Next p3d patch / fix en route

[BMagann 11]

No, you only had stutters, poor frame rates and CTDs

 

I don't know what a CTD is (I hope it isn't like a STD), but as far as stutters and frame rates go, I do much better in FSX. For a program that is basically FSX+, P3D v2 didn't really improve that much on those issues. Maybe when the hoped-for future arrives when 3rd party developers do whatever they are supposed to do to make P3D really different from FSX those things will be different.

 

But really, when you stand back and look at the two sims there is very little difference right now. Same flight models, same ATC, same weather, same menu system in a worse package, same oom issues. Some cool eye candy with the shadows, lighting effects and improved autogen, but don't turn those sliders up TOO much or the thing will crash. And when it does, it will be YOUR fault for having dared to use the slider settings provided, even on a sh*t-hot system.

 

In any case, I hope that P3D 2.x someday achieves it's potential. To say that it has at this point is like the story of the Emperor's New Clothes. But it is clear that the staff here have decided that they aren't really going to tolerate criticism much longer. It will be seen as unhelpful. 

 

Praising LM for saying they are working on a problem is fine and warranted. But let's reserve our real praise for when the problems are actually fixed.

[Arwen 289]

 

 

But really, when you stand back and look at the two sims there is very little difference right now. Same flight models, same ATC, same weather, same menu system in a worse package, same oom issues. Some cool eye candy with the shadows, lighting effects and improved autogen, but don't turn those sliders up TOO much or the thing will crash. And when it does, it will be YOUR fault for having dared to use the slider settings provided, even on a sh*t-hot system.
 
In any case, I hope that P3D 2.x someday achieves it's potential. To say that it has at this point is like the story of the Emperor's New Clothes.

 

The big difference for me is that FSX is no longer being supported/updated and P3D2 is. Plus FSX never gave me the same feeling of immersion that I get with P3D2, and most of that is a result of that 'cool eye candy.'

 

I'm running P3D2.1 with most of the sliders pretty far to the right and getting no OOMs (plus I have FTXG installed and mostly flying A2A's Cessna, which is a fairly demanding 3rd party addon aircraft).

 

Has anyone here actually stated that P3D2.x has achieved its potential? If so, I haven't seen that in any post yet.  Because the main reason for anyone to be excited about P3D2.x is due to the fact that it is still being developed ... and I don't know any software that is still being developed that has yet achieved its potential.

[Jimmy RFR 406]

 

 

Because the main reason for anyone to be excited about P3D2.x is due to the fact that it is still being developed ... and I don't know any software that is still being developed that has yet achieved its potential.

 

This.  It's an active, dynamic project that's very much still in development.  Not only that, but we even have people listening to our input.  Really, not much to complain about there, if you ask me.

[SeH 15]

you´re all so funny rly
 

it´s because of folks like you that made software developer think they could go away with shockingly bad software...

 

 

Look at the last years and how that problem has grown...and no matter if we´re talking about battlefield or p3d or other commercial software. It´s all the same.

 

So companies come up with software that is bugged as **** or isn´t even able to run without crashing all the time. And because of the golden age of the internet they then come up with x patches solving problems that are so clear, they would´ve noticed if they even played their own game for at least half an hour.

 

But not blaming them for this, because you all pay for the betatesting. So why should they even care about quality management ?

 

 

 

And then you even praise them for that behaviour. "At least they are working on it and developing" Are you kidding me
And even then, when it´s absolutely clear, that the software is faulty in so many things, folks come with something like this:

 

"Some folks, and I am one, are happily enjoying some fantastic flights in P3D2 because they have enough common sense to set their system up reasonably."

 

sry but...no words for that.

 

 

So I know time has changed, and devs can should release patches and bugfixes. But at some point it´s just unaccetable.

So can you pls stop praising LM for developing p3d ? they choose to do so and it´s their **** job. Sure are they developing it.

But have a little bit of "common sense" and don´t take everything which is thrown at you as the best and ultimate just because it´s thrown at you...

