I am presently in a cross country real-time flight between Ganges, B.C. and Flint, Michigan.  Because at the moment I can't inject live weather, I am running this cross country flight with the Building Storms scenario.  Over the last two days, and with many, many start, observe, tweak/massage settings across graphic genre/end flight and repeat, I have some usage-observations for you;

Firstly, you do need no less than 8 GB's of vRAM,  **IF**, if you want to run the sim pretty much maxed out.  If you choose to run each slider and feature that can be adjusted, at 80-100 percent of that feature's range, you will consume usually at the start of your flight and loading in, about 3.2/4 GB's of your max vRAM 'budget' which on my 8GB card, sits around 6.7 GB's.  On my EVGA FTW GTX1070 8GB card, running under W10 Pro, over many, many flights the last 24 hours, My scenarios start at 3.2/4. During the flight the mean average fluctuation vRAM load in, sits at 3.4/6, and when all hell is breaking loose, with clouds, rain, storm, snow, fog and haze, with my plane passing over some seriously detailed Orbx city, town, whatever...my vRAM can load out at 4.4/9, but drops rapidly back to my medium 3.2/4 on average. So, does DX12/P3D v5 free up vRAM, in real time. Absolutely yes!  The following screen grabs is on my flight east at FL180 at 183 knots under a building storm and unsettled weather/atmospherics.  Totally real life believable to say the least!   In some of the shots I have the vRAM reader/FPS counter on, so you can left click your mouse button twice, on each pic..to bring them up to full res for a better look-see. 

So..you do NOT need anything larger than any 8GB DX12 enabled GPU to run and enjoy all of P3Dv5's feature sets.  With an older i7975 CPU, GTX1070 8GB combo, I am well able to have the sim 90-100 percent cranked up...and obtaining and keeping 30 FPS as the mean running average, even in such atmospherics as the pic you see here, above the Rockies...   If you have a decent, recent (7 years or newer) CPU, driving an 8GB vRAM card...there is no reason whatsoever that you need/should wait to enjoy what this new DX12 enabled sim brings to the table..and to the genre.  

Here's part of my flight, as I am live running it...heading towards KFNT....

The Rockies below, in the haze with the clouds filling the valleys, is truly spectacular in animated real time upon my monitor!

 

 

Edited April 18, 20206 yr by Sesquashtoo

I'm also enjoying V5 so far.  However one big caveat I would give.  The official V5 versions of the more complicated airframes are still to arrive.  So I'm cautious to be too generous yet until I see them in their full glory.  

I flew KMRY-KHAF last night using ORBX airports at both ends, orbx SoCal region, the justflight Arrow and my full AI traffic from AIG/OCI installed.  I flew the route at 2k resolution with all sliders to the right and was able to keep my FPS pegged at 30, occasional dips down to 28 or so.  vram memory was around 4.8.

This is on an i7 7700k running at 4.8ghz, gtx1070, and 16gb of some pretty fast ram (can’t remember the exact speed).

Now I recognize that the justflight arrow is not as resource heavy as the airliners are going to be, and I lack multiple layers of active sky clouds, but I was so impressed with the performance on this flight, especially given the hundreds of AI aircraft working in the background.  A similar flight in v4 (anything close to the Bay Area) would have been a stutter fest with fps unstable and unlikely to be higher than 20.

All in all, the sim has some issues that need to be worked out, but it’s a solid step forward as a base; flights like this are very encouraging for the future of p3d.
 

 

Edited April 18, 20206 yr by regis9

1 hour ago, micstatic said:

I'm also enjoying V5 so far.  However one big caveat I would give.  The official V5 versions of the more complicated airframes are still to arrive.  So I'm cautious to be too generous yet until I see them in their full glory.  

I agree 100% with your caveat... the performance is very good with the default aircraft (after initial hesitation I took the plunge on v5 since I have so much v4 addon content sitting unused; I just hadn't had the desire to fire up P3D in the last 6 months when the experience has lately been superior in DCS, XP, IL2 etc), and you can definitely see where the rendering in the new version is finally smooth and providing a proper representation of flight.  Zooming over the starting area around San Antonio with Orbx textures and LC in the F22 at 400 knots is breathtaking.  The move to the new API was long overdue and is honestly the primary benefit of v5.

However, my first attempts with pointing v5 to my A2A and RealAir aircraft in my v4 Addons folder has been underwhelming.  The Bonanza and Cherokee (the only two I have tried so far) hit performance hard in a much more significant way than I experienced in v4, depending on where my settings are.  My first experiments have required a lot of slider tweaking to get into something marginal for use with Trackir.  I know those aircraft are not yet released or optimized for V5, but just based on what I am seeing with those preliminary tests, it may not be as straightforward for developers to move certain aircraft over to V4 without patches from LM or re-work from the developers.  In more than a few cases, it is not going to be just "new installers" - and development or release of "native" v5 aircraft to play nice with DX12 may very well be a thing (it was that way in Xplane with the move to XP11).

 

Now...

/start rant/

Just my 2c on something... I see some performance reports and screenshots that show frames in the 20's or just around 30.  Sorry folks, but IMHO frame rates that low are just not acceptable for a flight sim in 2020.  It is a non-starter for head-tracking or VR and is jarringly noticeable if you have experienced 60+ Hz video, simulation and gaming.  There is no way you can properly simulate a gusty crosswind landing, for example, at 30 Hz in a way that effectively reinforces stick-and-rudder skills.  Expectations need to be higher after this many years of flight sim development.  When the more advanced aircraft are released for v5, we can't be going from 40-80 fps down to 20-30 and accept that is OK - even if the frame times are finally more consistent.  YMMV...

/end rant/

Edited April 18, 20206 yr by PurdueKev