Trying P3D once again

falcon409

falcon409

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Staff member
Didn't have much luck with P3D 1.4 but with all the talk about the improvements with Ver2, I had to give it a look at least. Here's a few early observations:
Problem with my CH Throttle...it wants to use the slider on my joystick rather than the CH Throttle.
On entering the Sim, the Raptor is already spooled up and screaming as soon as it loads, even with the throttle at idle. I have to quickly cycle the slider to get it to spool down.
Speaking of load times, I seem to remember reading that initial load time would be lengthy while it configured scenery settings, etc, etc., but after that, the load times were relatively quick. I think someone mentioned it took around 15secs. Not so here. . .I've flown several twenty minute flights with the Raptor, landed, shut down and closed the Sim. . .on each subsequent reload it takes a full minute to load. . .no different than my FSX setup and this is without anything except the base installation.
Shadowing is very cool, I will say that, especially for a first-timer who isn't expecting it, lol.
I was impressed with the fact that even at high speeds the ground textures weren't blurry. . .very nice.
Runway Lights and aircraft lights are very large and fuzzy (similar to a bloom effect, although I have that turned off right now). On landing, using instant replay, the Raptor is engulfed in a white ball, which turns out to be the landing lights as it get's closer, but even on the ground that effect remains until it's very close to me.
Finally, FPS show no change over what I had in FSX (high teens with max sliders in heavily populated areas and low 20's elsewhere). The Sim seems smooth, however I was expecting at least a modest increase in fps and that hasn't been the case.

Going to work on it some more as time permits and continue to try to improve on what appears to be a salvageable Simulator.
Here are my specs:
Win7 Home Premium_64bit
AMD FX(tm)-4300 Quad Core (3.8Ghz)
8Gig Memory
NVidia GTX 650Ti w/2gig mem
2 widescreen monitors
 
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beginning with a maximum engine and is a problem that people know we all have LM should only keep that same flight and put it as default but with motors in low
 
For the CH controllers, this worked for me.

I calibrated all three controllers, throttle, pedals and stick, individually from the Windows controllers menu. Getting to the menu may be different depending on which Windows version you are running, but in Windows 7 I entered joy.cpl under start/search and opened the menu as administrator.

Once in the menu each controller displayed separately. I calibrated each using the Windows settings/calibration interface. I followed each calibration step and hit "enter" on my keyboard (not on the actual controller) as I completed each step.

I also un-installed the CH Controllers software and run only the drivers that install with each controller. The software kept inserting a combined controller driver that mucked things up.

FPS. The settings in V2 are much higher than FSX for instance autogen medium is more like FSX high. Back down your sliders and see how you do. The heavy hitter on FPS is the shadowing, so try running a lower setting. With your setup you should be seeing good frame rates...around 30.

Good luck with your tweaks...you'll get V2 up to full song with a bit of work.
 
Thanks for the HU on the controller, actually what solved the problem was that I needed to assign the Throttle to the correct axis. Once I did that it worked fine. Part of the fps problem was using the Raptor to do any testing, lol. When I went from that to just about any other aircraft (GA Type) the fps came up, not by a whole lot, but enough for me to know the Raptor was a bit hard on the fps. I went from Virginia to New York using the "map" and was once again impressed with something FSX could never do. . .When moving from one area to another by dragging the aircraft icon in the map view, then coming out of that, it was always a minute or two before the textures, etc. could completely redraw. . .P3D does it instantly, very impressive.

I tried setting the frames to unlimited, to see what change that made. . .none, lol. I fiddled with the sliders for the various scenery elements as you suggested. As far as I could tell, they matched FSX, so I have them set to Dense for now. I changed aircraft after landing near JFK and went to the Robinson, figuring low and slow would give me a better perspective on how the ground textures were being loaded. I kept waiting for the textures to sharpen. . .even went into a hover to wait for them. . .they were already sharp, kinda, lol. They are nicer, more realistic and better represent the areas you fly in, but didn't appear any sharper than FSX textures.

Finally, as the image below shows, I was approaching the City and got an error. I wish I had taken a shot of the actual error, but I did get this one. . .not sure if the info means anything to anyone, but it surprised me because I've not ever had the sim just lock up like that, even in that area. Also included below is the "light Ball" I mentioned in my first post.

