P3D v4.4 and settings ... and video samples from Beta

[Guest]

I made a quick video here on how to solve the black texture loading issues with P3D V4.4:

 

Cheers, Rob.

[GeoSkyman 59]

Rob, this tweak solved the major problem for P3d 4.4

Thank you

[ShezA 176]

15 hours ago, Rob Ainscough said:

I made a quick video here on how to solve the black texture loading issues with P3D V4.4:

 

Cheers, Rob.

Great video Rob. Clearly illustrates what the new settings do.

[Nemo 1,304]

16 hours ago, Rob Ainscough said:

I made a quick video here on how to solve the black texture loading issues with P3D V4.4:

 

Cheers, Rob.

Thanks for these clear instructions, though I'm not sure if my 1070 (8 GB VRAM) can handle it.

Rob, if you allow an off-topic question. What kind of steroids did you put into your system to get such loading times. I mean 3 seconds until opening screen and another 5 seconds to load a flight is incredible fast. I have 30+50s on a fresh installation and now (with ORBX, FSGlobal mesh, ...) I have at least 60+90 seconds loading time. Both Windows and P3D have their own PCIe SSD. Is it your faster CPU/RAM/GPU that makes such a difference?

[Cruachan 705]

2 hours ago, Nemo said:

Thanks for these clear instructions, though I'm not sure if my 1070 (8 GB VRAM) can handle it.

Rob, if you allow an off-topic question. What kind of steroids did you put into your system to get such loading times. I mean 3 seconds until opening screen and another 5 seconds to load a flight is incredible fast. I have 30+50s on a fresh installation and now (with ORBX, FSGlobal mesh, ...) I have at least 60+90 seconds loading time. Both Windows and P3D have their own PCIe SSD. Is it your faster CPU/RAM/GPU that makes such a difference?

Hi Harry,

That’s easy. Whenever I am testing stuff and this involves multiple reloads of the simulator you can save yourself a load of grief by pruning back what is active/enabled. For example, disabling what is not required in the DLL.xml and Exe.xml files (basically replacing ‘false’ with ‘true’), Add-ons, running with default Prepar3D.cfg and, most important, disabling anything considered irrelevant to testing or for demo purposes in Scenery.cfg. These modded files can be saved for future use. Remember to backup these files before making changes. The Lorby SI P4AO utility makes light of enabling and disabling stuff in Scenery.cfg and, indeed, your various Add-ons. It should be noted that the latter is much easier to do now in v4.4 as it usually does not require you to restart the sim.

I’m running with a stripped back setup at the moment and, if you ignore the 9-10 secs before the splash screen appears (sometimes it is instant), then the sim loads to the Prepar3D Scenario screen in 6 secs and a further 4 secs to fully load the Prepar3D default flight scenario at Elgin (KVPS). Makes the world of difference during a troubleshooting exercise as waiting for a highly customised sim to load can be a real pain.

It’s also possible that Rob has carried out some video editing to make the presentation as efficient as possible.

Regards,

Mike

Edited December 10, 2018 by Cruachan

[Dirk98 354]

17 hours ago, Rob Ainscough said:

I made a quick video here on how to solve the black texture loading issues with P3D V4.4:

 

Cheers, Rob.

I wonder, how did you get to try such a large step from 1000 to 300000?! Did you have some tips about the possible range of the values?

Thanks for the video.

[GSalden 4,653]

49 minutes ago, Cruachan said:

Hi Harry,

That’s easy. Whenever I am testing stuff and this involves multiple reloads of the simulator you can save yourself a load of grief by pruning back what is active/enabled. For example, disabling what is not required in the DLL.xml and Exe.xml files (basically replacing ‘false’ with ‘true’), Add-ons, running with default Prepar3D.cfg and,   most important, disabling anything considered irrelevant to testing or for demo purposes in Scenery.cfg. These modded files can be saved for future use. Remember to backup these files before making changes. The Lorby SI P4AO utility makes light of enabling and disabling stuff in Scenery.cfg and, indeed, your various Add-ons. It should be noted that the latter is much easier to do now in v4.4 as it usually does not require you to restart the sim.

I’m running with a stripped back setup at the moment and, if you ignore the 9-10 secs before the splash screen appears (sometimes it is instant), then the sim loads to the Prepar3D Scenario screen in 6 secs and a further 4 secs to fully load the Prepar3D default flight scenario at Elgin (KVPS). Makes the world of difference during a troubleshooting exercise as waiting for a highly customised sim to load can be a real pain.

