FSX-SE FSX upgrade

[fsusem36 2]

So after years of working with FSX, I might be ready to transition to Prepare.  But there is one nagging problem (besides forking out the $700 to 1000 for a new system and $199 license cost for P3v4, and having to use windows 10)

The problem is that everytime I look at a Youtube video with Prepare I don't see a big enough jump in the over all visuals???  Meaning I thought it would be like "Oh my god wow!" but it was more like "really this is the newer better sim????"   Is it just me  or really bad Prepare videos?    Because before forking out all that money I want to be blown away.  As with most of you I have gotten my FSX sim to near perfection with all the add on's so what Iam I missing other that a slightly crisper sim because of better memory management?

 

FSX/SE   3.5Ghz cpu/1070Ti/ 2TB drive and just about every add on there is

[Adrian123 1,015]

Then, Don't fix what's not broken specially if you don't do long flights with PMDG like aircraft and suffer from OOM's to take advantage of a 64bit Sim.. I don't go around pushing one Sim over another.

Edited January 14, 2019 by Adrian123

[Dazkent 113]

If you happy with FSX then just stick with it. Sure some of the latest airports are P3D only. I still use FSX regularly and it never ceases to amaze me what a brilliant product it is.

 

[TextRich 88]

I purchased it when it was v.3... and refunded it.  I didn't feel it was enough of an upgrade over FSX:SE.  I can see myself getting v.4 (or even higher) eventually once add-on developers make must-have add-ons that will work for P3D only.  Despite the occasional crashes, I feel my FSX:SE setup is perfect for all of my simming needs.

[ckyliu 1,749]

16 hours ago, fsusem36 said:

and having to use windows 10)

Why do you have to use Win10? My P3Dv4.4 works fine on Win7. Unfortunately it does mean I cannot play Forza Horizon though.

I'm glad I moved to P3D as photoscenery looks a lot better, no more OOM management and shadows within the virtual cockpit and from clouds. If those things don't bother you there's no harm in sticking with FSX. I just got fed up of endless tweaking nonsense, P3D just works.

Edited January 15, 2019 by ckyliu

[airernie 263]

If you really want to commit to P3Dv4, then $700 to $100 isn't going to cut it on a new computer.  Sure, you can get something in that price range, but read the forum messages long enough and you'll realize that won't cut it.

A suitable video card is going to cost you $500+.  Then the i7-9700K or i9-9900K CPU, then the motherboard and memory, so you can overclock the CPU, The the SSD, etc.

As long as you're satisfied with FSX (I am), I would stick with it.  Just manage your settings and you'll eliminate any OOM messages. 

Yeah, you'll have a hard time flying that PMDG 737 out of FSDT's KMEM or FlightBeam's KMSP, but our software is called 'Flight Simulator',not 'Set on the ground and look at the pretty airport simulator'. 😉

Ernie

 

 

[ckyliu 1,749]

I keep reading "you need a $3000 supercomputer for P3D" and it's nonsense, sometimes I think it's just an excuse for folks to brag. Whilst obviously you buy the best system you can afford, a $1000 build (excluding monitor) is sufficient providing you spec carefully and don't expect to max everything out (P3D is built with headway for the hardware of the future).

P3D will run just as well, if not better than FSX for the same visual quality. I use a 5+ year old i5 with my P3D sliders fairly rightwards and I'm running 1440p resolution; when pushed hard my framerate drops to high teens, but I could fix that if I compromised on the visuals a little. The OPs 1070Ti is probably similar speed to my GTX980 card, although their CPU clock of 3.5 GHz is 25% down on mine.

Edited January 15, 2019 by ckyliu

[scianoir 610]

5 hours ago, airernie said:

As long as you're satisfied with FSX (I am), I would stick with it.  Just manage your settings and you'll eliminate any OOM messages. 

Using a scenery configurator to limit the amount of scenery loaded to that which you need for a particular flight can significantly reduce your incidences of OOMs. I use the very reasonably priced SimStarter NG payware utility which also enables you to configure and store other FSX settings in addition to being a scenery configurator and I find this excellent. I understand however that freeware scenery configurators are also available.

Bill

[rhumbaflappy 113]

21 hours ago, fsusem36 said:

FSX/SE   3.5Ghz cpu/1070Ti/ 2TB drive and just about every add on there is

You don't say what CPU you have, or the amount of memory. That said, a 1070Ti is more than sufficient for P3D, especially at 1080p resolution. 16gb memory would help, but should not be a requirement. I'm guessing your CPU is fine. Just like FSX, sliders will need to be adjusted.

Almost all FSX scenery will work in P3D. Very few exceptions. Aircraft is another matter. The 64-bit program requires 64-bit DLLs. C++ gauges from FSX will not work. If the FSX gauges are XML, they should work.

My personal experience is that P3D runs better than FSX.

[fsusem36 2]

Hi

So as airernie said I think it comes down to personal choice and he is right about the visuals all the videos show how neat it is that the wings bend in the wind and you can see the flaps and slats...etc

Well the last time I checked no pilot sat in the cockpit monitoring the wing movement, Like me they are usually busy monitoring the instruments, because you cant see that much of the wings from the cockpit anyways..

