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Hah, I’d love to see that, although I’m also a developer on X-Plane and therefore biased. If anyone at Anandtech wants some help with setting that up, they can

Hah, I’d love to see that, although I’m also a developer on X-Plane and therefore biased. If anyone at Anandtech wants some help with setting that up, they can reach me at [username] at x-plane.com. X-Plane is indeed super scriptable, which is used by various IHV’s to auto test new drivers and hardware. We also use it extensively internally in our CI testing suite. Edit: To the OP, I can provide performance benchmarks from an i7-6700k vs Ryzen 3900X for your Dad. It’s unfortunately not super apples for apples. What I can say is that the massive L3 cache is doing wonders for X-Plane, and the greater core count is definitely going to be more relevant in the future as well.

enimodas 6y ago
How's office morale there after the launch of msfs 2020? Or does rising interest in flightsims have positive effects on xplane too?
- Alupis 6y ago
  It probably depends what the user wants - a game or a simulator. FS2020 is pretty - lots of eye candy, but the flight model simulation isn't as realistic as X-Plane, which historically has put correctness above eye candy. FS2020 is also very buggy still (including crash to desktop after restarting a flight, etc), although getting better. That, and there are not many plugins, add-ons and aircraft models available yet for FS2020, although it's growing. The default built-in aircraft have many missing features, buttons, autopilot modes, etc - which prevent folks from using these as "study level" simulations. As of right now, serious simmers still use X-Plane/Prepar3d, but maybe that changes as updates roll out for FS2020.
- justsid 6y ago
  Honestly quite good. Like Alupis mentioned, X-Plane might have a slightly different target audience than FS 2020. That being said, X-Plane 11 is also almost 4 years old now and I'd hope a sim released in 2020 beats it graphically. We recently completed our move away from OpenGL, which served as the base graphics library for a good 20 or so years. It took forever, partially due to how deeply ingrained GL-isms were in the code base. But we are now all fancy and modern with Vulkan and Metal, which allows us to do some really cool and long overdue things with the sim that were previously almost if not completely possible. So that's quite exciting for me, not to mention that it got quite a bit faster in the process. I can't speak for the other parts of the sim since I almost exclusively work on the graphics and game engine bits of X-Plane, but I think most everyone in the company is pretty excited for the future. Also, and this is purely from a flight sim user perspective, competition is always good. Just like it's good if AMD and Intel compete with each other. The only winner is the end user.
deagle50 6y ago
The X-Plane benchmarks in the Phoronix review look outstanding. I just need to decide between 5800 and 5900. Side question, will the large cache on RDNA 2 close the gap with Nvidia?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- justsid 6y ago
  It pains me to say, but I would not recommend an AMD card at the moment, at least if you plan on running Vulkan on Windows. The problem is with add-ons, they still run under OpenGL (because that's what the SDK provides and by now there is an insane amount of plugins relying on it), so X-Plane exports some of its render surfaces to OpenGL and let's plugins run normal GL code on it, while under the hood synchronizing the two worlds. The problem is that the AMD driver has a bug with scheduling mixed workloads. Sometimes the GL side gets to execute first, sometimes follow up Vulkan work executes first. This leads to incorrectly composited rendering and really annoying flickering. And despite trying to have this fixed for over a year and many many emails with AMD engineers, we are nowhere near close to a fix for this. We are at the point where we are even considering integrating Zink just so we can ship an enjoyable add on experience to users. Not every user has that problem, it depends on the hardware and software that runs (ie a very classic race condition). But I can't in good conscience recommend AMD over Nvidia here. And I hate that, because the Big Navi cards look amazing.
  - deagle50 6y ago
    Thanks. I'll try to wait for the 3080/Ti.
  - kmonsen 6y ago
    I’ve had tons of issues with amd graphics drivers, and it seems fairly widespread. I think they said it had been a focus this generation.
deagle50 6y ago
Another side question if you'll indulge me, any hopes for temporal AA? It would be a huge win for image quality and GPU performance.
eptcyka 6y ago
He's looking to build a completely new system, so it's a toss-up between the 10900kf and whatever looks to be good from AMD at a similar price, but I do appreciate the data point :) From the few sparse google sheets I've seen, it looked like X-Plane was still preferring Intel cores and NVIDIA GPUs. It's a shame really, everyone's benchmarking the GPUs and nobody's looking at the impact of the CPU as far as I could tell. But now that we have an AMD core that's 20% faster than the previous one, the tables might've turned. Best of luck developing X-Plane, I wish I could help you guys justify the Linux support, but unfortunately I've not got the enthusiasm or free time to commit to a flight sim just now.

enimodas 6y ago

How's office morale there after the launch of msfs 2020? Or does rising interest in flightsims have positive effects on xplane too?

