Performance of Carenado aircraft for XP11?

[Bjoern 1,155]

I'm curious For FSX, I wouldn't touch any of their aircraft with a ten feet pole because virtually all of their aircraft come with extremely large model files and tons of high resolution textures which drag down performance.

Are things any better with their X-Plane releases?

Edited July 10, 2018 by Bjoern

[danklaue 65]

Many people love the fact that Carenado planes are textured with detailed, high-quality 4k textures. Whether or not performance drags down depends on so much more than just the size of the textures.  It depends mainly on VRAM headroom left over in your video card after all scenery, cloud, and other graphic files are loaded.  If you're skirting the limits of your video card's VRAM, yes, you'll get a performance hit... which you may be able to mitigate by setting your X-plane graphics settings to compress the textures (which also lowers the resolution of the individual texture files), so you can adjust the sim to suit your harware and your usage style. 

(For example, if you enjoy using high-resolution scenery meshes and Orthophoto tiles, you may need beefier hardware to additionally run a plane running 4k textures... but if you don't fly in heavy sceneries, you'll leave more headroom for airplane details.)

 

Overall, X-Plane also benefits from several newer technologies that should give your system more mileage... but again, there's little you can do if you have old or underpowered hardware, and still want to fly highly detailed planes in highly detailed scenery. Something's gonna have to give.

[Bjoern 1,155]

Thanks for the info, but that's not what I wanted to know.

FSX does not cope well with unoptimized models like Carenado's, so my question remains: Are the X-Plane versions of their aircraft optimized in any way and how large is the framerate impact, if there is any?

[Glenn_C 135]

Hi Bjoern, your question is a tad ambiguous. Compared to what are asking if there is a large frame rate impact? You cannot compare FSX with X-Plane. FSX is 32bit, X-Plane is 64 bit . FSX uses DirectX and X-Plane uses OpenGL. The sim architectures are just so different.

Carenado build there models specifically for X-Plane they are not just ported over from FSX as far as I am aware. I would imagine they optimize there models and textures  as much aspossible as any good developer should do 😉 

What I can tell you is I have a couple of Carenado planes and run X-Plane  at 4K on a 50" TV monitor with a GTX1080ti and get good frame rates, way into the high 30's.

 

[t4murphy 24]

I run the carenado AC in XP11 without any issue on a 1440 or 2k monitor on a gtx 1070 along with 32 gigs of RAM without any issue. 7700k i7 at 4.5gz also. The carenado AC seem to run smoother in XP11. A little more functionality with lights. I have both p3d and XP11 versions of carenado. XP11 look better to me. I remember just short time ago when running carenado on fsx it was a challenge on a 970 gtx but also used a 2500k i5. I rarely go back to  p3d except for the majestic q400 and occasionally the pmdg 747. Give XP11 a try but have at least 16 RAM. You can have both Sims. I would highly recommend though P3d over fsx. A lot of fsx orbx and most flightbeam and fsdt stuff along with fly tampa are a free upgrade. PMDG, quality wings, and ASN were my only things to pay on upgrading. 

[turnandbank 243]

I have the C337 in for both X-plane11 and Prepar3d. It runs smoother in X-plane 11.

[olderndirt 2,295]

From what I've read, the developer "Thranda" has done most, if not all of the Carenado/Alabeo ports to XP and have produced significant improvements to the FSX/P3D versions.  Whether or not these improvements are what you're looking for is going to require some investigation.

[avgaskoolaid 292]

2 hours ago, Glenn_C said:

Carenado build there models specifically for X-Plane they are not just ported over from FSX as far as I am aware. I would imagine they optimize there models and textures  as much aspossible as any good developer should do  

 

The models and textures are imported (more or less) directly from FSX/P3D- in fact, you can use Carenado FSX repaints with their XPlane counterparts after changing the file type and flipping them around a bit. However, all the systems and sounds are built from the ground up.

4 hours ago, Bjoern said:

I'm curious For FSX, I wouldn't touch any of their aircraft with a ten feet pole because virtually all of their aircraft come with extremely large model files and tons of high resolution textures which drag down performance.

Are things any better with their X-Plane releases?

In my experience Carenado planes run smoother in XP than in FSX/P3D, however XP as a sim runs smoother in general. It's better to compare Carenado's planes with other planes in each respective sim. For example, with the Doriner 228 in P3D I get worse frames than with the PMDG 777 (off the top of my head, ~15% FPS drop between the two). In XP, the Dornier 228 gives me much better frames than the FF A320 (~30% better), and slightly worse frames than the Flightfactor 757 (~10% worse). Of course, this will vary based on what you're doing and your system, but I find that Carenado's planes are still a little heavy in XP, but not as much as in P3D. 

Also, in XP the flight dynamics, systems, and sounds, are much better having been built from scratch by Thanda, a well known and competent GA dev. 

[Guest-475 81]

I can't say if they run better or worse than their FSX/P3D counterparts, but I don't have any performance issues with the Carenado planes I fly in XP11. I have the XP-11 versions of the PC-12, B200, Do228 and CT210M.

Otoh, I don't care about the frame rates I get as long as they stay at or above 30. I also don't use any addon airports or heavy addon overlay scenery. So it might be that one or all of them have an fps impact of 10, 20, 30 or even more compared to other addons I use, I just wouldn't notice (or care 😊).

