Has Orbx abandonded FSX and P3Dv3?

[overspeed3 410]

Plain and simple:  I myself have invested far too many $$$'s to start all over again with a 64 bit system just to get s'more eye candy...  

[Christopher Low 5,324]

I stayed with P3D v3 for quite some time, but I finally decided to "bite the bullet" and upgrade to the 64bit version at the end of 2018. I had actually purchased and installed it around two months earlier, but only used it for beta testing purposes. I was reluctant to upgrade completely because I was worried that a lot of my "stuff" would not work properly. I was particularly concerned about my large collection of AI planes. Thankfully, it was not as bad as I had expected. By that stage, a large number of AI models had been converted for use in P3D v4, and I have upgraded a handful of other models since then (when I noticed that the old versions had issues). My AI environment is now virtually as rich as it was in P3D v3, with the added bonus that I decided to get rid of some AI planes that were not really needed. The negative side of this story is that Aerosoft Dublin does not work properly (and therefore I do not have it installed), and I decided not to add the Earth Simulations scenery packages (since updated ORBx versions of most of these are in the works).

In short, I am now very happy that I upgraded to P3D v4. It gives me the opportunity to think about some nice payware planes (FS Labs A320/A319 and Quality Wings 787), even if I do not have the spare cash to buy them at the moment!

Now, where is that Violin emoticon when you need it.....

 

[hs118 706]

I believe you will start to see the aircraft developers begin to differentiate their models. A well known company that has spent some years developing one of the most complex aircraft for P3D has hinted this model will be more feature rich in v4 (64 bit). For the FSX/P3Dv3 version, some sacrifices to 32 bit will likely need to be made.

[charliearon 3,017]

13 minutes ago, Christopher Low said:

Now, where is that Violin emoticon when you need it.....

 

 

[GHarrall 494]

2 hours ago, overspeed3 said:

Plain and simple:  I myself have invested far too many $$$'s to start all over again with a 64 bit system just to get s'more eye candy...  

Most things work in v4 64 bit anyway. Some are free upgrades, some need a small fee. 

You really would not be starting all over again. 

[shivers9 1,174]

2 hours ago, overspeed3 said:

Plain and simple:  I myself have invested far too many $$$'s to start all over again with a 64 bit system just to get s'more eye candy...  

Very good post. You have the very good sense to know that you are giving up features and more eye candy in order to save your hard earned money for something else. If just 20 percent of the Avsim Posters were that wise the the number or arguments would drop by 90 percent.

A friend sent a PM the other day that said in cleaned up lang. - if the head of NASA was a member of AVSIM we would be spending billions of dollars in america trying to bring back the old space shuttles to run on Coal and steam. 

[birdguy 3,943]

I do have P3Dv4.4 installed.  But for the present only Northern and Southern California and a single addon aircraft...the Quest Kodiak.

But I have all the FSX/P3D sceneries  and more.  All the SDB military airfields for North America.  Aircraft that don't even show up when I try to more them over to P3Dv4.  I have to give up too much to dump v3 for v4.

I used to be a model railroader.  I a pretty large N scale layout.  I sent hours on the scenery building mountains and cliffs of the southwest.  I used the most expensive track and switches.  I had two complete name trains (SP Daylight and WP California Zephyr) and a beautiful cab-in-front SP articulated steam locomotive.  I had invested a small fortune in it.  Then if someone came along and told me to dump it because HO gauge was better I would have told him to go suck canal water.

Maybe I won't be getting my monthly fix from Orbx anymore, but every day new stuff comes up on AVSIM and Flightsim.com to keep the old stuff fresh and exciting.  8 new aircraft and 2 new sceneries for FSX on FS.com added just this morning.  I downloaded the Air Force Academy scenery.  It will be nice place to park my Air Force C-12, the PMDG Beech 1900C for FS 2004 that works well in V3 but doesn't even show up in V4.

I have too much money, time, and addons invested in FSX-P3Dv3 to give it up.  I do have V4 because it's there.  But the old lady I grew to love when she was young and sexy I will remain faithful to.  I still look at the young ones, but I won't give up the old lady.

Noel the Luddite...

