P3D-Newbie now on "cruise level" and some questions...

[Franz007 482]

Hi to all

 

Now that i become more confident with P3D, i'm having a few questions and i hope someone can help me answer them. As a brand new User i posted the first part here 10 days ago:

 

http://www.avsim.com/topic/494299-x-plane-user-new-to-p3d/

 

In the meantime i installed around 20 airport scenerys from Flytampa, ORBX, Fsdreamteam and Tax2Gate. I also own the PMDG 737 and 777.

 

Here my specific questions i have so far after 10 days of experience flying with P3D:

 

1) I have installed the whole ORBX base scenery and also FTX Vector. Since i hade 2-3 OOM's today, i tried deactivating FTX Vector in the Scenery Library. For example, during one of the OOM's, i had 400 MB of VAS left as my PMDG 777 was parked at Toronto Flytampa (GSX was loading the aircraft) -> OOM! After that i restarted the sim and deactivated FTX Vector. And it gave me around 1GB of VAS left (that mean 600 MB more!). And i did not see any visual difference...so was it a behaviour you would recommand me in such cases? Or should i try something first to prevent an OOM?

 

2) When approaching heavy sceneries like Aerosoft EGLL and having my framerates going down from 40-50 (in flight) to 20 or below, what can i change in the rendering options to have better FPS? For example in X-Plane i could change the HDR from 4xSSAA+FXAA to 2x and it immediately gave me 12-15 fps more. And deactivating water-reflections gave some 5-8 fps more! With P3D i can't see any diffference! Even if i reduce the texture filtering or the MSAA the FPS won't change. And worst the FPS dont change as well if i reduce the scenery details. Or they will only change a very little bit, let's say around 5 FPS. So my question is: which option can i reduce to gain some FPS at heavy scenerys?

 

3) SInce i'm having a powerfuld GPU (Nvidia 6GB Titan) but an i7700K with "only" 3.5 Ghz, what settings do you recommand me to use? I guess it would make sense to put a lot of workload on the GPU? And what about the textures? Can i use the maximum textures without having to worry about or will those textures also be loaded inside the RAM of P3D, making it dangerous because of OOM's? When i observe the load of my GPU with P3D it is only filled with 2GB (even with the highest resolution). So is there a way to make more use of the big amount of VRAM or doesn't it make sense because of the 32-Bit limitation of P3D?

 

I would really appreciate some help.

 

Thanks very much and best regards

Franz

[downscc 1,327]

1)  I experienced an OOM error months ago with what I thought was plenty of VAS remaining and learned there are several explanations.  For example, the amount remaining might not be contiguous and  the largest free block is smaller than what needs to be loaded.  More recently with v3.3 I've seen remaining VAS numbers get very small but P3D is diligently albeit slowly freeing up space.  As for Vector, you need to deactivate the eye candy you don't see from flight levels such as small streams, power lines, etc.  Some will only enable major highways but I am a little more generous.  I've found the biggest VAS killers are a few add on airports that include a lot of photoscenery.  FlyTampa is guilty of this, for example Montreal has a single photo bgl that is 450MB in size, which will promise an OOM error if remaining is low.  I always turn those off.

 

2) IMHO get rid of Aerosoft EGLL.  The scenery alone is 4.5GB and VAS is only 4GB, 'nough said.  The UK2000 is not as "pretty" but it works very well.

 

3) See Rob's AVSIM Guide to Prepar3D for explanation of which settings are GPU centric and which are CPU.  And by the way, my 6GB 980Ti will run anywhere between 2.5-3.5 GB when working...just depends. 

[ryanbatc 12,836]

Looks like you jumped into it lol.  You'll have to adjust some settings if you're going to run VAS crushing addons (anything Orbx, big name payware airports, PMDG etc).

 

I'd first drop autogen to dense, then try changing texture resolution to 1m.  You're going to lose the uber sharp ground textures but it should help with the VAS.  What you might do is save a certain settings config as "AddonHeavy" - something to easily change to when you're flying in those areas.

