Nice shots @chipwich 
I will have to install Fraps again, been using Nvidia shadowplay for the last year or two, but it doesn’t seem to record P3D in the right resolution, the recording comes out super lowres.
I hit that Alabeo well more than a few times too during this sale… how are you liking the Chieftain? The glass panel seems to have a framerate hit for me, wish they provided changeable glass/steam gauges with it like they did for the PA44 which has become my favorite plane from that sale.
I think some flight sim stores are on to me - they are the same thing as Kohl’s is to my wife. Here…have a $5 coupon to buy something you really shouldn’t buy. Go ahead. Just between friends…
Just installed P3D v3 installed finally. I have been playing with the settings. Both in VR and on the flat screen it looks beautiful. Wow oh WOW! The stock clouds are great. The performance is better than FSX or P3D v2.
I do have one problem. When the sim begins, I cant get to the bindings menu. I cant bind any keys to the Flyinside UI… Lucky for me, I am distracted with other things on the sim. However, its a crawling phase for me.
I’ve got ORBX Global and Vector. I’m curious on NA LC. Think it’s worth it?
Since I’ve not reinstalled DCS onto the new computer, I’ve added all of my modules to P3D.
Accu-Feel is a must, but couldnt get it to run. Until I found this:
Wow…just shows how I can’t keep up with things. FTX Global open LC North America - didn’t even know about that. Heck…I dunno how many add-ons that would make that would cover (some) of the same areas:
North America completed! We have now completed the FTX openLC North America pack after starting off with the northern half - Arctic, Alaska and Canada. openLC North America now covers an area over 24 million square kilometres with FTX Global custom textures and new textures unique to openLC. FTXG openLC as the name suggests, replaces the default landclass layer with higher detailed and a better variety of land types. This in turn creates a more varied and accurate terrain with FSX or P3D. It has been specifically designed to work with both FTX Global Base and FTX Global Vector as part of the total simulator overhaul. With FTX Global and openLC North America you can now begin to explore the vast and beautiful area of North and Central America, Greenland as well as the Caribbean islands and Hawaii. Make sure to check the photoreal volcanoes of Popocatépetl, Iztaccihauatl, Colima, San Cristobal-Casita, Telica & Momotombo as well in your travels.
I’d be interested in it if it more fully fleshes out the areas outside of the FTX Terrain Regions I have (I have all of the ones that cover the western U.S.). I’m not sure I understand how or if it would accentuate those regions or if the FTX Terrain Regions would trump the FTX openLC. But for areas that aren’t covered by FTX Terrain Regions (like my home states of North and South Carolina), this might be a good option.
Sigh. Wonder if I should wait for a sale though.
From the manual:
How does openLC fit with FTX Global BASE?
If you are new to FTX Global and have purchased openLC you’ll probably want to know what the FTX Global BASE product does within FSX/P3D. This was released back in July 2013 and upgrades the entire simulator’s TEXTURES worldwide, more specifically:
* Replaces all the default landclass textures located in \Scenery\World\Texture with custom Orbx FTX textures
Installs FTX Central and other supporting apps into the \ORBX folder. FTX Central and these other apps help manage all Orbx addons including FTXG, FTX Regions and FTX Airports Adds 3D lights to all vector main roads all over the world. These can be turned on and off using FTX Central
Makes corrections to the base landclass for some parts of the world, particularly in SE Asia and the USA SW area
* Adds zero-FPS hit 3D lights to all textures all over the world.
So what openLC does is enhance the new textures with much better landclass representation,
telling the simulator what type of textures to place in a certain area.
I don’t believe it does anything for the full-fat regions as they have their own updated textures and landclass.
More info in the pdf manual, including details of the massive area they’ve covered: http://fullterrain.com/usermanuals/FTX%20Global%20openLC%20North%20America.pdf
Man…just spent around three hours testing P3D and my Rift trying to find a happy medium. What I’m basically trying to determine is whether it is worth me running my Air Hauler 2 campaign in Papua New Guinea while using the Rift or not. So I started looking at P3D settings, FlyInside settings, and an odd and frustrating thing happened.
I was using the Woitape area of scenery to test. My FPS was a stuttering mess and I turned everything down until I just had mesh and overlay type graphics and my FPS was doing great (90 FPS). I can turn a bunch of other stuff up, but the very second I move the Scenery Complexity slider to NORMAL, my FPS tanks to 20-35 and becomes a jittery mess.
It is really odd because just moving that slider one notch up makes ALL of the 3D ground objects appear. But this is the weird part, which took me foreeeeeever to figure out. I can load another airport in that region (like Kokoda) and the slider at NORMAL gives me all the 3D scenery and 90 FPS. To test it further, I started bumping up the rest of the sliders and they had almost no reduction in FPS. But that one airport (Woitapi) must have some scenery object that is causing a problem with my FPS.
So I’ll have to figure out that area…but the testing outside of that area makes me think flying it in VR is going to be awesome. The valleys and ORBX scenery is just incredible. The Oculus Rift depth perception really makes you feel like you are getting yourself into trouble when you go into some of the box canyons and you wonder if you can make the turn to get out… Very immersive stuff (when running at 45/90 FPS in FlyInside…not so much at 25/35…)
Thanks for doing some of the footwork @BeachAV8R. I’ve spent two lost days trying to get the F1 GTN750 to work, but fortunately, I am not alone in that quest. Hopefully, enough folks are complaining that F1 are on a bug hunt.
