The Most Powerful Hardware, the Most Average of P3Dv4 Performance

[sddjd 117]

Neil, just as a quick test before you start overhauling all your settings are you using Gatwick Extreme? If so, as an experiment use the config utility to back it down one notch from "extreme" to see if that makes a material difference to your fps.

This made a huge difference to me at that particular airport in spite of using other equally scenery-heavy airports with high frame rates results; seems some of the 'extreme' objects are killers and didn't miss them much visually.

Edited June 22, 2018 by sddjd

[Petraeus 147]

Possibly a useful comparison, but this is my 3-year-old system:

Overclocked Intel® Six Core i7-5820K (3.3GHz @ MAX 4.4GHz)

MotherboardASUS® X99-S: ATX, HSW-E CPU, USB 3.0, SATA 6 GB/s

Memory (RAM)8GB KINGSTON HYPER-X PREDATOR QUAD-DDR4 3000MHz X.M.P (2 x 4GB)

Graphics Card 4GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 980 - 1 DVI, 1 HDMI, 3 DP - 3D Vision Ready

With most sliders to the right (I love autogen), and 28 AI aircraft on the ground, I'm getting around 30 fps at UK2000 EGKK in the PMDG 747 on a 3440x1440 screen..

It strikes me that you should be getting more, but I don't have the expertise to tell you why you're not.

I was planning an upgrade next month, particularly for a better graphics card, and hopefully so I could base myself at EGLL, but maybe I'll not bother...

[Lorby_SI 2,036]

Hello Neil,

I have pretty much the same hardware (i9 7900x, 64 Gig RAM, Asus X299 deluxe board, Asus 1080ti OC, all SSDd) on my devel system, connected to three full-HD screens (5760x1080 pixel) in NVidia Surround mode. I have pretty much the same P3D performance.Yes, it is a little disappointing, all things considered. There are better CPUs to run P3D on. From gut feeling the sim runs better on my old i7 5930K (same GPU).

Be careful when overclocking this CPU - it is getting very hot very fast. Make sure to use Coretemp or similar to keep an eye on the temperatures. My CPU was pushing 100 degrees C at full blast (Corsair 240mm radiator water cooling) - and a mere 4.5 GHz. I have backed down now to 4.1 and tell myself that the difference isn't that obvious.

Best regards

Edited June 22, 2018 by Lorby_SI

[NeilG 0]

Thank you for your replies all. It does seem to me that despite all the things that we are doing to make our hardware work harder that P3Dv4 still does not use all the power that we through at it most efficiently, but I am not technically knowledgeable enough to say that with conviction. I run DCS and X Plane 11 and they both run so much more smoothly. But over the years I have invested far too much money in sceneries and I want to enjoy them a bit. Take a look at the following settings and screenshot of the default F22 at Heathrow. They are high settings but not, I would argue, absurd. And Heathrow is a known resource hog. However, 15-17 FPS? Really? Anyway, tell me what you think.

Settings 6 by NEIL GARDNER, on Flickr

Settings by NEIL GARDNER, on Flickr

Settings 5 by NEIL GARDNER, on Flickr

Settings 4 by NEIL GARDNER, on Flickr

Settings 3 by NEIL GARDNER, on Flickr

Settings 2 by NEIL GARDNER, on Flickr

Edited June 24, 2018 by NeilG
Insert images

[NeilG 0]

On ‎6‎/‎21‎/‎2018 at 2:16 PM, Cruachan said:

Hi Neil,

Take a deep breath...and relax 😀

I think you are perfectly fine with your chosen hardware setup. Advice from other users can be helpful but, unless it is consistent and proven to be effective, can quickly lead to confusion and an unwelcome tweaking mentality which becomes very difficult to shake off.

I would begin by overclocking your CPU. You have an ASUS mainboard so this can be done automatically with the Asus AI Suite III utility assuming, that is, it will work with your board. You will need to confirm. It’s very easy to use and  achieves an optimum safe overclock quickly and without any hassle. Keep an eye on the temperatures although your CPU water cooling solution should keep you safely well within specs.

Secondly, the best advice I can give you is to familiarise yourself with the Display Profile section under Display Settings. The creation of suitable and appropriate Display Profiles for a variety of situations normally flown by you is the ‘secret’ to success and is rarely talked about because most folk are constantly struggling to achieve the impossible - a one-fit-all bunch of unrealistic settings. Ignore posts that proclaim everything’s maxed out with all sliders hard right. Such a configuration will only deliver acceptable performance in a very narrow range of situations. Customised Display Profiles is definitely the way to go.

Thirdly, try locking your frame rate at 30 or 31 without the use of VSync or Triple buffering and experiment with the Fibre Frame Time Fraction Dynamic utility as mentioned in a previous post. This does have proven benefits in helping to maintain performance in the more demanding situations.

Regards,

Mike

 

 

Thanks for that Mike, I needed some reassurance after some of the responses that I received on the P3D forum. You would think that Id just forked out a goodly portion of my pension on something that ran on orange juice and elastic bands. Thankfully, someone also said that Id be better off coming to Avsim because people are generally more knowledgeable

[Cruachan 705]

Hi Neil,

FIRST: Preserve your current settings by Saving your Profile with a unique name under Display Global Settings.

Looking at your settings I would consider trying the following:

1. FXAA = OFF

2. AA = 8xMSAA

3. Anisotropic 16x (You won’t notice any difference in performance and your GPU will handle it with aplomb)

4. Target frame rate = 30

5. Aviation Traffic: From the top start with 10, 10 and Low respectively and then increase values gradually until your performance starts to suffer.