 

As far as fps - 20 is typical for your non overclocked CPU.  You'll want to basically OC as much as possible and say in the 4.3 - 4.5 range you should be able to get 26-30 fps.   If you have any AI traffic disable that too - is a CPU heavy item.

 

As for your last question - P3D is still VERY demanding of the CPU.  It's not as optimized like XP for the GPU usage.  OCing will help the most for more fps.  OOM's in a nutshell are caused from many textures loading... so 4096x4096 textures and sharp detailed scenery/planes/cloud layers etc.  For some reason Autogen is a VAS hog too in P3D.

[virtualstuff 758]

Hi to all

 

Now that i become more confident with P3D, i'm having a few questions and i hope someone can help me answer them. As a brand new User i posted the first part here 10 days ago:

 

http://www.avsim.com/topic/494299-x-plane-user-new-to-p3d/

 

I would really appreciate some help.

 

Thanks very much and best regards

Franz

 

Below is a guideline which could be helpful when flying complex airliners:

 

Just enable the only few items mentioned here below in FTX vector and disable the rest (it's a vas hog ;-))

- High ways

- Primary roads

- Beaches

- The rest off not selected run the automatic configuration after those settings and when finished click apply.

- Don't use any form of SSAA kills your frames especially in overcast with clouds ;-)

- Dynamic reflections at this point is FPS hungry at higher settings....

- Use tessalation at full max settings (relieves your CPU)

- Don't use Road traffic

- Water settings...

- Autogen (remember P3D will have so much more data as FSX ever had with the same settings

- Careful with AI settings (VAS load and FPS cost)

- Use HT with a correct affinity mask for your system and O/C your CPU above 4ghz

- Texture size max 2048 or with those large airports I would even go to 1024 ;-) 4096 is insane and just asking for OOM no matter what hardware you have...

 

- Flytampa airport the larger ones disable 3d people/3d grass/taxi edge lights

 

You will notice with the above there aren't OOMs even flying the 777 into Toronto

[ryanbatc 12,836]

In other words, what Andre is saying (and I agree), is even with our monster PC's today we must turn down settings because of VAS issues.

[Franz007 482]

Hi Guys

 

Thanks very much for your answrs! I will try what you said and lower some texture/resolutions or scenerys.

 

Cheers

Franz

[Franz007 482]

A little remark: it's strange but i dont have many problems with Aerosoft EGLL as mentionned above. With the PMDG 737 i got around 1.4GB of VAS left howing and with sligtly reduced settings i'm having 28-38 fps (looking from the cockpit without power on).

 

The biggest problem by far i 'm having is at YMML from ORBX! Even with lower texture resolutions i got OOM's almost each time.

[cannow 61]

Egll can work fine just not with ftx england uk2000 offering is slightly better on vas an much better on fps when i use egll and heavy i completely deactivate vector and ftx england and just have lc europe though somewhere around the lam vor vas can jump by up to 500mb never isolated the issue . If i keep my eyes closed dont lookout the window i may safely leave uk airspace . A restart essential though though before landing if landing at a payware airport to clear out vas.gives you also a chance to reactivate vector ,

[swiesma 625]

With my last reinstall I left away Vector and did not have any OOM issues (and other strange CTDs) ever since.

[Franz007 482]

In the meantime i discovered that the only airport that was causing huge VAS-problems (YMML from ORBX) could be fixed on a very easy way. The huge amount of VAS was causing by the option "3D grass". If i switch that option off, i get around 1.2-1.3 GB of VAS left with a PMDG 737 (before it was around 300-400 MB and very close to an OOM). That's a huge difference!

 

I just dont understand why ORBX don't deactivate that option on default, since it seems the airport cant be used as a default by any of the PMDG-aircrafts, even with very low texture-resolutions. But it's good to know what the problem was :smile: