Hi All,

 

With more and more simmers trying P3D and feeling a little lost with setting up the in sim sliders, NVidia Control Panel settings, and general tweaking I thought I would take a shot at providing a framework to help these new P3D simmers. It can feel a little daunting migrating off of one sim platform onto another and even though at its core, P3D is FSX it's still a new platform and getting to know the nuances of it takes time and comes with a lot of frustration. Rather than post up all my screen shots in a forum thread, I've created a PDF file and saved it to DropBox - P3D Settings PDF

 

This doc is by no means complete and as the title states, this is a START and contains the settings that work best on my system but given the settings are what most would consider conservative my hope is it will give folks struggling with what to tweak a good stable base to build upon. I'll keep adding to it based on what I find in the various forms and with the help of the community as a whole so enjoy the doc and please, post any questions, comments or suggestions right here and I'll update as needed.

 

Thanks,

 

Mike

You have to log into drop box to see it?

You have to log into drop box to see it?

 

I'm fixing that right now!

Mike that a really useful document to have and I have downloaded it and saved it. Will send a copy to my brother as he has just converted to P3D from FSX.

 

Thanks very much for the time and effort.

 

Pete

Hi Mike, great idea and thanks for taking the time. I have just gone through the whole same migration & setting up process myself, and it is indeed very confusing and involves a lot of trial and error. Not helped by the somewhat vague explanations on the LM tuning guide page ( For example, the TextureMaxLoad=6 setting - they say "it's great for photoscenery", but don't elaborate or tell how the variables work or what the range of settings is...) I now have my install running very nicely, at around 50 - 60 FPS, with Rex textures, ASN, VRS superbug and high settings, but it took me several frustrating days of changing stuff....

 

I had a couple of questions after looking at your cfg file entries; ( bear in mind I run photoscenery only) 

 

texturemaxload  what made you pick 30? What is the effect? I have mine in at 6 as per their guide but did not notice any real effect...

 

TBM - I see you have it at 400 - I use this setting in FSX when using photoscenery or tile proxy and it helps massively with the loading of crsip max res tiles. How did you arrive at this setting? Does not seem to have the same effect in P3d. I think this is tied in to the LOD radius setting, which is locked at 6.5 in P3d. For me, in  FSX, I can run at 10.5 and this gives crystal clear tiles all around ( I have a beast PC & a 4K monitor) I see in your settings page you have the LOD radius set midway, why is that? The one issue I do have in P3d is that there are noticeably low res tiles much nearer than in FSX and I can't seem to change this, no matter what I tweak....

 

Affinity mask - I also have a 6 core CPU, did you find any noticeable improvement using this? 

 

Why don't you run water at Ultra - you don't get the wave effects unless you do.......

 

There are certainly some entries in there I will try , thanks again

 

 

 

 

Mike that a really useful document to have and I have downloaded it and saved it. Will send a copy to my brother as he has just converted to P3D from FSX.

 

Thanks very much for the time and effort.

 

Pete

 

Thanks Pete! Keep an eye on this thread as there's going to be some more updates today to the doc.

 

Hi Mike, great idea and thanks for taking the time. I have just gone through the whole same migration & setting up process myself, and it is indeed very confusing and involves a lot of trial and error. Not helped by the somewhat vague explanations on the LM tuning guide page ( For example, the TextureMaxLoad=6 setting - they say "it's great for photoscenery", but don't elaborate or tell how the variables work or what the range of settings is...) I now have my install running very nicely, at around 50 - 60 FPS, with Rex textures, ASN, VRS superbug and high settings, but it took me several frustrating days of changing stuff....

 

I had a couple of questions after looking at your cfg file entries; ( bear in mind I run photoscenery only) 

 

texturemaxload  what made you pick 30? What is the effect? I have mine in at 6 as per their guide but did not notice any real effect...

 

TBM - I see you have it at 400 - I use this setting in FSX when using photoscenery or tile proxy and it helps massively with the loading of crsip max res tiles. How did you arrive at this setting? Does not seem to have the same effect in P3d. I think this is tied in to the LOD radius setting, which is locked at 6.5 in P3d. For me, in  FSX, I can run at 10.5 and this gives crystal clear tiles all around ( I have a beast PC & a 4K monitor) I see in your settings page you have the LOD radius set midway, why is that? The one issue I do have in P3d is that there are noticeably low res tiles much nearer than in FSX and I can't seem to change this, no matter what I tweak....

 

Affinity mask - I also have a 6 core CPU, did you find any noticeable improvement using this? 

 

Why don't you run water at Ultra - you don't get the wave effects unless you do.......

