But what if I use my computer for other stuff beside flight simming? I have other games that I play and photoshop, will HT off make those run any worse, better or have no effect?

 

HT on is the "killer feature" of the i7. You pretty much turn your i7 into an i5 with HT off.

Daily use greatly benefits of HT on as you get better load on your cores.

 

It's up to you what to use

 

I have HT on and do not have any OOM issues at all - but with the cost that I disabled FTX Vector.

But what if I use my computer for other stuff beside flight simming? I have other games that I play and photoshop, will HT off make those run any worse, better or have no effect?

 

I tried the HT off thing last year (i7-4770) and it had no effect on P3D in my case.  I run HT on with an AffinityMask and get a much better outcome.  I think the HT off thing depends on your processor, it's not a guaranteed fix for VAS or performance issues for everyone.  That being said, with HT off my computer ran like crap so I had to turn it back on. 

 

You have to go back to the basics, you're running a lot of heavy stuff so there isn't a magic bullet to fix your issue.

I do not own orbx products, but have pretty descent payware sceneries like Münich, Kopenhagen and Wienna. I also fly the 777 between them regularly and have every slider in the scenery tab maxed. I also use AS2016 and fly on vatsim. HDR is on, shadows are off and all traffic is off. Screen Resolution is 1920x1200 and texture 2048x2048.

 

What I did in the beginning when I started flying the 777 is I turned off the external 3d model. I know it is a no go for a lot of simmers out there, but it is ok for me not to see the 3d model when simming. This apparently saves a couple of hundreds of VAS. Try turning off the ext 3d for the 777 and test your usual flight, hope that helps.

Turn HT off for VAS? Really? WOW! Not heard that one before! 

 

What has HT to do with VAS? 

 

For performance, if you have 6 cores maybe you could turn HT off to OC better...but HT helps in texture loading. I never liked the idea of turning off HT. It has not help me in any way with the 4 core processors. Except I can OC to one additional GHz. up.

I found that if I use ASN or any other weather addon it cuts my flying time in half so I use one of the default weather styles for long flights.  Also beware of aircraft that are resource hogs, some of them will eat memory like there is no tomorrow.

I love flying with everything turned on but alas, it's going to take a 64 bit sim to do this. Maybe next year.

 

Yesterday I flew my Stearman from Friday Harbor up the Skagit River valley to Concrete and then did some low level canyon flying past Mt Baker and then through the mountains to the North Fork of the Skaget River, and back to the coast via the river.  I got almost back to the coast before I heard the gong go off.  All of this took over 3 hours because I kept pausing to take screenshots of the wonderful scenery I was flying over.  

 

I am telling you this as an example of you can accomplish if you try.  Using a sim is a lot like eating a steak, you will choke if you take too large a bite. :smile: 

 

I fly P3D v3.3 on a decent machine.  I use Orbx scenery with almost all of the sliders at max flying low and slow so that I can enjoy the scenery that I have spent so much money on. 

 

I can tell by your aircraft choice that you like to fly fast and high from major airport to major airport so high detail scenery isn't that important but weather is.

You are going to have to use the old trial and error method to see what you can do without and what you need to do to accomplish your goals.

 

Just think of that OOM Gong as a system that is telling you that you are running out of fuel and that it's time to land and refuel.

 

Happy Flying 

 

Dale

I just wish there was a way where P3D can optimize things dynamically. For example, while on the ground or flying low, scenery will be very dense, and when getting above a certain altitude like FL200, the sim will somehow unload the autogen and change to lower resolution textures or mesh, and upon descending back down, it will load back the detail again. That way we can have beautiful and detailed scenery while on ground and at low altitudes and when we fly high, we will have the scenery unload so that we can get our performance back. Why can't it be dynamic in this sense.

 

 

I just wish there was a way where P3D can optimize things dynamically. For example, while on the ground or flying low, scenery will be very dense, and when getting above a certain altitude like FL200, the sim will somehow unload the autogen and change to lower resolution textures

 

I concur.

 

There is FSAltitude that does something like that....but I don't believe it solves the VAS issue. The P3D need to ignore secenry autogens etc if above 10K AGL and use a low resolution Phototextures or something,

 

 

With HT off you get a lot less VAS usage.

 

According to LM, HT on adds slightly to VAS load because of the extra process involved in managing additional threads. Nothing more, generally less than 200 MB. I'm running HT on most of the time, right now I happen to have it off testing something unrelated to VAS and I don't see a significant difference.

 

There are many things that add significantly more to VAS load than HT.... that's where the focus should be.

I just wish there was a way where P3D can optimize things dynamically. For example, while on the ground or flying low, scenery will be very dense, and when getting above a certain altitude like FL200, the sim will somehow unload the autogen and change to lower resolution textures or mesh, and upon descending back down, it will load back the detail again. That way we can have beautiful and detailed scenery while on ground and at low altitudes and when we fly high, we will have the scenery unload so that we can get our performance back. Why can't it be dynamic in this sense.

