P3D Performance

[gman5250]

I read a good post on tessellation a couple of years ago, but can't remember where it was. Bottom line, this particular article explained in detail how the load had been assigned to the GPU in P3D. This is one of the reasons I'm looking at an absolute Rock Crusher of a GPU somewhere down the line.

With my system, I run tessellation at medium for 99% of my normal VFR or high altitude flying. The only time I turn up tessellation to max is when I want to shoot traps or do low and slow over the ocean. This consideration is even more important in 3.1 with the changes in wave rendering.

Like Rick said, it's going to come down to finding the sweet spot for your computer...but then when LM comes out with 3.2 or what ever the next iteration is going to be called...we can all start the process all over again.

 

[SpaceWeevil]

I'd all but given up on getting P3D running smoothly before this thread. More than anything else it made me look at my expectations. Obviously – I thought - with more efficient coding and DX properly supported it was going to be sliders far right, every last 4096 doorknob glowing in glorious HDR. As for the frame counter, surely I'd need four digits? OK I'm exaggerating, but so many people report running maxed out with perfect smoothness and this was a long way from my experience when I first tried P3D.

This thread encouraged me go back to basics - all addons disabled, shiny new cfg - and see what could be done with my mid-range hardware (i7 3770K @4.5, GTX 970, 8GB RAM, SSD). The answer, it turned out, was a lot more than I thought. I started with the settings P3D chose and went from there – some went up, some went down, but the goal was to run as smooth as possible with stock a/c and scenery. It took a lot of testing but I finally found my system’s sweet spot which is basically 'medium and a bit more' all round (happy to post if anyone's bothered..) and DSR enabled. I found that running a higher resolution with less AA really smoothed things out visually and performance-wise. I can now run my favourite freeware and most payware a/c with almost perfect creamy smoothness over Orbx EU and PNW, even Orbx airfields as long as most of the optional detail is off. The view out of the cockpit is a LOT better than FSX – sharper textures, less autogen popping, more realistic colours, better haze, better clouds. On the downside it just can’t run my A2A Cherokee, 172 and 182 with anything like the same smoothness as FSX. Also I deplore the loss of force feedback - it may not have been very realistic but at least it gave something to trim against.

So anyway, even though this wasn't my thread, thank you all for your thoughts. I won’t be retiring SE or the DX10 fixer just yet but I’m a lot happier than I was last week – happy enough to stick with P3D while I save for that monster PC build I’ve always promised myself.