Having been a die hard FSX user since it came out, I flew for the first time in Prepar 3D 2.2 this afternoon, it is stunning. Never had so many "wow" moments in a simulator before.

 

You have done an amazing job with this version Lockheed Martin, please keep it up!

Been flying all day when I have the day off.

A trip in the morning, one in the afternoon, and one at dusk.

Each and every flight was different and STUNNING

It's true that most have no idea what they are missing until they experience it for themselves. It is stunning indeed.

 

I have been flying it for months and am still getting goose bumps when experiencing the new cloud shadows.

 

Kind regards,

I too find it remarkable, until the performance begins to tank under broken or overcast conditions with shadows enabled. I'm hopeful that LM will continue to optimize the platform and minimize performance issues with some of the new eye candy.

LM cannot do everything.

 

You have to realise that we have to pull our own buggies or get more horsepower.

That's been true even with FSX. People deluded themselves with  a host of questionable tweaks, but the only true way of improving performance is buying better hardware. Expensive and sad, but true.

Amen to that. It's been said before, but I'll say it again, 'There's no free lunch!' But even so, without all the sliders to the right, the views are quite stunning in P3D.

I totally agree.

I sprung for a new rig a couple of weeks ago. I used to fly just around my home airport because of the reasonable frame rates afforded photoreal scenery. Now that I have the horsepower, I spend my times tooling around Orbx's Pacific Northwest. I have shadows across the instrument panel, Active Sky Next weather and A2A's C-172. No tweaks. And I tell you, it is simply amazing. Beautiful, rich, realistic. I could do this all day (until the wife gets home Wednesday after three weeks away helping with the family).

It's true that most have no idea what they are missing until they experience it for themselves. It is stunning indeed.

 

I have been flying it for months and am still getting goose bumps when experiencing the new cloud shadows.

 

Kind regards,

Ditto, and it's sometimes hard to put your finger on the why part, at least it was w/ 2.0.  You new it was better and compelling, but because it's so much the same simulator one can be a little fooled into thinking it's more similar to FSX than not.  However, and this has been my absolute experience, I just never could complete a flight in FSX after installing P3D V2.0  I tried many times, and was really enjoying the PMDG T7.  But in the end I would abort the flight and head back up in P3D V2.0.   V2.2 is that much better and those goose bumps do leave me w/ that sense of 'wow' that was there in FSX, but never quite to this degree.  We had the lovely add ons for FSX so that wasn't the difference.  But the combination of superior autogen rendering and clarity, HDR bloom effects that to me are really just right, and now cloud shadowing which is fine in certain scenarios as long as it's run w/in your GPU's capacity, a level of smoothness that truly hits the 100% mark in the lighter situations, apparently is what it takes to garner this reaction.   There are still issues that are significant but the dev team seems quite on task.  Be fun to hear what is to be targeted next.   

The experience that P3D gives me is one of visual depth, dimension, and realism that I just cannot get from FSX.  I do get back into FSX from time to time, but in comparison it just seems quite 2 dimensional and flat.  And for me, my performance in P3D is better than FSX because P3D utilizes more of my CPU/GPU combination than FSX does.

 

It is something that has to be experienced.  When I see pics and videos of P3D, they look nice, but that just does not come close to flying within the sim.

I am not sure how they have made this version so much better. I guess it is down to the much improved autogen system and the cloud shadows. They add a massive amount of immersion along with the entire shadow system.

 

The terrain just glides past without any stutters or popping which makes it seem almost real! When you add some goodies such as ASN, FTX Global and REX this really becomes a real visual feast! Flying the Q400 is especially good due to the low impact on frames this aircraft has. I am hoping in future releases we can add further goodies such as rain effects in the VC ect.

 

For the first time I really think flight sim has a bright and exciting future