IRIX and Software

hi,

does someone successfuly run flightgear 0.99 on Indy ? i have r5 with 160Mb of ram, 8 bit gr. everything installed and load`s fine - i get the loading screen with aeroplane in an window and the logo, then after "loading subsystems" step and more minutes waiting the window simply disappear and the memory clears from fgfs ...

in paralel i watched the mem usage in "gmemusage" and goes to the maximum (~160 000 K) then from hdd usage seems that after some point the system goes in hard swap ...

should i try with 256M ram, or i need some "bigger machine" ?

You're going to need a WAY bigger machine Even on a decent Octane with texture acceleration, frame rates will hover around the low teens. Even if, by some miracle, Flightgear were to run on your Indy, the lack of texture acceleration and the R5k CPU means you will basically be watching a slideshow.

Indy is good only for non-textured games like Battalion and the SGI flight simulator demo. Doom will also run fine. But Flightgear, Quake, and anything that uses textured 3d is out.

EDIT: Just to give you an idea, here are the kind of frame rates you can expect from Flightgear on SGI hardware. As you can see, an 8-bit R5k Indy will get less than one frame per second.

Part of the reason is that Flightgear is not written with SGI hardware in mind. It's not a very optimized piece of software on any platform, let alone our specialized niche hardware. I'd guess that if it were coded to efficiently utilize these machines, a midrange Octane would get 20+ FPS.

I tried out flightgear on my fuel 500MHz V10 and it was a slide show.
I will soon get a 600MHz V12 fuel and will try it again.
But I suspect that is is unplayable on any SGI.
Please note that the frame rate list on the flightgear page is only guesswork and not from actual testing.

Has anyone else bench-marked flightgear and can comment on my experience?

//deBug

Tried it on my new fuel 600MHz with V12 and it was actually OK.
Around 15 fps according to the built in fps counter.

deBug wrote: Tried it on my new fuel 600MHz with V12 and it was actually OK.
Around 15 fps according to the built in fps counter.

O.K- what's going on here? must be huge textures, since that is the only difference between V10 and V12.

Perhaps a "texture trimmed" edition would work better for SGIs?

SAQ wrote:

deBug wrote: Tried it on my new fuel 600MHz with V12 and it was actually OK.
Around 15 fps according to the built in fps counter.

O.K- what's going on here? must be huge textures, since that is the only difference between V10 and V12.

Perhaps a "texture trimmed" edition would work better for SGIs?

Seems like the minimum texture setting inside the sim is 64MB, that would explain the poor performance on V10. I will exeriment some more during the weekend to see if its possible to trim down the texture size more than that.

The easiest way to reduce the texture size is to rename Textures.high in the root of the base package. Only the low resolution versions of the texture will be used then.

Erik

Indy is good only for non-textured games like Battalion and the SGI flight simulator demo

anybody knows is the SGI flight simulator demo downloadable from somewhere ? url or something ? i googled the web and not found anything about it. it maybe comes with Irix installation ? (i still not have cd`s)

cybercow wrote:

Indy is good only for non-textured games like Battalion and the SGI flight simulator demo

anybody knows is the SGI flight simulator demo downloadable from somewhere ? url or something ? i googled the web and not found anything about it. it maybe comes with Irix installation ? (i still not have cd`s)

I haven't seen it downloadable anywhere. It is on the early 6.5 applications CDs - at some 6.5.x it was moved to a separate demo CD, buy I'm not sure when that happened.

SkyBound wrote: The easiest way to reduce the texture size is to rename Textures.high in the root of the base package. Only the low resolution versions of the texture will be used then.

Erik

Ok, tried this, did zilch for my framerate

OK, I tried Flight Gear a little bit more on a few different machines.

O2, 300Mhz R5k CPU, 512 MB Mem. CRM gfx.
below 1 FPS

Fuel 500MHz R14k CPU, 1GB Mem, V10 gfx
2-4 FPS

Fuel 600MHz R14k CPU, 1GB Mem, V12 gfx
6-15 FPS, usually around 9FPS with minimum settings, cockpit visible, plane on the ground on default airport.
In the air FPS might go up to around 12-15.

//deBug

What a disaster...

well, if someone volunteers to optimize the code for the SGI specialized hardware, I am sure the results would be quite better..

gborce wrote: well, if someone volunteers to optimize the code for the SGI specialized hardware, I am sure the results would be quite better..

Yeh? - just how much better in terms of fps would "quite better" likely to be?
In order for someone to volunteer the many, many hours that would be needed, it would be necessary to have some sort of estimate. Based on heuristics and deBugs numbers, I don't think it would be worth it at all - with un-SGI-optimised code producing an average of 9 fps on a 600MHz R14000 with V12, we'd be needing something more like "outstanding miracles" rather than "quite better".

Out of curiosity I loaded flightgear on an eight-way Onyx2 with IR2E graphics.
I started it from the command line, the default rendering options seemed to be:
Specular reflections on objects;
Precipitation
<I added> Show frame rate.

With the plane on the ground it gave 26 - 27 fps.
I didn't take the time to learn the controls, so I couldn't manage to keep the plane airborne for very long, but during the spiral to the ground it displayed anywhere from 30 to 36 fps.