 

Edited February 12, 2019 by birdguy

[GHarrall 494]

1 hour ago, shivers9 said:

Very good post. You have the very good sense to know that you are giving up features and more eye candy in order to save your hard earned money for something else. If just 20 percent of the Avsim Posters were that wise the the number or arguments would drop by 90 percent.

A friend sent a PM the other day that said in cleaned up lang. - if the head of NASA was a member of AVSIM we would be spending billions of dollars in america trying to bring back the old space shuttles to run on Coal and steam. 

V4 and the 64 bit system is not just about 'eye candy' though. I think that's pretty obvious. Just one of the huge improvements is the fact that AI barely affects performance anymore. Add to that the multitude of other fixes and improvements under the hood and its a clear winner in my book.

Anyone who thinks its all about PBR and other eye candy is mistaken.

[shivers9 1,174]

10 minutes ago, GHarrall said:

V4 and the 64 bit system is not just about 'eye candy' though. I think that's pretty obvious. Just one of the huge improvements is the fact that AI barely affects performance anymore. Add to that the multitude of other fixes and improvements under the hood and its a clear winner in my book.

Anyone who thinks its all about PBR and other eye candy is mistaken.

I agree. I fly the latest P3D release and only have the Vertx DA-62 installed. Folks can fuss and justify their decisions all they want. Flight simming is just like most things these days....you get what you pay for. It's up to each one to decide. This whole thing is what ran Rob off the site it appears. A lot has changed here since we lost Tom A. Like so many others who have been around for years, at least now, I don't have rush my morning coffee and Cigar so I can rush to log into AVSIM. LOL

[Bob650 31]

20 hours ago, birdguy said:

I'm an old man twisting in the wake turbulence of century rapidly leaving me behind.

Noel

LOL, I feel your pain.

If I were to switch to P3D, I'd not only need P3D but a new gaming rig to run it on. It's not even a money issue, I'd buy the rig and buy all my favorite planes and scenery over again, at least the ones without dual installers. But the thought of the hours I'd have to spend setting up and tweaking a new sim turns me off. Some of you P3D gurus should hire out your services to set up new sims for people 🙂.

-Bob

[G-RFRY 1,705]

15 hours ago, Bob650 said:

LOL, I feel your pain.

If I were to switch to P3D, I'd not only need P3D but a new gaming rig to run it on. It's not even a money issue, I'd buy the rig and buy all my favorite planes and scenery over again, at least the ones without dual installers. But the thought of the hours I'd have to spend setting up and tweaking a new sim turns me off. Some of you P3D gurus should hire out your services to set up new sims for people 🙂. 

-Bob

That`s what I like about P3Dv4 I don't tweak anything like FSX I only use two config tweaks from Robs testing no AM,  you can get lost in over tweaking. 

[airernie 263]

1 hour ago, rjfry said:

That`s what I like about P3Dv4 I don't tweak anything like FSX I only use two config tweaks from Robs testing no AM,  you can get lost in over tweaking. 

I can say the same about my FSX installation. The tweaking of yesterday isn't necessary with today's systems.

[Paraffin 2,197]

On 2/11/2019 at 9:31 PM, Ramjett said:

Ah yes, but I wonder if someday it will be a factor?  It's known that the 64-bit simulators handle things much, much better than FSX or FS2004, but I suspect the developers...seeing an open-ended market...will throw more and more "eye-candy" in to the pool to get that guy or gal "on the fence" to buy their scenery.  Girls waving goodbye from customized terminal interior shots, the guy in 16C who keeps getting up to go to the Loo.  Purchase by download an in-flight movie to watch from a selectable cabin seat while "Otto" gets you to Dubai.  Firefighters practicing crash response with realistic looking flames pouring from the practice hull in the "pit".  Pretty soon, you'll all be singing the same song we are and trying to come up with your own version of a "flux capacitor" to power up and go bigger, better, farther, higher with an Intel i21 octa-core and a nuclear power supply.  If it starts to hum better head for the hills... LOL.  And the Devs know you'll buy it...we're all hooked in one form or another, be it 32-bit, 64-bit, FSX, FS2004, xPlane11.  The Devs see potential and they will tap it, regardless of how it works on your system.

