Suggestions/help for low end computers setup for v5

[robbo3066 1]

Hi

I read with interest the various threads on v5 setups but wonder if anyone with a greater knowledge that me could advise on the v5 setup for a lower end computer & Graphics card. 

Windows 10 with AMD FX 6300 six-core processor 3.50GHz, 16gb ram, 64 bit, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 6gb

I have a lot of payware airports, such as FDST, Taxi2Gate, LatinVFR, UK2000 and use mainly Aerosoft Airbusses or Qualitywings 787

Thanks for any help and suggestions

Rob

[JoeFackel 760]

I would say as long as you dial your settings properly it should run on your hardware. I wouldn't expect to your on 4K or high AA / texture settings.

[Chock 17,769]

Obviously the draw distance and complexity of scenery is going to be a factor in performance, and where this is concerned, the best thing to do is start on the low settings, then try a bit higher, and a bit higher and then a bit more, until you find a particular setting is starting to slow things down and also note how much it appears to slow things down to determine a decent linear guess at what is going on and which settings impact things more (this last bit is important). So the best way to go about this, is try each setting on its own, and when you have determined a satisfactory upper limit, back it off from that a bit. Note things down on a bit of paper, this will help as well. This is because we are testing each setting in isolation, but your PC is going to have to work harder when all your settings are increased, so if you know which setting is making things work hard, you will know which one to adjust first when everything is working together.

Assuming you have a 16:9 aspect ratio monitor, I would try dropping the resolution to something which you can live with. Try 1920x1080, or even 1360x768 if it is really struggling. The less pixels your computer has to move around, the better it will do. However, what looks decent to you will also determine whether you want to do this. Here's an interesting guide to that stuff:

https://www.techspot.com/article/1113-4k-monitor-see-difference/

It is worth bearing in mind that dropping the resolution will have a bearing on how useful/necessary/capable some Option settings are and how hard they might have to work, so it is worth understanding these and what they actually do. Knowing this stuff will be of more help than having someone just say: 'yeah mate, turn that off, works great on my PC'. So, here goes...

Antialiasing - Antialiasing helps to smooth out the sawtoothed jagged edges of things which appear as a result of the resolution not being able to smoothly draw (typically) diagonal lines because the image is made up from square pixels in the same way that something made from Lego blocks will inevitably appear 'blocky'. Computationally it can be quite taxing on your PC to address this, because your computer is analysing the levels, colours, brightness etc of an image, then having done this, it upsamples the resolution to give it more pixel data to play with, then it downsamples the resolution back to what it originally was after having added softening to the edges of lines by shaded pixels along the edges where sawtoothing is apparent. There are numerous variations on this technique, but that's the gist of it. 

Where FSX and P3D are concerned, you have two choices - MSAA and SSAA and one of these is much harder on your GPU/CPU than the other. Put simply, SSAA (Super-Sampling Anti-Aliasing) is sometimes referred to as FSAA (Full-Screen Anti-Aliasing), since it analyses the entire screen (actually it sometimes just does several areas of the screen) when it is doing its stuff to improve jagged edges and it fully renders all of the sample data of all these areas. As a result, it does a better job, but it takes more power and time to do it, which equates to a nicer image, but also potential for lag and slower frame rates. MSAA (Multi-Sampling Anti-Aliasing) also analyses several areas of the screen, but it limits the calculations performed based on that analysis and therefore  also the visual tweaks done on the image, making it a faster calculation for your PC. It doesn't look as good as SSAA, and there is more of a chance of things such as Moire patterning (moire patterning is what you see in real life if you for example walked past two wire mesh fences and observed weird patterns as the meshes intersected with one another), but it's a lot less work for your computer.

Trilinear and Anisotropic Filtering - Trilinear filtering analyses the image (often drawing on mip-mapping) to allow the PC to smoothly change the sizes of what is displayed without displaying any obvious blockiness or jumping of the image. A good example of this would be if you were in a first-person shooter game and your character was walking toward a brick wall. Trilinear filtering would allow that brick wall pattern to smoothly scale as your character approached it. These days the better option is Anisotropic filtering, which kind of does the same thing as Trilinear, but it also takes into account things which are viewed at oblique angles. A good example of this would be looking down the runway in your flight sim if the runway had a texture which depicted a paved surface. Without Anisotopic filtering, there's a good chance you'd see some weird patternation shapes going on as the texture stretched into the distance.

Dynamic Texture Streaming - This is new in P3D, but conceptually it is fairly easy to understand as the clue is in the name really. Essentially what it will do is dynamically downsample texture resolutions on the fly (i.e. throttle them) to help the sim not use too much VRAM. So if you get VRAM errors from running out of it, then turning this on would help.

VSync and Triple Buffering - Vsync can reduce tearing (tearing is where the display shows information/data from multiple frames in a single screen draw). Turning Vsync on syncs the FPS to the monitor's refresh rate. Turning Vsync on will enable the Triple Buffering option, which can sometimes improve performance by buffering visual data in readiness to use it, but doing that can cause lag. The best way to determine whether this is useful for your PC is simply to try it and see what it gets you.

Variable Refresh Rate - Does what it says on the tin basically. If your monitor supports this, it may get you some increased performance but since it is messing with the refresh rate it may cause some tearing.

Now you know what all that stuff does, get a big cup of tea or coffee, and spend 20 minutes trying them all out on your sim and tweaking various combinations of them, until you have it running nicely.

 

Edited May 11, 2020 by Chock

[robbo3066 1]

Thanks Guys for your comments, whilst taking your comment JoeFackel into account, I have gone through your reply Chock in detail and have found a series of setting which the computer feels happy with and even a little leeway to improve. Thanks for that.

Rob

[TurboKen 221]

I was going to make a comment about draw distance being a big hitter and then I saw "Chock's" post and gave up and went back to work.

Edited May 11, 2020 by TurboKen

[Christopher Low 5,353]

Calm winds and clear skies would be a good start. That's what I do, and it allows me to run P3Dv4 at higher detail settings than I might otherwise be able to.

[787flyer 633]

I would have also said that with a 6Gb graphics cards in use, I would be conservative with the Texture Resolution setting and set that to 1024 to begin with and work upwards from there if your system has available resources.

[Ricardo41 5,949]

18 hours ago, robbo3066 said:

Windows 10 with AMD FX 6300 six-core processor 3.50GHz, 16gb ram, 64 bit, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 6gb

Low end? Lol.