P3D V3 pushing performance/VAS test videos

[jkeye 150]

Hi Rob

In the NGX video is that ProATC X you are using?

Are you able to use default ATC?

Jay

[Guest JustanotherPilot]

Here are some shots I took.  Settings maximum, still experimenting with HDR sliders to get correct color tone.

Addons in the shots Rex texture 4 direct and soft clouds ASN and AS A320, ORBX, EU and Norway. ProATC-X v1.7.2

System i7-4790K (not overclocked  - 4.0ghz), Radeon R7 270X GPU, 12gig DDR3 1600 ram, win 7 64 bit.

So far, 3 x  2 hour flights with no stuttering or lagging. The textures don't flicker and the load time seems to be instantaneous. The cloud issues present in v2.5 are gone, for those users with a high end graphics cards the experience would be more amazing. All in all - way,way different to P3D v2.5. Money well spent.

 

Steve S

 

Here are some shots I took.  Settings maximum, still experimenting with HDR sliders to get correct color tone.

Addons in the shots Rex texture 4 direct and soft clouds ASN and AS A320, ORBX, EU and Norway. ProATC-X v1.7.2

System i7-4790K (not overclocked  - 4.0ghz), Radeon R7 270X GPU, 12gig DDR3 1600 ram, win 7 64 bit.

So far, 3 x  2 hour flights with no stuttering or lagging. The textures don't flicker and the load time seems to be instantaneous. The cloud issues present in v2.5 are gone, for those users with a high end graphics cards the experience would be more amazing. All in all - way,way different to P3D v2.5. Money well spent.

 

[GSalden 4,655]

In v3 I now have the LOD one notch higher and no issues ....

I the coming weeks I will use Fsuipc VAS monitor and make lots of flights and push the settings each time a little higher....

When I find the max for my system I will set it a little less detailed and fly with that...

[Paul_ 52]

Hi Rob

 

Without putting a dampener on things  ... the rollout of the PMDG 737 video looked like it was suffering from micro stutters ... or is that caused by uploading to You Tube?

 

Regards

 

Paul

[Guest]

Paul, that's why I include FPS counter ... should be around 29-31 FPS for most of the videos with a couple of exceptions here and there.  YouTube processing can take a few days as it continues to improve quality and performance.  I could post the 737 NGX video on my Google driver for folks to download but it's a 3GB file, the 777 video is a 6.8GB file, but you'll need a good 4K mp4 player.  My recorded (ShadowPlay) files do look better than what you see on YouTube ... but ShadowPlay will compress while recording even at it's max quality setting ... then Adobe PP compresses more for MP4 file that YouTube can handle ... then YouTube will do it's own compression ... so by the time you see the footage it's gone thru 3 compression processes ... the simulated native experience is MUCH better.

 

Jay,

 

I have ProATCX but wasn't using it in these videos ... I don't expect it to have any impact as I used it in V2.5 without issue.  I was using listening to www.liveATC.net which is non-interactive but is real world.

 

Cheers, Rob.

Hi Rob,

 

did you change any settings in the CFG or in Nvidia ontrol panel, i use 8 SGSS with 4 or 8 msaa ( no difference ) in the ni at this moment and my displays are not so crisp..my card is a GTX980 and cpu 4790K oc to 4.9 so i have the room i think ...when i disable NI and use 8 msaa and ultra it s getting even worse ..monitor is 1920 32.

 

Thanks in advance ,

 

Gérard

 

Hi Gerard,

 

Not using SGSS AA (NI) in these videos, just 4K res and 8XMSAA all set in P3D.  The clarity is probably because I'm running 4K res and don't use FXAA (although FXAA can be pretty good are removing shimmers).  SGSS AA is obviously the best option but I would only do that if you are running SLI ... and SGSS AA also responds well to GPU Overclocking.

 

Cheers, Rob.

[Paul_ 52]

Thank you for explaining Rob  ....... 

 

I thought You Tube would be the culprit

 

Thank you for uploading

 

Paul 

[Guest]

Paul,

 

Not saying stutters still can't happen, they can ... really depends on the 3rd party product.  Like I said earlier if I turn MyTraffic 6 up, I get a lot of stutters ... I need to investigate this as it might just be something with my setup.

 

To clarify other questions about VAS testing ... in these videos you'll notice I make sure I'm flying at least two texture sets (Day and Night) in the same area during the same flight ... in some cases Dawn/Dusk and day/night.  This should have a more significant VAS "load" than doing a flight from A to B.  Other's have suggest that flying from A to B is a better VAS test, I'll disagree with that in V3.0.

 

A V3.0 base (no add-ons and using default aircraft) ... flight from A to B (same graphics settings I used in these videos) and my starting and end VAS will be within 200MB of each other (well below VAS limits).  So this tells me the VAS management from A to B is good.  If I start adding 3rd party products and the VAS pattern (note pattern, not the actual values) changes for A to B flight, then something "else" is happening.  I'm not going to suggest what that something else is but I can make folks aware of what happens when the Prepar3d.cfg is "tweaked" (keep in mind I've tested many tweaks and I use none of them in my normal flights in V3.0).

