Noel, I think you will find that the P3D team acknowledge that there is still more work required with water. And as this sim is continues to be developed ............. well, I suspect we will see an improvement. Good times ahead I suspect.

Every day I become more acquainted with P3D V2.1 and It gets better and better as I add on. I'll plug a tweak: if you can set your monitor refresh rate to 50hz interlaced as apposed to progressive. Set your display setting in P3D as high as you like as long you can maintain 20fps. Turn off V-sync and triple buffing and forget about NvidiaInspector. Set your target FPS in P3D to 25fps and you will fly smooth at 25fps and it will still appear smooth as low as 20fps. I have all setting maxed out with smooth flight with these setting. A WORD OF WARNING DON'T FORCE AN INCOMPATIBLE REFRESH RATE TO YOUR DISPLAY OTHERWISE YOU MIGHT DAMAGE IT!

I'll add to that. FSX in DX10 mode and using the DX10Fixer is actually usable, as DX10 takes advantage of some more recent improvements in GPU design. But it isn't close to P3d 2.1, just because LM has added a number of features that were never present in FSX (shadows, hardware tessellation, volumetric fog, etc.). There's no point in taking my word for it, though. I suggest that people just take a look at screen shots from FSX, P3d 2.1 and even XP10. Anyone that says that they can achieve the same quality as P3d 2.1 using ORBX NCA as they can with FSX DX10 or XP10 must have an unusual system or maybe they are just lucky.

I think 2.1 is a big improvement over 2.0. Initial version was unusable for me. However, it's still not as good as my P3d 1.4 which is my main sim right now. I can achieve same quality (except shadow stuff which I don't care) without any hassle from uncompatibility issues with legacy addons. It's still blurry when blurry, still stutters when stutters, performance is more or less same. My installation is bigger than 250gb, so I am not going to bother moving to another sim which is same quality at best. I'll move when differences becoming so big and when there'll be lot of native addons taking advantage of DX11 etc.

   

 

Noel, what are your sliders set at?

 

Water detail needs to be set at ultra, tessellation at least medium, and mesh resolution at 1M to get the effects to work properly.

Maxed Dylan, maxed water, tess, mesh, etc.  It's not bad mind you, but it's not as good as it was in FSX IMO and I thought there was room for improvement there too, though not as much as in P3D.  I had horrid water until I made peace w/ AA and AF settings.  Flying low in heavy winds looks very cool so those eff w/ the right wave ani's but overall from up high there is a certain fuzziness that is there that seems to interfere w/ reflectiveness.   And I'm not flying long enough under 500' that to have all of these effects be more than a novelty.   Like I say though, it's not bad, just needs improved for my tastes and certainly looks very weak compared to other software water implementations.  And of course, the serial sudden texture updates  or whatever they are in the animation sequence are just too bizarre compared to other software.  I was a credited beta tester for TW2004 and the water in that 10 y/o title looked way more like water than what we see in FSX/P3D.  Not saying that is the kind of water that needs to be in a flight sim, but seriously water is just plain a weak part of our flight simulator by modern standards, don't you agree?

http://www.prepar3d.com/forum-5/?mingleforumaction=viewtopic&t=4565.0#postid-30400