I got a fancy new computer, thinking to get back into flight simming. It was not long ago, I was the master of all I surveyed, a staff reviewer for AVSIM, confident in a variety of complex airliners, up-to-date on the latest tweaks to wring another 2 FPS from FSX. 

But I picked a bad week to stop sniffing glue—I mean a bad year to return to this hobby. Devs seem shocked and demoralized as asteroid Flight-MMXX hit, sucking the oxygen out of the hemisphere. I seemed to have missed P3D’s heyday, to hear some talk. And FSX is “not supported.” 

I like airliners. I like big airports. If things move around the airliners on the ramp, I like that, too. And I like it to look good and run well without a lot of fiddling around. I’m old and cranky.

Originally, I thought FSX. But then, I learned P3D was mainstream with some 3rd Party support, the kind right up my alley. Captain Sim has some oddly Roman numeral offerings that run on it. Coolsky has their great old MD-80 and DC-9. And what’s this? Leonardo? With my First Big Boy airplane, the Maddog resurrected?

Sim paralysis. Does P3D improve performance, stability, look better? Is it a better platform for this kind of flying? I don’t care if devs are having second thoughts about P3D at the moment because Microsoft has crowned the lawful successor to FSX. Time will tell, but I have my doubts and don’t want to wait. Advice?

PC: i9 10900K @ 5.3GHz | 32GB DDR4 3200 | 10GB RTX 3080 | 32” Asus TUF VG32VQ Curved Monitor | Samsung 2TB SSD HD | Win 10 Pro 64 - Flight Sim TBA

Welcome back!

Yes, P3D is the way to go, hands down. I have said goodbye to FSX a long, long time ago. And your PC should be very well positioned to run it. Currently, P3Dv4 and v5 are both popular. v5 is obviously the newer of the two, and incorporates the latest technologies. That said, v4 is the more mature. Ultimately, it's become a remarkably stable platform for me, with few if ever crashes and great addon support. It is the first P3D version to be 64bit, which did away with limitations on how much RAM P3D (and FSX back in the day) could use (remember those out-of-memory errors?). v4 also introduced PBR, which is a way to handle lighting of objects in a way that makes materials looks much more realistic, especially metals. This ash really done wonders for the overall graphical fidelity of the sim.

v5, being '5.0', needs some time to mature, but it holds the promise of being the best-performing P3D version so far. It also uses a new atmospherics engine that does away with the 2D clouds. Personally I love it, but it's labeled as 'beta' and it certainly has some noticeable limitations, the biggest being that it currently doesn't support more than one precipitation layers... Another drawback from v5 is that it's increase in performance in large part comes from its switch from DirectX 11 to 12. The problem being that once you run out of VRAM, P3D currently simply stops running. Hence, major reasons people await v5.1 is for a more graceful handling of out-of-VRAM errors, perhaps a smaller footprint altogether, as well as better integration of the enhanced atmospherics so that software like ActiveSky (yes, they are also still around) can make full use of its functions.

Now, I want to be clear... many people do complain about P3Dv5 and running out of VRAM. Personally, I've not had any such problems so far. I have installed the current v5 version just to test performance in several big cities that have always given me issues, those being New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo and Osaka. Now, performance is mostly very good, and while my VRAM usage is pretty high, I've not had any out-of-VRAM errors. But, Iv;e not tried any high-detail airports with PBR yet. PBR, while beautiful, uses several texture maps that combine to give the beautiful material representation that it gives, and this can starve your VRAM if you're running very high texture quality settings.

So to summarize... Yes, P3D all the way. If it's stability you're going for and you're fine with whatever is currently available in terms of addons, then you might want to go for P3Dv4. With your PC specs I doubt you'll have any issues running it! However, keep in mind that P3Dv5 is the future. However, it has some issues that hopefully will be taken care of to a large extent come v5.1. But when that come sis anybody's guess!

One more thing. Prepare to re-purchase everything you ever owned for P3Dv4. With the advent of 64bit and PBR, essentially everything had to be recoded or redesigned, and so publishers have tended to ask for full purchases of the newer versions...

That sounds pretty straight forward to me..

What was FSX, is P3D now.. V5 is the current release.

And yes, it will do everything that FSX did, only better.

Will you have to add your favorite airplanes, yes.

Will you have to add your favorite airports.. depends on your tastes and budget.

Either way, based on what you describe as your needs... P3d V5 is the way to go.

 

 

What they said. P3Dv5.............

1 hour ago, SierraHotel said:

Then one day in the not to distant future you are sitting in front of your AMD equiped PC trying (and failing) to ease the discomfort of your full body bio suite! You suddenly realise just how many thousands of dollars you have spent on addons for P3D just to make it fly and look as good as MSFS (you failed of course)! MSFS that has all those dedicated entusiasts making aiports, scenery and amazing aircraft for free, you hang your head and start to cry.............. 🤪

Hehe....as I've already read some of the answers.....I want to recall a very poignant scene in a movie long past called Kentucky Fried Movie.  If you look up Rex Kramer Danger Seeker, you'll find it.   Needless to say its not in line with today's social norms....but I instantly thought about that when @SierraHotel came into a P3D forum and dropped an MSFS challenge.

Simmers of ALL ages and creeds......I can also relate to this as a former military guy who, like any proud sailor, vehemently defended my branch of service whenever those low-life Marines, Airdales, or Army-men tried to expound on how great their branch of the service was. 🙂 

True story....we were in a bar overseas (wait....doesn't every sailor's story start like that?), there was a table of Marines (4) sitting and having a good time, while the rest of the bar was primarily Squids (I can use that word because I was one....but have a Marine call a Sailor a squid....ohhh boy)...typical arrangement, as the Marines were part of the security detachment for the ship I was on.

Anyway, I can't recall the exact details, but a quickly developing dispute between them and a group of locals (I know there were more than 4), which lead to them standing up from their chairs....which we all understand as the international sign of a rumble is about to start.  Not that us Squids were particularly interested in the Marine's affairs (and didn't really think they couldn't handle themselves).  Like a scripted movie, and almost like a flash mob nowadays (they didn't really exist in 1984), the entire complement of Sailors stood up, almost in perfect unison, and just stared the local mob down.

The next round was on the Marines 🙂

If the moral of the story was not painfully obvious....well you know.

Since I'm MSFS'r now....I have no dog in this race, other than to offer advice as it was asked for.  I've had my run with P3d (and FSX, FSX DX10, FSXSteam, etc), painted dozens of planes for the community, loved my heavy metal, yadda yadda.

@Tim_Capps, Depending on the forum you asked this question in will lead to completely different responses as we, as a simming community have silo'd ourselves into camps, and like branches of the military, are ready to vehemently defend our turf when other ruffians drop in and spout their opinions, hehe)...this was done partly out of necessity, but it also does the whole community a disservice.

Anyway...Yes P3D v5 is the Cat's Meow now if you need to fly heavy stuff...you have a LOT of catching up to do!!  3 things I can offer:

1. If you need to ask if you should get this version of P3D or this one...based on your status as a student or not....DON'T ASK HERE!   Just make your own moral decision and move on. 🙂
2. A lot of stuff you have (if not all) from FSX, will need updates to P3D.  Some will cost, some will not...and some will not work at all (I think the lovely L1011 you show is not updated to V5, but have not followed that plane in years....best to go visit the CS site and find out)
3. You WILL see a new kid on the block....all full of spunk and ready to go toe-to-toe with the old school.   Dip into their world if you love aviation in general without the tagline P3d, MSFS, FSX, Flight, Xplane, etc, and see where MS has evolved flightsim to since FSX (with AS labs and Blackshark's help of course).   Will it fly your heavies yet? Not 3rd party, and while the included aircraft look good, they have....issues...but there are modders that keep surprising us with what they can do, even without a fully developed SDK (don't ask...that is a fight all itself).

 

I think P3D is currently the place for tubeliner simulation, if you have all of the requisite payware addons and whatnot.

Where your particular case gets a little.. hinky?... is that it sounds like you're probably gonna have to spend many hundreds of dollars rebuying all of that stuff for v5.  So at that point you have to ask whether it's "worth it", and your answer to that question may hinge a lot on estimating when (and I suppose if) you think Microsoft Flight Simulator is going to start delivering a great airliner experience.

I also agree with Steve that the answer you get is going to be entirely contingent on where you ask the question.  The P3D forum clearly thinks P3D is the way to go, weirdly enough.  I'm sure the X-Plane 11 forum will agree wholeheartedly. 😄

 

11 minutes ago, JoeFackel said:

OP is searching for complex aircraft, not soulless eyecandy.

Wise and reasonable if you want simulate flying instead of making screenshots.

Hehe.....Hey Joe...this is how'd I respond to that if I was a hardcore MSFS'r heII bent on proving that my sim it better than yours.....

....if you want true complex aircraft devoid of any eye candy...

http://www.aerowinx.com/

And don't go grabbing the Windshield addons for it that allow it to connect to P3d screens so you can see that terrible world outside your cockpit....that would ruin the pureness of your experience for you, memorizing how to push buttons on an FMC when ATC changes your arrival. 😉

And I have this vision of you at your PC.....looks something like this:

 

 

I wonder if when you sit in a passenger plane, you pick the isle seat and ask everyone around you to close their windows?

