The 2 box solution.
I have been in technology since 1972. This is before anything like the 8008 chip was in civilian hands.
I have had flight simulators around the house since about 1980 or whenever SubLogic got started.
Landing the Dreamliner is hard because it seems like the stick isn’t sampled very often. This is a classic “long delay” control loop fault.
When I look at all the things MSFS2020 is trying to do and how painful and marginal some of the current solutions are, I ask myself a simple question… The same question that aerospace professionals might ask: What major functions can run in parallel in 2 separate boxes; 2 separate disk-motherboard-IO system units?
I think the solution is obvious…
Box 1. Maintains the flight model and samples control inputs frequently. The geographic coordinates and the pitch, yaw, roll output of the aircraft flight model are then passed to…
Box 2. This box renders the aircraft and world and handles all network traffic.
The current state of MSFS2020 tells us that for the game to run really well in a single box (one Intel mother board and one graphics system), several iterations of optimizing code are ahead of the developers. Large products like this are usually “demoed” in easy, script like environments and getting the thing running at all is usually when investors start pulling resources and money back out of the project. Then it stays in script form forever.
I do not expect that this team will be allowed to or will be able to move from demo script toward machine language level speed.
Therefore, if a version of this flight simulator is ever certified for the flight schools, I predict it will be running in twin boxes with the world rendering engine box receiving aircraft current location info across a simple serial line from the flight model box.
They do not have to be equal boxes. The flight model function may not need more than a standard modern Intel I7 chip set.
A really clean flight model that is highly responsive to student and instructor inputs is what the flight schools want.
Instruction can still proceed even if there are funky world rendering issues and delays in drawing swans on lakes.