Starting simming again after a long time

[belongedtoair 1]

Hey everyone.

I was so interested in flight simming back in 2013-2014 and this forum actually helped me a lot. I was using a mid-range setup and wasn't satisfied with the performance. Last version I used was 2.4 or 3 I think.

 

Anyway, I started collage and bought a laptop which has 7700hq, 16gigs ram and gtx1050ti (4gb). I'm considering getting back to simming again.

I know I shouldn't expect such a big difference, but new versions of P3D seems promising for me with the improvisations.

I'm not looking for high settings, just want to run my sim smoothly in low-mid settings with some scenery and aircraft addons.

So what do you guys think about simming on this laptop? Any recommendations will be appreciated, not just about hardware side, also the things I need to know before starting in version 4.

By the way I was using AMD 6300 and 660Ti back then.

 

Thank you,
Regards.

[John_Cillis 2,406]

Your laptop sounds comparable to my desktop, I think it will work.  P3d chose conservative settings when it recognized my system.  I adjusted each slider to the right, looking for drawbacks.  The two items which impacted performance were max AA and max AI.  I brought AA back to 4x, and AI to 25 pct.  My experience has stayed quite smooth, even with photoreal scenery installed.  My graphics card is slightly better than yours, but only has 3GB of VRAM.  My system only has 8GB of RAM.  My cpu clocks at 3.6 GHZ.  Have not run into any issues at all.

John

[belongedtoair 1]

Thanks for the quick reply John.

The biggest thing concerns me is the cpu speed.

It's 2.8ghz default and up to 3.8 with turbo. But I don't know anything about this turbo technology. Do clock speeds increase to the max value while running sim, or is there any specific adjustment I have to do without overheating the cpu? And also do clock speeds effect performance so much just like the older versions of p3d?

[simbol 5,819]

Welcome home!

I wish you a great simulation experience.

Regards,
Simbol

[Chock 17,769]

Welcome back.

What you will find is that whilst it is still true that P3D and FSX-SE use the CPU more than most modern games and sims tend to do, there has been a lot of effort to get the GPU to do more work in them and indeed for the work that the CPU has to do to be better geared toward more modern systems.

This is certainly true of P3D V4, which you will find runs better than the old FSX does on the same computer. Certainly P3D will run well on the computer you have, and as John says, by default it installs with the option sliders on fairly conservative settings, which despite their modest option choices, look better and indeed will run better than either FSX or FSX-SE do on similarly modest settings. From that point you can shove those sliders to the right a bit more and tick more of the fancy options until you get to a point where you are happy with the balance between eye candy and frame rates.

[belongedtoair 1]

Hello again, by spending last night with p3d, I also got some scenery and aircraft addons. 

For now, with mid-high settings I'm able to get 30 frames with addons, which is decent for me.

The only thing frustrating me is the dynamic lightning box. I can't get any landing or taxi light when it's unchecked, but also it's a frame eater for my experience.

[simbol 5,819]

19 minutes ago, belongedtoair said:

Hello again, by spending last night with p3d, I also got some scenery and aircraft addons. 

For now, with mid-high settings I'm able to get 30 frames with addons, which is decent for me.

The only thing frustrating me is the dynamic lightning box. I can't get any landing or taxi light when it's unchecked, but also it's a frame eater for my experience.

Are you using SSAA? It causes problems with Dynamic lighting. Also what video card do you have?

[belongedtoair 1]

Yes I just figured it out frames came to normal when using MSAA instead of SSAA. 

I created 2 configs for day and night flights. In daytime I can use SSAAx2 without a big impact and get rid of most jaggies. In night flights I couldn't see any noticeable difference in AA setting so I set MSAAx2 for nights. 

[n99wb 10]

2 hours ago, belongedtoair said:

I can't get any landing or taxi light when it's unchecked. . .

That's odd.  Default aircraft too?

[willy647 193]

2 hours ago, simbol said:

Also what video card do you have?

Don't you guys read ??? He has a 1050ti - very first post !

[belongedtoair 1]

21 minutes ago, n99wb said:

That's odd.  Default aircraft too?

Oh sorry forgot to mention I was using NGX. In default aircrafts it seems normal. But I fly with NGX more so I think I better turn it on and set down AA to MSAA.