 

**************************************************************

OK...Mocking session complete 🙂

I agree P3D v5 is the way to go...for now, if you are into heavies.   But watch the new kid on the block....he's growing up....and will probably become Biff from Back to the Future fame when picking on the older kids that used to rule the playground 🤣

 

14 hours ago, Tim_Capps said:

...I like airliners. I like big airports. If things move around the airliners on the ramp, I like that, too. And I like it to look good and run well without a lot of fiddling around. I’m old and cranky....Sim paralysis. Does P3D improve performance, stability, look better? Is it a better platform for this kind of flying? I don’t care if devs are having second thoughts about P3D at the moment because Microsoft has crowned the lawful successor to FSX. Time will tell, but I have my doubts and don’t want to wait. Advice?

I've used P3D since it debuted, but didn't upgrade to v5 as I wanted to see what MSFS was going to bring to the table.  I use P3D maybe 24h/week, for years n years, and I've got $100-$1000s worth of add-ons to make it as good as it can get, save TruEarth regions which require huge storage, but are going to get you closer to what you have in MSFS, performance perhaps notwithstanding--someone can chime in on that.   And I've got just under 60h now in MSFS flying most exclusively the Daher TBM930.  Given what I'm reading as to where you are at with this here's my recommendation:

1. Biggest no-brainer in the history of deciding which flight simulator to buy first:  MSFS.  It's cheap, it's aggressively being further developed, and it's been an absolute wonder to use, coming from someone w/ $1000s in add-ons for P3D.  Performance, for what your seeing both in scenery & atmosphere, is stellar already, and that is before the DX-12 implementation apparently being worked on now for MSFS.
2. To get you into very quality aircraft, the lovely PMDG NGXu is my favorite, followed by Majestic's Q400 'Crash 8', go ahead and pick up P3D, presumably v5 is what you want since there are compatible versions of scenery and airware and ground services apps you will want to use.
3. Instead of trying to make the whole world available in best quality scenery consider limiting the region to just what you need for commercial US mainly, or whatever your world region of choice is.  So the usual ORBX global sceneries, and ORBX global vector, etc etc etc.  ORBX landclass regionals or TruEarth states or European countries where limitedly available.  With P3D you will spend hours and hours and more hours setting up, installing addons, understanding and configuring them.  Then you're going to need a separate cloud texture and weather program like ActiveSky, etc etc etc.  With MSFS, it's pretty much point and shoot as you have nearly the entire world in front of you in photoreal photogrammatrized PBR lit color, volumetric clouds and performance as I say is really quite stellar.   The clouds will improve visually w/ DX-12 I read.  And the entire install is pretty much a one button press, then setting up controls of course.  It likes lots of GPU just like P3D 5.x does.   Look at the OSD in the upper left of this screenshot of a flyover of the medieval walled town of Rotenburg ob der Tauber near Munchen.  The frame rate is locked at 30 by vsync to 30Hz screen, the bottom two are the two logical processors handling MSFS' mainthread:  14% + 22% = 36% of my hyperthreaded CPU at 4.9Ghz.  Look how cool the CPU is, hyperthreaded and all-core overclocked:  45C.  The GPU is hammered though, but is still just barely keeping up with meeting the mininum 30 frames per second requirement to maintain stutter-free smooth flight:

Image hosting site not working right :o(

So to summarize:  pick up both, use MSFS for what it's great at, and P3D 5 for what it's great at--just don't try to make them both do exactly the same thing.  Restrict P3D install to just what you need to satisfy your need for quality tubeliners and other, but the visuals below, all over the world, just don't hold a candle to what MSFS does right out of the box.  For me, when the PMDG NGXu and Majestic Q400 arrive in MSFS I will very likely not come back to P3D.

Caveat:  I understand TruEarth does something very similar for considerable cost and in restricted areas so it's possible to get the same +/- visuals as I say in limited areas and w/ substantial storage required per area.

Edited October 13, 20205 yr by Noel

Given my flying preferences (not so much glass) and heavy FSX investment, it really comes down to FSX frozen 6 or 7 years ago when I quit (but now with a much, much better computer) or starting fresh with P3Dv5. MSFS2020 isn’t really the question.

I may very well pick up it at some point. But I guess the real question is “today”— is P3Dv5 going to give me enough “wow” with, say, Leonardo’s amazing-looking Fly the Maddog and a few other add-ons like some airports to make it significantly better than, say Coolsky’s nice DC-9/MD-80 and a ton of other stuff that I can re-download for FSX?

There are intangibles in the decision that make it not just about the money, or waiting to see who is left standing in three years. This will probably be my last foray into flight simulation. I just want the best platform to match my equipment and preferences, and things looking good is high on my list, and if I’m going to be going with the legacy, I think I’d rather have the better version, all things being equal.

