I ran some benchmarks moving from high to ultra. No change in FPS or VRAM on my 780, but I also could not tell any difference in visuals, so I'll probably keep my setting at high.

 

 

but I also could not tell any difference in visuals

 

I could see an obvious difference between the various settings. Apart from the obvious (mountains) I also noticed a difference in Norway on slopes that ran into the water: with a low setting they looked odd (in the distance) as if something went wrong with the texture and with the higher settings things looked okay. The setting apparently not only has to do with the quality but also with the distance at which certain things are rendered. 

Interesting to see because it does really made a big difference.

Thanks for taking the time Bill.

Mesh resolution @ 1 m?

I have a 3ghz I7-950 X58 system that at one time I use to run Prepar3d quite happily on a SSD raid.  I took a hiatus, backed it up and then deleted the install.  Coming back a few years later I decided to do a fresh install, this time however on a HDD Raid.  I have been struggling with abysmal performance for the past two weeks and have tried damn near every possible tweak with the exception of one, Tessellation at Ultra.  This is just not the ultra system although with a GTX970 this is the one setting that should be Ultra.  The difference in performance is night and day.  I couldn't even use an affinity mask on this system, ALL 8 cores were needed to keep up. I use Processor Lasso and tried several configs, all but 0, only physical...not enough go juice.  Before tessellation I was looking at locking this system at 20fps since that's all the cpu could manage on average and terrain loading was just awful with stutters so long you could eat dinner even at that FPS with all 8 cores maxed.  Scenery settings were all normal, 4.5 LOD ,10m and 15cm, nothing in the extreme here.  I had much higher settings before and it was smooth, it was boggling.

With tessellation at ultra I can lock 30FPS now and actual move LOD and Scenery settings even higher, settings I remember having. Can cruise the F22 at 700kts in both medium and low level and mostly keep up, not quite but then I really only need 400knts max for most of my stable.  If you have an under powered CPU and a decent GPU this setting is a life saver!

On 1/3/2017 at 2:02 AM, AoA said:

I have a 3ghz I7-950 X58 system that at one time I use to run Prepar3d quite happily on a SSD raid.  I took a hiatus, backed it up and then deleted the install.  Coming back a few years later I decided to do a fresh install, this time however on a HDD Raid.  I have been struggling with abysmal performance for the past two weeks and have tried damn near every possible tweak with the exception of one, Tessellation at Ultra.  This is just not the ultra system although with a GTX970 this is the one setting that should be Ultra.  The difference in performance is night and day.  I couldn't even use an affinity mask on this system, ALL 8 cores were needed to keep up. I use Processor Lasso and tried several configs, all but 0, only physical...not enough go juice.  Before tessellation I was looking at locking this system at 20fps since that's all the cpu could manage on average and terrain loading was just awful with stutters so long you could eat dinner even at that FPS with all 8 cores maxed.  Scenery settings were all normal, 4.5 LOD ,10m and 15cm, nothing in the extreme here.  I had much higher settings before and it was smooth, it was boggling.

With tessellation at ultra I can lock 30FPS now and actual move LOD and Scenery settings even higher, settings I remember having. Can cruise the F22 at 700kts in both medium and low level and mostly keep up, not quite but then I really only need 400knts max for most of my stable.  If you have an under powered CPU and a decent GPU this setting is a life saver!

+1 i agree , Discovered it my self a couple of month ago.

i could not figure out why i had so much blurry terrain until i saw i had turned tesselation to off or low.

 

With SLI it has to be at ULTRA and it was a changer moving some work from CPU to the GPU´s

 

Michael Moe