How is it?

[DAL1850 51]

Clouds and volumetric fog/haze effects are unquestionably the best new feature of P3D. I have not had that sense from a "Flight Simulator" branded product since Fly!

[HighTowers 1,434]

Lots of cool effects to enjoy now. Some will have a more profound effect on performance, but there is also so much more to settings to play with and I dont mean in a cfg file. If performance is questionable, there is all kinds of things you can do to balance it out. Most likely toning down some setting will not have a profound difference visually. 

 

FPS- This is something that doesnt need so much obsession with. Just because some have FPS drop, dont freak out. Instead concentrate on it being smooth. Yes I have had at times my FPS drop, but it didnt matter. It was still smooth and thats what matters. 

Im also not so sure what the obsession is with full screen. Windowed works great and I didnt have any difference switching between nor did I see any big differences in performance.

 

All these little bugs will get fixed, and the best part is that LM listens and acknowledges them.  They will continue to work on performance optimization. 

 

The only really big stand out issue I can see already, is the VAS. This needs to be priority one. 64 bit is the answer but in the short term temp solution something else has to be done. As commented, once we start adding all these fancy addons, we will be pushing that limit again. 

Memory management I have no doubt was much improved, but at the same time, there is so much more effects, and other things now that while very cool, and have lots of immersion factor, have also contributed to be part of the VAS party.  IMO 64 bit has got to be priority one. Work out any other issues outward from there.

Doing this sooner rather than later would make sense before all these devs start preparing thier products for V2 and then it can be done altogether. Wishful thinking? Perhaps, but its the most logical.

 

The future of flight simming is bright. And I include XPX to be in that mix, to remain objective. We just have many of our addons invested in this FSX/P3D core foundation and hope they carry over.  

[PoanickyBoad 3]

 

 

The only really big stand out issue I can see already, is the VAS. This needs to be priority one. 64 bit is the answer but in the short term temp solution something else has to be done. As commented, once we start adding all these fancy addons, we will be pushing that limit again. 

 

Fully agree. This is the one thing holding me back - I'm discouraged (and disgusted) by the high VAS levels being reported so far with fairly few addons installed and in some cases with default aircraft/scenery. Until they go 64bit we are going to be artificially limited by what we can achieve with this sim and compromises will always have to be made. What's the point of having fancy new features and effects that you can't use with your favorite addons because of this? Would make far more sense to get the core issue sorted first and go from there. 

[JasonHarris 96]

 I'm discouraged (and disgusted) by the high VAS levels 

 

   Dude, if thats all it takes to disgust you then you better not come time my place after the kids are in bed.

 

   Sometimes it gets downright filthy!  Not to get in to too much detail but once I was pounding away, full guns blazing in an a10 warthog, and I hit 3.8GB!  Nearly got an OOM.   ouch

[Rocky_53 1,579]

Fully agree. This is the one thing holding me back - I'm discouraged (and disgusted) by the high VAS levels being reported so far with fairly few addons installed and in some cases with default aircraft/scenery. Until they go 64bit we are going to be artificially limited by what we can achieve with this sim and compromises will always have to be made. What's the point of having fancy new features and effects that you can't use with your favorite addons because of this? Would make far more sense to get the core issue sorted first and go from there. 

 

Sorry, I don't understand...

[zap737 1]

This may be a silly question, but if a part of the load is being taken by the GPU in P3D, then will this platform significantly benefit from GPUs in SLI? (Or Tri SLI, or Quad SLI?).

 

From my understanding FSX didn't benefit from SLI, but perhaps P3D will.

[DJSean00 7]

Sorry, I don't understand...

 

+1 what's he on about?

[sascha 314]

Hi all,

 

I already requested this in another P3D thread: I'd be very interested to see some images of exotic locations eg in Asia and Africa. With FTX Global would be super! Would be nice to see how these longhaul flights end ...

 

Best,

Sascha

[Guest]

This may be a silly question, but if a part of the load is being taken by the GPU in P3D, then will this platform significantly benefit from GPUs in SLI? (Or Tri SLI, or Quad SLI?).