6. Uncheck: Windshield Effects

7. Thermal visualisation = None

8. Uncheck: Enable turbulence and thermal effects

9. Uncheck: Dynamic Lighting (this can be impressive when viewed at night and certainly worth experimenting with, but is a known performance killer).

10. Shadows: leave these settings for now but you can certainly experiment later when you have established a good performance base.

11. Tessellation Factor: High

12. Reflections: Terrain, User vehicle, Buildings

13. Autogen vegetation density: Medium (can be turned off at night)

14. Autogen building density: Medium

Now, Save this new Profile using another unique and meaningful name.

Check your performance again at Heathrow.

A small collection of Profiles can be created to suit differing circumstances and your preferred scenery complexities. For starters, you could create a Profile that delivers adequate performance at busy hubs, one for General Day flights and one for Night Flights. Unfortunately there is unlikely to be a one-fit-all Profile nor is it likely that another user’s Profile would suit you. It will be necessary to devote some time experimenting until you achieve what works for you. In the end it’s worth it.

Regards,

Mike

 

[RALF9636 1,920]

Maybe at first turn off dynamic reflections and dynamic lighting to make sure it's not the GPU which is the limiting factor.

[Marc Banger 5]

Just found this on another forum, could be of some use?

" I have something you can try though, it's not something that will fix visuals and I haven't tested it much but once you open the sim and it is on the menu, open task manager and go to the Prepared v4 task. Then right click it and 'go to details'. Once there, right click again and 'select affinity'. Then, untick CPU 0 and click ok. Load the sim in your desired way and once everything has loaded, turn on CPU 0 again. This shares the processes across each core for P3D.

Not sure if Lockheed Martin know about this but I just hope something performance wise will be fixed in 4.1 on 10th October.

I upgraded my CPU a while ago to a Skylake 6700K at 4.6 and it substantually increased my performance back on v3. After spending all my money's, this is the only thing I have found that increased the performance a lot (A high CPU clock).

The CPU 0 thing on Task Manager might not be ideal for now, but my performance is around 30/40 fps at Heathrow now with max to medium settings whereas it was around 15-20. "

I have been reading about and it is mentioned quite alot that P3D V4 heavily replies on a high cpu clock speed, so you may have to overclock your cpu to around 4.5ghz, by all means get watercooling first before attempting to overclock, even if it's one of those All-in-One Corsair watercoolers, I wouldn't recommend doing that on an air cooler. Also I've heard that most of the "work" is undertaken by CPU 0 so maybe trying that above about unticking CPU 0 might help, I can't confirm if it does as I have not tried it, maybe someone who has can? Just thought I'd mention it.

Hope you get the issue sorted.

[whitav8 98]

Just in case you performance-interested folks (aren't we all) haven't come across the company called Silicon Lottery, here is a link to an example of the great value you would get with having them completely test an overclock (towards 5.0 ghz or better) AND delid the CPU so that it runs 15 to 20 deg C cooler for not much extra dollars:

https://siliconlottery.com/collections/coffeelake/products/8700k50g

Jetline Systems and Frooglesim use them. The CPU comes guaranteed to work reliably at a given overclock with specifics on voltages and what their test system was.

Dave W.

Edited June 24, 2018 by whitav8

[somiller 694]

In addition to the all-important CPU overclock, my suggestion would be to sit at the most demanding airport you have installed, and one-at-a-time, lower these settings to lowest/minimum and click okay and see what affect it has on fps. Make notes on the performance change of each setting change. In this way, you can see which lowered settings result in the greatest improvement, then fiddle with only those settings. Any setting change that yields at least 2 or 3 fps or more is a critical setting for performance.

1.) All traffic settings - traffic can be terrible performance hogs, especially AI aircraft, Road vehicle, Ships and Ferries. On my 6700k, a difference of a few % of traffic has an impact on my fps.

2.) Turn off Windshied Effects

3.) Turn off Dynamic Reflections

4.) Turn off Display Lens Flare

5.) Turn off FXAA

6.) If running 1920 x 1080, during the day use 4x SSAA. For night flying, use 4x or 8x MSAA (SSAA with Dynamic Lighting is an absolute GPU killer, even for those running 1080Ti's). If running 4k, always use 4x or 8x MSAA (SSAA not needed with 4k)

With reasonable settings on the above, and with your "World" settings, with RARE exception you should be able to maintain 30 fps locked at 4k. If you can set your TV/monitor to 30Hz, with locked 30 fps in P3D, you should be able to achieve a perfectly stutter-free sim.

I am tempted to suggest an Affinity Mask setting, but I am not familiar enough with the 7900X and it's use with P3D to know what it should be. Look up Rob Ainscough's profile here on AVSIM, and do a search of his profile on "7900X" - He has some really good info on getting the most out of that CPU. Not sure which one, but one of his topics included P3D settings he uses with the 7900X. He's gotten some killer performance with his system, and so too should you. Rob has even posted some videos of his system running P3D at 60 fps with a PMDG aircraft, and it's breathtakingly smooth.

Kind Regards,

[AnkH 2,233]

As I mentioned elsewhere, people selling those monster-rigs for P3D should be slapped each day once. Although in certain scenarios (and depending on the amount of addons running OUTSIDE the sim), more than 6 cores can provide some extra overhead, it is usually just not needed, especially without overclocking. Then, I seriously don't get who builds a Skylake-X system with only two RAM sticks (instead of four). This all adds up in the end resulting in a 3000$ rig not providing a single FPS more than a rig for 1000$ with a i5 and a proper combination of Hardware.