Alupis 6y ago
It probably depends what the user wants - a game or a simulator. FS2020 is pretty - lots of eye candy, but the flight model simulation isn't as realistic as X-Plane, which historically has put correctness above eye candy. FS2020 is also very buggy still (including crash to desktop after restarting a flight, etc), although getting better. That, and there are not many plugins, add-ons and aircraft models available yet for FS2020, although it's growing. The default built-in aircraft have many missing features, buttons, autopilot modes, etc - which prevent folks from using these as "study level" simulations. As of right now, serious simmers still use X-Plane/Prepar3d, but maybe that changes as updates roll out for FS2020.
justsid 6y ago
Honestly quite good. Like Alupis mentioned, X-Plane might have a slightly different target audience than FS 2020. That being said, X-Plane 11 is also almost 4 years old now and I'd hope a sim released in 2020 beats it graphically. We recently completed our move away from OpenGL, which served as the base graphics library for a good 20 or so years. It took forever, partially due to how deeply ingrained GL-isms were in the code base. But we are now all fancy and modern with Vulkan and Metal, which allows us to do some really cool and long overdue things with the sim that were previously almost if not completely possible. So that's quite exciting for me, not to mention that it got quite a bit faster in the process. I can't speak for the other parts of the sim since I almost exclusively work on the graphics and game engine bits of X-Plane, but I think most everyone in the company is pretty excited for the future. Also, and this is purely from a flight sim user perspective, competition is always good. Just like it's good if AMD and Intel compete with each other. The only winner is the end user.

deagle50 6y ago

The X-Plane benchmarks in the Phoronix review look outstanding. I just need to decide between 5800 and 5900. Side question, will the large cache on RDNA 2 close the gap with Nvidia?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
justsid 6y ago
It pains me to say, but I would not recommend an AMD card at the moment, at least if you plan on running Vulkan on Windows. The problem is with add-ons, they still run under OpenGL (because that's what the SDK provides and by now there is an insane amount of plugins relying on it), so X-Plane exports some of its render surfaces to OpenGL and let's plugins run normal GL code on it, while under the hood synchronizing the two worlds. The problem is that the AMD driver has a bug with scheduling mixed workloads. Sometimes the GL side gets to execute first, sometimes follow up Vulkan work executes first. This leads to incorrectly composited rendering and really annoying flickering. And despite trying to have this fixed for over a year and many many emails with AMD engineers, we are nowhere near close to a fix for this. We are at the point where we are even considering integrating Zink just so we can ship an enjoyable add on experience to users. Not every user has that problem, it depends on the hardware and software that runs (ie a very classic race condition). But I can't in good conscience recommend AMD over Nvidia here. And I hate that, because the Big Navi cards look amazing.
- deagle50 6y ago
  Thanks. I'll try to wait for the 3080/Ti.
- kmonsen 6y ago
  I’ve had tons of issues with amd graphics drivers, and it seems fairly widespread. I think they said it had been a focus this generation.

deagle50 6y ago

Another side question if you'll indulge me, any hopes for temporal AA? It would be a huge win for image quality and GPU performance.

eptcyka 6y ago

He's looking to build a completely new system, so it's a toss-up between the 10900kf and whatever looks to be good from AMD at a similar price, but I do appreciate the data point :) From the few sparse google sheets I've seen, it looked like X-Plane was still preferring Intel cores and NVIDIA GPUs. It's a shame really, everyone's benchmarking the GPUs and nobody's looking at the impact of the CPU as far as I could tell. But now that we have an AMD core that's 20% faster than the previous one, the tables might've turned. Best of luck developing X-Plane, I wish I could help you guys justify the Linux support, but unfortunately I've not got the enthusiasm or free time to commit to a flight sim just now.