 

Common tweaks (and even listed in the P3D learning center):

 

1.  SWAP_WAIT_TIMEOUT

2.  TextureMaxLoad

3.  FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION

4.  PANEL_MAX_UPDATE_PER_FRAME

5.  AffinityMask

6.  MaxRegionsPurgePerFrame  (not sure if this one is in the learning center)

 

And more undocumented tweaks that can increase Autogen Radius, improve shadow quality, etc. etc. 

 

How these all play on VAS is important ... the very common FFTF tweak that improves FPS but at the possible cost or terrain LOD (aka blurries) also impacts the RELEASE of resources over time.  Reduce the amount of time you give a process affects the entire process which also affects not only loading of resource, but releasing of resources.  The removal of tiles/textures doesn't happen "immediately" it's removed over time and is "queued" up for removal because the de-allocation process is slow (read stutters) hence the need to spread the removal of resources over time.  As you can guess, if the removal process is slower than the tasks being added to the removal queue, VAS will start to be consumed over time (flight duration) and never reduce.  This is probably why we see such a variance in VAS consumption over flight distances as people have different "tweaks", different "hardware", and different add-ons/settings that will all impact the removal of tiles and recovering VAS.

 

If this is your case in V3.0 then I'd recommend you:

 

1.  Remove any "tweaks" you've done to your Prepar3D.cfg

2.  See what happens on the VAS front

3.  If VAS still just keeps going up and up, then adjust the MaxRegionsPurgePerFrame (default = 16) ... higher values should purge memory faster but at the cost of possible long frames (really depends on your PC's performance).

 

Something to think about.

 

Cheers, Rob.

[Skywolf 992]

MaxRegionsPurgePerFrame - Thanks Rob

 

This is awesome, one could increase it little bit with fast pc and push the VAS.  Excellent, I will need to test this one out later in the next few days

[pgde 571]

Here are some shots I took.  Settings maximum, still experimenting with HDR sliders to get correct color tone.

Addons in the shots Rex texture 4 direct and soft clouds ASN and AS A320, ORBX, EU and Norway. ProATC-X v1.7.2

System i7-4790K (not overclocked  - 4.0ghz), Radeon R7 270X GPU, 12gig DDR3 1600 ram, win 7 64 bit.

So far, 3 x  2 hour flights with no stuttering or lagging. The textures don't flicker and the load time seems to be instantaneous. The cloud issues present in v2.5 are gone, for those users with a high end graphics cards the experience would be more amazing. All in all - way,way different to P3D v2.5. Money well spent.

 

Hi:

 

I have the same level of graphics card that you do. What are your graphics, etc settings? All people post are Nivdia settings...

 

Thx

 

P.

[Afterburner 374]

 

MyTraffic 6 seems to have a huge impact on FPS ... no sure why as standard AI traffic doesn't ... even at only 5% AI I got more aircraft than I expected and in some cases the AI settings seemed to be ignored and almost 80% AI at KSFO HD?  So I need to do a little work here and see what's going on with MyTraffic 6.

 

 

 

It is typical for MyTraffic to generate very large amounts of traffic, even when the slider is set low. I use MT 5.4B for FSX and P3Dv3 and also see a lot of traffic at most airports at low settings.

 

As far as the impact of AI Traffic on FPS, you might be interested in checking my FPS comparison by different configurations in one of my earlier posts: http://www.avsim.com/topic/462647-mytraffic-v6-for-p3d-inbound/page-12#entry3219366

 

Unfortunately, MT6 doesn't offer the option to select low-quality textures any more, which saved a lot of FPS on my system.

[Guest]

 

I have the same level of graphics card that you do. What are your graphics, etc settings? All people post are Nivdia settings...

 

 

 

P3D graphics settings are at the end of each video.  nVidia settings are all default for Prepar3d.exe ... NI was not used in these videos.

 

Cheers, Rob.

[Nyxx 6,993]

When using MT6 use traffic manager it's free and works very well, kills all unnecessary aircraft and gives back fps

[pgde 571]

P3D graphics settings are at the end of each video.  nVidia settings are all default for Prepar3d.exe ... NI was not used in these videos.

 

Cheers, Rob.

 

Hi Rob:

 

Thanks for the reply. I was actually asking @JustanotherPilot about his settings since we have the same family of cards.

 

And, thanks so much for all the information you have provided. I made the switch to P3d v3 and am much happier Your insights and information really helped.

 

P.

[Richard Sennett 2,499]

Super Rob - V3 is a beautiful thing 

[michaelray 236]

 

 

MyTraffic 6 seems to have a huge impact on FPS ... no sure why as standard AI traffic doesn't ... even at only 5% AI I got more aircraft than I expected and in some cases the AI settings seemed to be ignored and almost 80% AI at KSFO HD?  So I need to do a little work here and see what's going on with MyTraffic 6.

 

 

Thank you for the effort you put into the videos Rob.

 

I am seeing a huge difference with MT6 in P3DV3 compared to P3DV2.5. With V2.5 I had MT6 @ 30% and Traffic Manager @ 40 aircraft. At this setting I felt I still had plenty of headroom.

 

In V3 I am back to MT6 @ 20% and Traffic Manager @ 20 aircraft and this is still right on the limit of causing stutters. I am hoping that down the track I can find a solution for this.

 

Michael M