Not blame the UI libraries we were using, argue about design or architecture, or expect to be patted on the back for our genius regardless. It was the milliseconds that mattered.
I’d hope the Flight Simulator devs have similar priorities when making a video game where FPS and input device latency are important.
The stuff I criticized in this game is similar to the components I worked on. You can indeed undock a UI panel and put it on another monitor without causing a FPS hit in your main 3D window. You can also display only a menu screen without maxing out the GPU. At least part of the problem is they’re running the main render loop to needlessly redraw the UI as fast as possible. That stuff comes off as basic to me. In the initial development stages you’d say, “Hey, FPS is important here, maybe we should only redraw this UI panel when it needs to be updated. Then we can save the GPU for redrawing the world.” Instead of waiting for users to start making comments like, “My sim runs slooooow if I put the ATC, weather, and checklist windows on another monitor” or “Why are all the fans in my computer so loud when I’m on the download screen???” It’s because somebody didn’t program this game as well as they could have. And I point this out because I actually have programmed apps that have these features, and don’t have these problems.
Nice suggestions, but they just don’t work here.
Asobo doesn’t read or participate in these forums. That’s obvious from Q&A sessions. As far as I can tell, a few Microsoft employees of varying expertise and community engagement pass along the gist of what happens here. Nuanced discussions about how things should work or what’s behind a particular issue get lost in the shuffle, cast aside, and are ignored. We learned that the hard way after months of these discussions that went nowhere in the tech alpha.
What gets Asobo’s and Microsoft’s attention is if you make a big fat stink about it. Bang that drum loudly and often until they’re forced to notice. Then your issue gets priority, be it TrackIR support or UI details like “Press Any Key”. Not saying that’s good or how it should be, but it’s the deal.
I think a couple of things you said bear further discussion.
DEVELOPMENT PRIORITIES
It is indeed very puzzling how MS/Asobo (MS/A) prioritize things. The only thing that makes sense to me is to “follow the money”. They made a huge splash and raked in a lot of capital upon initial release. Many people have very reasonably stated that the core sim is a VFR sim, and right now I agree with that assessment.
If we consider the possibility that MS/A’s reactions are more appropriate for a product that is on schedule, then the scenery, atmospheric visuals, basic GA planes, VFR flights, Virtual Reality, Xbox support, and initially planned lack of core support for GPS / FMS systems makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? Using a forum voting system to prioritize the next features / bug fixes fits. Ignoring / backlogging issues relating to Airliners and complex systems fits.
They have probably sold a lot more copies once they released VR, and I bet they will sell a TON more with the Xbox release. To MS, that’s triggering current and future hardware sales and software sales on a subscription model, with GamePass dragging users farther and farther down the Xbox rabbit hole. It also has been giving them hot, free, advertising for well over a year now! They profit when people buy, and they profit by not having to shell out for advertising.
WHAT DOES THAT MEAN TO THE GENERAL SIM COMMUNITY?
Based on the voting system and bug fix results, the casual user has been somewhat satisfied with the progress until the recent terrain spikes and changing rudder control on the Xbox controller. Why haven’t we seen the spikes fixed yet? Because that’s another third party problem – Black Shark has to fix that, not MS/A. But overall, for all but the more advanced users, the sim is in pretty good shape as it slowly improves on the road to Xbox release.
WHAT DOES THAT MEAN TO THE HARD-CORE SIM COMMUNITY?
It means that we are going to continue to be frustrated with what we perceive as puzzling priorities, bugs that ruin the immersion for us, planes that don’t fly like real planes, third parties delaying study-level planes or delivering incomplete planes for quite some time yet, and a lack of features and performance to support external cockpits and multiple monitors.
WILL HOWLING AT THE MOON GET US THERE FASTER?
No. If complaints don’t align with their current VFR / VR / XBOX priorities, then it’s just not going to get done in the next three to six months. It’s clear that they are still on a shake-out cruise with their 3P partners, and are experimenting with core features, WASM, and the SDK. Anything that doesn’t increase future hardware and software sales, or generate free advertising (good and bad), is going to the backlog.
Howling may feel good and get others to howl, too, so I understand the need. And if done in a positive, objective manner, it might also attract the attention we want. But if done negatively or using hyperbole, it’s just going to get ignored.
BACK ON TOPIC – PERFORMANCE HITS ON “BREAKING OUT” INSTRUMENTS
After thinking a little bit more, I believe one of my UI design arguments doesn’t hold water. I said that the Coherent GT engine wouldn’t need to redraw a bitmap to put it on a second monitor. That’s not correct, is it? If the engine is responsible for producing the instrument’s bitmap, that means it has to take into effect view angle, resolution, size, etc. So if they keep the cockpit view intact, and draw a second view (even 2d / flat) of an instrument on another monitor, it will double the performance hit, won’t it?
BURNING GPS CYCLES IN THE MENU
I do agree that on the surface this seems puzzling. In fact, I use Riva Tuner (not the Nvidia control panel) to limit the framerate to 60 fps, and I don’t see any difference in terms of lower sim performance. So I’m going to agree with you on this one and assume whatever they meant to do while in the menu is not worth the GPU load. Looking at the GPU performance metrics, I can’t figure out why it’s even acting like it’s under heavy load.
I think they should give us a raw frame limiter in the sim (and I’m not talking about V-sync). Let me do in the sim what I have to do using Riva Tuner right now.