NickN now gives advise on tuning P3D

[Kuragiman 227]

Tested out his tweak guide settings and did a flight from KBNA-Nashville (Upgraded AFCAD) to Taxi2Gate's KMDW-Midway.

 

Positive Results

================

Very smooth overall performance with incredible levels of autogen.   Was previously unable to get any kind of smooth anything in the PMDG 737NGX with this level of detailed turned up.    I did notice the return of microstutters on my machine while at the airport itself with AI traffic moving around (which he does not use any of in his test).    Once away from the airport it was pretty smooth the entire way with 30-35 fps in VC and 45-60 outside the plane.   Overall, a noticeable difference in FPS and smoothness while piling on settings higher than I've ever used before.

 

Negative Results

===============

The reintroduction of black lines occasionally as shader/texture load in the distance occurs.  I have not seen that happen in a VERY long time.    

Micro stuttering at airports with AI traffic.   You can also see it in the ground vehicles moving around as they skip frames.  The aircraft itself while pushing back was fairly smooth but it is obviously P3D was sacrificing the smaller details like cars and stuff to get it.

Using just VERY DENSE autogen for trees and buildings with AI aircraft culled to no more than 30 on display at a given time, the short hour and half flight resulted in CTD from OOM right after touch down on runway 4R at KMDW much to my annoyance.  I have not OOM'd in forever in P3D until I applied Nick's tweaks.   Now granted, I push the tree draw distance out to it's max of 12000 meters. rather than the 9500 he has in his CFG file.

 

I run a 3930k i7 6-core OC to 4.6ghz with GTX 980 and 32 gigs of ram running at 1866mhz on a 10k RPM raptor drive.

 

Overall, a great flight but the ending was a sad frowny face.   I thought this would be IT.    Overall it worked very well but the high autogen with the PMDG 737 running at full tilt was more than the 32 bit environment could handle over Chicago on my setup.    Guess I'll scale the autogen back to Normal for both since even normal on both is still better than FSX DENSE.   Will play with it more.    Prior to his tweak guide, I had my FPS locked at 33 with V-Sync on and Triple Buffering on had ZERO stuttering.   I am going to scale back Autogen and turn those back on and see what happens.    His guide overall is a VERY good starting point for people looking for the perfect experience in P3D.

[Mickeyj 35]

Thanks Brian for testing it out. I read his recommendations over at simforums. I was wondering about cranking up the sliders that far. I mean trees have not much impact on performance than buildings have. Shadows on low or no is obvious that performance goes up all the way.

 

Anyway tonight when im home i give it a shot on my i7 5820k. BTW i will uninstall the NGX as it is a showstopper in current state of sim and model. After all that it is well made but the performance hit is quite to heavy for me despite the fact that i encounter 3-5 second freezes every 5 minutes. 

[Fi5kuS 57]

Tried it as well with overall good results. For some reason, much better performance when flying through clouds. 

 

Nonetheless, I need to nerf almost all setting to save VAS anyway.

[carlito777 712]

 

 

BTW i will uninstall the NGX as it is a showstopper in current state of sim and model

 

??? I get excellent frames between 25 - 50 fps even on airports like Aerosoft Heathrow Extended at 5910x1080 resolution. Sorry, but this general statement is not right. Might be that with your (maybe extreme) settings it is not working on your system. But I wouldn't express that as a general statement. The NGX is excellent and very smooth in P3D with the right settings.

[eminyilmaz 17]

When I get rid of nvidia inspector it becomes Commodore 64. Yes, I can keep 60 fps most of the time without nvidia inspector but I don't want to fly with those ugly jaggies and shimmers. How are we going to get a decent AA without nvidia inspector? 

[Peter Webber 339]

When I get rid of nvidia inspector it becomes Commodore 64. Yes, I can keep 60 fps most of the time without nvidia inspector but I don't want to fly with those ugly jaggies and shimmers. How are we going to get a decent AA without nvidia inspector? 

How can you talk of the C64 in that way? :rolleyes: It was my 1st intro to flight simulation....still have my software and C64 in it's box!

Regards..

[Mickeyj 35]

??? I get excellent frames between 25 - 50 fps even on airports like Aerosoft Heathrow Extended at 5910x1080 resolution. Sorry, but this general statement is not right. Might be that with your (maybe extreme) settings it is not working on your system. But I wouldn't express that as a general statement. The NGX is excellent and very smooth in P3D with the right settings.

 

Hi Carlo,

 

yes of course im definitely on your side. The NGX is a great product and it feels like a real jet liner. PMDG did a really good job on this. It depends everything on the "right" settings. The NGX and other tubes are not my type of flying anyway. I fly a tube in the real world. It is not a big thing for me to dump the NGX.

