P3Dv4 is brilliant!

[YukonPete 586]

First my system is a brand new Alienware Aurora R6. ( Yes I know some of you hate Alienware and think they are over priced ) I love the Alienware systems and this is my 3rd in 11 years. I live in the remote Yukon so its not so easy to jump in the car and head to the local PC hardware store some 12 hours drive to Anchorage AK. Even Amazon takes 2 weeks if I order something. So I stick with Alienware. One thing about Dell is the warranty is first class. In my experience anyway.

So I ordered this system as my other was pushing 5 years old and wouldn't you know it? She arrived the same day P3Dv4 was released.

My Specs are i7 7700K, GTX 1080, 16GB DDR4 2666mhz Ram, Crucial 275GB .M2 SSD ( Win 10 Boot ) Crucial 1TB 2.5" SSD for P3Dv4 and a 2TB HD for storage. I run a 50" Vizo 4K TV at 30 hrz.

For me P3Dv4 is brilliant! Absolutely night and day compared to version 3. People with disappointments over V4 I don't understand at all. I have all my setting maxed out ( Except for Dynamic lighting. As it drops my FPS down 50% ) I get absolutely no blurry textures out as far as the horizon. I have all the currently available ORBX regions installed, All the Flightbeam and FSDT airports, Fly Tampa Sydney and Toronto, AS2016, ASCA, PMDG 747 & 777 and the TFDI 717.

I can load up one of the PMDG birds or the TFDI 717 at any of the high quality airports like Fly Tampa Syd or Flightbeam KSFO HD and my frames will remain in the 25-30 FPS ranges and is as smooth a silk. It absolutely blows V3 away. If I turn on Dynamic Lighting my frames will plummet to 10-15. 

One thing I find really funny is some people here claim they never had an OOM with FSX or P3Dv3. Obviously these people didn't push any limits.

[Lenny777 299]

Nice system! Yep. 64 bit is a game changer. P3Dv4 is great! I too finally was able to load on the ORBX, fly with PMDG 777 payware airport ((ENGM) to payware airport (LPPT), high settings, addons galore (AS16, EFASS NG, MYTraffic), and for once in the FSX genre not experience any worries about OOMs!! This is flightsimming nirvana finally.  Did it again from OMDB to  HESH. We've finally been able to experience flightsimming like it should be. Can't wait for the innovative stuff that will be released in the coming years.

 

i7-7700k 4.2 GHz, ASRock H270 Pro4 MOBO, ZOTAC AMpExtreme 1080 8GB, 16 GB DDR4 Ripjaws, Core V71 Thermaltake case.

[niyoko 7]

55 minutes ago, YukonPete said:

I can load up one of the PMDG birds or the TFDI 717 at any of the high quality airports like Fly Tampa Syd or Flightbeam KSFO HD and my frames will remain in the 25-30 FPS ranges and is as smooth a silk. It absolutely blows V3 away. If I turn on Dynamic Lighting my frames will plummet to 10-15. 

This is one point about Prepar3Dv4 that was impressed me a lot so far. V4 runs perceivable much smoother than v3. I'll be in the PMDG 747 at KIAD, KORD, or KSFO and see 25-30 FPS in the VC, but it doesn't feel bad. Everything feels good. MY settings are not maxed, and that's OK. I think the settings are equal to what I had to v3, plus more autogen. The results I see put a smile on my face.

[kdfw__ 542]

agree. graduated from fsx to p3dv4 and getting better performance with higher image settings.  ex: fsx fsdt kord=20fps (lock 30) no ai/gnd traffic, p3dv4 fsdt kord=30 (lock 30) 75%ai/gnd.  texture loading also fast and sharp flying f16 at m0.8.  

[MikeT707 1,181]

Loving v4. I am getting 50% move FPS in most scenarios comparing apples to apples in my 4790k (oc 4.5G) with a gtx970/4g and 8G RAM. I do need to up my RAM to 16 and do plan to get at least a 1070/8G sometime in the near future. Been using PTA and that makes a huge difference in the visuals. And I mean a huge difference. 

[Drumcode 1,893]

I'm going to say more, it's f*****ng awesome. They finally got it right. I mean they can sure build on this and keep improving it, but I'm loving it. Just finished ORD-DEN perfectly smooth, not a single stutter, amazing final and overall experience. 

[captain420 3,099]

Yes, P3D v4 is a great update, 64bit makes a difference. However I get around 15-18fps while sitting at the airport, and my settings are fairly medium-high, not maxed out at all. Overall I'm happy with this because I am running very heavy addons at the moment so I willing to sacrifice some performance for that.