 

There are certainly some entries in there I will try , thanks again

 

Hi Mark,

 

I feel your frustration! The LM team have a great opportunity to make their Learning Center so much better and all it needs is someone to invest a little time to elaborate on some of the settings they published. Given the option, I would rather they spend their time and energy on developing and fixing what's still broke.

 

To answer your questions:

 

• texturemaxload  what made you pick 30? - Part of it had to do with what was already in my FSX.cfg file so when I started adding in the LM suggested tweaks, I tried to research each one to see what the benefit was and what that specific setting was attempting to "fix". There are quite a few threads between Avsim and the P3D forums stating higher values, in multiples of 3 were having a positive impact on stuttering. For some, the sweet spot was 27, for me it was 30.
• TBM - This value can be debated and I've seen values range from the default 40 to 160 and read on one German forum values in the thousands. I ran with the default value of 40 for a week and what I noticed was in turns there was noticeable stuttering and and overall lagginess. I tried 160 based on a thread Rob Ainscough started on the P3D forums so throwing caution to the wind I added an extra 0 to the 40 and the results were very positive. If I reduce the number back to the default value, I notice it right away. Having said all this, that number may not work for everyone so if 400 doesn't give you good results, try lower settings.
• Affinity mask - The jury is still out on this one. On one hand, LM has it published on their Learning Center yet on the other hand, there are several forum posts stating this isn't needed anymore. I put the value in my .cfg file but I need to perform some more in-depth testing to see if it makes any gains.
• water at Ultra - Perched in the pointy end of the aircraft at FL370 water looks the same to me using medium or ultra    I don't typically fly low and slow or in a float plane so I reduced the value to the middle of the range to allow me to up some other settings that are more "important" to me and to also give me the best visuals/performance. As I mentioned above, my settings can be considered conservative to some and all I want to provide are "base" settings from which folks can build upon.

Thanks for the questions and if you have any more, please post them up!

 

Mike

Hey Mike thank for the explanations. I like to fly low and slow in GA planes or low & fast in the superbug! hence my obsession with the scenery looking good.......

 

I used to use Tileproxy when flying FSX and that set your TBM at 400 automatically, ( obviously no autogen) and it certainly had a very noticeable effect. What is not clear from LM,  is why for example, they have locked the LOD radius at 6.5 and also how these variables in the cfg all interact with each other -IE, if you change one, do you need to change another to see best effect. It's clear there is still a lot to learn - hopefully the guys at LM will keep the information flowing, as certainly, "a little knowledge is dangerous" in this situation. 

 

It's really pure luck I have ended up with what I consider acceptable performance and scenery loading so it very much still trial and error, with a large amount of contradictory and confusing stuff on the various boards. 

 

Keep up the good work! 

This doc is by no means complete and as the title states, this is a START and contains the settings that work best on my system but given the settings are what most would consider conservative my hope is it will give folks struggling with what to tweak a good stable base to build upon.

 

Hi Mike.

Appreciate your input but a lot of your settings seem just too arbitrary

to be relevant as a general guide.

 

Allow me to fire a few shots:

 

Most simmers complain about the LOD being too low in P3D even at  the Max setting yet you have it set only to High.

Texture Resolution=4096. Just too high for most and a VAS killer.

Mesh Resolution=19m. Too low for most. Eg Orbx scenery needs 5m.

Given the problems most of us have with AA and clouds your Max Cloud Coverage Density is not going to help.

Apart from airport vehicles you have no other AI at all. This would make your settings here irrelevant for 90% of simmers I guess.

Supersampling AA does not work in P3D with Nvidia cards yet you have set SSAA on in both NV control panel and the p3d.cfg.

 

Your p3d.cfg tweeking values are worth investigating but otherwise I don't see much advantage if any of your P3D in game settings over default as a starting point for most people.

 

gb.

Wow. Thanks I guess for the constructive feed back. In your entire post you choose to pick apart things yet don't really offer up anything to help the spirit of the doc and that's to contribute to make it better. Well, it's easy enough to delete a doc from Dropbox considering it's of no value.

 

m

Wow. Thanks I guess for the constructive feed back. In your entire post you choose to pick apart things yet don't really offer up anything to help the spirit of the doc and that's to contribute to make it better. Well, it's easy enough to delete a doc from Dropbox considering it's of no value.

 

m

 

Sorry Mike, did not mean to offend, but as you are a 13 year veteran here

I thought you could take a bit of flack.

 

Truth is all these P3D settings and tweaks have been analyzed to death here and the

conclusion is mostly "may work for you, try it and see" or "lets wait for the next update".

 

gb.