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Rocky_53

P3D and my initial thoughts

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Hmmm, OK, well don't shoot me down guys. I know I'm going to be a single voice swimming against the tide. Today I finally managed to install P3D for the third time. The previous two times each ended, mainly because of frustration brought about by me not investing enough time and patience. Today, I have spent about 6- 8 hours trying in vain to get something that resembles the awesome performance and look of my FSX-SE installation. I have tried just about every combination of settings off various posts on Avsim, followed the P3D installation guides and tweaked and untweaked the cfg. So far I am extremely disappointed and unimpressed. I have had stutters, mainly due to abysmal framerates, that only disappear when flying in anything other than average urban sceneries. The water looks like crap, all the scenery looks soft, not sharp at all, the shimmering is just intolerable and to put a nail in the coffin, for some reason, when I drag windows onto my second monitor, the whole sim's performance drops through the floor, to a point where it's impossible to fly! With an i7 6700 running at 4.2Gz (soon to be 4.6 hopefully) separate SSD's, a GTX 770 4Gb and 16Gb 32000Mhz RAM, it's hardly asking for the world to actually manage to get the thing to function half decently. Perhaps I may persevere, but I find it difficult to believe that once I install the rest of all my addons I can improve the look and performance. Unsure what is going on with the second monitor though. Very disapointed at this time  :sad:


Howard
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Strange, you should be only one in thousands who are using P3D without any of the issues you're experimenting. Probably P3D is not for you and you should stay with FSX.

Good luck,

Ed

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Cheers, Ed

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And when you finally get it to resemble something like you want, you'll find yourself OOM'ing on Finals into any Payware airport you choose to land at.  My Specs are higher than yours - 980ti, and even turning down sliders to normal and using 1024 textures still results in a failed flight.

 

My last three filghts between one and three hours were a heartbreaking waste of time.

 

So, i've switched to XP11.  It has great potential and I know that every flight will end when I choose.

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Hi Rockliffe,

 

don't give up. My system is actually worse than yours (GTX 660, i7 3820, no SSD, same RAM), and yet I have a very enjoyable experience with P3D. One thing to realize is that P3D settings are not comparable to FSX settings. FSX autogen extreme is more like P3D normal in terms of the number of buildings and trees.

 

Peter

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Hi Rockliffe,

 

don't give up. My system is actually worse than yours (GTX 660, i7 3820, no SSD, same RAM), and yet I have a very enjoyable experience with P3D. One thing to realize is that P3D settings are not comparable to FSX settings. FSX autogen extreme is more like P3D normal in terms of the number of buildings and trees.

 

Peter

Hi Peter, in fairness, I tried different autogen slider settings and surprisingly they made very little difference to performance. Have you any idea why I cannot use the second monitor?


Howard
MSI Mag B650 Tomahawk MB, Ryzen7-7800X3D CPU@5ghz, Arctic AIO II 360 cooler, Nvidia RTX3090 GPU, 32gb DDR5@6000Mhz, SSD/2Tb+SSD/500Gb+OS, Corsair 1000W PSU, Philips BDM4350UC 43" 4K IPS, MFG Crosswinds, TQ6 Throttle, Fulcrum One Yoke
My FlightSim YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@skyhigh776

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And when you finally get it to resemble something like you want, you'll find yourself OOM'ing on Finals into any Payware airport you choose to land at.  My Specs are higher than yours - 980ti, and even turning down sliders to normal and using 1024 textures still results in a failed flight.

 

My last three filghts between one and three hours were a heartbreaking waste of time.

 

So, i've switched to XP11.  It has great potential and I know that every flight will end when I choose.

 

Sorry to see you have those issues. I successfully complete all of my flights, and recently made a nice one from KBOS (Boston) to OMDB (Dubai) on a PMDG B777, about 11 hrs, without issues. But anyway, don't get upset, because LM will be releasing shortly a hotfix 2 for P3D v3.4.14 that looks aggressively to resolve those OOMs you're suffering from, according to the recent news at P3D website.

