6 hours ago, CaribbeanCLANK said:

My PC is not as powerful as some folks here and P3Dv4 runs a lot better than I expected. Here are my PC specs...

i5 4590 @ 3.3 gHz

16 gb RAM 

EVGA GTX 1060 6gb FTW (recently bought to replace my old GTX 650Ti SC 2gb)

3 Hard drives (1 SSD for Windows 10 Pro and 2 mechanicals...P3Dv4 has it's own drive)

I have a bunch of add-ons installed and still get pretty good performance considering my specs. My settings are a mix of Very High to Ultra with traffic turned off (I have a small percentage of road traffic). Flying the PMDG 747 from Flightbeam's KMSP to Flightbeam's KSFOHD, I will get around 26-40 fps in cockpit view while on the ground but the sim is very smooth with a stutter every now and then. Once in the air, I can get around 33-48 fps in cockpit view and in the external view at altitude, anywhere from 70-112 fps. On approach, in the cockpit, frame rates will drop back down to 25-40. On the ground, my frame rate is usually around 30-60 fps in external views. I do have orbx Global and OpenLC N. America, Active Sky P4, AS Cloud Art, Envtex, ChasePlane, precipitFX, 777immersions, and a bunch of airports installed. 

Most importantly, the sim runs very smoothly and looks extremely good. Textures, lighting, auto gen, shadows, the add-ons....I haven't fired up FSX since I got it.

This is an excellent post. It tells a very important story. People can have a good P3D experience without having to spash out silly money for hardware.

16 hours ago, shivers9 said:

I have a set up that is pretty close to that. 3770K Oc'd to 4.5 and 16GB Ram. I have a 980 TI and they do a fair job on 40In 4K monitor. I am wondering if the upgrade to 1080 TI is worth the money to do. Their are many confusing opinions out there but it does not seem to be worth the upgrade to a 7700K processor and I hope someone can help me decide if the 1080 TI is overkill.

You know, given that we only live about 5 miles apart, you are welcome to stop by and take a look my friend.  We're running fairly comparable systems... I have a i7-4770K at 4.5GHz.

I recently moved from a GTX960 to a GTX1080 (the 1080 was a gift from a friend/member of my group who was grateful for several years of flight sim tech support).  Although there is a lot of difference between the GTX960/GTX980 (the key of course is the last two digits in NVIDIA's item designation) the difference between the GTX980 and GTX1080 is significant - as shown HERE.

Best wishes.

Great comparative link, Dave.

7 hours ago, CaribbeanCLANK said:

Once in the air, I can get around 33-48 fps in cockpit view and in the external view at altitude, anywhere from 70-112 fps. On approach, in the cockpit, frame rates will drop back down to 25-40. On the ground, my frame rate is usually around 30-60 fps

But what screen resolution is this using? People rarely mention the screen resolution and it can really be significant. A particular GPU may give great performance at 1920x1080 but could struggle at 2k or 4k with much lower settings. FPS figures are meaningless without some comparative point of reference.

29 minutes ago, vortex681 said:

But what screen resolution is this using? People rarely mention the screen resolution and it can really be significant. A particular GPU may give great performance at 1920x1080 but could struggle at 2k or 4k with much lower settings. FPS figures are meaningless without some comparative point of reference.

Exactly. The used resolution has way more impact on the performance than Add-ons but it is always forgotten to mention it.
Thats why i included it in my signation, its an VERY important info!

3 hours ago, vortex681 said:

But what screen resolution is this using? People rarely mention the screen resolution and it can really be significant. A particular GPU may give great performance at 1920x1080 but could struggle at 2k or 4k with much lower settings. FPS figures are meaningless without some comparative point of reference.

Sorry...my bad, I forgot to mention my screen resolution. I am at 1920x1080. I want to get a 34 inch ultrawide monitor so I will upgrade to a GTX 1080 as its a higher resolution. 

I have no interest in 4K as this will get very expensive. 1080 looks just fine to me. I had my eyes set on a GTX 1070 but could not get one under $500 with all this cryptocurrency mining nonsense driving up GPU prices. Even if I got a GTX 1080 I would still sim at a res of 1920x1080. That is just me though, resolution is more important to others.