The Official Prepar3D 2.0 Thread

[Soya]

I would urge people to be very careful when porting over FSX 3rd party addons to P3D that are not licensed or at least not yet licensed for P3D. If you do, keep it for your own personal use and I would resist the temptation to post screen shots or to share information regarding these non licensed addons that fall outside of current P3D use. It might end up biting you in the behind.

 

[thingemajib]

Hmm, hadnt thought about that, good point Soya. The video is unlisted anyway so I'll take my chances on that. Probably best if I didnt upload the bat file though. Guess if anyones really interested in it they could trust me for it...

 

[Vuvuzela]

I would urge people to be very careful when porting over FSX 3rd party addons to P3D that are not licensed or at least not yet licensed for P3D. If you do, keep it for your own personal use and I would resist the temptation to post screen shots or to share information regarding these non licensed addons that fall outside of current P3D use. It might end up biting you in the behind.

I understand what you saying. But can they really do anything? Somehow I think these guys have other things to worry about.

Can they link a couple of screen shots on a forum page to your P3D account?

 

[ghutchison14078]

I understand what you saying. But can they really do anything? Somehow I think these guys have other things to worry about.

Can they link a couple of screen shots on a forum page to your P3D account?

They send an F-35 over to drop a JDAM on your house

 

[TNA]

I've never felt the need to swap GPU's with FSX, I use a HD7950 across 3 x 24" panels with Orbx scenery and REX and never had any problems with it not being smooth enough.

It is more about getting anti aliesing working in my experience. Getting rid of those jaggies makes a HUGE difference to image quality. Still get those ugly autogen popins however

 

[Vuvuzela]

They send an F-35 over to drop a JDAM on your house

Excellent...cant wait

 

[shadow_boxer]

Just thought I'd post a few pics. Nothing special in terms of a set but just to show performance in familiar locations. So far, I'm finding P3D2 so much better than FSX in terms of performance. Visually there isn't much in it but I think there will be even more performance to come once we find the right settings and cfg tweaks. These are completely unedited, just resized. Hopefully you can make out CPU/GPU. 1440p, tesselation high, FXAA off, HDR enabled, shadows low, MSAA 8, Ansio 8X, triple buffering enabled, frame rate unlimited, v-sync on. City flying 20-30fps (Aerosoft NYC, San Francisco), complex airports 20-25fps, UTX+FTX Global 45-60fps!

 

[Vuvuzela]

Very nice indeed.

 

[shadow_boxer]

Very nice indeed.

Thanks. Still playing around with it and trying to find the right settings for my system. On the whole I'd say performance is significantly better and it's much more stable but it also has it's shortfalls. My main gripe is that as of yet there is no working nvidia inspector profile for v2 which would sort out the "jaggies" and AA. Texture bluries also rear their head every now and again and autogen pop ups also haven't been completely eliminated but are better than FSX. I'm really optimistic about P3D though. Cant wait for the community and developers to continue to improve it. Lets not forget how long its taken for FSX to get to this stage. I would say that for anyone on a well running and optimised FSX rig don't go to P3D just yet if your system handles it ok. I'll post my settings up when I get a chance.

 

[ghutchison14078]

I'm loving 2.0

Just installed UK2000 Glasgow and the QW146...both work perfectly and looks the business

Had to go back to FTX Global for my UK scenery at the moment as Orbx are in the process of updating all the FTX region installers for P3Dv2

 

[shadow_boxer]

Beautiful shots there. Loving the cockpit shadows in the 146. Shame it wasn't on offer anywhere in the recent sales as it was on my wanted list. Ended up buying a fair bit of ORBX UK scenery in the recent sale so still downloading it all! I managed to install PNW and AU using the Estonia migration cool which works absolutely fine.

 

[ghutchison14078]

Sim720 Stornoway released today.

P3Dv2 Compatible

http://flight.sim720.co.uk/products_stornoway.php

 

[2StepSteve]

Being out of touch with flight sims for quite a while I recently (accidentally) stumbled upon this product; I can't tell you how damn excited I was! Finally we have something to carry the torch from FSX, which has been limping along for years and needs to be put to bed.

Here's my experience so far..

I have managed to get some addons installed. Namely UK2000 airports and ORBX England FTX, ORBX Global.

FTX products can be tricked in to thinking that they are installing in to a Prepar3Dv1 installation (guide here). On the whole this works well. I can't get Stapleford airfield to work though, but this appears to be compatibility problem.

London City (UK2000)

Glasgow Airport (UK2000)

Performance seems good, but damn, moving those sliders to the right HURTS.

My recently built Haswell system can be brought to its knees and loading times even with a fast SSD are horrifying when addons are enabled in a built up area. I'm amazed at how slow the loading becomes!

My spec:

4470K (Currently at a mild OC to 4.2Ghz)
8GB
HIS Ice 7950
Samsung 840 Evo 250GB

FPS are generally 22-30fps.. but I do like to keep those sliders to the right and when I do I see more like 15fps.

There are a few issues I've come across. Namely after 20 minutes or so flying I am sometimes met with a low memory warning and P3Dv2 closes. During flying in a busy area my 7950 card has 2.8GB of 3GB consumed! I am thinking though that this isn't the problem (?) and that 8GB system memory isn't enough.


Also.. there is this:

Autogen buildings will sometimes lose their textures and turn to a random colour, I am thinking this is driver related and will play around with different drivers, but it is annoying.

On the whole though and with the above issues the experience is good, and will get better! All that is needed is patience. Given time 3rd party addons will optimise their content for P3Dv2 and performance is bound to increase.

 

[ghutchison14078]

Can't take the P3Dv2 smile off my face

 

[ghutchison14078]

Performance seems good, but damn, moving those sliders to the right HURTS.

