Microsoft Flight Simulator maps entire globe with AI
bbc.com
bbc.com
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 optimized for throughput at all, each (often small) file is individually downloaded and then uncompressed in sequence. Is this 1997? My favorite bug: if you minimize the download window it starts using 100% of the GPU. This is kind of indicative of what you'll experience later on - that special kind of randomness that stems from developer incompetence. Most people (including me) seem to need to restart the whole thing a couple of times. Loads of people are simply stuck at the download step.
Third: Loading times with this game are insane. It can take a minute or two (with a very fast 6-core CPU, 1 Gbit/s network connection, M.2 SSD, etc) to load the main menu, because it seems to download the scenery for the stuff that is vaguely visible in the background scenery every time. Then another minute or two for actually getting started with your flight. And when going back from flight mode to the main menu: yeah, another 1-2 mins.
Fourth: When you actually get to start the aircraft:
- There are loads of bugs that cause insane FPS drops/frameskips.
- There currently seems to exist an issue that causes FPS slowdowns when the Azure-based geometry servers are slow. Did they do blocking networking in the same thread as the rendering? :) No idea, but the propblem is for for real. The typical FPS is higher when fewer people are playing. All of those gorgeous youtube videos you've seen from before the launch? Yeah, those are no longer representative. Also, I think most of them have been carefully edited. There are just way too many random FPS and frame skipping bugs abound. It's a mess.
I recommend looking at a recorded live stream (from recent days) to get a better understanding of the simulation performance.
(I've spent maybe 6 hours with MSFS2020 so far.)
Fifth: This is a very complicated application. There is no documentation.
Sixth: I'm running on a GTX 1070 with 8 GB of video memory, so sadly I can only run this at 1080p. When everything is working perfectly it's kinda smooth - about 40 fps. Most of the time though, something is causing a severe FPS slowdown, so closer to 5-10 fps. It's all kind of random. It seems like most of these issues are bugs, rather than the hardware meeting actual limitations. Changing the display quality (ultra/high/etc doesn't really impact these random variations in FPS much.)
Seventh: The in-game credits start with this sequence: DESIGN, UI DEVELOPMENT, PROGRAMMING. Maybe I'm being overly sensitive here, but to me this order could sort of explain why this disaster shipped in its current form.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. So many insane bugs.
Most infuriating of all: The constant social media spam about how this is fantastic. Talk of framerate issue issues/slowdowns/bugs is constantly downvoted e.g. on reddit.
Anyone thinking about getting this game should first read through https://www.reddit.com/r/MicrosoftFlightSim/comments/ic3o90/...
Of course there are also many positive aspects of this app/game. I just wanted to bring attention to what I think should have been showstopper issues.
So from the perspective of existing simmers, a game that seems to be pretty bad relative to mainstream AAA titles is actually looking really great compared to that status quo.
As for the download system -- yes, there's no excuse for that. I'm not sure how they got that so wrong given the abundance of prior art that does it better. The seeming relationship between Azure load and FPS/stutters is concerning and certainly a new condition that didn't exist in existing sims. Overall I do think the new sim suffers from being released prematurely, as we see so often with software now. But the reason for all the hype and praise is because the flight sim community really is excited about the potential this represents because we've been stuck with such ancient platforms for so long.
I remember being saddened about how first person shooter games took over from flight sims as being the ones which the smartest people worked on, starting circa 1993 with Carmack's master piece.
I think you flight sim enthusiasts have been so starved for atttention since FSX that you've kind of lost perspective. ;)
PS: It's a next gen game built for the future in mind, GTX 1070 is basically outdated. Expect to require a 3xxx series graphics card for good performance.
(Also 3xxx series cards aren't released yet.)
At least some progress screen to show you've started the program would help.
One major issue is that sitting in the menu seems to use 100% GPU. I can't see any reason for that, especially when the game often runs at 90% GPU for me.
It seems to be multi-core aware, but multithreading is definitely leaving a lot to be desired. Modern CPUs with 8 cores (16 vcores) seem woefully under-utilised.
Turning on vsync tanks frame rate by about 6 or 7 fps for me. "Popping out" a navigation window and putting it onto my second screen also causes around a 4 to 6 FPS drop.
