P3D v4 graphic settings for best overall performance/visuals

[captain420 3,099]

I am running in 4K with a GTX 1080 FTW card... and have a few questions regarding the graphic settings...

1) Water settings, I currently have set to ULTRA, and I have the global world ships AI package, if I want the ships to reflect their lights into the water, do I need to enable 'sim objects' under the water settings? Does anyone have all those boxes check? 

2) Special Effects - what exactly are these and when do you see them?

3) Dynamic Reflections - Does this only affect the reflection of your plane or all objects in the world?

4) Dynamic 3D Autogen Vegetation - Not sure what this is, does this make a noticeable difference?

5) Use high-resolution terrain textures - Whats the difference between the high res textures and the default? I'm assuming the high res are 4096x4096, but if this is unchecked, what resolution are the textures?

6) Shadows Casting/Receiving - What do you guys have enabled for this?

7) FXAA - should this be on or off if running at 4K?

8) AA (Antialiasing) - I currently have mine at 2xMSAA, I heard for 4K AA isn't necessary, so should this be off instead?

9) Texture Filtering: Anisotropic 16x

10) Texture Resolution: Ultra 4096x4096

11) Vsyn: On, Triple Buffering On, Target frame rate: Unlimited

12) Wideview Aspect Ration checked

13) Mipmap VC Panels checked

Sitting with the default plane at FSDT's KLAX I get around 12FPS, and I don't have all my sliders max'd out. My settings are pretty reasonable.

[1st fltsimguy 466]

I am suffering from the same issues, a manual would be helpful.

I just found out about this.

4) Dynamic 3D Autogen Vegetation - Not sure what this is, does this make a noticeable difference?

My trees were all light green, looked terrible and another posted told me to untick it....presto, darker green more realistic trees.

[mikeymike 357]

Autogen still popping tried everything

And i have a high end system

[MarkW 1,490]

14 minutes ago, 1st fltsimguy said:

 

4) Dynamic 3D Autogen Vegetation - Not sure what this is, does this make a noticeable difference?

These are the so called speed trees and they move with the wind or with prop wash from a helicopter.  Unless you  are flying a helicopter its best to turn them off.

[MadDog 353]

1 hour ago, captain420 said:

Use high-resolution terrain textures - Whats the difference between the high res textures and the default? I'm assuming the high res are 4096x4096, but if this is unchecked, what resolution are the textures?

I don't know exactly what it does either... but whatever it is, it cuts my frame-rates nearly in half (note that it requires a restart before this option takes effect).  If you're getting bad performance, try unchecking that box, restart, and see if it makes a difference.

[Farlis 2,280]

1 hour ago, captain420 said:

4) Dynamic 3D Autogen Vegetation - Not sure what this is, does this make a noticeable difference?

Speedtrees instead of normal ones. On my meager GTX 970 it draws half the performance. So yes it makes the most noticeable difference of all.

[sfgiants13 83]

8 minutes ago, MadDog said:

I don't know exactly what it does either... but whatever it is, it cuts my frame-rates nearly in half (note that it requires a restart before this option takes effect).  If you're getting bad performance, try unchecking that box, restart, and see if it makes a difference.

The textures look nice but I never thought to untick them.  I'm trying to cut out some of the eye candy so I can run 4x SSAA on my 1060 but I didn't bother to try untickin that.  I did speed trees but not HD textures.  I'll have to try that when I get home to see if it helps.

[flytrumpet767 68]

12 minutes ago, MadDog said:

I don't know exactly what it does either... but whatever it is, it cuts my frame-rates nearly in half (note that it requires a restart before this option takes effect).  If you're getting bad performance, try unchecking that box, restart, and see if it makes a difference.

In my case turning this off also got rid of stutters. 

I'm still just finishing reinstalling and testing, so I haven't really paid attention to the quality of the textures. I'm running UTX, FTX Global and open Lc. And it seems to look good to me even with this box unticked. 

[sfgiants13 83]

6 minutes ago, flytrumpet767 said:

In my case turning this off also got rid of stutters. 

I'm still just finishing reinstalling and testing, so I haven't really paid attention to the quality of the textures. I'm running UTX, FTX Global and open Lc. And it seems to look good to me even with this box unticked. 

Thanks I'll try and report back.  I'm having issues with stutters as well due to my GPU being at 100% utilization even with vsync on and my FPS steady at 25 so hopefully this will be enough to smooth it out. 

[captain420 3,099]

So if you are running FTX Global textures, then does the Use High Resolution Terrain Textures even matter? I'm assuming if you install FTX Global, that the textures are already 4096x4096, if I'm not mistaken?

[flytrumpet767 68]

2 minutes ago, captain420 said:

So if you are running FTX Global textures, then does the Use High Resolution Terrain Textures even matter? I'm assuming if you install FTX Global, that the textures are already 4096x4096, if I'm not mistaken?

That's a good question. But the difference between ticking and unticking that box is pretty big on my setup. I'll definitely do more testing. I run unlimited, vsync and triple buf on. Monitor runs at 60hz. No problem maintaining it in default flight. 

[MadDog 353]

33 minutes ago, captain420 said:

So if you are running FTX Global textures, then does the Use High Resolution Terrain Textures even matter? I'm assuming if you install FTX Global, that the textures are already 4096x4096, if I'm not mistaken?

FTX Global textures are 1024x1024.  Usually, higher resolution textures are reserved for objects such as your aircraft, clouds, airport facilities, etc... which is why I'm curious what this setting does.  It may apply to vector-type textures such as roads, shorelines, or streams; but I'm honestly not really sure.  I just know it completely overwhelms my poor little GTX770 (which otherwise performs surprisingly well).

[joemiller 269]

(1) Always adjust your settings to a 'flyable' sim. Meaning we have have different set-ups, fly different a/c (some like tiny little bush planes,, others love large high-end a/c- as myself), and we all fly under different conditions (weather, terrain, traffic. payware Vs freeware etc.) Therefore, even if you (we) had the best CPU or video card, we must all adjust according to our flying conditions.

(2) The higher your texture resolution, the harder your system will need to work. if it can't, your sim will crawl- adjust, adjust!

(3) Follow some of those good tips previous members have posted such as uncheck  Dynamic 3D.

(4) Do not chase your FPS. P3D V-4 is so good that even at high-settings (I tried this just for fun and to stress my sim & system), you will see lower fps; however, the sim performs significantly better than previous versions. (again, adjust, adjust, adjust) 

[LRW 42]

 

Beau Hollis of LM wrote this in their P3D forum:

http://www.prepar3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6315&t=124753&p=158168&hilit=Use+High+Resolution+Terrain+Textures#p158168

GPU heavy features:
- Shadows
- Dynamic Reflections
- SSAA
- Dynamic Lighting
- 3D Water (water set to ultra)
- New 3D rain/snow effects (set weather to storm theme to test)

In terms of GPU memory, checking the high resolution terrain textures box will up the terrain tile resolutionfrom 256 to 512. This uses 4x the texture memory for terrain. With a cfg tweak, you can get the resolution up to 1024. We don't support this via the UI because so few video cards have enough memory to function on that setting. Note that in addition to using more GPU memory, this will put more stress on the threaded CPU jobs used to generate those textures. So, it will impact loading times and paging performance which can lead to blurry textures, models popping in, etc.

[flytrumpet767 68]

Looks like they implemented features that are pretty heavy for currently affordable graphic cards. That explains why leaving all those boxes unticked makes such a difference. Maybe in a few years those features will be mainstream. 

In the meantime, I think I'll go with more fps