The short answer is: this is not a very good idea.
Now with OS X, this configuration is supported, and OS X will cleverly copy graphic output from one video card to another to make the system work well. You will get a fps hit when this happens.
With Vista, this configuration isn’t supported. (Snarky comment: it is lame that Microsoft completely rewrote their video driver infrastructure and went backward in terms of configuration support.)
With Linux, I have no idea if this configuration can run. I do know that trying to change my configuration hosed Ubuntu thoroughly and I decided not to break my Linux boxes any more, having spent plenty of time doing that already in the last few days.
For X-Plane, we can’t handle this case very well (at best you get the framerate hit) because we need to share textures between the IOS screen and main screen. So if you are trying to set up an IOS screen, you really do need a dual-headed graphics card. For what it’s worth, every card I’ve gotten in the last few years has had two video outputs.
My Mac Pro has just gotten weirder – I put a Radeon HD 3870 into the second PCIe x16 slot. (The machine comes with a GeForce 8800.) I now have one monitor in each.
So here’s where things get fun:
- Start X-Plane. 60 fps.
- Drag the window to the second monitor. 30 fps.
- Quit, move the menu bar to the second monitor, restart. (X-Plane is now on the right.) 160 fps.
- Drag the window back to the primary monitor on the left. 100 fps.
What’s going on? Two things:
- On OS X, X-Plane’s graphics are rendered by one video card, and that video card (in 921) is the card that has the menu on one of its monitors.
- When an OpenGL window is displayed on a monitor that is not attached to the video card that is doing the rendering, OS X will copy the image from one video card to another, at a cost of some framerate.
So what’s going on above? Well, the 60 fps is my 8800. When I drag the window, the OS starts copying the graphics, slowing fps. When I move the menu bar, the 3870 does the rendering, and we get much higher fps. Once again, put the window on the monitor that is not attached to the video card, and fps hit.
Final note: fps tests of the 8800 vs 3870 with X-Plane 921:
Fps test 2, 8800: 46,49,51
Fps test 2, 3870: 70,75,80
Fps test 3, 8800: 24,25,25
Fps test 3, 3870: 40,41,43
In other words, the 3870 is significantly faster. I believe that this is due to the OS X drivers, not the cards themselves. Note that the 3870 is in a PCIe 1.0 slot and the 8800 is in a PCIe 2.0 slot.
I think we’ve reached the point where, if you are putting together a new computer and have X-Plane in mind:
- Get a quad-core machine if the pricing is favorable (and I think it should be now).
- Get a “Direct X 10” compatible graphics card. That would be an nVidia 8, or 9 series (or I guess that crazy new 280 card) or a Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000. DX10-type cards can be had for $100 to $150.
Quad core is easy: X-Plane 921 will use as many cores as yo have for texture loading (especially in paged scenery), uses two cores all the time, and uses 3 during DSF load. The infrastructure for this additional scalability (previous builds used two cores, more or less) will let us put 3-d generation on 4 cores or more. More on this in another post, but basically X-Plane’s utilization of cores is good and getting better, so four cores is good, particularly if it’s not a lot more expensive.
Now for DX10, first I have to say two things:
- We don’t use DirectX. We have no intention of switching to DirectX, dropping OpenGL support, or dropping OS X/Linux support. I just say “DX10” to indicate a level of hardware functionality (specified by Microsoft). The DX10 cards have to have certain hardware tricks, and those tricks can be accessed both in OpenGL and Direct3D. We will access them by OpenGL.
- We are not going to drop support for non-DX10 cards! (We’re not that crazy.)
X-Plane does not yet utilize those new DX10 features, but the DX10-compatible cards are better cards than the past generations, and are now affordable*. By making sure you get one of these, you’ll be able to use new graphic features when they come out.