This is definitely a "release broken, patch later" build. I do like the game, but I fear the extent of "patching" might not fix the fundamental performance issues that probably need a rewrite of much of the core simulator engine itself. No software should take 30+ seconds to appear on screen with any indication it's loading. I get the feeling the devs have focused so much on feature development that no time at all went into performance optimisation, and that's a shame as this game has such real potential.
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, thus changing load percentages.
>Turning on vsync tanks frame rate by about 6 or 7 fps for me. "Popping out" a navigation window and putting it onto my second screen also causes around a 4 to 6 FPS drop.
Vsync delays game loop to next screen refresh, so excluding these newfangled Freesync/Gsync monitors framerate reduction is expected. Also managing multiple windows/contexts from single applications is quite inconvinient, might clash with system compositor, etc, so I wouldn't hold that against them.
Note that I didn't actually play the game and cannot comment on game performance itself. Certainly omission of DX12/Vulkan rendering backend is rather disappointing.
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/Gsync monitors framerate reduction is expected.
Interesting - my setup has freesync screens and GPU, although admittedly I'm not too sure about any of these newfangled display things. I have 2 displayed enabled, tomorrow I'll try it with just 1 display in case that helps.
And absolutely agreed, lack of DX12/Vulkan is a real shame and missed opportunity.
Regards lack of splash screen, perhaps I'm getting old, but this is a regression from older versions - FSX took a while to load but had a progress bar. If I had to ship a game in this state, I'd quickly write a shim executable to show a loading bar immediately. There's an exe that loads it (without startup intro videos) in the SDK, so clearly possible.
I guess maybe my expectations are out of line with the modern "release broken, patch often" mindset, but it seems disappointing they didn't optimise for multi core CPU, or handle regressions in basic UX, or do performance optimisation. But nonetheless, there's clearly some great work in this sim, and hopefully they'll have the confidence to try address some of these issues in patches - perhaps even moving to Vulkan or DX12. Nothing is impossible in a world where the entire game is downloaded and updatable, I guess.
"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.
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.
It's just one of at least 50 similarly severe P1 showstoppers, sadly. But, yeah, I definitely agree.
Get 32GB and give yourself some breathing room.
I also agree with that note on how the credits were stacked up. And that’s literally how this game got built. Asobo came to MS with this awesome visualization tool and MS pretty much said “ok, why don’t we hand you FS14’s code and we can call it FS20?”
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.
I can't see anything else bottlenecking the system elsewhere on performance - it really does seem like the overall game missed out on any real performance optimisation.
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%.
But more importantly, it's not a game that's defined by it's release; developers are clearly following the service model, which gives me confidence that most of the bugs will be sorted out and game polished.
Are you sure? Got a source for that?
The french developer company Asobo has typically been launching one great-looking, abysmally performing game per year so far:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asobo_Studio#Games_developed
Why would they spend more than a year on MSFS?
I'm hopeful that an update could improve performance, especially with respect to spreading CPU load over more cores, but it sounds like a lot of other simmers are mostly content, so maybe that will never happen.
The micro stutter is very much real (AMD gpu here, Ryzen CPU), and annoying. I have tried to do some tracing to see what's going on. The fact sitting idle in the menu takes gpu usage to 100% doesn't inspire me with confidence. Frame pacing seems to be causing the stutters but I haven't managed to link it to an IO delay or similar yet.
My fear is the developers will focus on fixing functionality and never really optimise performance - I suspect getting good usage of 8 core CPUs (16 vcore) would require another full rewrite, which doesn't feel too likely.
Original comment: I've seen reports that the Steam refund window of a few hours of 'gameplay' is used up by the mammoth download time. Steam only downloads the installer, and the installer then downloads the game data. Steam considers the installer to be the game itself and starts the clock ticking.
[1]: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-08-20-valve-assu...
After 6 hours of game play (sort of - half of that been spent looking at loading screens and trying out different settings) I'm still not sure. It's oh so promising but also so insanely buggy and random.
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/amp/valve-says-the-time-it-takes-...
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.
I haven't done a full comparison yet because the plane I could compare more directly would involve stock vs payware, which is not really fair.
I do think that they can improve it with time but definitively feels rushed.
This is not a tolerable release. My gut feeling is that Microsoft needs to get this french studio (Asobo) to spend at least 50% more time on making this work. I don't think they will.
