Hi All,

I am running P3D v4.3 PRO on an iMAC i7, 32Gb, 4Gb NVIDIA, 128GbSSD/1Tb via Boot Camp (with Win10 on an external 240Gb SSD).

With most settings between Low and Medium, everything runs smoothly and I get 60FPS. This however collapses to 20FPS- when in multi-screen.

I have Left and Right views (through View Group on 2 separate monitors off my iMac) and this seems to be killing it - though I am unable to see this necessarily reflected in GPU and CPU stats.

1. Is this performance drop normal and is there any solution to it?

2. Would a similar setup on a PC yield higher performance in a 3-screen configuration?

The most taxing setting I have seems to be Scenery Complexity (medium) but I need a quite good terrain detail level as I use P3D as a training platform for my PPL.

Other add-ons on my iMAC are ASCA, U Live Traffic and my home plate scenery. I also have a Garmin G1000 sim on a separate PC but this is through WIFI.

 

Thanks for any help and hardware advice you could provide (happy to switch over to a PC-based setup, but I  need to make sure what config to go for then).

The problem here is that your "high-end" iMAC might be "high-end" for Mac standards but not for flight simulator pc standards... What is the EXACT designation of your i7 and the clock speed? What is the EXACT designation of your 4GB nVIDIA graphics card?

Your multiscreen issues might be simply related to the fact that 3xFullHD basically needs three times the performance for a single screen. Obviously, no? But there are also some special ways how to properly configure multiple screens, there somebody else have to help.

Deftintely sounds like the computer is not as powerful as you may think it is, at least for gaming. As was stated above, what are the exact specs for it? A 4 GB Nvidia graphics card is not high end by any means.

Many thanks for the quick reply.

Fair point (I actually thought the "High-spec" would trigger some reactions but was not sure what else to call it 🙂)

I will get you the details specs (i7 clock and video card) tonight but from your initial messages, I take the video card is most likely the bottle neck in a 3-screen configuration. Any idea as to what would be the right PC specs to obtain good performance in such a config?

It depends on what kind of sreens you want to use. Three times FullHD and you might be perfectly fine with the coming RTX-2060 or a GTX-1070, three times 4K and everything below a 2080Ti might be connected with lowering settings even further down.

So 3.5GHz Intel i7 with GeForce GTX 780M 4Gb. Screens are 27" BenQ Gaming LED monitors but not 4K,.

I'd obviously look at increasing P3D setting-level if switching over to a PC, so an i7 configuration with a RTX-2060 or a GTX-1070 be the way forward to comfortably run in 3-screen? (not sure if 32GB Ram is needed too?)

1 hour ago, Spar said:

So 3.5GHz Intel i7 with GeForce GTX 780M 4Gb. Screens are 27" BenQ Gaming LED monitors but not 4K,.

I'd obviously look at increasing P3D setting-level if switching over to a PC, so an i7 configuration with a RTX-2060 or a GTX-1070 be the way forward to comfortably run in 3-screen? (not sure if 32GB Ram is needed too?)

Honestly, with that spec 20fps is pretty on-target. I run P3D v4.2 on an i7 7700K at 4.2GHz with three screens in a view group and I get 20-40, depending on the weather and scenery. Mostly I tend to get high 20s fairly consistently.That's with a GTX 1070. I haven't put any time into trying to optimise it. You will get significantly better performance if you ditch the view group and run a single window with nvidia Surround mode, but you will need to accept some perspective problems on such a wide view and you lose the ability to be creative with your screen layout.

You can try lower the screen resolution for both side monitors (because I think they are less important) and that should help increase fps a bit.

Many thanks for your suggestions. I tried a lower res on the side screens, it gave a few FPS back, but not that much.

I was not able to get Nvidia Surround mode to work however. I couldn't get the Timings match between my iMac 27" (2560 native) and my BenQ 27" (1920 native). Though the iMac has a 1920 res configuration, it has a larger pixel area and applying the BenQs' 1920 Timing parameters would just mack it go black.

Bottom line is I'll have to trade my iMac for a PC. I am leaning towards an i7, 16Gb RAM, GTX-1070 8 GB + the same BenQ monitor. Please let me know if you reckon this does not suffice for a smooth 3-screen rendering, or you think this is not a future-proof enough setup.

Cheers.