[Guest]

The most important aspect of P3D V4 is 64bit and the changes/enhancements to the SDK/PDK ... many shackles have been removed and content providers (aka 3rd party) are able to explore their creativity and bring an entirely new level or realism to the platform.  Content providers are just starting to scratch the surface and their current mission is to make existing products compatible (early days).  LM have managed to retain a great deal of compatibility which has allowed many content providers to get their existing products up and running in a very short period of time.

There is a lot more than can be done with the V4 SDK and PDK and I expect to see that get explored by content providers in the future as LM continue to improve and enhance the P3D platform.

Flight simulation has always been about providing the means/tools to content providers because the days of 100+ member development team (ACES) are long long gone (there are no large scale flight simulation development teams any more, none).   When you combine 3rd party content providers with LM's core development team, the platform has effectively recovered back to those glory days of 100+ (or more) member development team.

Personally, I've waited 11 years for this 64bit day, I begged, screamed, was rude and harsh ... anything to get ACES to release FSX as a 64bit product.  That didn't happen as Microsoft pulled the plug ... it's finally a reality now.

Cheers, Rob.

[Iceman2 110]

Game Changer,

What has me gobb smacked is the difference in the blurries. No matter what tweak I tried with V3 the textures were blurry everywhere. In V4 now I have crystal clear textures without any tweaks.

Rob please pass on our gratitude to LM. (Amazing)

One funny thing though, I don't see any drop in FPS when I turn on landing lights using DL. (They must be powered by the GPU)(I have TXp)

IM

[swiesma 625]

No more OOMs, scenery till the end of the horizon, great performance, dynamic lights on the PMDG planes looks marvelous....

 

v4 is really a huge step forward.

[Michael Moe 495]

+1

Love it so much and no "DXGI error" or anything yet with my SLI setup. 

SLI in general feels really improved. Extremely smooth performance.

Now we just need to find the Dynamic lighting tweaks in the future. It can produce some stutter with Chaseplane.

Also is there any idea "having a shortcut"  inside P3Dv4´s graphics with the "TEXT_BAND_MULT=?"

It has some nice crispy texture speed effects on my system going from 30 to 70. Maybe there is more to it ?

Michael Moe

[Eziocin 46]

V4 is a great step forward...no brainer....

One thing is still puzzling me, (and this is not a criticism to the platform itself, but a suspect that I am missing something obvious).....in P3D v3.4 I had reached a great level of smoothness with the following settings:

FPS locked at 30 in Nvidia Inspector

VSync OFF inside P3D Menu, Vsync=FastSync in Nvidia Inspector

Monitor refresh rate at the stock 60Hz

 

In V4 I cannot achieve the same smoothness with such settings (I know everyone is reporting that V4 is much smoother than V3, so it must be something to do with my rig and/or settings), I have very good FPS but stutters here and there.....the only way to have a wonderfully super smooth experience is by lowering the monitor refresh rate to 30Hz (Vsync in P3D ON and FPS locked at 30 in Nvidia Inspector).

My specs are I7-2600k @ 4,8 Ghz, and GTX1080 

 Is this normal ?

regards

 

Ezio

[Jude Bradley 659]

Well said Rob.

As the OP says, it's brilliant. PS. In English (UK), Brilliant means excellent, cool, froody. Not the IQ type of brilliant.

 

[A320wolf 27]

7 hours ago, MikeT707 said:

Loving v4. I am getting 50% move FPS in most scenarios comparing apples to apples in my 4790k (oc 4.5G) with a gtx970/4g and 8G RAM. I do need to up my RAM to 16 and do plan to get at least a 1070/8G sometime in the near future. Been using PTA and that makes a huge difference in the visuals. And I mean a huge difference. 

I'm the same hardware spec like you, only the CPU (I have an I7-4770K) is different. During the weekend I reinstalled all my system from zero (new Win10 installation as well). P3D V4 with my FSDreamteam sceneries, AS2016+ASCA, ORBX Global + OpenLC USA and EU + PMDG 777. I did some test flights with the default F22 and with the 777 just to see how P3D looks vs previous versions and wow! Great improvement, I notice that textures are loaded faster. At the present I think to remain with my 8GB RAM, because the performance are very good, so I prefer to invest in other add-ons  (first PMDG 737)

Great work LM!

Regards, Max

[Anxu00 176]

Agree.  The biggest improvement that I saw was the elimination of microstutters with my setup, which is now 6 years old (well the GTX980 is 3 years old).  I have invested too much in add-ons and HW and refuse to do anything more until I got something out of what I had paid already.  In V3, I would have high FPS, but the stutters would just killed it.  With some modest extra investment, I finally can enjoy the thousands that have been spent.  As long as I am using reasonable settings, I can enjoy the sim for a while yet.