Well, me thinks it's back to FSX! Just tried a flight from Bella Cool, so virtually nil autogen, with average settings throughout, with min cloud shadows, and when I loaded a cloudy Orbx weather theme, the sim dropped to a stuttering mess with barely 8/10 frames!

Your system is simply NOT capable of running with cloud shadows ON in very cloudy weather. You might get some satisfaction by playing around with different cloud sets.

 

The cloud shadows can easily overload your GPU and when that happens it steals cycles from the CPU which causes lower frames and possible stuttering.

 

Even at lower settings in P3D they are still set HIGHER than FSX - it's all relative.

 

I've found that by reducing the cloud layers and turning OFF cloud shadows during heavy weather, I get smooth frames and it still is visually stunning.

 

Whereas with FSX we were continually tweaking, P3D2 is another animal - it is MUCH more sensitive to the settings.

 

A suggestion - use something like MSI Afterburner to monitor the GPU % usage - start adjusting sliders - rebuild shaders between adjustments - watch the GPU usage - when it gets to 99% - watch the frames - you'll get the hang of what works for YOUR system.

 

Vic

Thanks Vic...

For me it never goes above 85% and most of the time it is around 40%.fps still below 30.

 

I will try Robs settings later.

 

Michael

This is the same evolution that was experienced with FSX. People structured, and adjusted their systems, to a satisfactory level. Then something new came out for FSX and the system now longer worked. Everyone was warned that there would be an impact and either better equipment or lower sliders may be needed.

 

Despite that there was a chorus of complaints when the new goody caused distress on some systems. New goodies sometimes cost customers money - the old "free lunch" saying.

 

My system is far from high end since I always purchase one or two generations behind the tech curve. 

i5 2500K overclocked to 4ghz, 8gb 1600 memory, nVidia GTX 550 1gb memory video card.

 

Right now I am on the edge of buying either a CPU or video card. I have not done anything yet since I can get quite good performance with most sliders at the mid point. I skip terrain shadows but do run cloud shadows at the minimum 6000 meters. A very nice experience. Would I junk P3DV2.2 if the cloud shadows were too much for my system? No! The future is with the P3D product not FSX. I will soon bite the bullet and buy some more stuff to get ALL the nice shadows. Most of my "flying" is done with ORBX territories. The regions landclass is so good you can turn off the autogen trees and still see a creditable scene. I could go on but the bottom line is if at least 1/2 sliders setting, or 1/2 value settings do not work then there may be some setting that is an issue. Inspector should be a thing of the past.

 

One other thing. I saw that setting the affinity mask to 15 (all 4 cores allocated to P3D) helped with blurred (blurries) textures. I did not believe it as most tweaks never helped me. But it was true. Quite fast resolution of ground textures was the result. There may be other affects but can't see them.

To the original poster and Rockcliff,

 

may not be the same issue but when I started using P3D I too noticed the ground textures were not as sharp as FSX.  Now all the poster said was the P3D was blurry but I assume he means the ground textures and not like the aircraft or buildings.

 

I was comparing my photoreal in FSX and the same location in P3D and there was a definite difference.  It was not "loading time" where after a few seconds things pop into clarity on the ground.  Thought I had tried every combination.

 

As said, may not be the same issue but I did not see this mentioned here.

 

How did I solve it?  Cranked up the Texture Resolution slider all the way right. BAM!  Most incredible sharpness.  Guess I had moved in down in the past without realizing it.  I now keep my at 15cm unless some scenery states they are using 7cm.

Remember - with FSX we were completely at the mercy of the CPU. The GPU was just there. ANY adjustment we made affected the FPS. Well now with P3D they've offloaded a huge amount of the processing to the GPU so we are back at finding the BALANCE for our individual system.

 

Some settings will affect ONLY the GPU and visuals. Others will affect ONLY the CPU and FPS.

 

AI traffic for example has a big hit on FPS and has no noticeable affect on the GPU. Clouds and clouds shadows have a huge effect on the GPU and NO effect on FPS *unless* you push other settings high enough to overload the GPU - then frames drop and stutters begin.

 

IMHO, settings are MUCH more critical in P3D than they ever were in FSX.

 

Until hardware catches up ( boy! haven't we heard that for years!) and more streamlining is done by LM, I really believe the best option is to have several CFG files set up for different flying conditions. IFR with heavy overcast, VFR scattered, VFR heavy cover, etc

 

Vic