P3D V4 Stopped enjoying it. Time to reconsider the options.

[Piotr007 164]

Hi,

As this might be odd I stopped enjoying P3D V4 on my system. I am very unhappy of the performance I get with all the addons I've installed. I spent many hours in tweaking, testing and flying and trying to have fun. At some moments I had fun, but it quickly came down to one big bummer.

Scenery addons:

As soon I installed all the scenery addons I could get "supported" in my P3D V4, the problems became more and more apparent. The most apparent problem are the lag/stutter graces. It seems I have loaded up an extensive amount of payware scenery that for some reason ravage my CPU performance, I suspect. At times I get even 100% CPU load. This caues stutters and lag graces on final for example when approaching for landing. Very frustrating. I was too enthusiastic in adding all I could, just in the notion the OOM is gone so sky is not the limit anymore, just like it was advertised...

Wrong: there are still limits. The limits are the amound of scenery and more importantly the load a CPU can take when having all FSDT, Flytampa and some Aersoft and custom sceneries activated in conjunction with ORBX/FTX/HD Trees etc. They might be invisible if not near them, but the CPU seems to take the hit over the entire earth inside the sim!

So my next steps are:

- Get P3D stock scenery back.

- Remove all of the airports I am not using at the moment, only flying from departure to destination airport. Hopefully CPU loads will be within acceptable range to enjoy the sim again.

At this time I am maddened by tweaking, but I seemed to have overlooked one step. I am wanting too much too fast perhaps?!

 

Time to return to a stock sim. I am looking from there where to go next!

 

 

Oh my PC specs:

CPU: i7 6700K @ 4,5 ghz stable.

CPU cooling: Corsair H110i GTX

Mobo: MSI Z170A Gaming M5

PSU: Corsair CX750M

RAM: 32GB Corsair Dominator DDR4 @ XMP 3000MHZ

Graphics: MSI Geforce 1080 GTX 8GB GDDR5

HD: WD Green Caviar 1TB 7200 RPM

SSD1: 1 TB Samunsung EVO

SSD2: 480 GB Samsung

Running on Win 7 Professional Edition

 

I think to switch to Win 10 in near future (Q4 2017) and buying Coffee Lake 6-core CPU which fits on my LGA 1151. Thoughts for P3D V4?

 

 

 

[Ron Attwood 3,464]

8 minutes ago, Piotr007 said:

I spent many hours in tweaking, testing

There's your problem. Stop poking it about!

[Piotr007 164]

11 minutes ago, Ron Attwood said:

There's your problem. Stop poking it about!

Hi Ron,

Yes you are right. But then I tweaked it into misery. Time to tweak it out of misery again.

[Iceman2 110]

I have the same system as you but with a titanXp. It's IMHO not a high end computer anymore.

However it can run P3Dv4 perfectly and untweaked with most slides maxed out. If you can't help yourself not to tweak, I suggest the insim slides are all you need to tweak.

I also suggest you format your HD and start over. Then only add scenery that has V4 installers.

This means patience is now required (sit on your hands) until developers getting their products V4 ready.

Im amazed with V4 and couldn't be happier.

IM

[Wise87 1,275]

From reading other post It has been said developers have been updating there installers to work with P3Dv4 but unless they start using the SDK and compiling planes and scenery the proper way will never get the full benefits that v4 has to offer. Sure it may install and be v4 compliant but is it really v4 ready. Too many shortcuts are being taken resulting in poor performance. Can anyone name one developer that actually used the LM SDK to properly export the way it's suppose too be?

[laserit 93]

Peter

I had very annoying stutters on final, landing and taxiing. I turned off Airport Ground Traffic and it completely removed stutters from all the airports I've tried including KLAX with full UT Live.

If you haven't tried this already I hope it helps.

[Flic1 972]

I have a similar system to yours and my experience with V4 is completely opposite!!  Much more stable and smooth flight all around...especially much better at the add-on airports that I had stutter problems with in V3.  Like Ron said, I don't think it needs to be tweaked at all, you just have to get the sliders in the right spot.  Are you running with HT on?  I have had a much better experience with it off while running unlimited FPS.  Many of my stutter issues in the past with V3 were related to HT and trying to get the correct affinity mask setting.  Maybe try removing your addons and deleting your .cfg.  Try to get a smooth experience with default settings and then add things slowly. If you are using AI traffic, use a limiter!  Good luck!