Regards,

Mike

With FT Amsterdam + TE Netherlands enabled only it takes up to 1 min of loading on my system.

And I have everything on a M2 SSD.Booting up into Windows is superfast...

[stripealipe 87]

Surely would be very sweet if they could code some kind of test scenario that you could run and let the code work out some good settings overall for best performance. This kind of tweaking starts to get a bit silly in this day and age, especially when we're down to settings at the 'command line' level. But then i guess this is what we have to deal with when tweaking a rather antiquated graphics engine..

[Guest]

34 minutes ago, Dirk98 said:

I wonder, how did you get to try such a large step from 1000 to 300000?! Did you have some tips about the possible range of the values?

No tip other than Beau indicated it's memory allocation and there is NO CAP to the value.  So 1000 seems like an very small amount of allocation and I know I have plenty of VRAM to spare so I used a much larger value ... experimented with a few different values and settled on 320000.000000.  But I do admit, the identifier naming is somewhat misleading and not sure why the default value was 1000.000000?

6 minutes ago, GSalden said:

With FT Amsterdam + TE Netherlands enabled only it takes up to 1 min of loading on my system.

That's not bad if you're running hi res textures and other scenery loaded.  On an unrelated topic, do you still have P3D V4.3 running in SLI configuration?  If so, please PM me as I need someone to test something for me.

Cheers, Rob.

[Guest]

5 minutes ago, stripealipe said:

This kind of tweaking starts to get a bit silly in this day and age,

The only platform I'm aware of that doesn't require tweaking is AeroFly2 ... but it's platform scope is currently not as robust as XP11 or P3D.  But agree with you that an external "tuner" product where one could just push a button and settings would be created based on hardware and add-ons installed ... however the user will still be prompted for "favorite" locations as those will have most significant FPS impact.  A plan has been brewing with an associate.

Cheers, Rob.

[orbmis 9]

On ‎12‎/‎8‎/‎2018 at 6:40 AM, ShezA said:

Correct. My monitor can do 30Hz but the mouse and functions start to become sluggish so that is why 30fps and Vsync or half Vsync.

Hi Shez,,

Looking to try the 1/2 refresh rate tweak you've been discussing  here, and I do have a question on what may be related settings in NVI..... while I do see the setting for the Vertical Sync (to be changed to 1/2 refresh rate), the next two settings are:

Vertical Sync Smooth AFR Behavior (currently OFF)

Vertical Sync Tear Control (currently STANDARD)

What are these elements set at in your P3D setup?

Thanks,

Mike

[GeoSkyman 59]

Hi, please anyone can help me according a loading problem just came up?

P3D4.4 loads with no problem, can say quick. For The first time I see that while loading a scenario (flight) stacks at 80% Adjusting scenery objects.

Any help please for the reason who came unexpectedly?

Does the add ons in scenery library order can has anything to do with this?

Georgios

[ShezA 176]

17 hours ago, orbmis said:

Hi Shez,,

Looking to try the 1/2 refresh rate tweak you've been discussing  here, and I do have a question on what may be related settings in NVI..... while I do see the setting for the Vertical Sync (to be changed to 1/2 refresh rate), the next two settings are:

Vertical Sync Smooth AFR Behavior (currently OFF)

Vertical Sync Tear Control (currently STANDARD)

What are these elements set at in your P3D setup?

Thanks,

Mike

Hi, this is one for the gurus but I just turned them on/adaptive as they appear to be related to VSync. No harm as they work well. I do however doubt they impact P3D much like many other Inspector settings. 

[Langyboy63 22]

I leave AFR off, but change tear control to adaptive.

[joepoway 241]

22 hours ago, Nemo said:

Thanks for these clear instructions, though I'm not sure if my 1070 (8 GB VRAM) can handle it.

My 1070 with 8Gb of ram handles the 320000 tweak fine and only runs up about 5 Gb of ram. It all depends on the slider settings you run with as to how much ram will be loaded. 

I have found the two tweaks:

MAX_TEXTURE_REQUEST_DISTANCE=320000.000000   (Modify this line)

ENABLE_MEMORY_OPTIMIZATION=0   (Add this line)

to work great even with my 1070 GPU no more scenery unloading and loading. This coupled with the new scenery load distance into the auto gen slider stops most all of my previously frustrating airport loading issues.

Thanks Rob!

Joe