Hello all, I am thinking of moving across from FSX X to Prepare 3dv4. I have a I7 processor and a Gee force GTX 970 video card 4GB memory and a 1TB SSD drive. I run V pilot as I use VATSIM and Aivlasoft EFB. I have 16GB ram in the computer.

I run ORBX scenery, Global Base, Global vectors and Landclass Europe and USA and ORBX airports mainly in Australia and NZ. I also have Fly Tampa Sydney and Kai Tek. I also run Active sky 16 with Soft clouds.

I have quite a lot of freeware airport scenery for use in  the USA. I also have the PMDG 737 NGX, 777 and the 747v3.

My system is pretty well tuned thanks to all the input I have found on this site and I also run Nvidia Inspector.

I see that a number of you have moved up from Prepar3d v 3.4 to version 4.

My question is is this a good time to change from FSX would there be noticeable benefits and can I run both FSX and Prepar3d on the one computer until all updates have been made by the various developers. Would there be a clash between FUIPC for FSX and the new version 5 just released.

There seems to be so many differing views and I hope that you are able to make some constructive comments that may aid my decision.

Regards

There is no problem with FSUIPC, but not all stuff is implemented in v5. FSUIPC runs as part of simulator, so you can instal any version to any simulator and they are independent.

ORBX works, but currently only base, openLC, tress and regions, vectors have some relevance to 32bit app (I do not catch reason from anouncement, but I trust them :)), rest waiting for 64bit object flow dll. You can manually point airports scenery to new v4, but you can expect that there will be problems - no objects, missing airport flattern bgls (they are installed into default scenery folders) ...

If scenery do not include some special stuff like ORBX objecflow.dll, and it was working in previous versions of P3D, it will work with v4 too, some vendors did new installers and some will do in future. Not sure about vPilot, but you propably find answer on Vatsim forums quickly.

Take in account that Active Sky 2016 and all your PMDG stuff is FSX version and it is not compatible with P3D. You have to repurchase all those, guess that AS have discount for purchase P3D version. PMDG have no cross platform update and P3D versions costs more than FSX. Only 747 and 777 are compatible with v4 right now, but they will update rest for v4.

And to your question, if it is right time... Depends. I switch from FSX to P3D few years ago when I find that P3D existis, performs better and looks very well in comparsion to FSX - I'm really eye candy focused. 

From performnace and future support, P3D is good choice. Currently v4 is not that great as not all stuff is available to v4, but it will be changed during time. You can keep FSX until you get full replacement in P3D, you can wait... depends on you.

 

From eye candy element... P3D is must and you have to switch immediatelly :)

One other thing to think about.....I'm not sure of this yet, but I'm starting to believe the GTX970 (I have one too) is going to be a little ( a lot?) short on VRAM. I'm using P3Dv4 and the VRAM useage in the ORBX SoCal area is running 3.5-3.7GB. Add in complex weather, complex aircraft and complex airports and I have a hunch I'll OOM on the VRAM. Granted, this RAM usage is with all the sliders full-right but, since FPS isn't a problem, I'm not moving them back to the left. Interestingly, the load on the GPU is only about 40% so that's not an issue but the lack of VRAM is probably going to mean an upgrade.........Doug

You will be fine. You just may have to turn down some settings to avoid VRAM issues as stated.

As long as you keep your LOD and autogen radius (which goes astronomically further than FSX can) at a moderate setting, I think you'll have no issues. And it'll still look much better than FSX. I have a 970 4GB as well.

I switched over from FSX to P3V4 just recently but upgraded my 970 2GB to 1080ti 12GB.  With 4GB you may be OK as per bonchie,  I think this is the time to switch - 32bit days are over.  You can run both while waiting to port stuff over.

Ilya

 

4 hours ago, W2DR said:

One other thing to think about.....I'm not sure of this yet, but I'm starting to believe the GTX970 (I have one too) is going to be a little ( a lot?) short on VRAM. I'm using P3Dv4 and the VRAM useage in the ORBX SoCal area is running 3.5-3.7GB. Add in complex weather, complex aircraft and complex airports and I have a hunch I'll OOM on the VRAM. Granted, this RAM usage is with all the sliders full-right but, since FPS isn't a problem, I'm not moving them back to the left. Interestingly, the load on the GPU is only about 40% so that's not an issue but the lack of VRAM is probably going to mean an upgrade.........Doug

That is why I have Geforce MSI 1080GTX with 8 GB GDDR5.

ORBX with KLAX I get 12,5GB RAM usage. Luckily I have 32 GB DDR4 RAM.

Many thanks to everyone who has replied and I appreciate you taking the time to comment.

In conclusion i think I will move across a little at a time and keep the sliders middle of the road. Ill update scenery and aircraft on a gradual basis. At some point a higher spec graphics card I think.

Ill check the Vatsim issue regarding vpilot as that is very important to me being a real world IFR pilot.

Once again many thanks everyone

Used to get oom all the time at the outer marker after a flight with both fsux and p3dv3.

Totally gone as expected with p3dv4.

Utterly worth the price.

If your current setup isn't broken, there's really no need to pay more money to try and fix it.

Are you running OOM? With DX9, try DX10. If you're still getting OOM even with DX10, then that might be a reason to switch to P3D 64-bit .

Quote

Add in complex weather, complex aircraft and complex airports and I have a hunch I'll OOM on the VRAM.

VRAM doesn't work the same way as RAM, where there's an OOM message that pops up if you run out. Before my new build I was starved for VRAM using a different program. It didn't come up with any messages. Just constantly loaded/unloaded things from VRAM, while being a stutterfest, because of the backlog of things that were trying to be loaded into VRAM, but had to wait for the GPU to unload some things it wasn't using first.

8 hours ago, W2DR said:

One other thing to think about.....I'm not sure of this yet, but I'm starting to believe the GTX970 (I have one too) is going to be a little ( a lot?) short on VRAM. I'm using P3Dv4 and the VRAM useage in the ORBX SoCal area is running 3.5-3.7GB. Add in complex weather, complex aircraft and complex airports and I have a hunch I'll OOM on the VRAM. Granted, this RAM usage is with all the sliders full-right but, since FPS isn't a problem, I'm not moving them back to the left. Interestingly, the load on the GPU is only about 40% so that's not an issue but the lack of VRAM is probably going to mean an upgrade.........Doug

Doug, you might be right on the GTX970, I was running it on my P3D v3.4 installation with an i7-4790K and was pretty sure it was bottlenecking, I was suffering from stutters and poor graphics, I upgraded to the GTX1060 and the issues disappeared....and its great in v4.

Touchdown49, while I think the 970 will work in v4, it just won't deliver all the benefits that v4 offers, might want to consider an upgrade from the beginning so your not continually have to make settings adjustment to get an enjoyable flight..

hello everyone

 

Since this post in June I have now installed P3dv4.1 and it is running pretty well. I do think the lack of vram is an issue though and am considering upgrading to a MSI GTX 1070 or 1080. My question to you technical guys is i currently have a Intel i7-2600 CPU at 3.40 GHz. Is this capable of running the improved graphics cards. I am not really in a position to upgrade the CPU and probably the motherboard. My RAM is 16GB.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

 

Kind regards

With upgrades you should be careful. Upgrades are always costly. My suggestion would be to get better board and newer CPU and go from there. I spent money originally (not much, but enough) but after that wasn't enough so I build new PC....So money was wasted. Only thing I used is SSD from old PC...