* The roll-out of DX10 cards has been similar to DX9. With the first generation cards there was one expensive but fast card and one cheap but slow card. With DX10, NVidia got there first, with DX9 ATI did. Like a few years ago, now that we’re a few revs into the new spec, both vendors are making high quality cards that aren’t too expensive.
User Rs2Play is now the first user to be banned from the X-Plane Wiki. WikiMedia has some automatic features, like banning all associated IP addresses with a banned user, so if you find yourself kicked from the Wiki in error, email me and I will fix it. (This would only happen if you were in the same shared IP pool as the user in question.) Thanks to the users who immediately removed the spam while I was out of the office.
(If we have more spam, I can promote a few users to admin status to ban spammers faster, but so far we have had only one case.)
Unfortunately the situation with the X-Plane SDK Wiki is not as good. The problem is that the SDK Wiki does not use MediaWiki – it uses phpwiki, so we do not have the rich set of user admin tools that MediaWiki comes with out of the box. There is currently a user who is (for some reason) attacking the user database by registering fake email addresses over and over. I do not know what the user hopes to accomplish, other than wasting my time.
The unfortunate side effect is to leave the SDK Wiki user database in a state of chaos. When I have time, I will be adding some new features to the user signup code and trying to clean out the user base.
Why are we not using MediaWiki for the SDK? Well, besides history (we used what we found at the time), the SDK Wiki’s code is customized to integrate the SDK development tools with the Wiki itself. This is how you get the latest documentation and user generated content on one page when you look up an XPLM
function.
There is no scenery system Wiki – something I have debated a bit. At this point though I am more concerned with getting the scenery tools out than with updating the documentation; once we have a more complete tool set, then I can ask the question “can users figure out how to use these tools.”
Yesterday I described how triangles and meshes can be optimized and hypothesized that building OBJs carefully could improve vertex throughput. Having looked at some numbers today, I think the potential for framerate improvement isn’t that great…an improvement would come from cache utilization (post vertex shader), and our cache usage seems to be pretty good already.
Simulating a FIFO vertex cache with 16 vertices (an average number – very old hardware might have 8 or 12, and newer hardware has at least 24 slots) I found that we miss the cache preventably around 15% of the time (using a random set of OBJs from LOWI to test) – sometimes we really missed bad (20-25%) but a lot of the time the miss rate might be as low as 5%.
What these numbers mean is that at the very best, index optimizations in OBJs to improve vertex throughput might only improve vertex processing by about 15% (with the FPS improvement being less, since vertex throughput isn’t the only thing that slows us down).
In other words, if I solve the cache problem perfectly (which may be impossible) we get at best 15%.
So this could be a nice optimization (every 5% win counts, and they matter if you can improve fps by 5% over and over) but cache utilization isn’t going to change the nature of what you can model with an OBJ, because our cache utilization is already pretty good.
Have a Happy Thanksgiving!
I’ve been looking a bit at triangle optimization – first some terminology:
- Indexed triangles means that the vertices in a mesh are referred to by index numbers. This is the scheme OBJ8 uses. The advantage of indexing is that if a single vertex is used by many triangles (that share a corner) you only have to include the vertex data once, and then use that data many times by index. (The savings from indexing depend on how often vertices are shared.)
- Triangle strips are strips of triangles sharing common edges. Because triangles in strips share so many common vertices, they can be stored in a compact form, for a savings of almost 3x.
Back in the old days, triangle strips were critical for performance (hence the presence of strips in the OBJ2 and OBJ7 formats). However with modern hardware, indexing is more efficient – the slight increase in data size (due to the index) isn’t as expensive as the cost of specifying “we’re done with one strip, start the next one”. (Consider that if we use indexed triangles, we can submit all triangles in one batch – with strips, we need one batch per strip.) Thus OBJ8 uses indexing and doesn’t provide any strip primitives.
There is one other concept to be aware of: cache utilization. Graphics cards remember the last few vertices they processed, so if a mesh repeats a vertex shortly after using it, the graphics card can save work. Triangle strips naturally use a cache somewhat well because vertices occur in close succession.