 

From my understanding FSX didn't benefit from SLI, but perhaps P3D will.

 

Not yet but LM is trying to have SLI working with version 2.1.

[Christopher Low 5,353]

I am somewhat confused. LM have stated that memory management has been greatly improved in P3Dv2 with respect to FSX. Whilst I am aware that "memory" does not equal "VAS", I would have thought that the chances of an OOM would be greatly reduced in P3Dv2 because of the (apparent) ability to clean up the VAS by dumping scenery data that is no longer required (eg. your departure airport). If this is not the case, then there is no point in me even thinking about purchasing P3Dv2.

[CordoganAir 55]

I've seen a few posts about VAS usage being high but what I haven't seen  is a single post reporting an OOM. Just because the VAS is higher than expected doesn't necessarily mean that something else isn't working to avoid OOM's like what Christopher Low suggested above.

Also, I suggest before blindly speculating about performance that you head over to Word Not Allowed's blog and check out his performance analysis, great as expected: (Just copy and paste the text below into your browser since AVSIM got in their little whiny hairpulling slapfight with Word Not Allowed and wont allow linking to his page)

 

#####.wordpress.com/p3d-v2-performance-analysis/

[RoboRay 126]

Wouldn't you want your memory utilization to be high, really?  If it's not, you're not using it to maximum effectiveness.  You need some good management to avoid problems at high utilization, yes, but if you're not using it you're not benefiting from it.

[Noel 4,502]

 

 

I'm still getting 12 FPS. That's without any add-ons. Just the default plane that loads. Normally in FSX I would get 40-50 FPS running at the most dense airports and cities (KJFK, etc) with my add-ons. My system is no slouch though. I have a i7 2600K, GTX 670 4 GB, and lots of RAM.

 

Something's amiss for sure, unless you have all sliders maxed...

[DAL1850 51]

I've seen a few posts about VAS usage being high but what I haven't seen is a single post reporting an OOM

And we won't for some time. Not until we have compatible high-end scenery packages and aircraft like the T7. The best we can do at the moment is look at the baselines. For example, measure the memory footprint in FSX with maximum settings; compare this to comparable settings in P3D (which in and of itself is somewhat problematic because not everything maps 1:1). On average, P3D is yielding a base memory footprint about 500MB to 1.0GB higher than its predecessor. While we might expect this for a higher-end simulation, with it still being a 32-bit process, there is much less "wiggle room" for add-ons to run in. As you start layering these third-party products in, you're going to see the return of the OOM.

 

For now as long as you remain south of that 4GB ceiling, you won't experiencing issues with memory. Those will come later.

 

Another possibility is that many users are not packing massive firepower in their GPU...considering a good mid-range card performs almost equally compared to a high-end card in FSX. P3D has offloaded a lot to the GPU with its new DX11 rendering engine. So it may be that users with beefy Titan-class video adapters experience a lower memory footprint because much of the texture footprint can be absorbed by the video card. Textures that can't reside in VRAM must inevitably be stored in system ram - eating away at the precious process VAS.

 

So while there's a yellow caution flag out, I don't think there's enough data on the table to see where we'll definitively end up....but the initial numbers are a little concerning. A move to 64-bits would completely obviate this issue entirely. Add-ons are only going to get "heavier" and more data-intensive as time goes on. Not to mention, it's nearly 2014; 64-bit computing is here and the baseline units of data/bandwidth are the gigabyte and the terabyte. It's time to evolve. Nobody will be talking about 32-bit apps five years from now. Windows doesn't even natively run 32-bit code anymore...it uses the WOW64 proxy layer in much the same way Windows NT/200/XP ran 16-bit "legacy" applications.

[bonchie 2,305]

 

You are going to have to observe how P3D manages memory as it reaches the threshold, not simply the linear footprint. 

Windows 7 has a higher footprint then XP, but it's superior in memory management and releasing memory for use. 

 

LM claims they've improved this area and fixed many memory leaks. Time will tell. 

 

You don't need the 777 to test this. The Airbus Extended + and Orbx region + a high detailed airport will give you OOM errors in FSX and can be tested now in P3Dv2.