My recently built Haswell system can be brought to its knees and loading times even with a fast SSD are horrifying when addons are enabled in a built up area. I'm amazed at how slow the loading becomes!


FPS are generally 22-30fps.. but I do like to keep those sliders to the right and when I do I see more like 15fps.

There are a few issues I've come across. Namely after 20 minutes or so flying I am sometimes met with a low memory warning and P3Dv2 closes. During flying in a busy area my 7950 card has 2.8GB of 3GB consumed! I am thinking though that this isn't the problem (?) and that 8GB system memory isn't enough.


Also.. there is this:

Autogen buildings will sometimes lose their textures and turn to a random colour, I am thinking this is driver related and will play around with different drivers, but it is annoying.

I'll try and answer some of your points here Steve.

SSD's do nothing for performance once you are flying...they only speed up the initial loading process - (the bit with the progress bar before you jump into the cockpit) - they make ZERO difference to texture loading times and "smoothness" of graphics.

With regards to your FPS dropping in built up areas - well you will just have to make compromises with the sliders - building and vegetation autogen density and shadows effect performance the most in P3Dv2, experiment with these until you find the balance of eyecandy and performance that best suits you (you can have everything unfortunately)

The autogen building slowloading textures is the engine showing the limits of your 7950 gfx card - either ease back on the autogen density or buy a GTX780Ti

Also P3Dv2 is still only a 32-bit application - as such it can only address a maximum 4Gb of memory or VAS (virtual address space) - basically it can't utilize more than 4Gb of system memory - this is why you are getting out of memory (commonly referred to as OOM's). Urban areas with lots of autogen and complex addons and sliders all pushed to the right will break the 32-bit memory barrier - adjust your slider settings to compensate.

It can however use much more VRAM (graphics card memory) than FSX thanks to the new DX11 engine - this is a MAJOR benefit of the new engine in P3Dv2


To sum up - if you intend to use hi-definition complex addons you will have to make compromises on the slider settings, or buy a more powerful gfx card to help you achieve your performance targets - you could also overclock your CPU a bit more if you wanted more system grunt

 

[2StepSteve]

I'll try and answer some of your points here Steve.

SSD's do nothing for performance once you are flying...they only speed up the initial loading process - (the bit with the progress bar before you jump into the cockpit) - they make ZERO difference to texture loading times and "smoothness" of graphics.

With regards to your FPS dropping in built up areas - well you will just have to make compromises with the sliders - building and vegetation autogen density and shadows effect performance the most in P3Dv2, experiment with these until you find the balance of eyecandy and performance that best suits you (you can have everything unfortunately)

The autogen building slowloading textures is the engine showing the limits of your 7950 gfx card - either ease back on the autogen density or buy a GTX780Ti

Also P3Dv2 is still only a 32-bit application - as such it can only address a maximum 4Gb of memory or VAS (virtual address space) - basically it can't utilize more than 4Gb of system memory - this is why you are getting out of memory (commonly referred to as OOM's). Urban areas with lots of autogen and complex addons and sliders all pushed to the right will break the 32-bit memory barrier - adjust your slider settings to compensate.

It can however use much more VRAM (graphics card memory) than FSX thanks to the new DX11 engine - this is a MAJOR benefit of the new engine in P3Dv2


To sum up - if you intend to use hi-definition complex addons you will have to make compromises on the slider settings, or buy a more powerful gfx card to help you achieve your performance targets - you could also overclock your CPU a bit more if you wanted more system grunt

Thanks for clearing some things up there ghutchison14078. I totally forgot that it's still a 32bit application! Do you think it will ever be coded in 64bit if there ever was a 'game' that needs to be 64bit to allow for more memory use it's this!

I'll push my 4770K some more over this weekend.

I'm thinking that a 4GB graphics card would make more sense (R9 290) over a 3GB card?

 

[ghutchison14078]

Thanks for clearing some things up there ghutchison14078. I totally forgot that it's still a 32bit application! Do you think it will ever be coded in 64bit if there ever was a 'game' that needs to be 64bit to allow for more memory use it's this!

I'll push my 4770K some more over this weekend.

I'm thinking that a 4GB graphics card would make more sense (R9 290) over a 3GB card?

64-bit would certainly be a huge step forward but it would also render ALL addons ever developed for FSX/P3D useless, unless all the developers were willing to recompile all their addons into 64bit code (unlikely due to massive costs).

With regards to the gfx card, if you only run a single display @ 1080/1440p then a 3Gb card will be plenty memory, with current graphics cards you would run out of GPU power before you would run out of VRAM
Head over to the Lockheed martin forums hardware section to get recommendations on Nvidia vs ATI for P3Dv2, it's not really my area of expertise...I just bought the most powerful DX11 graphics card I could afford when P3Dv2 was released - the GTX780 Superclocked - I rarly see more than 2.2 - 2.5 Gb VRAM usage even using complex addons and weather.

http://www.prepar3d.com/forum-5/?mingleforumaction=viewforum&f=24.0

Nvidia geforce cards were always best for FSX due to the terrible AMD driver support for FSX, but things may have changed. I tend to stick to Nvidia cards though (personal preference)

 

[shadow_boxer]

Great shots above guys. A few more from me in P3D v2. Early morning departure out of Glasgow flying to Shetland. Unfortunately been having the occasional OOM error usually when flying in Orbx Scenery with the Majestic Dash 8 Q400 with Opus live weather. Weather and clouds really are a massive performance hit. REX recently also just announced REX v4 so hopefully it'll be better optimised especially with P3D. (Hopefully there'll be a nice discount for existing customers!)

 

[Vuvuzela]

Some great shots above.

 

[cuffylad]

I think I have now been convinced to take the plunge on this!