2 minutes ago, Tim_Capps said:

is P3Dv5 going to give me enough “wow” with, say, Leonardo’s amazing-looking Fly the Maddog

Quite frankly, its going to blow your socks off! 🙂

And if I can again be so bold and make a shameless plug for one of my paints waiting for you when you get the Maddog for P3d:

This is a TWA mod to the original AA I released...and if not mistaken, the very 1st PBR release in P3D (pats himself on the back, hehe).

If you are a PMDG 747 fan, you can see the improvements in the PBR techniques Brain T and I made since the Maddog: (this is 99% his work....I mostly consulted and critiqued hehe)

You will NOT be disappointed with P3D if you're looking for the airliner experience vs how far we've come since FSX (and these are not even in V5....I stopped at V4.5 in my P3D journey)

Based upon your criteria Tim, I'd also say that, for you, P3D V5 is the way to go. I fly both P3DV5 and MSFS and enjoy both but for much different reasons. In P3d I'm generally flying in the soup with real or historical weather. Since I can't see anything but the gauges, I'm not really concerned about scenery, etc . For good IFR practice and fairly accurate flying V% is the master.

When I want to tool around looking at beautiful scenery and break all sorts of flight rules by flying under bridges inverted  then MSFS is it.

Vic 

 

2 minutes ago, F737NG said:

There's a lot to like in MSFS, let's not overhype it's 'simple usability' though.

Hehe...you caught me...guilty as charged. 🤥🙂

But we can all generally agree that the stairway to get to into the cockpit and finally start flying is much shorter in MSFS than P3d, true? 

14 hours ago, Tim_Capps said:

 Advice?

 Heavy metal airliner flying is the preserve of P3D. It cannot be beaten at this point in time.

It takes a lot more effort and financial resources to make the P3D world look good than either MSFS by default or in some respects even XP11. However, the systems detail and visuals of the top-end airliners are second-to-none.

Your PC should be able to blast it's way through the legacy programming issues that can cause notable performance problems for some mid-tiered or lower PCs.

I would say choose an area of the World you really like and focus on building a scenery library to support it. There's nothing worse (as I can attest) to trying to build-up scenery in all of the continents and having very dated scenery spoil the cruise segment of your flight.

I have photoscenery for the entire western USA, western Europe and parts of Australia and eastern China. It's not quite MSFS-level scenery, but in P3D v5 it's as good as I can get it, plus my virtual hangar contains a better calibre of aircraft to fly.

11 minutes ago, Steve Dra said:

Hehe...you caught me...guilty as charged. 🤥🙂

But we can all generally agree that the stairway to get to into the cockpit and finally start flying is much shorter in MSFS than P3d, true? 

When it comes to installing scenery, absolutely.

If I want to geek out with a full pre-flight prep, I'll take my time to have GSX run in the background, prep the cockpit, have Self-Loading Cargo do its thing, set up the FMC based on SimBrief data, prep the Navigraph charts for the route, tune in to LiveATC.net and push-back probably some 20-25 minutes after I first loaded the scenario in P3D.

I can just as easily take the A2A Cherokee out for a quick spin in P3D in the same amount of time it takes to get the C152 out for one in MSFS. Then there's the 'pot luck' of whether there's been a patch or an upgrade to MSFS that needs installing before the sim will load fully.

Swings and roundabouts, really.

Well, I’m new to the new forum, too, so I don’t know why I was stuck with quoting that despite clearing everything I could find to clear, but I didn’t mean to.

Anyway, I’m not sure why people assume I’m going to rush out and re-purchase everything I collected over the life of my FSX career. If I were to get the Leonardo Maddog and a few airports I’d be fine for a while and go from there. No doubt, there would be be some escalation, but over time. And, I am not only a lawyer but expert in moral casuistry, so I’m not sure where that comment was coming from, but am Prepared to argue whatever issue to which it alludes.

I picked this forum to narrow the replies, which has worked pretty well. I know that in America Divided, nothing arouses stronger feelings than flight simulation.

I was a Navy JAG during Desert Storm, NAS Sigonella, but rode a circuit reaching from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Gulf. I got to visit a lot of ships—mostly in liberty ports—but got under way just enough for fun. No one had any idea what to do with on O-3 lawyer. One time I got the Commodore’s suite, it otherwise being unused. Another time I got kicked off USS Wasp by the Commodore with whom I got into a mutually alcohol-involved argument over the case in Toulon. (Moral: it may be your ship, but in the end it’s my case, heh heh.) What I did in the war was in Manama, mainly to do with USS Samuel Gompers (since target practice) and some interesting cases involving a certain no-longer-in-effect ground for adesps that had its diversions. The only bar story I can relate here is one that ended with two lawyers being removed by firefighters from one that was filled with smoke.