Microsoft game performances.

boeing126 · Post by **boeing126** » Wed Apr 02, 2003 12:13 am

Microsoft have a vested interest or thats what i was told every fltsim version runs slower so we all go out and upgrade my info is pentium and Microsoft work this one together we upgrade both companys profit.
Way back in about 1995 some professor guy from an American university published a paper on graphic cards i have it somewhere.At that time 3d cards were just coming on the market and there was lots of discussion about them,This prof guy sited microsoft fltsim as a good example of a game that wouldn,t profit from such a card.If i remember rightly he said it was the game engine that was the problem.I used to notice a couple of years ago in the puter mags if a new video card came on the market they used to base their speeds on the quake engine.Anyway this profs conclusions were fltsim could be made to have far better frame rates that it had/has its just that microsoft like things the way they are.
Remember that when the new Trainsim comes out if it comes out and your frame rates are down to 3.
me i,m not rushing out to upgrade anything,Im sticking with what i got including msts1.

jashton · Post by **jashton** » Wed Apr 02, 2003 1:49 am

Well, it's obvious that most of MS's operating system sales are made from pre-installs in new systems. Since they have a major vested interest in maintaining new system sales, and a prime means of creating demand by producing bloated, inefficient programs, it's no wonder their programming leaves a lot to be desired.

Independent software producers should have a different objective. Since I don't have Trainz, I'd be interested to find out if it is more system-friendly.

Jeff

saddletank · Post by **saddletank** » Wed Apr 02, 2003 10:31 am

jashton wrote:I don't have Trainz, I'd be interested to find out if it is more system-friendly.

Generally, yes, it is. It delivers higher frame rates using much higher polygon count models - a very efficient game engine compared to MSTS. So you could run Trainz faster on the same PC or at the same frame rate on a much lower spec PC, so in that regard yes, it's more 'system friendly'.

Whether you think MSTS or Trainz is the more realistic simulator or which has fewer bugs is up to you to decide

isambardkingdombrunel · Wed Apr 02, 2003 11:32 am

I am suprised you say that Martin,i find msts performs better on my ageing system.I struggle quite a bit with UTC running at 1024x768 and i havent a hope of running it in the same res as msts (1280x1024).

Athlon 600
768 sys mem
geforce4 Ti4600 128ddr (2xagp)
sb 128 sound

But of the 2 sims,i prefer UTC,i can see its potential.Yardmaster (without violating my NDA) will be a big jump forward.

IKB.

garethep · Post by **garethep** » Wed Apr 02, 2003 11:35 am

I downloaded the trainz demo and the performance on my laptop was too slow for me to even bother trying it out. whilst MSTS while slow is still perfectly playable even at high resolutions.

saddletank · Post by **saddletank** » Wed Apr 02, 2003 2:43 pm

Thats an interesting comment IKB, from what I have seen of Trainz (all at UKTS shows on other people's machines) it runs smoother than MSTS. Even if the screen res is lower I didn't notice this.

mikesimpson · Post by **mikesimpson** » Wed Apr 02, 2003 10:30 pm

Hi Martin,

I bought Trainz a while ago when it was on offer cheap at a Model Railway show, but have never really liked it.

It certainly has a few features which MSTS could do with, laying miles of track is very simple. However I do not think it looks as good as MSTS on screen and making your own models means you need to learn GMax.

So I guess I will just stick with MSTS.

Post by **NeutronIC** » Sat Apr 05, 2003 6:10 pm

I think that the whole debate about whether microsoft have a vested interest in releasing slow software to make you upgrade is a tad on the paranoid side really. Their interest is in releasing software that everyone wants to buy - bottom line is that if a competitors product is 25 quid total cost because it requires no extra hardware and theirs is about 1000 quid for the same kinda product because it's really hopeless on current hardware, they'd go out of business rather quickly, even Microsoft.

The original poster is correct that the problem with most technical simulators such as Flight Sim and Train Sim is that they spend an awful lot of CPU cycles calculating physics and less CPU cycles worrying about the graphics. As the 3D cards have come on, more and more CPU load for the visual image has been able to be offloaded on to the graphics card but you also have to remember that when a game is released, it's largely been developed on 1 or 2 year old graphics cards, so people complain that the latest XYZ game doesn't use some new feature that their brand new spangly card has got. While it's true that they will have early access, at some point you have to finalise the feature set on the things that will definitely be readily available by the time you go to release and often that means that latest features from GPU's will get left until the next release.

I don't think it's fair to say that Flight Sim gets slower with each release - it's certainly not true with FS2002 because that was massively faster - what is much more true to say is that each release does a hell of a lot more work than the last one and sometimes there is a negative overall cost to the framerate (which FS2000 suffered from big time - but Microsoft suffered as a result, and now they listen closely to people complaining about that kind of thing). Keep it in perspective - the difference in overall product from FS98 to FS2000 was mindblowing, they just screwed up some efficiencies and the overall effect was knackered by the poor framerates.

I for one don't think we'll see Microsoft making this kind of mistake again - indeed some early previews of ACOF (FS2004 for all intents and purposes) seem to indicate it's even more efficient and doing even more per frame than FS2002 did.

For my money, I'm expecting that MSTS 2, if such a beast does indeed exist (no reason to believe not, but until someone says something official, who really knows?

), will likely look a bucket load better than v1 and have at a minimum the same framerates on the same hardware and more likely have significantly better framerates.

My tuppence

Matt.

jashton · Post by **jashton** » Sat Apr 05, 2003 9:06 pm

NeutronIC wrote:I think that the whole debate about whether microsoft have a vested interest in releasing slow software to make you upgrade is a tad on the paranoid side really.

