JimmiG

Seems to work fine for me after some initial testing, but I need to use it for longer to make sure it doesn't crash on longer flights. Getting 80 FPS over major cities now instead of ~40 and it looks a lot smoother too. Since I have a 170 hz monitor with VRR, it's easy to perceive the increase smoothness. It also masks the micro-stutters that can happen from time to time. Input latency is of course still the same as it was at 40 FPS, which is especially noticeable when panning, but as long as you tweak settings so your base frame rate is well above 30, it's fine, especially in a flight sim which isn't twitchy like a first person shooter for example. It's not a magic fix that will make your 10-15 FPS feel like 30+, it's more for just increasing smoothness when you already have a decent frame rate.

Seems like Vulkan finally solves the micro stuttering issue this sim has had since the beginning.

Yeah, I play almost all of those games. I'm a huge fan of ETS2. The feeling can be quite similar to flight sims, with beautiful scenery passing by, exploring new areas etc. It's very relaxing. You need a decent steering wheel (€150 and up), so it's not super cheap. I really like that it's more structured than something like P3D or X-Plane, with jobs boards, leveling up, earning money etc. ATS is also good, but I would wait until they've finished the rescale project and made it the same scale as ETS2. Cities Skylines is obviously a totally different game, where you build and manage cities. A lot of it comes down to creativity and how much you enjoy that. Anyone can create a functioning city, the hard part is making it look nice and designing efficient interchanges and traffic systems. Check Youtube for some amazing cities people have built. Farming Simulator I played for a while, but it gets extremely repetitive and frustrating in the long run. Ploughing fields just isn't that exciting :smile: You can hire AI helpers, but the AI is so bad you'll constantly babysit them. Elite Dangerous I just couldn't get into. Played for ~15 hours and realized it would take me hundreds of hours to get a decent ship. Ships are 70 million and up, and missions pay 50 - 100k, a good trade route will give you a few thousand per ton in profits etc. They've made it such a grind in order to make people stick with the game and buy all the expansions, but for me it had the opposite effect. It's not a space sim so much as a "being poor and not finding a decent job"-simulator.

I think the big difference between FSX/P3D addons and X-Plane is "polish", which applies to many of your points above. FSX design teams generally consist of more people, with higher development budgets and more testers. Many X-Plane developers are still one-man shops or very small teams. For me, that's part of the charm of X-Plane addons. It's not unusual to just get a direct download link to a .zip file that you extract and dump into your X-Plane folder, where as FSX addons have installation wizzards, professionally produced PDF manuals, control panels, automatic updates etc. It also means that some of the smaller X-Plane dev studios don't have the resources to perfectly color-match and edit ortho photos or produce that photo-realistic 3D interior. As long as the price reflects this, I'm generally OK with it. However, "Quality" or "polish" is something reviewers should take into account still. When you pay money for a "product", you expect the overall experience to feel professional.

If I just download via the browser, FSS downloads are super-slow. I use Free Download Manager with 30 simultaneous connections, which speeds it up considerably. I have the same problem with FTX Central - trying to download new libraries from there takes forever. Downloading from Google Drive takes a minute or two.

Well, everyone did their best to deny this bug, but guess what.. It's actually fixed in XP 10.50 RC1! It just goes to show that the development of this sim would progress much faster if people didn't deny bugs and errors.

Just updated. The water reflection mis-alignment that I reported perhaps 2-3 years ago is finally fixed. No more ships that look like they're hovering over the water, or reflections of land that are offset by half a mile etc.

I see. Well it's a long video and I kind of just scanned it quickly toward the end. Anyway I just picked one up based on this, and it's definitely smoother due to the different spring mechanism. On the regular yoke, the springs are directly attached without the gears, which is what causes the creaking and gripping. The gearing definitely smooths it out a bit. It's not perfect but then again, this is not a $1000 yoke.

Well someone must have done in the past 2-3 years... Besides I filed a bug for the mis-aligned water reflections introduced around XP 10.10 - 10.20, and that was ignored.

Obviously the first thought when you see a message about running out of "memory" is to try and figure out how to add more memory. Unfortunately, as stated before, and unlike most other simulators available now, P3D can only use 4 GB of memory (actually, 4 GB of virtual address space) PCI-Express videocards don't really run out of memory, either. If a program uses more video memory than available, it will automatically begin to use system RAM. This causes a massive performance drop, but doesn't produce any error messages.

This issue has existed for quite a while (at least since 10.30, maybe even before 10.20) and I'm wondering why it isn't getting fixed. It seems moving the shadow quality setting to the highest ("Melt your GPU") actually reduces the draw distance compared to high: High: http://imgur.com/PRlnzjz MYGPU: http://imgur.com/jWe9adT The shadows do not disappear completely at the highest setting, but the draw distance becomes significantly lower. Also, it seems to only happen from the 3D cockpit view, while they look fine from external views.

I agree. There are plenty of very, very good freeware and payware airports for X-Plane, but this one in particular is closest to the OrbX "feeling", with photo-realism, dense vegetation etc. I would love to see more X-Plane airports from this developer.

Definitely sounds like you have installed to the default "Program Files (x86)" location which is not a good idea with P3D. I wouldn't recommend disabling UAC since it's a security feature. Without it, any program you run on your system can run with full privileges which is a huge security risk these days.

Going from 4.4 to 4.7 GHz is a ~7% higher clock speed, so that's the absolute maximum increase of FPS that you can expect. So if you were getting 25 FPS at 4.4 GHz, under ideal circumstances (no other bottlenecks), 4.7 GHz would give you about 26.7 FPS.