Also when I watch vids of P3vd I still see (the jerky movements of the sim).  Yes you get more eye candy but not enough for me at this point.  Interested in flying not a beauty contest.  So when someone makes a sim that makes it hard to distinguish between the real world and it... yup, I'm in... mortgage the house  gotta buy new stuff. 🙂

[fsusem36 2]

Oh yeah my CPU is 3.5Ghz and 8G memory and it is a thing of beauty:).....at least as far a sims go.  The operative word being "Simulated"   And lastly I don't really suffer OOM's even with a flight from west to east coast.  And scenery is fantastic with Megascenry 3

Edited January 15, 2019 by fsusem36
Additional info

[nikaslan 9]

On 1/15/2019 at 11:30 AM, ckyliu said:

I'm glad I moved to P3D as photoscenery looks a lot better, no more OOM management and shadows within the virtual cockpit and from clouds. If those things don't bother you there's no harm in sticking with FSX.

In fact, with some minor investment you can easily get FSX-SE to P3D levels, visually at least.

With Steve's DX10 fixer combined with Cloud Shadows you get virtual cockpit and cloud shadows. Also, If you invest some time to use Reshade (free) you get a really major upgrade in visual/lighting quality, way above anything vanilla P3D can produce, especially with some excellent presets (I use this one:  https://sfx.thelazy.net/games/preset/4143/ ).

Beyond visual improvements, you still have a 32-bit simulator. Known negatives aside, you get maximum compatibility with all great addons, without having to pay way more for 'academic' use.

With ORBX Global, SA OLC and Vector I am currently on a great trip across Central and South America to Antarctica. Add to this the full REX texture treatment and AS2016 real-time weather, and I don't see FSX-SE going anywhere for the foreseeable future, not at least until XPlane can provide the same whole experience (ATC, weather, seasons, non-ortho terrain textures, vector accuracy) worldwide.

[ckyliu 1,749]

@nikaslanThat's helpful information but you missed out "I just got fed up of endless tweaking nonsense, P3D just works" in the quote. Financial investment is small but time investment is large, and I am time poor. Steve's DX10 fixer didn't work well for me and then he pulled it altogether for a while. ENBserie made my FSX crash. The photoscenery improvements are not shaders, in v4.4 they are much sharper at distance thanks to changes in the code that no FSX tweak can achieve. And I can think of nothing I want to do less than spend 2 hours try out 10 different shader presets. Then have to mess about enabling and disabling scenery to stop the thing OOMing. I don't have much time to fly nowadays and what I like about P3Dv4 is that I can just fly, without having to worry about what's in the cfg, if I've loaded the right shaders for the time of day etc.

My costs of moving to P3D were minimal beyond the cost of the sim itself, all my scenery (ORBX, UK2000, Horizon), texture (REX4TD+SC) and gauge (RXP) addons ported across without hassle for free, FSXWX is free too, so I only paid a small upgrade fee on the Majestic Q400. If you already have your FSX all tweaked and looking nice and you don't have OOM issues then you may as well stick with it. But spending weeks trying to turn FSX in to P3D for the sake of saving $80 didn't make sense to me. If you use A2A and PMDG then switching is a helluva lot more expensive and then it can make more sense to tweak FSX.

Edited January 17, 2019 by ckyliu

[nikaslan 9]

4 hours ago, ckyliu said:

@nikaslanThat's helpful information but you missed out "I just got fed up of endless tweaking nonsense, P3D just works" in the quote.

@ ckyliu  I can feel you pain. In the old days of FSX Acceleration tweaking was a big part of the game. ENB made my FSX crash too. OOMs on the other hand were never an issue for me, I don't know why, maybe the my specific configuration and settings were never forcing the 32-bit software to its limits. But the truth is that I had frequent crashes (non OOM related).

BUT, FSX-SE is another thing altogether. All basic tweaks and fixes are already applied, I only have Bufferpools=0 and that's it. Period. It's stable as a rock, it never OOM'ed me. Also, no more ENB but Reshade instead. I can switch from full screen to window like 100 times and it will never crash. The difference with Reshade is astonishing with the right preset! That's it. No tweaking, no pain. It just works as it should have from the start.

As you already observed, I have enough A2A planes and the investment to switch to P3D, to gain what?, makes absolutely no sense to me.
But I understand that everyone has different needs and experience, so YMMV.

Edited January 17, 2019 by nikaslan

[vortex681 806]

On 17 January 2019 at 1:59 PM, ckyliu said:

That's helpful information but you missed out "I just got fed up of endless tweaking nonsense, P3D just works" in the quote.

But, as nikaslan has already pointed out, FSX:SE is a different beast as far as tweaking is concerned. After years of trying to optimize the boxed version of FSX, I now have a completely un-tweaked config file and use Orbx scenery, Active Sky weather, Night Environment night lighting and mainly A2A and RealAir aircraft. I use Steve's DX10 Scenery fixer and Cloud Shadows at QHD resolution and have yet to have an OOM. There’s no "killer feature" yet in P3D which would tempt me to ditch FSX but I would never say never. FSX may be quite old but, for me at least, it's not showing its age, particularly in its Steam incarnation.

Edited January 21, 2019 by vortex681