Nice to hear that the developers of DCS have received a headset. See 40:39 in this interview: Scramble 04 - Matt "Wags" Wagner | The Alert 5 Podcast
Wags’ impression was that it was impressive, great resolution and clarity, but demanded huge performance, not attainable today. He added they had identified the terrain engine (not “train engine” as I first heard it) as gobbling most of the performance at the moment, and they’ll try to improve things there.
Looking promising!
Great to hear!..
edit: Nämen! En Svensk kokosnöt! 
Awesome, glad to hear Wags got one and has already identified where they need optimization to increase performance in DCS. Good job Pimax in getting them the HMD. I may not cancel my order now LOL! 
Wags now considers the Pimax 5K+ as Gen 2 HMD (44:27) and has high praise for it.
YES !
Now we just need a 5k+ and a 8k delivered to Frontier Devs.
How many years have they had vive and rift and not done anything to improve VR. They introduced deferred shading and actually made it worse 
Still waiting for the VR improvements that Wags announced as ‘coming soon’ six months ago.
I’m not holding out hope for them to do anything for Pimax.
…Yes…frustrating indeed !
DCS needs new game engine not few patches…
They might do something to improve playability but i am not too exited about it .
Thee DCS devs have stated they are going to be switching to vulkan API in the future, who know when but we should see improvement in CPU and maybe get SLI working finally.
Great news! I wish all sim developers got their Pimax! It would be a three win situation.
They need to learn how to efficiently code for multi-core CPU. If not, someone else will. Optimizing terrain or changing to Vulcan API are just insignificant changes in comparison to being able to fully utilize the potential of 16 core CPU. Especially in simulation world.
True, but this is a huge undertaking. It is much harder than you would think, to move a existing codebase to multithreaded code.
On the 1+m line engineering suite I work on, it has taken ~8+ years to do it. Even now, we are still optimizing, to take better advantage of multiprocessing. It also greatly increases the difficulty of finding and fixing bugs.
I believe I can imagine the difficulty, but I also believe this is actually becoming one of the most important factors/skills in the SW development of the code which is performance critical. The fact that the guy in the podcast did not even acknowledge that makes me a bit skeptical.
Agreed. The thing is, is the trade-off worth it, financially? That’s years of no significant new features, delayed bug fixes, more new bugs, etc.
There’s a lot more overhead with multithreaded code. Small fast engineering simulations, now take significantly longer than they used to (in our code base) even though complicated large simulations are significantly faster. There are tradeoffs and some of our customers who only do small simulations are less happy. This also approximately doubled our memory usage.
Short-term? Probably not. But once someone else does it, they will become obsolete. Plus, as you wrote, this is a huge undertaking, which probably needs financing a team for several (many) years, so it is a strategic decision rather than simple yes/no profit one.
Would say for both Egal Dynamics and 1C/777 (Il2 Great Battles Series Sims) they will have to bite the bullet at some stage, moving from single process sim operation to multicore.
That being said, I would imagine it could be easier for simulations to piecemeal parts of their computational workload out to other cores like for example, AI and Physics computations. Have them also written so that if they are assigned to a Separate thread and they start overloading that thread, than any new AI/Physics models that are generated within the sim environment, they are assigned to a new thread.
The main thing with these sims is not just the pretty scenery but when creating a filled world environment with combative elements - there is a lot of computation that is required that saturates a single thread quite quickly and limits the amount of generated objects the sim can handle. Offloading those processes across multiple cores can lead to richer environments and greater scale of simulation for the end user.
Great to hear Eagle Dynamics has their hands on a Pimax Headset and are identifying where things can be improved. 1C/777 I am not sure if they themselves have access to one although I have mentioned that setting up a Pimax based VR display at the Sim Expo’s they go to would be a great experience for prospective flyers. They are also continually improving the VR experience in their WW2 and up coming WW1 flight sims.
It’s true that some of the simulation parts of simulation engines could probably utilize multi-core better (e.g weather etc), however switching to Vulcan is likely to make a noticeable difference.
I don’t know specifically for DCS but for X-Plane, where they are also migrating to the Vulcan API, the developers said that it reduces the number of calls the CPU has to do to the graphics engine API by around 50% - I can’t remember the exact figure. This is all CPU work that is saved by switching to Vulcan and not graphics card related. This means that the CPU has more time to do it’s other tasks.
I assume something similar will be true for DCS
I would buy a lot more DCS modules if I could run them at 90fps in VR. Now I barely touch DCS (Tomcat will be an exception but I already dread the performance) and mostly just fly in IL2 instead. There, I jumped on Flying Circus and Bodenplatte as a pre-order because I knew they were going to run fine.
Multi-core use is a really significant feature. Why is it that the software industry keeps making excuses, rather than progress?
Yeah, especially since single core performance has essentially come to a halt and the only thing growing is the number of cores.
The 7700K was only 8% faster than the 6700K for single core performance. The 8700K is only 2% faster than the 7700K. Over the last 3 generations we’ve only seen marginal improvements in CPU speed but Yay we got another 4 useless threads so we can run 4 more instances of Media Player in the background. Good thing we need to upgrade the motherboard for this new useless improvement.