Well, I wouldn't be paranoid if they weren't after me

My comment was based on my use of MS office an a constant basis since it first came out. In terms of functionality and ease of use, my opinion is that it peaked at Office 95. Since then, I have noticed that it has gotten more complicated to do the same things. I suspect that 90% of the users only use (and understand) 10% of the features, so adding more and more obscure features is not, to me, an "improvement." I would rather see the upgrades of programs that fix bugs and make it easier to use.

Perhaps it's true that MS does not intentionally make slow software, but neither do they have much incentive to take an inefficient working program and spend time and money making it more efficient with no change in utility.

Jeff

boeing126 · Post by **boeing126** » Sat Apr 05, 2003 10:56 pm

What i neglected to say in my original post was that there was a debate going on about "Would it be better to use two graphics cards"Rermember this was circa 1995" Some posts at that time in fltsim forums were putting the two card system forward.The notion i think being one card looked after 2d stuff and the 3d card was then more able to cope with 3d.I dont know how the arrangement worked physically I never tried it.This is where the professors article came on the scene,He came down on the two card system i think.
Even today most people tend to blame graphics cards for slow frame rates but i,m not so sure,I think hdd and memory play a major part in game performance.But i still think Microsoft deliberately have kept versions of fltsim slow frame rated.
Then again i,m biased i dont like microsoft.

Post by **NeutronIC** » Sat Apr 05, 2003 11:20 pm

I don't especially like, or dislike, Microsoft - they're just another publisher as far as I am concerned and if someone else has something which is better than a Microsoft product I have no allegience to Microsoft, I just choose whatever is good for me (I'm something of a selfish consumer, balls to the corporates

).

Office: I dunno, I find Office gets better and better each time - you'll be amazed just how many features you do use in newer versions simply because they're automatic, I certainly wouldn't want to go back to Office 95 after getting used to my Office XP, and I wouldn't call myself a power user of it. The same is true with Windows, for me Windows 2000 turned the corner and became a really awesome product and Windows XP was another step in the same direction.

Performance: Absolutely, while it always used to be the case in arcadey type games that 3D acceleration fixed all problems, that's because their non-graphical cpu cost is very low - simulators tend towards a much greater cost on non-graphical elements. This is definitely where a good motherboard, high speed RAM, superb discs and lastly, a good CPU, will always help out. Heck, you could run MSTS on a 1.5 ghz CPU and get awesome framerates if the rest of the machine was beefed up suitably with good mobo etc. My current machine uses the 'Shuttle' system and has a really hot nForce motherboard, I put 400mhz Ram in it and it made a very nice difference indeed, the mobo is really nice too. Performance in simulators is about all around system performance, not just your graphics card.

Matt.

jaffamafia · Post by **jaffamafia** » Sun Apr 06, 2003 2:22 am

boeing126 wrote: Some posts at that time in fltsim forums were putting the two card system forward.The notion i think being one card looked after 2d stuff and the 3d card was then more able to cope with 3d.I dont know how the arrangement worked physically I never tried it.

When I first built my PC I used to have a m/b with onboard graphics and a seperate Righteous Orchid 3D accelerator card. The 3d card had a lead which connected the output of the main 2D card to the input of the 3D card and then the monitor connected to that.

When you ran a 3D application the 3D accelerator card kicked in and took most of the load off the CPU. Under this setup I used to get fantastic frame rates even with a 300MHz CPU. I would still be using the setup now if it wasn't for the fact that XP isn't too happy with using a two card setup.

There are even articles in some magazines advocating a similar setup now using two 3D cards to produce the picture by using one card to produce the even numbered picture lines and the other to produce the odd!

I think the reason why this "conspiracy story" about Microsoft working in collusion with Intel came about when FS2000 was released and every review said that even on a machine at the recommended spec you would struggle to play the game smoothly. I think it may have been more a case of the play testers not doing their jobs properly so an incorrect spec was released.

autonerd · Post by **autonerd** » Sun Apr 06, 2003 6:33 am

My $0.02 (or, since this is a British forum, perhaps I should say "my 2p"):

Graphics accelerators usually make a huge difference in game performance, but MSTS seems to be uniquely processor-intensive. I could run lots of (current-at-the-time) games with no performance issues on my Duron 850, but MSTS wasn't at its best. I bought a new MB and an Athlon XP 1600, kept the same video card (32mb GE-Force2 GTS) and HD and saw a noticeable improvement in MSTS. For other apps (ie office) I really can't see a noticeable improvement, they ran fine before and they ran fine now. Incidentally, I run dual-boot, cos MSTS runs faster and better in WinME then it does in WinXP.

As for an MS conspiracy... well, I'm no Bill fan, but I think it's a matter of the technology improvements driving software. A faster chip comes out, so software makers write code that takes advantage of the new speeds. Run on an older machine and it'll seem slow. Generally speaking, Windows and Office will run fine on any machine if it's got enough memory. I had a P2-300 at work, Win2000/Office 2000. Last job I had a P2-400 then a P3-800, same software. All three ran pretty much the same. (Now I have a Mac at work. G3-266. Wheee!)

Post by **NeutronIC** » Sun Apr 06, 2003 9:14 am

Jaffa: The Righteous 3D was one of the first Voodoo 1 cards along with the Diamond Monster (the one that I had), they were 3D only cards and the idea was that the application stopped using the 2D card and started using the 3D card for games, since they were connected by vga-passthru it was all overlayed and the user usually didn't see anything different (except when the game crashed in 3D mode and didn't switch you back to 2D and thus the only option was a reboot

).

This isn't done anymore simply because a number of cards such as the later Voodoo Banshee, nVidia RivaTNT and ATI cards which were combined 2D and 3D hardware on the same board. It's a much better way of doing it than the older 2-card solution. 2D acceleration is very simple so it's cheap to add to the much more difficult 3D cards.

Matt.