6 hours ago, dal330200 said:

This is why I was saying early on that it may be worth waiting to make the plunge, and so many people got on my case about it...

Now, we're all experiencing a vast-array of annoyances, setbacks and disappointments as we all get used to the idiosyncrasies of v4.  I really fault LM for this as they could have made more beta copies for developers.  This wasn't some super-secret spy program here, and they could have opened things up a little bit.  However, I also fault many developers who had no clue as to what it would take to make their products work in v4 and started putting out tentative timetables that could and still can not be met.  At the end of the day, we ended up a bare-bones stock product that will take months to customize and call our own, because some marketing geniuses failed to communicate with each-other and really dropped the ball on how it could have been released. 

That said, I get good performance, except around big airports, and I expect this.  I also think the eye-candy and lighting is much better in v4.  I also think that the quality of smoothness, and stuttering, is better than v3.  Even when I fly into dense areas, the stutters are annoying, but they are not as impairing as in v3.  Then, there's the OOM issue.  I avoided this when I knew I was going to be heading into VAS-intensive areas by saving the flight, restarting the sim and then reloading it.  It took about a minute and I was back up in the air.  Big deal.  Now VAS isn't a problem and I can fly and fly and fly.

I still think that I will be using v3 more than v4 for months, until everything I enjoy can be migrated into the new platform.  I mean there's only so much fun I can have with a 777 when my 737s and Buses are in the hangar in v3.  However, I'm also happy to use both to get the experience that I'm looking for. 

Be Buddhist about this...let it be.  It will take time.  Meanwhile, keep flying and enjoy.

John

 

 

You are right John. I too am in a transition, actually from FSX to P3D V4. I am using FSX sometimes because it has already many things up and running. For dense areas I can use P3D V4 to get things more immersive. 

I now disabled all of my scenery addons and the problems are 99% gone. I just suspect that I bought a bunch of payware that is not optimized for P3D V4 yet. My another worry is I they will not make it entirely compatible and just leave the installers only P3D V4 compatible. The developers should consider quality of their products above quantity. For the last few weeks we saw suddenly dozens of airport sceneries appear that are so-called P3D V4 compatbile. Yes, it can be installed. Yes, it can run on your PC or laptop without crashing. But no, it cannot run smoothly without stutters because it is no optimized specially for P3D V4 (SDK). This is the main reason why I experience stutters imho.

1 hour ago, vgbaron said:

One of the biggest things about P3D that we all have been saying over and over is this - right out of the box P3D needs little or NO tweaking. That was true for V1 and is even truer for V4. I'm sorry but I do not see any logic in blaming LM for simple user error.

The OP did exactly what he was NOT supposed to do and asked in many places on these forums and continued to tweak. Now he is reaping the rewards. Piotr - you best bet is to uninstall, format and reinstall P3D and leave it alone. Take baby steps as you SLOWLY add things that are proven to be compatible. Your system should run P3D just fine - just don't get in it's way.

Vic

Thank you Vic. You are right about that tweaking. In the end it did more harm than good. BUT, there are plenty of other reasons why it did not run well. I explained the scenery issues and these often causes the stutters. It is actually my fault to install addons that aren't actually 100% compatible with P3D V4 > which resulted in my tweaking spree > which then resulted in problems and issues with the entire program!

I deleted my CFG file yesterday and disabled most of my addons. It worked out quite well, almost no issues anymore and anywhere. I am going to narrow down the problem. ORBX, Flytampa, FSDT, UTL, Custom scenery, Aerosoft... 

At a certain point when I add 1 of these at a time I will come eventually to the game breaker again! And that is exactly what I am going to leave out of the sim, until it gets supported 100%.

Maybe just use add-ons that are optimised  for 64bit?

4 minutes ago, Wobbie said:

Maybe just use add-ons that are optimised  for 64bit?

Yes, the question is which these are. As many scenery developers are not trustworthy in being honest about their portovers to P3D V4.

I think that some developers are being a bit irresponsible by claiming that their scenery addons are now "P3D v4 compatible", when in fact all they have done is tweaked the installer. It has been mentioned elsewhere on these forums (by Robert Randazzo and others) that full compatibility requires compilation using the v4 SDK. Without that, all bets are off.

1 hour ago, Christopher Low said:

It has been mentioned elsewhere on these forums (by Robert Randazzo and others) that full compatibility requires compilation using the v4 SDK. Without that, all bets are off.

Not a single airport in the default scenery, as supplied by LM, is complied with the P3D V4 SDK.