Strips and DSF
DSF allows for triangle strips (and triangle fans) as a space-saving measure. Even with indexing, the indices can be compressed if strips and fans are used, and with DSF, file size was a very high priority.
When the DSF file is loaded, the data is rebuilt into indexed triangles (and reindexed – the DSF internal structures don’t provide as good indexing as the DSF loader can create) – in version 803 we first started using indexed triangles and found it to be a big win.
MeshTool will generate triangle fans (as a space saving measure) – if you build a DSF by hand (using DSF2Text), use strips/fans to compress file size.
Because DSF focuses on file size, the quality of mesh output is a function of the DSF loader, which has to run while flying. So while I can imagine some improvements in future performance, I don’t expect to be able to get huge wins because the very best mesh optimizing algorithms are much too slow for real-time use.
The DSF loader already produces full indexing and preserves cache utilization from strips and fans – the next logical optimization would be to reorder non-strip, non-fan triangles for better cache use on load; the order in the DSF file may be optimized for file size and not cache utilization.
Optimizing OBJs
Where I believe there could be real improvement is in OBJ8 generation. The OBJ loader currently loads the indexed OBJ triangles exactly as specified in the file – build a smarter file and we can get faster framerate. There are two possible ways to win:
- Cache utilization – by ordering vertices for cache use, we can get better throughput.
- Hidden surface removal – by putting the exterior triangle earlier in the OBJ, we can draw them first, occluding the interior of an object, which cuts down fill rate. (In an airplane, you would want the exterior fuselage first in the OBJ, before the seats inside, so that only the pixels visible through the window are drawn.)
This second form of optimization may be of limited utility in that an OBJ8 optimizer has to respect authoring decisions about translucency, attributes, etc.
I am investigating OBJ optimization now – my hope would be to put optimization into a new version of the ac3d exporter and ObjConverter.
Strips and the iphone
There is one place that triangle strips do matter: the iphone. It turns out that the iphone will process triangles a lot faster if they are presented in a strip-like order. So the iphone DSFs are the first to use triangle strips (instead of fans), and the OBJ exporter for the iphone optimizes the OBJ mesh into triangle strip order.
My tests indicate that strip order makes no difference on modern ATI and nVidia GPUs, so there is no point in releasing these optimizations in the main X-Plane tools. In the long term, I expect our OBJ tools will have two optimization paths – a strip-based path for the iphone and a cache utilization-based path for the desktop.
I saw a post about this on X-Plane.org…authors sometimes try to make a vehicle (a car, truck, etc) modeled via an OBJ “drive around” using animation translate commands. The problem is that sometimes the objects disappear. Here’s what is going on:
X-Plane uses a bounding sphere to decide whether to draw an object. The bounding sphere is the smallest sphere X-Plane can fit around the entire object; if the sphere is on screen, the object is drawn (even if the object itself isn’t on screen). We do this because we can test whether the sphere is on screen very quickly.
But what if the object has animation? X-Plane attempts to guess how animation might affect the sphere by looking at animation commands and making the sphere a bit bigger where animation might move the object outside the sphere. This process works, well, rather poorly. In particular, X-Plane doesn’t know exactly how your datarefs will change. This results in two error cases:
- If X-Plane assumes the animation is more drastic than it really is, we make the sphere too big. The object will then be drawn even when it is not on screen (because the sphere is on screen because it is too big). This case hurts fps but does not cause objects to disappear.
- If X-Plane assumes the animation is less drastic than it really is, we do not make the sphere big enough, and sometimes the object “disappears” because the object is on screen but the (too small) sphere is not.
Now let’s apply this to objects that are driving around. Usually this is done via a translate animation command where datarefs feed the object’s position.