Good luck, Ed

  • Upvote 1

Cheers, Ed

MSFS Steam - Win10 Home x64 // Rig: Corsair Graphite 760T Full Tower - ASUS MBoard Maximus XII Hero Z490 - CPU Intel i9-10900K - 64GB RAM - MSI RTX2080 Super 8GB - [1xNVMe M.2 1TB + 1xNVMe M.2 2TB (Samsung)] + [1xSSD 1TB + 1xSSD 2TB (Crucial)] + [1xSSD 1TB (Samsung)] + 1 HDD Seagate 2TB + 1 HDD Seagate External 4TB - Monitor LG 29UC97C UWHD Curved - PSU Corsair RM1000x - VR Oculus Rift // MSFS Steam - Win 10 Home x64 - Gaming Laptop CUK ASUS Strix - CPU Intel i7-8750H - 32GB RAM - RTX2070 8GB - SSD 2TB + HDD 2TB // Thrustmaster FCS & MS XBOX Controllers

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Howard, when you say 'use a second monitor' do you mean as an extra space to put things? i.e. GPS, Weather reports etc. Or do you mean as an extension of the panel/cockpit type of thing?

 

It irritated me for a while that I couldn't just drag the GPS pop-up across, but now I have got used to undocking and dragging.

 

As for the looks of P3D I confess it was a long process, interspersed with uninstalling P3D, before I got it to where I like it. Now I rarely use FSX.

Don't try too hard mate. Remember, softly, softly catchee monkey. :smile: Set it back to default and change a bit at a time.

 

P.S. I still don't like the aircraft selection window. I like to peruse the thumbnails ans say "Mmm, I'll take that one"

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Hmmm, OK, well don't shoot me down guys. I know I'm going to be a single voice swimming against the tide. Today I finally managed to install P3D for the third time. The previous two times each ended, mainly because of frustration brought about by me not investing enough time and patience. Today, I have spent about 6- 8 hours trying in vain to get something that resembles the awesome performance and look of my FSX-SE installation. I have tried just about every combination of settings off various posts on Avsim, followed the P3D installation guides and tweaked and untweaked the cfg. So far I am extremely disappointed and unimpressed. I have had stutters, mainly due to abysmal framerates, that only disappear when flying in anything other than average urban sceneries. The water looks like crap, all the scenery looks soft, not sharp at all, the shimmering is just intolerable and to put a nail in the coffin, for some reason, when I drag windows onto my second monitor, the whole sim's performance drops through the floor, to a point where it's impossible to fly! With an i7 6700 running at 4.2Gz (soon to be 4.6 hopefully) separate SSD's, a GTX 770 4Gb and 16Gb 32000Mhz RAM, it's hardly asking for the world to actually manage to get the thing to function half decently. Perhaps I may persevere, but I find it difficult to believe that once I install the rest of all my addons I can improve the look and performance. Unsure what is going on with the second monitor though. Very disapointed at this time  :sad:

 

Sounds like my experience! Cured most of the stuttering with some tweaking. I can still only do VFR flights with it. Airliners are just out of the question.

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Your 770 GPU is obsolescent.  I knew when I had one that it wouldn't cut it with P3D.  I purchased a Titan X two years ago and am as happy with P3D as anyone could be.

 

Jim

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Recommend you check out the AVSIM P3D Guide which provides information on configuring, etc.  Overclocking your system is one major reason for crashes/freezes and other issues with P3D (stuttering, blurries, etc., etc).  Whenever you get crashes, suspect a bad overclock first and go back to the Optimal Defaults in the BIOS (3.8 or 3.9GHz which is fast enough IMHO).  So, if you are crashing with textures at 1024 and settings at normal or below normal, it is your overclock that is killing your enjoyment.  Overclocking is not for intermediate computer users but should be left for experts.  If you set your overclocked settings to auto and did not touch your voltages (as I have done and done by ASUS experts on YouTube, your system will eventually crash).  If a CPU voltage is too high or too low, the computer system will crash when P3D throws a sudden massive usage of the CPU or GPU (with the ntdll.dll as the likely faulting module). It is the only explanation as to why the OP and many others with great systems crash with modest/conservative settings and many others, with the same or lessor system specs, have no issues whatsoever.  When you overclock and your system is not properly cooled or your PSU is not powerful enough or you have a bad BIOS setting, that's all it takes.  It doesn't always happen all of the time but just on certain flights or situations.  That's why you just cannot figure out why, with a powerful computer system and low P3D settings, P3D crashes or freezes up.  P3D and FSX were not exactly written/coded for modern computer systems and the sims use a lot of resources depending on the flight session and what is loaded.  So, go back to Optimal Defaults in your BIOS when you have a sudden unexplained crash or freeze. 