Of course, someone might say "recompiling the AFCAD won't give you any benefits", which is precisely my point: every aspect of the scenery is different and should be analyzed separately, and you cannot expect that just recompiling would auto-magically convert a bad performer into a speed demon.

A badly-optimized scenery will be just as bad, even if recompiled so, it's just wrong to generalize, and assume that everything "requires" to be recompiled. If LM really required this and if the knew there were stability problems, they would got rid of backward compatibility entirely.

Speaking about ground polygons, for example, which is the thing that interacts the most with dynamic lights and the airplane dynamic, and it's the part that forced many developers to still use FS8 code (most of the sceneries out there are made like that. NONE of the FSDT sceneries made after 2010 used FS8 code anymore, we were the first to get rid of it entirely...), while the FS8 code is surely the slowest one, the P3D native code is NOT the fastest one either, because we could measure a slight fps drop, on the same scenery, compared to the usage of the FSX code + our own custom Couatl/Addon Manager handling to prevent ground flickering.This because the P3D native code supports priority layering of ground polygons which HAS a performance cost, albeit very low so, we are using it for KMEM and KCLT, because it's easier to use, with less quirks and more predictable.

However, we couldn't find any evidence that the method used to do ground polygons has any effect on the frame rate loss caused by dynamic lights, see here:

http://www.fsdreamteam.com/forum/index.php/topic,16007.msg114745.html#msg114745

The only things that really have an effect on dynamic lights performance, are the Antialiasing mode and the screen resolution. The SDK used for the scenery has no effect on it, other than FS8 code being the slowest one, which is something that has been known for years. We gained 30% fps by removing the FS8 code, when we updated JFK to V2 version, in 2013.

That's just an example, to show that just using the P3D V4 SDK it's not a magic bullet, and each case is different and each scenery is different. Of course, we can only comment on our own sceneries, where we always tried to get rid of legacy code as soon as possible. I'd guess a scenery made with hundreds of SCASM macros, so it's totally littered with FS8 code everywhere, might be a different story.

That doesn't mean a scenery DESIGNED, right from the start, using the P3D V4 SDK couldn't be made much better, because it surely can. But it will be designed starting with an entirely different approach, not just "recompiled", it will be a different product, that would work ONLY with P3D V4, and couldn't even be back-ported to FSX. There are NO sceneries out there made like this, and no present scenery can be updated to this status just by "recompiling it": it would have to be remade from scratch, to *really* use the V4 SDK to the *full* extent.

As I said in another thread.....

Instead of taking the pmdg "word" for it in terms of compiling for v4, why not actually speak to a scenery developer?

there is a very enlightening discussion over at flytampa regarding what SDK elements are used from each sim version and how if it was "native" v4 very little would work including many of the stock .bgls that actually ship in the default p3d install. Do you really think that all the world default scenery elements were recompiled bgls? 

Check it out over at Flytampa ......

 

As for the op, clearly over tweaking and cramming addon software into v4 within a couple of weeks has borked the installation. We can't even be sure if all of the stuff that's been shoe horned in was even fully v4 ready. 

13 hours ago, Piotr007 said:

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

Your experience is not unique. After adding back all the add-ons and have the same settings as before in V3, I found V4 does not offer anything better in performance. In fact the removal of the 32 bit limit seems to cause more trouble in memory load.  I suspect V4 does not feel the urgent need to remove stuff from memory anymore as soon as possible?  My solution right now: go back to v3.4 where all of my add-ons work and back to flying.  I did not have OOM issue before, I stayed away from dangerous add-on such as Orbx Socal, I use reasonable settings and my sim currently performs fine. The only thing I do new: convert all of my add-ons into using the add-on.xml mechanism, so that I I have to change PC or do something else in the future, I don't have to spend hours reinstalling.  At this point, V3.4 for me until the add-ons are all shaken out and clear, and I have a clear picture as the additional cost, since many are charging anew rather than upgrade, and I lost the Baytower RV-7, RealAir's sounds and others.

13 hours ago, Piotr007 said:

As soon I installed all the scenery addons I could get "supported" in my P3D V4, the problems became more and more apparent....

 

So, what do you expect? Only install stuff that is officially compatible AND compiled 64bit. You are telling us you try to run your car with soup because it's a liquid anyhow, and it doesn't perform as expected.

1 hour ago, Anxu00 said:

 I found V4 does not offer anything better in performance. 

Is exactly the opposite of what I found. But everyone should do what he thinks is best :-)

I have tons of addons in v4 running and no problems at all, only stutters with PMDG dynamic lights, but I can live with that. Otherwise v3 compared to v4 is another world for me. v3? Never again.