Just wait 6 months and if it’s not smooth by then it probably never will be.
But it's also so, so tempting.
The game does load very slowly. This is on a system with 32 gigs of RAM and NVME SSDs.
It looks amazing though!
I don't seem to max anything out when flying - even GPU has a little headroom according to task manager.
Hopefully Asobo will spend time on performance, rather than just bare functionality, as there's definitely lots of scope to fix things like frame pacing and overall performance.
First thing you should do though is disable live traffic and no online players. It greatly improved performance for me. Visuals are amazing now.
https://i.imgur.com/hpNfPtZ.jpg
Notice the little porches added by the AI. It's actually impressive how good the 3D models turned out.
There's a tag for museum aircraft, 'historic=aircraft', but the tiles rendered for openstreetmap.org don't show it, so people add a tag saying it's also a building.
It's only a theory, I haven't correlated a picture from the game with matching data.
Here's an example from the USS Intrepid: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/277980026
The game was probably released faster than what one would expect from a super polished title, but the game is still extraordinary. The visuals are superb, the detail is spectacular (I can see my real house with our pool as I fly over), the mechanics are incredible for a base flight simulator (lots of stuff you’d normally pay extra via addons for), and the game has been out less than a week.
They’re going to make the game better, and if you’re into flight simulators it’s a super easy purchase.
I went into this week with high expectations and my expectations were greatly exceeded.
I think this will be a problem a bit - apart from initial WOW effect, not that many people are into civilian flying. Its way too complex for casual gamers and learning curve is almost vertical, you need ultra-expensive hardware (how many want to spend 1000s in covid times?) and to be honest, non-combat realistic flight sims are really not for everybody, I would say not for most gamers.
People rave about details, but plenty of places look on similar level as if I would take google earth's built in flight sim - I am talking about what I've seen around Mont Blanc, not exactly a remote place. Yes, few more nicer buildings and slightly more detail, but that's hardly enough for non-geeks.
Sorry to sound so pessimistic, it is a fantastic game in its own tiny little niche and I am sure most issues will be resolved over time, I just think nowadays that niche is pretty small and won't expand that much because its not something that's easy to grasp and have fun quickly.
It is however much better than anything that has previously existed and as long as you squint a bit and accept the flaws it’s great fun.
- The water looks better in Flight Simulator. A large pond has ripples and reflections in Flight Simulator but it's just flat in Google Earth.
- Trees and houses look better in Google Earth. Flight Simulator put trees in the middle of a house and in the middle of a street, and they seem a bit more crumply.
- Neither one gets palm trees right. On a major road with palm trees next to it, Flight Simulator turned them into green stalagmites and Google Earth didn't model them at all, leaving them as flat shadows on the ground.
It seems like if you like good-looking water or clouds (which Google Earth barely has) then Flight Simulator would be better, and obviously clouds are important for flight simulation. But if you just want to see the sights, Google Earth is pretty good and Flight Simulator isn't necessarily going to model things better.
Comparing Google Earth vs Flight Sim is the same as watching 3D images of hiking trail end points vs actually walking through the trail.
Sadly though, I expect it will need to have a free to play mode with micro transactions to support the ongoing investment into keeping the infrastructure up for delivering the open world imaging.
So - many orders of magnitude more expensive than just capturing satellite imagery.
X-Plane handles some edge cases better for sure, like stall/spin.
The feel of MSFS is much much much more real... like how there's always a little bit of turbulence.
I wonder if it’s based on usage from previous versions of Flight Simulator.
Considering their current global footprint (latency) and the fact that the game already requires a massive amount of always-on bandwidth, it would seem like this is a less painful conversation in this case.
(Even after the install there's a 19g download update.)
I wonder if everyone who gets one has a system with the specs to run it?
But he was on a brand new stupid level hardware PC.
The Deluxe Edition (89,99€) includes everything from Microsoft Flight Simulator plus 5 additional highly accurate planes with unique flight models and 5 additional handcrafted international airports.
The Premium Deluxe Edition (119,99€) includes everything from the Microsoft Flight Simulator Deluxe edition plus 5 additional highly accurate planes with unique flight models and 5 additional handcrafted international airports.
I’d strongly recommend this if you’re not very sure you’ll like the game.