X-Plane estimates the effects of a translate animation using the largest and smallest key frame values. But the animation engine will extrapolate beyond these key frames. So consider these three cases:
- As your dataref goes from -1 to 1, you translate by +/- 1 meter. In this case, the bounding sphere will be increased in radius by one meter.
- As your dataref goes from -25 to 25, you translate by +/- 25 meters. In this case, the bounding sphere is increased in radius by twenty five meters.
- As your dataref goes from -1000 to 1000, you translate +/- 1 kilometer. In this case, the bounding sphere is increased in radius by 1000 meters.
Note that in all three of these cases, the animation works exactly the same! But by using different dataref and value extremes, X-Plane’s estimate of the effects of the animation (and its change to the boundign sphere) can be quite different.
So…if you animate an object and it disappears, it is probably because the bounding sphere has not been increased, perhaps because a translation animation is being sent values outside its minimum and maximum values.
The problem is of course that to have an object “roam” over a large area, it must have a very large bounding sphere, which means it is being drawn a lot more than necessary.
Lines are a bit long here in Maryland, and we’re not even a swing state. Doesn’t matter! Go vote!
Previously I have blogged about a key choice in file format and scenery system design: will the file format be “specification based” or “reality based”.
Specification based: the format has an exact interpretation of the data. OBJ is an example of this…the format describes triangles and there is only one interpretation of what that triangle could be.
Reality based: the format models real-world concepts; the correct interpretation is “as close to the real world as possible.” The nav.dat file is like that.
I have been reading the OpenStreetMap Wiki and hit upon something I didn’t realize: you can’t use copyright to protect a derived work from a file that simply contains a list of facts!
Now I am a programmer – I am used to writing code, slapping a copyright notice up top, and assuming that it’s now mine…heck, I’m the one getting carpel tunnel from typing it out. But consider the nav.dat file; it contains a giant list of frequencies for navaids. It’s a fact that the BOS VOR is 112.7. Is my mentioning of that fact in this blog a derived work of the nav.dat file? Of course not, and it’s a good thing too because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to state facts without IP conflicts.
The OSM guys believe that they need to change their license to something weirder than the CC-BY-SA license they have now because the CC license uses copyright, you can’t copyright facts, and OpenStreetMap is really just a huge collection of facts.
Now at this point I’ve written six paragraphs too many without the obligatory “I am not a lawyer.” I am not one. And I must admit, my biggest concern with all of this is that it gets confusing and hard to interpret, and I’d be perfectly happy if there were only 3 or 4 licenses out there for everyone, you’d pick your favorite flavor, and everyone would know what it means.
Suffice it to say, it never occurred to me that a criteria of a file format might be “protectability” – that is, does the file format allow an author to specify something other than facts, so that it is elligible for copyright protection?
If you are an author, the good news is: pretty much all of our file formats would meet that criteria:
- OBJ and DSF are essentially 3-d modeling containers (DSF is just a damned wierd one).
- Images are copyrightable, so that takes care of your textures.
- Plugins are code, clearly copyrightable.
- ACF files contain, among other things, 3-d models, see the first point.
- Apt.dat would be the format most at risk of “factualization”, but I think you could argue that the arrangement of bezier curves and attributes is more of an artistic 3-d model than a statement of fact.
But who knows, I am not a lawyer.
(Oh yeah, this whole article is written from an entirely US-centric viewpoint…I am even less qualified to speak of such things outside the US than I am here at home.)
I’m never quite sure about naming names. There are users whose contributions to X-Plane and its scenery system have been immense – we wouldn’t have what we have without them.
But I don’t want to make the decision to blog for anyone else – this blog is part of Laminar Research’s communications to our users, and I don’t want to set up content that leads our paying customers toward third parties who may not want the extra questions/attention.
So I guess for now what I’ll say is this: the work I discuss here on this blog is not a solo effort – I have had the good fortune to collaborate with some really good people, and it has made X-Plane that much better of a flight simulator.
To everyone who has helped me with the scenery system: thank you!!