Edited February 26, 2014 by firehawk44
removed inappropriate language.

[MikeT707 1,181]

Do us a favor SeH.  If you are going to be so demanding and hold Lockheed Martin to such a standard, might I suggest that you hold yourself to a similar standard.  Please write full sentences and make sure they are coherent.  Also, please use proper punctuation, spelling, and grammar. Otherwise we may feel like we are beta testing your commentary.

[SeH 15]

well, that´s typical. Come up with language stuff
 

maybe, just maybe, english is not my first language ?

[LHookins 3,103]

 

 

maybe, just maybe, english is not my first language ?

 

If it wasn't, you'd be a lot better at it!

 

Hook

[ChaoticBeauty 6,692]

ANd you might also think the world owes you a living but that isn't going to happen. This is the real world - things take time. Just because YOU have an itch due to autogen being on the cpu you want it NOW! Can YOU say they are not working on it?

 

Remember, they are building this for THEIR target customer. I would venture a guess that your autogen issue is not in the top 10 list of priorities. Doesn't mean they are NOT going to do it. Just means they haven't done it yet.

 

http://www.prepar3d.com/forum-5/?mingleforumaction=viewtopic&t=4286

 

Go through the entire thread. Beau admitted that autogen is still running on the CPU, and it won't be multithreaded further because it's "as optimised as it can be".

[wizzards 99]

I remember purchasing Fsx gold and finding that it was US  on my mid range system,approx 3yrs and £1250 later I had a PC the could use it,only to find that it looked awful and seemed to have lots of issues,I then realized it was my fault!,i had to Overclock and then tweak to enable my system to run this £30 5/6 yr old software,I started a journey of Overclocking/ tweaking to sort out one or other issue,s or to improve performance,so I could use all the wonderful add ons that had been developed to improve my flying exp?,one expert / guru saying this is the way only to find another expert /guru saying no its not,but no MS they had gone home 5yrs ago and were not interested in me or FSX ,so in my book I paid £30 not a massive amount of dosh and I can contact LM via their forum and V2 is only 3mth old and LM are still working on improving it,and I still get a Dam more enjoyable flying exp than i ever got with FSX with all its tweaking

maybe its my old gtx 570 graphic card, as i keep most not all the sliders set in the middle

[Arwen 289]

http://www.prepar3d.com/forum-5/?mingleforumaction=viewtopic&t=4286

 

Go through the entire thread. Beau admitted that autogen is still running on the CPU, and it won't be multithreaded further because it's "as optimised as it can be".

 

When you quote someone, you really should be more accurate, otherwise it is misleading (and then I have to wonder at your motives). I just went through that entire thread and he never wrote anywhere "as optimised as it can be" ... for one thing, you spelled optimized wrong.  This is what Beau actually wrote about threading, optimization, and autogen in that particular thread:

 

" We load in a fixed lod level of autogen data out to the full draw distance in order to allow distant objects to be raised up to transition in rather than popping. This works great for FlyTampa airports that tend to force all objects to draw all the time anyway. It may be these airports you are seeing the hit on make heavy use of the lod system to place tons of detailed animated models relatively close to the camera."

 

"In almost every usage scenario, a GPU upgrade should improve the overall performance and smoothness of the sim. Older video cards (and motherboards) can have issues with both data throughput and with getting data to the card over the io bus. We send a lot more data to the card each frame even with tessellation disabled because of instancing and GPU particles. If tessellation is on (and it really should be if you want the full v2 experience) there is 3x as much texture data per tile and millions of vertices/pixels created each frame by the tessellation shaders. High end cards take this in stride but low or mid range cards can get hit hard by this. GPU usage stats can be misleading because io or pipeline data throughput can cause stalls that prevent cores from doing work because they are waiting on data. GPU stalls can also contribute to stutters."

