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Nearly everyone is familiar with terms like 20/20 vision, but what does that mean when it comes to developing a flight simulator?

The projector array used to create the high-resolution flight simulator.

Most flight simulators only offer 20/40 vision, meaning that important details are often blurred or not easily identifiable to the pilot. Yet, most young military pilots starting their flying careers have 20/13 eyesight, which allows them to see far more detail than most visual systems provide.

At NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, CA, NVIDIA has been developing an “eye-limited” visual system for a flight simulator being co-developed with the United States Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). For the first time, the Air Force can explore the various elements of vision within a flight simulator where the acuity of the displayed images will be 20/10.

To create this simulator, NVIDIA used nine 4K (4096 x 2160) projectors, which together provide more than 36 times the resolution of a standard high-definition television. The images are projected on a dome, with each projector overlapped and edge-blended, providing the pilot with a seamless view of the simulated outside world. While the system works with nine projectors currently, the plan is to scale up to 15 projectors, increasing the overall resolution.

An Image Generator (IG) is the name given to the collection of computers, graphics subsystems, visual databases, control, and rendering software operating together to graphically simulate synthetic worlds in real time. Traditionally, a large cluster of computers would be used to drive a configuration like this visual system. If the simulator was configured with a traditional IG architecture, maintaining a 60-frames-per-second update rate would require 36 computers, each rendering a small portion of the screen. These clusters are large, complex, and can be difficult to manage.

For this project, NVIDIA used Quadro SVS technology and reduced the overall complexity down to five computers, each driving multiple Quadro GPUs and Quadro Sync cards to one or two 4K dome projectors. To reduce latency, cost, and complexity even further, all the warp and blending between projectors is done in software using the NVIDIA GPUs.

Another significant challenge that comes with scaling up the projector resolution to be eye-limited is that the visual database needs to be eye-limited as well. The visual database in the system is made up of very-high-resolution satellite images that give the pilot an out-the-window view of the world. For this project, ultra-high-resolution 4K by 2K satellite images were used, often more than eight times or more the resolution of textures used in traditional flight simulations, ensuring the image database matches the display resolution where possible.

The visual system still needs to draw a new scene every 1/60th of a second. So, the largest frame buffer memory available from NVIDIA Quadro cards was used to store the entire visual database in use on the graphics card. With all the image data on the GPU, the IG doesn’t need to page them to and from system memory on the CPU, an operation that can cause the rendering to stutter.

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