1 hour ago, Anxu00 said:

 

15 hours ago, Piotr007 said:

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

Your experience is not unique. After adding back all the add-ons and have the same settings as before in V3, I found V4 does not offer anything better in performance.

 

As another user mentioned, my experience with v4 has resulted in better performance. It is important to make sure that "all the add-ons" that a user installs are v4-compatable. Also, settings in v3 do NOT equal the same in v4, so an Extremely dense autogen setting in v4, for instance, is different than that in v3. The autogen draw distance is also quite different. With the system you have listed, you should be running quite well so there may be an issue with your install or some of the add-ons that were installed in your v4 platform.

8 hours ago, Iceman2 said:

FWIW I found with my 6700k that using unlimited and Vsyn ON gave better results than limiting FPS. However this was only at highly demanding airports where the FPS dropped below my screens refresh rate. For some reason I got stutters in dense scenery areas with fixed frames but smooth with unlimited although the FPS were sitting at the screens refresh rate.

Another thing when in any view other than VC, (low demand) frames spiked high sometimes up over 100fps for just a second causing micro stutters. Seems Vsyc was struggling trying to hold the screens refresh rate in low demanding scenery. (My screen set to 25)

I then limited FPS in NCP keeping unlimited in SIM and now everything is smooth in all views including high demanding airports like FSDT/Fltbeam. These are the only airports I currently have installed so far. Wanting for other V4 installers to be released.

Now that FSDT have fixed the rwy textures for DL all is beautiful in P3D. I'm holding 25FPS under all conditions including heaps of AI traffic and clouds.

IM

 

I found the same thing with performance but a little different than yours as I have a 1060.  Set your monitor or tv to 30hz lock your frames at 20 in NVI then in the sim use v sync and unlimited frames and its butter smooth even in full overcast and my frames went up about 35 percent. V4 is so much better than V3 there is so much more under the hood.   Josh

8 hours ago, Iceman2 said:

FWIW I found with my 6700k that using unlimited and Vsyn ON gave better results than limiting FPS. However this was only at highly demanding airports where the FPS dropped below my screens refresh rate. For some reason I got stutters in dense scenery areas with fixed frames but smooth with unlimited although the FPS were sitting at the screens refresh rate.

Another thing when in any view other than VC, (low demand) frames spiked high sometimes up over 100fps for just a second causing micro stutters. Seems Vsyc was struggling trying to hold the screens refresh rate in low demanding scenery. (My screen set to 25)

I then limited FPS in NCP keeping unlimited in SIM and now everything is smooth in all views including high demanding airports like FSDT/Fltbeam. These are the only airports I currently have installed so far. Wanting for other V4 installers to be released.

Now that FSDT have fixed the rwy textures for DL all is beautiful in P3D. I'm holding 25FPS under all conditions including heaps of AI traffic and clouds.

IM

In NCP do you limit it to 25 or +1 or 2 FPS?  I run unlimited in the sim and while it is smooth I run into blurries at more demanding airports on approach.  I'm hoping limiting it in NCP might help with that since I haven't tried that yet (limited in sim causes stutters for me regardless if it holds the refresh rate or not).

8 hours ago, Farlis said:

Jeez, Vic, a little overkill, don't you think?

It's totally sufficient simply to run the "deletegenerated.files.bat" from within the V4 root directory or even just to delete the p3d.cfg and scenery.cfg and then restart from there without uninstalling anything, let alone reformat a drive.

Yes, you are correct. I guess I let my frustration seep in a tad.   ALTHOUGH - in the back of my mind is the suspicion that, assuming a lack of attention to the tweaking, he could have files in random places that will jump up and bite him. I would leave format and reinstall as a last ditch option but I wouldn't completely discount it.  It all depends on what was done to his system.

Vic

After reading all the comments (which I appreciate very much) I'm staying with the latest P3dv3 for a while.  I get no stutters at all and consistent 30 or 60 fps with all settings maxed (except for no HDR) .  This is flying in Alaska with ORBX NA Land Class, ORBX Alaska, ORBX Alaska Airports, ORBX Global Base, AS16/ASCA, OPUS Buttkicker program, A2A C182, TrackIR and the GTN750.  I don't get OOM's and I don't tweak the P3D config.  All I've done is OC'd the CPU and GPU, used certain Nvidia Inspector settings and many of Rob A's suggestions. It took a long time to get here.

When most folks can do that in V4 (and the A2A Connie's updated) then I'll switch to V4.  Don't want to sound smug, but I'm enjoying flying more than ever, and just don't want to have to deal with problems for now.