 

That's a lot of work for something a 64 bit process would take care of instantly.

According to LM, HT on adds slightly to VAS load because of the extra process involved in managing additional threads. Nothing more, generally less than 200 MB. I'm running HT on most of the time, right now I happen to have it off testing something unrelated to VAS and I don't see a significant difference.

 

There are many things that add significantly more to VAS load than HT.... that's where the focus should be.

 

I am also running HT on, with "normal" settings HT on should not be a problem. And you are right. There are others issues than HT on/off he should focus on :-)

Just wanted to bring back the old thread by Rob... a lot to read and a lot of information about HT vs VAS.

I just wish there was a way where P3D can optimize things dynamically. For example, while on the ground or flying low, scenery will be very dense, and when getting above a certain altitude like FL200, the sim will somehow unload the autogen and change to lower resolution textures or mesh, and upon descending back down, it will load back the detail again. That way we can have beautiful and detailed scenery while on ground and at low altitudes and when we fly high, we will have the scenery unload so that we can get our performance back. Why can't it be dynamic in this sense.

 

Fiber Accelerator does something like this, although I'm not really impressed with its performance in P3D--in FSX it made a difference.

 

Unlike FSX, P3Dv3 does unload scenery that's not in use.  But when you see crashes as you approach your destination, it's generally due to the loading of either the add-on scenery textures, or a heaping helping of AI planes (usually both).  ATM can help a lot...I run stock MT6 (no AI airplanes other than what's in the package) with AI traffic capped at 50 total acft.  It allows you to specify the dest/arrival airports, and it gives priority to traffic departing/arriving those fields when deciding which AI acft to cull from the herd.  Setting the traffic slider to realistic levels also prevents a huge surge in AI as you approach the field (for me 30-35% seems about right).  And if you do use 3rd party AI models, they need to be properly designed as AI planes, e.g. mip-mapped medium res textures, otherwise you're trying to render multiple copies of bloated full aircraft textures.

 

Also, cloud texture sizes can usually be turned down fairly low (1024x1024, even 512x512) with minimal impact to visual quality--clouds are *supposed* to be fuzzy!

 

As far as HT, you can leave it on with next to no impact on VAS by properly setting an affinity mask...for example AM=85 (01010101) on a 4-core CPU will let P3D use one virtual core on each of the physical cores, leaving the additional virtual cores available for use by processes outside the sim (e.g. OS tasks).  It looks--to P3D--the same as HT off.  Other processes using the virtual cores will not eat into the sim's VAS.

 

As an aside, I'm a bit sceptical of the "64-bit will cure all these ills" school of thought.  It might prevent OOMs, but it would do so at the risk of slamming the CPU/GPU with a lot more workload...right now the VAS limit serves as a regulating mechanism to keep designers of every aspect of the sim environment from throwing in everything including the kitchen sink, which would bring things to a crawl as processing power proves as much a bottleneck as VAS.  So having some efficiency forced on us isn't necessarily a bad thing.

 

P.S.  A few config settings (in Prepar3d.cfg) that you can try that might help with VAS issues are:

 

[sCENERY]

MaxRegionsPurgePerFrame=32

[TERRAIN]

UseGlobalTerrainView=True

[GRAPHICS]

ENABLE_MEMORY_OPTIMIZATION=1

 

 

 

Regards

P.S.  A few config settings (in Prepar3d.cfg) that you can try that might help with VAS issues are:

.......

 

[sCENERY]

MaxRegionsPurgePerFrame=32

 

......

 

 

 

Regards

 

Totally agree with the bulk of your argument Bob - but have to disagree with the 'MaxRegionsPurgePerFrame=32' recommendation? I tried that on my 'relatively clean' 4790k/980ti setup and it introduced serious,verifiable, stutters?  Dropped it back to the default 16 and the stutters vanished.   I know!! - and before others jump in .... this isn't a poll - simply my experience, on my rig, with said 'tweak'. YMMV.

Bob, thanks for the help. I haven't touched my .cfg file as I heard in the latest version of P3D it isn't necessary. I use to run those old same tweaks like I did in my FSX.cfg prior to P3D v3.3.5. I'll see if I can try setting the AM again.

 

I also think that Pro-ATC is eating up my VAS as well. I am using MT6 with my AI commercial slider set to 15% and GA set to 0%. So my settings are fairly low, and I'm still getting OOM. Even with ATM tool, it doesn't seem to be helping much if any at all. I'll have to try again later to see.

 

 

[GRAPHICS]

ENABLE_MEMORY_OPTIMIZATION=1

 

Never seen this before - wow is this new tweak?

Rob A. has been recommending this:

 

http://www.robainscough.com/P3D_Performance_Tuning.html