[Piotr007 164]

6 minutes ago, laserit said:

Peter

I had very annoying stutters on final, landing and taxiing. I turned off Airport Ground Traffic and it completely removed stutters from all the airports I've tried including KLAX with full UT Live.

If you haven't tried this already I hope it helps.

You are right about this one. It helps. Lag and stutter graces are far less.

[Piotr007 164]

6 minutes ago, Flic1 said:

I have a similar system to yours and my experience with V4 is completely opposite!!  Much more stable and smooth flight all around...especially much better at the add-on airports that I had stutter problems with in V3.  Like Ron said, I don't think it needs to be tweaked at all, you just have to get the sliders in the right spot.  Are you running with HT on?  I have had a much better experience with it off while running unlimited FPS.  Many of my stutter issues in the past with V3 were related to HT and trying to get the correct affinity mask setting.  Maybe try removing your addons and deleting your .cfg.  Try to get a smooth experience with default settings and then add things slowly. If you are using AI traffic, use a limiter!  Good luck!

I am looking into all now. I am very confident it will be alright. But it needs a perfect balance. And balancing too much can do more harm than good in the end as always in simming.

[Piotr007 164]

12 minutes ago, Iceman2 said:

I have the same system as you but with a titanXp. It's IMHO not a high end computer anymore.

However it can run P3Dv4 perfectly and untweaked with most slides maxed out. If you can't help yourself not to tweak, I suggest the insim slides are all you need to tweak.

I also suggest you format your HD and start over. Then only add scenery that has V4 installers.

This means patience is now required (sit on your hands) until developers getting their products V4 ready.

Im amazed with V4 and couldn't be happier.

IM

So what about a i9 processor or a coffee lake Hexa Core i7 in the near future? I should also look into AMD's Threadripper. Which one to choose, Intel is more expensive but I feel more safe with Intel. AMD on the other hand is quite cheap, but will it run as good as Intel and not run too hot on 5 ghz OC?

[Piotr007 164]

No matter what I try, I cannot get rid of microstutters and small lag freezes at KJFk for example. All on stock scenery that is... 

Time to delete and rebuild my CFG I guess.

[CrownCityMisfits 58]

That sounds frustrating, borderline maddening.

On the flip side, my system is meager in comparison - i7-3930 + GTX680 2GB.

I am currently running FTX Global, HD trees, and A2A aircraft with maxed-out autogen, buildings, mesh, textures, cloud shads and terrain shads. I am not using dynamic lighting.

My AA looks great without shimmers, and I get a very smooth stutter-free 20-30 fps over Los Angeles, which is about as dense as it gets.

Now, I don't have heavy airports, Vector, AS16, or REX installed yet, but I feel there is room to add this content if I dial back a few sliders. I will know soon enough.

It's really interesting how v4 is behaving differently across everyone's computers. Wish I had some advice other than - it still may be possible for you to find an acceptable sweet-spot without all of the tweaks. I learned my lesson the hard way with over-tweaking, using assistants, etc.

For me, the V4 upgrade is a clear improvement.

So far.

 

[sfgiants13 83]

I was able to get rid of stutters at heavy addon airports using vsync at 25 hz on my monitor with unlimited FPS.  If your monitor supports that or 30hz give that a try.  The only real change I have to make at heavier airports or with dense clouds is lower AA setting and I'll get good performance.  I'm still getting blurries on approach but it's smooth so it is probably just a matter of me having too high of settings for my system to handle but V4 is still new so I'm still experimenting.  I haven't made any tweaks besides adding in TML=30 to help with scenery loading and my advice is to forget about tweaking it or you'll drive yourself mad trying to find the perfect balance.  I did that on V4 and again on V4 time and time again and did more reinstalls than I can count.  In the end it made no difference honestly and I'm pretty happy with where I'm at now.

[laserit 93]

50 minutes ago, Piotr007 said:

You are right about this one. It helps. Lag and stutter graces are far less.

Another heavy hitter is the Special Effects sliders. Setting them from max to medium gave me significant improvement.

If you make use of monitoring software such as http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html  you can see what effect the options have on your the main thread of your CPU and GPU. I notice that when my main thread or my GPU reach 100% utilization is when I see stutters.

I set my system up, where both the main thread of my CPU and GPU were averaging about 60-70% utilization  (to allow for spikes) at Vancouver BC using ORBX PNW, FSDT CYVR and UT Live. I get really smooth performance with very high settings @4k using Vsync@30hz frames set to unlimited.

My system is a 7700k @4.9, HT=on and a 1080ti

[SolRayz 392]

Turn down settings....problem solved.