No, this won't be a factor in devs "filling up" all that 64-bit memory space. At least not in most of our lifetimes. Most people don't realize how massive the jump from 32-bit to 64-bit address space is. It's not a linear progression, as if you're just doubling the available memory.

Here's what different versions of Windows 10 can address in RAM right now:

Windows 10 Home 32 bit   4 GBs
Windows 10 Pro 32 bit       4 GBs
Windows 10 Home 64 bit   128 GBs
Windows 10 Pro 64 bit       512 GBs

And that's not even the theoretical maximum, it's just what the current OS versions support and it will likely be expanded in the future. Windows Server Datacenter already supports 4 Terabytes!

There is simply no way, even with the eye candy and bloat you're mentioning above, that we'll hit a limit in 64-bit RAM for flight sims any time in the near future. This won't be like what happened with FSX and the 32-bit limit.

Of course there is no free lunch -- you will have to buy the physical memory needed for new features. I'm running a 32 GB RAM system right now because there actually is a feature in X-Plane (UHD scenery mesh) where that's a good idea, when used along with other utility software running along with the sim. It's likely that I might have to go to 64 GB of RAM in the next few years, the way things are going. But look how much overhead is still there in the OS versions above! Even with 64 GB of RAM in my computer I would still be using only half what my Windows 10 Home 64-bit system could use, with another massive upgrade step available if I switched to Win10 Pro. 

The 64-bit flight sim developers are just taking baby steps in starting to use this extra capacity, because they can't get too far out ahead of what people actually have installed in their computers.

[SteveW 1,792]

There will always be tweaks! Systems are more diverse than ever and optimisations work well. The simulator has no way of working out precisely the partitioning of power within the PC so we must do it. Put simply, current PCs work well but they really do have more scope for performance differences between systems now, much more.

[birdguy 3,943]

OK Guys, you sold me!

I have both V3 and V4 installed side by side with the essentially the same settings.

This afternoon I made a comparison test.  V4 won hands down.

I few the same course in the same aircraft with the same weather at the same time of day.  I turned the traffic off for both tests.

I had the frame rates capped at 30FPS.  

I flew an area I'm very familiar with.  The San Francisco Bay Area where I grew up.

I took off to the north from Gnoss field in Novato up in Marin county.  I had the autopiltot set to hold at 2,000 feet.  As soon as I cleared 500 feet I turned east and flew past Vallejo into Suisun Bay and turned south until I hit the bridge at Benicia.  Then I turned west until the nose of the aircraft was heading toward Mt. Tamalpais.  I held the course until I could see downtown Oakland.  Then I turned due south overflying Richmond and downtown Oakland.  When I reached the Dumbarton Bridge I turned west and then flew up west side of the bay skirting San Francisco and back home. 

In V3 I experienced some skips in the urban areas.  As I flew over the Richmond-Oakland metro area my frame rates dropped as low as 13 in some spots.  I had 1 pause of about 3-4 seconds somewhere over Richmond.  Throughout the flight frames rates never locked onto a steady 30 but fluctuated between 25-30 in the non-urban areas.

In V4 I noticed no skips.  Over the Richmond-Oakland metro area it never dropped below 17.  The pause I experienced over Richmond in V3 did not occur in the V4 flight.  The frame rates were almost rock steady at 29-30 in non-urban areas.

I'll keep V3 so I can still fly favorite aircraft that V4 doesn't like.

But for normal day to day flying it will be V4.

This has been an interesting thread,  Without it I would probably never have made the comparison test because I hardly ever fly over urban areas.  I prefer bush and mountain flying.  But the comparison convinced me V4 definitely outperforms V3.

My system:

Windows 10 Pro 64

Intel i7-7700 CPU@4.20GGZ

64GB RAM

nVidia GeForce GTX 1080T

Settings:

FXAA - Off

4xMSAA

Aniostropic 8x

Vsync ON Triple Buffering

LOD Radius Ultra

Tesselation Factor High

Mesh Res 5m

Texture Res 15cm

Use High Resolution Terrain Textures

Scenery Complexity Normal

Autogen and Scenery Draw Distance Medium

Autogen Vegetation Denisity Dense

Autogen Building Density Normal

These are the P3Dv4 settings recommended by a trusted friend.  They seem to work fine for me.

Noel