 

"Even if it were possible to move much more of the autogem work to the GPU without redesigning the whole system and breaking back-compatibility, it would be tough to justify doing it since most users want to use some of the new features and will be GPU bound. On max settings in dense areas, there are more than twice as many objects rendering as in v1. It is rendering all of them into the reflection view (v1/fsx didn't do this) and is rendering them into 12 2048x2048 shadow cascade views. Then in the final scene every pixel is doing 4 extra samples and per pixel lighting for the objects to receive shadows. The CPU load for reflections and shadows is minimal and happens mostly in a background thread."

 

"There have been many threads devoted to 64-bit so I won’t say much on that. It’s in our long term roadmap but we are still focusing on getting the 32 bit version optimized. As for threading, autogen work is already threaded out. In addition v2 already threads out much more work than was threaded out in v1. It may not always look that way from CPU utilization stats because a good deal of threaded terrain work is now done on the GPU.

Performance always has been and will continue to be something we are always working on be it directly or indirectly. Performance is a broad topic covering the entire application, the entire range of application settings, and the entire range of supported hardware. There are countless interdependent features sharing various hardware and software resources (CPU, GPU, RAM, vRAM, HD, User input, Operating System, etc). We have to carefully consider the impacts across the entire performance spectrum before making a decision to move work into a background job or onto the GPU."

 

"We actually do most of the heavy lifting for loading, paging and batching/instancing autogen in background jobs already. Because the viewpoint is constantly moving and rotating, new batches/instance groups are being requested every frame. The results of background jobs have to be synchronized back to the primary thread, put into buffers, and copied to the GPU. For what it doing, it actually performs quite well. In the case of trees it generally performs better than v1/fsx while buildings work more or less the same way they used to. The real issue as we have stated several times is that we are loading and drawing a great deal more autogen now than we used to because the pop-free method doesn’t work with progressive LOD loading. We decided to take the performance hit to reduce popping. As most of our users are GPU bound, the extra CPU usage has very little impact on overall performance. The end user has the option via cfg settings to disable pop-free or lower the settings to achieve the desired level of performance."

[SeH 15]

for one thing, you spelled optimized wrong. 

 

 

REALLY ?!

[ChaoticBeauty 6,692]

I didn't quote his exact words, but that's what he means. Firstly, he admits that autogen wasn't moved to the GPU (despite the DirectX 11 blog saying the opposite), and when Word Not Allowed kindly requested that autogen receives better multithreading, since it cannot be moved to the GPU, Beau says that Prepar3D 2.0 is already multithreaded and autogen doesn't need further optimisation. But the task manager says otherwise (not much multithreading taking place, probably not much more than FSX).

 

Also, I didn't spell "optimise" wrong. This is how it's spelt in British English. "Optimize" is correct in American English, and I choose to use the former.

 

EDIT: One more thing, Beau promised Word Not Allowed that with a GTX Titan, he would be getting 30 FPS in all scenarios. Word Not Allowed made tests with a GTX Titan system, but he was getting lower FPS because Prepar3D 2.0 is still CPU-limited, unless you turn up all shadows and water effects, which means you'll be getting below 20 FPS. Beau isn't right about the CPU utilisation.

[Guest]

Are we still talking about a sim most of us play for our enjoyment or did I miss something and are we talking about something that may mean the end of the world if we don't get it solved…?  :blink:

[mgh 89]

Are we still talking about a sim most of us play for our enjoyment or did I miss something and are we talking about something that may mean the end of the world if we don't get it solved…?

Of course it's the end of the world.

[simmerhead 885]

I think if you paid $200 for a pro license you have the right to be a bit p'd off at the amount of bugs present. At the same time I just try to keep calm and take in the reality of the flight simulation scene. Lockheed Martin is the only serious player in the market, hence I will enjoy and support what I get (within limits) until someone can make something better.

 

I wouldn't mind if Airbus or Boeing entered the scene though. With the amount of pilots needed to keep up with the growth in the airline industry a simulator might be a good tool to keep people interested and motivated to seek out a career in aviation. If it hadn't been for Microsoft's Flight Simulator series I would never have started my PPL back in 2001.