[ryanbatc 12,832]

Generally they still have a lot of textures and on my "dated" system their addons work my GPU pretty hard.  I set my slider to high in XP11.  I also usually run a little lower in game AA, so the CPU doesn't work as hard when I fly their planes.  They do look dang good and I think they work better in XP11.

Quick compare. 

P3D v4 I see approx 30MB ext mdl file and 20 MB interior

XP11 obj file is 1.4 MB.  But I don't really know what I'm comparing here.  The default laminar baron is 5MB obj.

Plus you can find some sexy PBR textures :)

@Bjoern - what is your current system anyway these days?  I remember you from the old FScom forums or maybe SoH

pc12_cyge_1 by ryan b, on Flickr

Edited July 11, 2018 by ryanbatcund

[CaptCWGAllen 49]

Re the response from @Danklaue - he is the lead XP developer for Carenado (and also the Just Flight XP models) so he is pretty clued up on all things XP/Carenado 😏

I find they use more juice than the default but then they would  - but they run absolutely fine on my system.

cheers

Peter

  

[Bjoern 1,155]

16 hours ago, Glenn_C said:

Hi Bjoern, your question is a tad ambiguous. Compared to what are asking if there is a large frame rate impact? You cannot compare FSX with X-Plane. FSX is 32bit, X-Plane is 64 bit . FSX uses DirectX and X-Plane uses OpenGL. The sim architectures are just so different.

Carenado build there models specifically for X-Plane they are not just ported over from FSX as far as I am aware. I would imagine they optimize there models and textures  as much aspossible as any good developer should do 😉 

What I can tell you is I have a couple of Carenado planes and run X-Plane  at 4K on a 50" TV monitor with a GTX1080ti and get good frame rates, way into the high 30's.

 

Judging from the filesize and drawcalls of the MDL files of their more recent FSX/P3D releases, there is no optimization at all.

 

 

 

---

This is exactly the kind of input I was looking for:

(Sorry for the weird formatting, Avsim's forum software is absolutely atrocious when reordering quotes)

 

16 hours ago, t4murphy said:

The carenado AC seem to run smoother in XP11.

 

16 hours ago, turnandbank said:

I have the C337 in for both X-plane11 and Prepar3d. It runs smoother in X-plane 11.

 

13 hours ago, hmn434 said:

In my experience Carenado planes run smoother in XP than in FSX/P3D, however XP as a sim runs smoother in general.

 

11 hours ago, mgeiss said:

I can't say if they run better or worse than their FSX/P3D counterparts, but I don't have any performance issues with the Carenado planes I fly in XP11. I

 

6 hours ago, CaptCWGAllen said:

I find they use more juice than the default but then they would  - but they run absolutely fine on my system.

Edited July 11, 2018 by Bjoern

[Bjoern 1,155]

11 hours ago, ryanbatcund said:

Generally they still have a lot of textures and on my "dated" system their addons work my GPU pretty hard.  I set my slider to high in XP11.  I also usually run a little lower in game AA, so the CPU doesn't work as hard when I fly their planes.  They do look dang good and I think they work better in XP11.

Quick compare. 

P3D v4 I see approx 30MB ext mdl file and 20 MB interior

XP11 obj file is 1.4 MB.  But I don't really know what I'm comparing here.  The default laminar baron is 5MB obj.

Plus you can find some sexy PBR textures 🙂

@Bjoern - what is your current system anyway these days?  I remember you from the old FScom forums or maybe SoH

X-Plane's aircraft come in multiple OBJ files, so you'll have to sum those up.

 

i5 4670K @ 4.2, 8 GB 2400, GTX 1060 6 GB or i7 6700HQ @ 3.1, 8 GB 2133, GTX 960M 2+2 GB. XP11 runs from a 512 GB USB3 SSD.

 

 

13 hours ago, olderndirt said:

From what I've read, the developer "Thranda" has done most, if not all of the Carenado/Alabeo ports to XP and have produced significant improvements to the FSX/P3D versions.  Whether or not these improvements are what you're looking for is going to require some investigation.

I'm always down for improvements. Pricing of the conversions also seems to be more competitive than for the original FSX releases, hence my interest.

[ohsirus 241]

Yes, Life is smoother under XP11.

[t4murphy 24]

On 7/10/2018 at 10:37 PM, ryanbatcund said:

Generally they still have a lot of textures and on my "dated" system their addons work my GPU pretty hard.  I set my slider to high in XP11.  I also usually run a little lower in game AA, so the CPU doesn't work as hard when I fly their planes.  They do look dang good and I think they work better in XP11.

Quick compare. 

P3D v4 I see approx 30MB ext mdl file and 20 MB interior

XP11 obj file is 1.4 MB.  But I don't really know what I'm comparing here.  The default laminar baron is 5MB obj.

Plus you can find some sexy PBR textures 🙂

@Bjoern - what is your current system anyway these days?  I remember you from the old FScom forums or maybe SoH

pc12_cyge_1 by ryan b, on Flickr

Oh yes, this thing the pilatus definitley runs smooth as silk in XP11 even with the reality XP750. It didnt run great at all in FSX.