1 hour ago, WarpD said:

Ok... I just took two images, one in FSX:ACCEL and the other in P3Dv4.  It's the exact same aircraft, same location, same season, no weather, same scenery.  Do they really look like there is no improvement over FSX?

Left side is FSX, right side is Prepar3D

https://goo.gl/photos/omzRrqKQ2pFHM9GR8

Is there a difference...absolutely!  However, the difference is negligible, especially when you consider the competing sim was developed 11-years ago.  To put the current state into perspective, consider Microsoft's former development cycle. Seriously, compare FS 5.1 to FSX, which represents the same 11-year development cycle.  If you put those pictures side-by-side, there's no ambiguity to the simulators improvement. To that point, it frustrates me how little our hobby as advanced in the past decade.  Yet, we know this space is littered with talent people adept at bringing the base sim to the next level; my faith lies with them....   

All I see is more trees and a darker runway. 

BTW, is that photoreal in the background? Where is this picture taken? 

That's how I feel about V4, it seems that except for the 64bit so no OOMs, we gained almost nothing compared to the V3. Kind of depressing. 

coding wise and technically it may be remarkable with all the work that has gone into p3d under the hood but visually when flying difference is very subtle other than the shadows, but overall not significant change from the original sim. Performance and hardware usage wise also not that different which even after becoming 64 bit pose a limit to how much it can be enhanced by 3rd party without becoming an unusable slideshow.

I'm very impressed with v4. Locked  30 fps at flytampa eham with hi-res it looks amazing.

And thats with all scenery and shadow sliders full right.  40 % road traffic, every setting in fly tampa config on high  with 4x sssa on a 42 inch 4k tv

Before with 3.4 it would have been oom or slideshow.

I'm happy

14 minutes ago, FlyIce said:

That's how I feel about V4, it seems that except for the 64bit so no OOMs, we gained almost nothing compared to the V3. Kind of depressing. 

Don't be depressed - the way to think of P3D vs FSX is not to look at the paintwork, the dashboard, the seats or the tires of this car, but concentrate only on opening up the bonnet and looking at the engine within. Then you will see some solid improvements. Unfortunately, with so many accessories missing, it becomes expensive to kit it up with all the bells and whistles. That is the problem for many. P3D is actually a typical military grade product - bland but it works well for what it was engineered to do.