I have to say that even at 17fps (shown in the City Screenshot), the sim was smooth so I can't complain about that, but I'm beginning to think that maybe the claims of 30+fps are being seen with much faster, much better rigs than mine. Both versions thus far (ver1.4 and ver2) have not shown any increase in fps over what I get in FSX. Remember though, I've done nothing with ver2 beyond installing it.

The fault module is "MSVCR100.dll". Didn't realize how hard it was to read the fine print, lol
 
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Make sure your GC drivers are the latest versions. This is critical. A lot of updates have been occurring concerning DX11 and OS updates. Nvidia now have updates for this sim on their drivers as well, if you have an Nvidia.

I would raise your frame rates limit to 50 or even unlimited. You should then see higher frame rates. (Default setting is 30, so if you have it at 30, it will rarely get up to 30, usually hovering around 29, etc). I moved mine to unlimited and now its hovering between 50 and 85 FPS.

Make sure your shadow slider is at 50%.

Traffic is still high on frame rates hits, but not as bad. They had some breakthrough improvements to cut down resource uses concerning AI and traffic.

HDR might run faster and smoother, (does for most people).


For some reason, the throttles weren't working with most joysticks. I wish we would have caught that. :(

Be careful porting over sophisticated scenery, as some are messing up the autogen. The addon developers are rushing to update their packages for V2.
 
Note that scenery is now run through the GC VRam. All of New York is in your GC Cache. If you maxed it out, that might have crashed your sim. I am running a 2 Gig GC and its doing nice. GTX660, about $120.00 at Frys Electronics. Not the best though. But... if you have a 512 or 1Gig GC, this might be what is causing a crash in NYC.


Bill
 
Lionheart said:
Make sure your GC drivers are the latest versions. This is critical. A lot of updates have been occurring concerning DX11 and OS updates. Nvidia now have updates for this sim on their drivers as well, if you have an Nvidia.
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I'll do that Bill.

I would raise your frame rates limit to 50 or even unlimited. You should then see higher frame rates. (Default setting is 30, so if you have it at 30, it will rarely get up to 30, usually hovering around 29, etc). I moved mine to unlimited and now its hovering between 50 and 85 FPS.
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I mentioned above that I set it at unlimited and saw no change in fps.

Make sure your shadow slider is at 50%.
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It's actually set lower right now

Traffic is still high on frame rates hits, but not as bad. They had some breakthrough improvements to cut down resource uses concerning AI and traffic.
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I don't use airport traffic at all (vehicles, etc.), the road traffic is set at 30% and Boat traffic is the same I believe.

HDR might run faster and smoother, (does for most people).
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What is that?

For some reason, the throttles weren't working with most joysticks. I wish we would have caught that. :(
Be careful porting over sophisticated scenery, as some are messing up the autogen. The addon developers are rushing to update their packages for V2.
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Yep, throttle was a minor problem, but fixed now and I don't have any scenery installed (beyond the base installation of P3D).

My Graphics card, mentioned in my specs above, is an NVidia GTX650 Ti w/2 gig of memory.
 
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Lionheart said:
Note that scenery is now run through the GC VRam. All of New York is in your GC Cache. If you maxed it out, that might have crashed your sim. I am running a 2 Gig GC and its doing nice. GTX660, about $120.00 at Frys Electronics. Not the best though. But... if you have a 512 or 1Gig GC, this might be what is causing a crash in NYC.
Bill
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I never fly around New York normally because of low fps, I'll stay away from that area in the future if I keep P3D. I mentioned earlier that I have the NVidia GTX650Ti. . .here are additional specs not included in the Specs I posted above:
CUDA Cores___________________768
Graphics Clock_________________980Mhz
Memory Data rate______________5400Mhz
Memory Interface______________128-Bit
Memory Bandwidth_____________86.40 GB/s
Total Available Graphics Memory__4096 MB
Dedicated Video Memory________2048 MB GDDR5
System Video Memory__________0
Shared System Memory_________2048 MB

NOTE: I was wrong about the memory. . .it is a 2Gig memory Card.
 
I thought I should also add the Drive Specs, as it may play into the function of rewrites within the program (not sure if that's valid or not).

P3D is installed on the C-Drive (also the drive the OS is installed on) in the Programs Directory. It is a 1-Terabyte HDD from Western Digital (I can't find the box so specs are not available) with 715Gig of free space.
I have two other drives (Both Seagates) D-Drive which I use for backups (which only has about 35gig of free space_no I don't have an external drive for that) and E-Drive which houses FSX (after the mess with Ver1.4 I hesitate putting the two Sims on the same Drive) and it has 622Gig of free space.
 