 

Please dont get me wrong here im enjoying P3D2 a lot as you can see that in my vids. What im trying to say is, that the sim and the hardware is still not ready for tubeliners+mega hubs+ai traffic etc to perform in a way that it will not crash due to OOM nor ending up in a slide show of less than 20 FPS. That is the reason why im staying away from all that HD eyecandy mega hub tube liner thing. So it is not only about the "right" settings it is also about the type of flying one prefers and enjoys IMHO.

[DylanM 1,069]

Negative Results

 

===============

 

The reintroduction of black lines occasionally as shader/texture load in the distance occurs. I have not seen that happen in a VERY long time.

 

Micro stuttering at airports with AI traffic.

 

Hey Brian, I tried out his settings for curiosity and had similar results. Good FPS, but the stutters were certainly more pronounced, likely because he is forcing a pseudo "unlimited frames" setting by using a low FFTF in combination with locked FPS @60. Keeping HT off likely isn't helping either.

 

Here's where I landed:

- Adopted his higher TBM setting of 80

- Removed the FFTF setting (letting the sim default back to 0.33)

- Kept my TextureMaxLoad setting of 15 (this prevents the black missing textures when panning)

- Kept my FPS unlocked

- Re-enabled Hyperthreading

 

On my new rig (admittedly which is now finally in the "fairly fast" group by today's standards), I get about the same FPS as with his settings, but back to the smoothness I had before.

[vc10man 732]

 

 

TBM

What is that and where do I find it in the CFG? Thanks.

[KingGhidorah 209]

tbm is TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT

[Richard Sennett 2,499]

Here's where I landed:

- Adopted his higher TBM setting of 80

 

 

I have TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT =110 - whats the difference between 80 and 110 ? thanks

[twharrell 38]

I respect Nick's contributions to flight simulation and glad he is on board with P3D. One thing to keep in mind, though, is he is using default airports and default aircraft. The only addons he is using are GEX and OpusFSI. Nothing wrong with that at all - he runs a lean system with minimal addons. So, mileage will vary with his recommended settings, as with any other tweak out there. If some benefit from his recommendations, then that is a good thing.

 

Also, I personally prefer HDR enabled. But I also know a lot of people who don't like it.

[Richard Sennett 2,499]

Theres no one answer but appreciate his efforts lots to learn from Nick thats for sure

[vc10man 732]

tbm is TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT

Thanks

[Kuragiman 227]

Hey Brian, I tried out his settings for curiosity and had similar results. Good FPS, but the stutters were certainly more pronounced, likely because he is forcing a pseudo "unlimited frames" setting by using a low FFTF in combination with locked FPS @60. Keeping HT off likely isn't helping either.

 

Here's where I landed:

- Adopted his higher TBM setting of 80

- Removed the FFTF setting (letting the sim default back to 0.33)

- Kept my TextureMaxLoad setting of 15 (this prevents the black missing textures when panning)

- Kept my FPS unlocked

- Re-enabled Hyperthreading

 

On my new rig (admittedly which is now finally in the "fairly fast" group by today's standards), I get about the same FPS as with his settings, but back to the smoothness I had before.

 

I actually was running HT On but I turned it off because I have a 6 core so I already have 2 extra cores for the sim to use.   I think this has solved some other issues too I was having in other games and also has my CPU running cooler and I even bumped up from 4.4 to 4.6ghz.    I returned to a TBM of 160 because the GTX 980 is a monster and can handle it and locked my frames back down to 33 with Triple Buffering and a V-Sync lock.    This seems to be the winning combo for me.   PMDG 737 is smooth as glass now, even with 30 AI aircraft clogging up the runways and taxiways.

 

In case anyone asks why do you lock at 33 well here is the explanation.     10% of 30 FPS is 33 FPS.    I give my PC a 10% work space to pre-render those Triple Buffered Frames (because I have Triple Buffering ticked on) so when it comes time to actually display them on screen none of my hardware actually has to wait for those frames.   It just pages them in while the next 3 frames get buffered in and so on and so forth and so I don't see any micro stuttering on my setup.    If your PC cannot consistently hit 30 FPS then you need to lower your Locked frames value to something you can achieve all the time (or turn down settings to get 30 FPS) and then tack on 10% to that number.    So if you can only ever get 25 FPS in the VC on the 737/777 then you would set your locked frames at 28.   If you can only do 20 FPS, then you lock it at 22, turn on V-Sync and Triple buffering and if your system is balanced you will see no micro stutters ever again unless it has to load new shaders it has never cached before.