 

Best regards,

Jim


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P.S. I still don't like the aircraft selection window. I like to peruse the thumbnails ans say "Mmm, I'll take that one"

If there is one thing I dislike from P3D is the menu. I prefer the FSX way of displaying the aircraft selection. Also not being able to go to the Scenery library and the sim settings.

One thing that I really like is the fact that you can create/save different .cfg files.

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Moved from FSX to P3D, and you couldn't pay me enough money to go back to FSX. I fly an average of at least 2 hours a day, all kinds of add ons running, i5 processor and a GTX 750 ti and almost 40 fps , many times more. Something is wrong with your system, I am afraid. By the way, I haven't had a crash in many months, and very few before that, which were mostly due to add on fixes not being implemented. 

 

Oh , I almost forgot,  number of tweaks that I use    Try ZERO!!!

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Hey, steady on Jim. As you will see from the system specs in my 'signature' I have quite a decent build where the CPU has been overclocked automatically using an Asus utility and the only crashes I have ever experienced over the past year are related to graphics drivers - manifest as a system freeze (+ message) which resets itself within a couple of minutes back to the desktop. I think I can count the number of instances on one hand. Otherwise the rig is rock solid stable.

 

Not saying you are wrong, but I would be looking at system memory as being the likely culprit before suspecting anything else.

 

Regards,

Mike

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Hi Peter, in fairness, I tried different autogen slider settings and surprisingly they made very little difference to performance. Have you any idea why I cannot use the second monitor?

Hello Howard,

 

sorry, I never tried to use two monitors. From what I have read you may need a modern graphics card for that, or two of them.

 

Peter

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Hmmm, OK, well don't shoot me down guys. I know I'm going to be a single voice swimming against the tide. Today I finally managed to install P3D for the third time. The previous two times each ended, mainly because of frustration brought about by me not investing enough time and patience. Today, I have spent about 6- 8 hours trying in vain to get something that resembles the awesome performance and look of my FSX-SE installation. I have tried just about every combination of settings off various posts on Avsim, followed the P3D installation guides and tweaked and untweaked the cfg. So far I am extremely disappointed and unimpressed. I have had stutters, mainly due to abysmal framerates, that only disappear when flying in anything other than average urban sceneries. The water looks like crap, all the scenery looks soft, not sharp at all, the shimmering is just intolerable and to put a nail in the coffin, for some reason, when I drag windows onto my second monitor, the whole sim's performance drops through the floor, to a point where it's impossible to fly! With an i7 6700 running at 4.2Gz (soon to be 4.6 hopefully) separate SSD's, a GTX 770 4Gb and 16Gb 32000Mhz RAM, it's hardly asking for the world to actually manage to get the thing to function half decently. Perhaps I may persevere, but I find it difficult to believe that once I install the rest of all my addons I can improve the look and performance. Unsure what is going on with the second monitor though. Very disapointed at this time  :sad:

I recommend you load a GPU monitoring porogram, like eVGA's PrecisionX or equivalent, and have a look at your GPU utilization.  If it's consistently above 85%, and I'll bet it is, odds are good that you'll be in stutter city, as the GPU isn't keeping up.  And a 770 isn't likely ever going to keep up very well trying to feed a 2560x1600 monitor, and doubly so with additional monitors hanging off of it.  I long ago gave up on the aggravation of multiple monitor madness in FSX and P3D, and now anything that needs to run other than the sim is on either a second PC or one of several iPads.  TBH, I think the GTX970 is the minimum I'd consider with P3D using a regular HD 1920x1080 monitor...and the SHD Dell you're running needs the GPU to push close to double the bandwidth compared with the HD monitor.

 

Yup, default P3D water sucks.  As does default FSX water.  Rex4 textures are my solution to that.  Blurry scenery is probably incident to the GPU shortfalls just mentioned.  And FTX Global makes an enormous difference in IQ just as it (or GEX) did in FSX.

 

P3D's strongest selling point is its ability to offload a lot of the heavy floating-point lifting from the CPU to the graphics subsystem.  Your system is configured backwards from P3D's operating strength...a very powerful CPU--with Cray-ready 32 GHZ RAM, no less!! haha--and an aging 770 that can't keep up with an application that's going to make the GPU earn its keep with DX11 much more so than FSX and DX9 (or 10 "preview") ever could.  A GTX1070 would really help the cause.

 

Best of luck!

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