Falcon, having it on the C drive should be OK although it would be better to have it on a separate drive.
I would at least reinstall it outside of the Program Files folder though as Windows considered it a protected system folder and that can cause problems with some games/sims, FSX was a good example so P3D will probably be the same.
 
Thanks,I'll do that tonight. Can you tell me if your load time has changed? I read that the initial loading took awhile but after that it was considerably faster. Mine is no faster than FSX and that takes over a minute or two to load. All I have in P3D right now is the base installation .
 
I cant really compare my load times between FSX and P3Dv2 as my FSX is heavily loaded with addons and takes an age to load but P3Dv2 does load really quickly, under a minute I'd say.

I'd just like to echo what Bill said about updating the GC drivers. I've been putting it off as my system ran pretty good as it was and having an older gen card (GTX 580) I figured if it aint broke don't fix it, my drivers where from Dec last year though.
I just updated to the latest about 10 minutes ago and loading the default flight in P3Dv2 my FPS has gone from about 20/25 to 45/50, WOW what a difference.
So even if you have an older card if P3Dv2 is your priority update asap.
 
My having the GTX570, I had the same (better FPS) results when I updated to the latest (non-beta) drivers.
 
I think my P3D is faster than my FSX. As I only installed FSX a few weeks before P3D came out after a reinstall of the OS it's pretty much standard apart from a couple of add-on airports that I've added to P3D as well and some shipping traffic.
 
Well, I am going to leave P3D on the system til the end of the month when the developers license runs out. Unless I can find a good reason to keep it. . .it's gone. I don't discount the numbers being posted as far as framerates, loading times and lack of blurries. . .I'm sure you've posted honest results, but guys. . .I see none of that. No change in fps or load times and blurries do exist and the time it takes for the ground textures to sharpen is no different than FSX. The shadowing and fog aren't enough to keep me running P3D. As mentioned, even at 17fps (which is my average so far in Ver2) the Sim runs smoothly, but so does FSX. Given what ver1.4 was like, I really expected big things from this version and in my opinion it hasn't delivered. You've seen all my specs and a few have mentioned that with my system I "should" see higher numbers. I agree, or at least I hoped that was going to be the case. . .so why don't I? It's a shame, I would like to get on the bandwagon with the rest of you folks, but thus far. . .overall, even with the few things I saw that really impressed me, P3D is not giving me any reason to stick with it.
 
I was getting quite bad blurries at first especially over ORBX scenery but after adding the affinity mask edit to the prepar3d.cfg they've gone and I get sharp textures all the time so far.
Mind you I haven't tried any fast jet flights yet so that may change, I've mainly been flying the A2A B-17 so under 200 knots.
I'l try some high speed flights tomorrow and report back.
 
Dangerous Beans said:
I was getting quite bad blurries at first especially over ORBX scenery but after adding the affinity mask edit to the prepar3d.cfg they've gone and I get sharp textures all the time so far.
Mind you I haven't tried any fast jet flights yet so that may change, I've mainly been flying the A2A B-17 so under 200 knots.
I'll try some high speed flights tomorrow and report back.
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I won't fly fighters enough for that to be a concern. My concern is that P3D Ver2 is not what I had hoped, not even close. Looking on the P3D Forums, it appears there are many who are in the same boat. One of the LM techs suggestions was to "dial things back a bit until you find a configuration that gives you the performance and overall appearance you're happy with", lol. . .pretty much an impossibility. One individual who had what amounted to a super computer was upset because he wasn't getting the 100fps he was getting with "all his other games". . .really?. Anyway, I did read many users who had very nice systems who were getting very poor results. . .very similar to mine. I guess it's like anything else. . .it isn't all things to all people.
 
This will be my final post, lol. . .I went back and scaled things back as suggested (which totally defeats the purpose of having ver2 as far as I'm concerned). Here are my settings, a few screens to show fps and the final straw. . .an error message, lol, SMH!


Oh, almost forgot. . .another LM/P3D Rep noted after seeing one contributors specs, that he was running a Video Card with "only" 2Gig. . .commenting that it was rather shy of memory if he wanted to run his sliders at max (which is where mine are now in FSX).
 
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