I Cannot Use GSX - Please Help

[Andrew737]

Good morning Umberto & Team

I hope you are all well.

Whilst you guys are working on GSX at the moment *Please* can you add functionality so I can run 3 instances of GSX at the same time please?

I have 3 identical PC's running 3 instances of FSX (displaying left view, forward view & right view) creating a 200 degree wrap around view. I want to use GSX in my setup - in theory all I require is a means of activating the 3 instances of GSX simultaneously.

Many thanks

Andrew

EDIT - I beleive this feature will increase sales because there are a lot of us Cockpitbuilders out there.

[virtuali]

I have 3 identical PC's running 3 instances of FSX (displaying left view, forward view & right view) creating a 200 degree wrap around view. I want to use GSX in my setup - in theory all I require is a means of activating the 3 instances of GSX simultaneously.

That's the wrong approach to create a wrap-around view, you are wasting both money and effort to setup 3 identical PCs, with ALL the issues you will have with all the 3rd party add-ons that won't work networked, without even mentioning higher licensing costs for all your software and the need to keep everything updated, all multiplied by 3.

FSX is not limited in fill-rate (the ability to run at very high resolutions), which means you should instead use a single PC with a video card capable of driving 3 monitors, and skip all the networking issues, the lagging issues, and the software sync issues, saving money and time spent too, because it's way easier to manage a single PC rather than 3 just for the visuals.

And video cards gets more and more powerful very quickly, especially in fill rate, and this will be driven by the more widespread adoption of 4K PC monitors, since a video card that can drive a 4K monitor has more than enough fill rate power to drive 3 full HD monitors/projectors ( a single 4K screen has the same resolution of FOUR FullHD screens ).

Changing the whole GSX architecture, just to have it running networked (every GSX internal variable should be networked to the other instances, and that, in addition to be very complex, will increase the chance to have issues with network packets lags), is not something we'll do.

We CAN, and in fact we ALREADY DID, keep in mind the issues of running with very wide screen aspects, that will affect cockpit builders using the approach we believe is the right one: an user reported the wingwalker would be seen disappearing too early with such wide aspect, and we fixed it in an update, but running 3 networked instances, that's way too much.

[Andrew737]

Hi Umberto

Ok it's too difficult - I understand

Thanks for the response :-)

BTW my system is as smooth as FSX could ever be. It will *Never* run this smooth with three open views on one PC; and the VAS...

[virtuali]

BTW my system is as smooth as FSX could ever be. It will *Never* run this smooth with three open views on one PC; and the VAS...

With a single view, you will add to the smoothness, the elimination of any possible network lags and a modern video card has the ability to run 3 views with the same fps, it only depends how you play with settings like antialiasing, for example, which have an effect on fill-rate. On top of that, even you managed to convince all 3rd party add-on developers to support network connections, every additional add-on that did that, would increase the network traffic, increasing the chance of lagging or micro-stuttering due to the network sync process so, the more add-on supports this, the more chances they could slow down the network.

And it's not just something you can solve with faster network cards/switches, it's the very process of each add-on client having to synchronize its internal state with the one of its server AFTER it has received a packet, that adds to the workload.

Suppose you have a complex 3rd party add-on with hundreds internal variables to transmit: they first must be transmitted over the network, and then the client would have to update all those internal variables so they match those of the server. Doing it twice, because with 3 screen, you have 1 server with 2 clients. Do it at every frame, of course, because if the add-on does something *visual* like GSX, it must be updated at every frame. Multiply with the number of add-ons that do this.

If the clients would do it immediately in one frame, you would see micro-pauses. If the client tried to eliminate micro-pauses by not trying to updated everything in one frame, you would see lagging between servers and clients. Not a problem if you are updating instrumentation data, but immediately visible if you are updating scenery stuff.

Speaking about VAS, if you run FSX in DX10 or Prepar3D, there's no difference whatsoever in the used VAS between using a single screen or many, this would be an issue in DX9 only, and almost all our products, including of course GSX, are fully compatible with DX10 and they are all compatible with P3D too.