After giving us such incredible innovations like pens that write upside down and ice cream that tastes bad (and a pretty huge portion of modern technology), NASA is looking earthside for its next breakthrough. Okay, “breakthrough” might be vainglorious for a computer benchmarking tool. I’m burying the lede here: NASA wants to use CapFrameX for its giant flight simulators.
CapFrameX, if you’re not aware, is a popular benchmarking tool. Users like its ability to capture and analyze system and performance info with a dizzying number of readouts and tons of customization. It’s based on PresentMon, an open-source project from Intel.
According to the official CapFrameX Twitter account, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (they went to the moon a few times) has “expressed interest in using CapFrameX to assess FPS performance for cockpit simulator video systems and has started the US government software approval process.” Subsequent comments from the account say that “they started the approval process.”
It makes sense that NASA is heavily invested in making its flight simulators work effectively. Even regular pilots need to rack up thousands of hours in simulated flights before they get into the cockpit of a real machine, so controlling the machines that get into the upper atmosphere and orbit of Earth has literally higher stakes.
Today, NASA uses a lot of commercial software and hardware in its flight simulator setups (as Tom’s Hardware notes) but its elaborate training sims are still some of the most advanced in the world. These include full-motion, fully enclosed systems that move on their own axes.
If I were a software dev working on an open-source benchmark tool, I’d be stoked that NASA thought I had the right stuff. Cheers, CapFrameX.