Not sure if it relates directly to P3D, but in X-Plane the two things that affect FPS that are readily evident are tree density, and shadows. In fact they might as well call the shadow setting an FPS slider. I’m running tree hugger and minimal shadows (the lowest visible), which keep FPS high. For screen shots you could crank up the shadows.
Will watch this space.
Well, I must say that im glad Im not the only one turning stuff down. VR has made me do several things. One is become more interested in OCing my hardware. I don’t go to extremes. However there is a bit to be gained from running my Proc a little overclocked. I am now concentrating on the GPU. Second is I have to optimize my cooling. Third, make sure my PC is running really well. CC cleaner and cutting programs I am not using out has gone a long way to get my pc clean.
As chipwich pointed out, the shadows are a killer. I have them low (P3D) and they still look good in the pit. Things like special effects are all the way to the left (LOW). These things help with performance. On the Nvidia control panel I changed from High Quality to Quality. Might even try Performance to see if it gets better.
What exactly do special effects do? Is that stuff like smoke and dirt coming from tires and stuff?
I think so. Im a relative nub w P3D. I will say, whatever it does, I don’t miss it. I still see contrails coming from my wings. The clouds are still beautiful and the scenery… well, my scenery is still stock. I am concentrating on getting some performance out of this sim before I can turn on any eye candy. Once I find a good baseline in VR then I will play around with it.
From the P3D site:
The Special effects detail feature manages effects like smoke, fountains, and fireworks that are created using units called sprites. The more sprites displayed, the better the effect looks, but higher settings may decrease performance on some computers.
Found this nice little nugget to get Traffic360 working with P3D v3.x (original post HERE) (this did work for me!):
Very enjoyable product and of course working with p3d v3.4.First you have to navigate the installer to Prepar3d v3.4.Then edit in Local Disk (C:)/ProgramData/Lockheed Martin/Prepar3D v3/simobjects (using the next Entry number available)
[Entry.xx]
Title=JFTraffic360
Path=SimObjects\JFTraffic360
Required=True
Active=True
_Then go to Scenery/World/scenery/locate TrafficAircraft._bgl rename this to TrafficAircraft.bgl.off/locate ai-traffic.bgl in same directory rename this to TrafficAircraft.bgl
In Traffic 360 open Traffic Control Center click on Traffic Movements and compile the file.
I hope it will work out well for you…
I believe that the v4 release is due to drop at 2 PM EDT.
Good comparison, doesn’t seem to make enough difference for me for now…
I’m thinking the same thing too…except I wonder if it handles HUGE amounts of add-ons that would usually result in an OOM error better. It’d be nice if it had better stability when pushing P3D to its 32 bit limits…
In the comparison video above, when the frame rates on both dipped towards single digits towards the end, 3.4 crashed which is why the video switched to just V4. You’ll also see V4 was using over 10GB at one point.
It was something of a torture test with ORBX Social and big airports, and it seems 3.4 couldn’t cope.
Here’s an interesting discussion from one of the HiFi team (Active Sky / ASCA folks):
“Hi,
Most of us have been using 64bit CPUs and 64bit OS since many years ago. The big difference is that now the sim will actually be 64bit (it will be compiled using x64). So, in addition to the gains in memory what does this mean for the performance of an application?
First it will avoid the indirection layer of WOW64 32bit emulation used in Windows. This leads to to a slight increase in performance.
In x64 mode an application has access to twice as many registers compared to 32bit (the so called x86 mode). This means that local data calculations will not need to access the main memory, more cache memory will be available and thus we’ll gain speed.
It uses double the number of XMM registers (the ones used for floating point calculations, vectors etc).
Functions are called with the “fast call” convention, avoiding (in many cases), CPU cycles to create stack frames etc.
On the other hand, a single pointer is now 64bits, meaning it’s double in size, so for relatively small data (such as a small array), this means you’ll need double the amount of memory.
So, what’s the net effect? A simple recompile of an application to x64 bit without any other changes/optimization as an average will lead to a 20-30% increase in speed, but this depends on the type of the application. For a whole world flight sim, where the “basic stuff” (such as the lat/lon coordinates) need to have double precision (aka 64bit), this is even more important and so CPU performance will likely see even more benefits.
The one thing you have to keep in mind as far as modern games are concerned is that the main bottleneck in most cases is not the CPU. It’s either the GPU itself (depending on the power, the AA level and the amount of semi-transparent objects that need to be rendered such as the clouds) or CPU-GPU communication. In a whole world sim, the disk-RAM also play an important role as we need to update objects and textures on the fly
As far as P3D v4 (since I’ve been a beta tester), I think we get the expected performance gains. I’ve seen (on my modest machine, with everything default except for AS/ASCA) a steady increase in frames from 25-55 in P3D v3 (depending on the conditions) to about 35-75 in P3D v4. Of course YMMV and things will probably get worse as we add more addons and stuff, but I think it’s a good starting point.
Kostas Terzides,
Active Sky developer”
Yes, I am getting those pretty regularly in P3D v3.4. The other issue is drive space. My current P3D v3.4 install folder is 187 GB. That would be a nice chunk to get back.
FYI, FTX Central is not working. Post on the ORBX forum:
Posted 40 minutes ago
We have identified some last minute issues with the v3 to v4 FTXC process, so we are working on that. Don’t expect anything in the 12-24 hours.
Please note that the current version of FTXC will not recognise P3Dv4, so don’t be surprised if you see no simulators to select (if nothing else installed).
