I initially tried P3D last year when 2.0 came out and was not impressed with it at all. I could not get the same performance with it as I did with FSX and my system just did not have the GPU horsepower to run it properly. Then there were the constant issues with crashing add-on's and with P3D itself, usually after trying to run one of the updates released by LM. By March, I gave up and went back to FSX not only because of those issues, but because I could not fly my PMDG planes in it nor was ASN available.

 

With the recent announcement that PMDG will be releasing the T7 and the NGX for P3D, as well as the release of P3D 2.4, I decided to give it a whirl. All I can say is that its the total opposite of my experiences with the initial and subsequent updates to 2.2. I setup my system from scratch on Tuesday and installed 2.4, the latest driver from nVidia, Rex 4, ASN, and some of my planes from Aerosoft, Quality Wings, and Eaglesoft. 

 

The biggest plus was that after 4 days of near constant use, I have not had a single CTD. That was eye opening as it was a fact of life with FSX and was also bad with 2.0 - 2.2. I have also not done a single tweak to the .cfg file and I still get acceptable performance. For example, at KFLL, with the AXE, ASN, and FS DreamTeam's latest KFLL scenery, I had FPS in the low to mid 20's. This is pretty much what I had with FSX. I do not have the high horsepower systems some simmers have but to me, this was great. I was also able to move my sliders more to the right vs 2.0-2.2 and not suffer any FPS pain.

 

The biggest issues I've found so far are with having to purchase add-on's again and in many cases, those add-on's are more expensive. The Flight1 GTN is an example.  The thing is though, the GTN for P3D seems a lot more responsive than the FSX version and it did not affect my FPS as it did in FSX. Whether this is down to the differences between the FSX and P3D versions, P3D itself, or maybe both, I don't know. Right now it works so much better and the overall experience is so much smoother that I'm not sure I'll be using FSX for anything but the NGX and the T7. Hopefully, I will have the same experience with other-on's as I slowly migrate away from FSX.

 

My only problem right now is to find a way to get SweetFX to work without bringing my system to a crawl but other than that, I think P3D is the way forward for simmers on FSX.

 

I'm happy.

 

 

 

 

Hi,

SweetFx is working fine with Win7 and Win8.0 operating system, but does definitely not work with Win8.1. 

 

http://forum.avsim.net/topic/442403-looking-for-p3d2-users-on-windows-81/

 

More Information in the SweetFX Forum (Freeware Forums) here.

I know it works, it just kills my fps.

Sorry; my mistake, I should have read the full statement.

Disable HDR in P3D. I tried using sweetfx.  I found that HDR in the sim itself is amazing. You can tweak the HDR setting to your liking, making lighter, darker, transition speeds etc.