P3d 4.5 is out!

[Samany69 41]

1 hour ago, Sethos1988 said:

Assuming you're using Windows 10, did you turn off the 'Game Bar'? I've heard that has been the cause of a few mysterious FPS locks in various games.

Sorry for the delay , but no, I'm on win7 x64.

Regards.
 

14 minutes ago, Deltaair1212 said:

I don’t mean to hijack this post but honestly you shouldn’t run frames that high anyways. Sync your frames to your monitors refresh rate. If it’s 60hz then your frames should be locked at 60fps. That provides up with the best performance. But if your monitor is at 144hz then I guess you can still lock your frames that high but anytime the frames dip below that magic number you’ll get annoying stutters. 

To be honest, I don't mean to get extreme frame rates, I can't even if I want to, my point is , Frame rate is out of my control and for some magic reason locked at 30 with me wanting or setting that !!


Regards



 

Edited April 10, 2019 by Samany69

[SpiritFlyer 987]

22 hours ago, Christopher Low said:

I am sticking with 4.4 at the moment. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Not me! Loved 4.4 but I'm changing to 4.5. If it ain't broke, break it. 😎

[newtie 533]

😂

[Branimir 58]

Just made a successful flight from EDDS to LJLJ, smooth performance as always, I have no complains about V4.5.

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

On 4/9/2019 at 9:03 AM, jabloomf1230 said:

There are a number of SpeedTrees improvements including new tree types  and textures. This is a nice improvement as with newer hardware the 3D trees are no longer a performance nightmare. And they look a whole lot better at low altitude than the ugly "stick figure theater" trees. At higher altitudes they are replaced with billboards so the performance impact continues to be about the same as the old style FSX "trees".

There are now 254 Speedtree vegetation types, as opposed to the original number of 21. But don't get too excited. A number of these were added to match the variety in height of the default billboard trees. It is also possible to individually place the ST models with Airport Design Editor and of course the built-in P3d Scenario Creator. At lower altitude, ow P3d looks visually like DCS World. And no more electric green trees either.

[pmb 5,137]

So do the new speedtrees fit better into ORBX sceneries than hitherto? It would be great if we could get rid of the cross trees over the long run looking quite ugly from closeup at an airport.

Kind regards, Michael

[Benjamin J 751]

27 minutes ago, jabloomf1230 said:

There are now 254 Speedtree vegetation types, as opposed to the original number of 21. But don't get too excited. A number of these were added to match the variety in height of the default billboard trees. It is also possible to individually place the ST models with Airport Design Editor and of course the built-in P3d Scenario Creator. At lower altitude, ow P3d looks visually like DCS World. And no more electric green trees either.

Would you have a screenshot handy? Would be quite interested in seeing what the ST look like now, as I hated the previous appearance...

[Axis3600 50]

And level performance is better the trees of Orbx or Speedtree now?

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

26 minutes ago, pmb said:

So do the new speedtrees fit better into ORBX sceneries than hitherto? It would be great if we could get rid of the cross trees over the long run looking quite ugly from closeup at an airport.

Kind regards, Michael

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by your reference to ORBX sceneries, but I'll give it go anyway. P3d4 has a large number of autogen tree types. The original FSX billboard versions  of trees were improved over time by both ORBX HD Trees and Turbulent Terminal Terraflora by substituting more detailed texture sheets. But the appearance of the vegetation from the ground and low altitude left a lot to be desired, as you point out. LM began experimenting with 3D trees as autogen, but they had licensed a relatively small number of ST models and as a result the match to the billboard tree versions was not all that good. Further, five of the ST deciduous tree species had some kind of bug in the texture sheets, which caused them to appear bright green during the Spring and Summer. The low altitude sim performance was also degraded by using 3D tree models, even though LM used a reduced scale for the autogen tree density in the P3d4 UI.

Another problem was that if a 3rd party developer placed trees adjacent to an airport boundary (not autogen), these trees would not be 3D models, unless the developer explicitly used the ST versions. Further, ORBX added additional vegetation types over and above the default  FSX types, so there was no way to match those additional types. This "matching" problem also shows up in the full ORBX regions. I asked ORBX about this and unfortunately, they are too large a software company to qualify for the more reasonably-priced Speedtree licenses.

Over time, the highest end PC hardware (let's say for example an Intel 9900 CPU and an nVidia 2080ti GPU) improved performance in the sim where it was again feasible for LM to take another look at whether trees (like all other SimObjects) should be true 3D. Keep in mind that if one pushes all the sliders to the max in the P3d4 UI and also pushes the tree autogen sliders to the max, even that kind of hardware is going to wobble. But also, once one is at a significant altitude, the ST billboard models are used, so performance should not be reduced any more than when using ORBX HD Trees or TT Terraflora.

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

4 minutes ago, Axis3600 said:

And level performance is better the trees of Orbx or Speedtree now?

I don't see why it would be. From my limited experience with P3d 4.5, I'd say that performance is identical unless one increases the autogen tree density slider to the maximum and then performance is worse than using 3D trees in 4.4.

[pmb 5,137]

33 minutes ago, jabloomf1230 said:

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by your reference to ORBX sceneries, but I'll give it go anyway.

I was referring to the fact that former STs didn't fit well to ORBX sceneries. They were rather sparsely distributed because of their performance impact and coloring didn't fit well to the ORBX environment being tuned to the normal autogen trees, preferred the ORBX- enhanced flavor. At least that was what I saw in my very few trials. Anyway, thanks for the detailed explanation. 

Kind regards, Michael

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

52 minutes ago, Benjamin J said:

Would you have a screenshot handy? Would be quite interested in seeing what the ST look like now, as I hated the previous appearance...

Here's a few quick screen shots. It would take a while to cover the variety in land classes.

Norway Mountains

The Bahamas

Mixed Urban Suburban - Spring

 

[Benjamin J 751]

Just now, jabloomf1230 said:

Here's a few quick screen shots. It would take a while to cover the variety in land classes.

Norway Mountains

The Bahamas

Mixed Urban Suburban - Spring

 

Thanks Jay, that's perfect! While it's certainly an improvement, I still can't say I'm particularly impressed with its looks. Until OrbX comes with their own implementation that matches the ST colors with their landclass textures, the matching between trees and LC textures will probably remain a little off.

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

I'm pretty sure that the UI tree autogen slider in P3d 4.5 now allows higher densities of STs, so much of the forested landclass textures are covered up, both by the trees and their shadows. But those tree densities degrade performance substantially at low altitude. 

[Sethos 4,304]

Had my first test run of 4.5 and I'm impressed, to say the least. One of my go-to tests is taking off from default KLAX in the F-22, with OrbX's SoCal, to see how performance / freezes are and for as long as I can remember, I could always count on the multiple seconds long freezes as all the autogen started to catch up and seeing sub-20 frames at times. Now, not sure if the freezing is related to what the guys are saying in this thread, but they appear to be completely gone. I can just take off, maintain the around 30FPS at its lowest and just keep flying with not a single freeze or stutter in sight. Everything just loads in smooth. Very pleasant experience.