niyoko

Nick, Glad to see that you sound a solution. Did your fix of turning off the volumetric fog help with both of your issues, or with the inability to turn off the default haze layer?

Great post Bob. I'm happy to hear how you're enjoying simming even more with Prepar3D. I read your story and want to get back into the air. I've been on a downer lately and haven't been able to find the motivation to do much. I want to feel the virtual air lifting my plane up again.

Not trying to sound sarcastic, but I just did the SUPER SIMPLE client upgrade from v3.1 to v3.2 with not troubles at all. I followed the upgrade instructions provided by Lockheed Martin, and I was installed and running in less than 10 minutes. All that I had to do after that was to re-activate and choose the "Don't Run" at the dialog prompt for Orbx's ObjectFlow dll. The I did a test with V3.1 vs. v3.2 sitting at FlightBeam's KSFO with Orbx's Northern California Scenery, MyTraffic 6, PrecipitFX, FsFx 777 effects, and Prepar3D's default Building Storms weather then taking off in the PMDG 777. My first impression was WOW NorCal and KSFO seem to be working even though Virtualli and ObjectFlow hadn't been updated...cool to that. The performance impression was that v3.2 is a BIG step in the right direction in performance from v3.1. The flight out of KSFO was very smooth and looked great as the big 777-300ER climbed with FsFx's 777 effects across the wings and contrails off the wing. I was getting but smooth low FPS when looking back at KSFO with traffic in v3.1. In v3.2 I was still experiencing good smoothness, but much better FPS. This is just with the client updated, so I'm VERY much pleased with the improvements made in the v3.2 update. ​Everyone is going to have a different setup and set of add-ons, but I wouldn't hesitate to upgrade to v3.2. At the very least everyone should do the client upgrade and see how it runs for their machine. It's another step forward for Prepar3D.

Ah, I see. It does then look like there is a hardware issue that is affecting you. I also can't blame you for wanting to stay far away from de-lidding the CPU. I've never done it. I know that I'll break something. In my case I recently upgraded from an AMD [email protected] and settled on the 4790K that I mentioned in my last post due to it having better heat transfer and power management. It might just be time to upgrade not just for more FPS in Prepar3D, but because it looks like you got a badly binned CPU.

@Shanan Going from a 4770K to a 6700K looks like an expensive move for a few more FPS, while the 4770K overclocked still appears to be a solid CPU. I'd advise holding onto your CPU and RAM for a little longer, and purchasing a better CPU cooler. You mentioned that you couldn't overclock much because of your CPU temperatures, so I'm thinking that you might be able to get a higher CPU overclock with a better cooler. If the CPU cooler helps you with achieving a higher overclock then you saved yourself a lot of money. If it doesn't change anything you can still take advantage of the new CPU cooler that you bought in your 6700K build. I'd look at Corsair's all-in-one water cooling solutions like a H80i or a H100i, or look at Noctua's line of coolers that are also very good for overclocking. Like Bert suggested you could read and post to the Hardware forum to get more advice. The way I'm seeing things is that the 6700K is good, but doesn't yet a significant advantage over a 4770K or 4790K.

I had the same issue with my Pro Flight Yoke and throttle quadrant. I had to manually extract the driver's .exe file. Then I plugged in my yoke with the throttles. In Device Manager I located the yokes device entry. It had an exclamation mark on it. From there I right clicked to update the driver. I then clicked "Browse my computer for the driver software". I choose "Let me pick from a list of device driver's on my computer". I had two options, Pro Flight Yoke and USB Device. I selected the USB Device and the yoke and throttles worked after that. I should have saved the link, but I think I caught Saitek say something on their support site that they is a know issue with the driver caused by the Windows 10 Build 1151 update that rolled out a little while back. My method of fixing it was from Saitek/Madcatz's support site.

I would agree with those suggesting a GTX970 upgrade to you build. I bought one recently and it does a fantastic job, for the money spent, at handling all of the GPU tasks Prepar3D asks of it at a 1080p resolution. The GTX970 is a good deal for the performance you get for the price. If you want really good 4k performance, then a GTX980 is a better choice. The 980 will cost more. Your CPU choise looks good. The numbers say the i5 4690K Devil's Canyon is a solid CPU that is marginally less powerful then the i7 4790K. Both appear to overclock similarly and with similar results. A few have been mentioning the Skylake CPUs, which are very good as well. I haven't yet seen any good benchmarks done with Prepar3D to make me choice an i5-4690K/i7-4790K over an i5-6600K/i7-6700K(skylake). Anand Tech has a good article: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8227/devils-canyon-review-intel-core-i7-4790k-and-i5-4690k The big change with the Skylake CPUs is the requirement for DDR4 RAM. This might be a good thing for Prepar3D. I just don't know if the expense is worth it right now. I have an AMD FX8320 running at 4.6GHz with a GTX970. I broke inside last week and ordered an i7 4970K with a Z97 motherboard. The CPU choise was the hardest, but I wasn't sold on Skylake CPUs' performance over the i7-4790K in Prepar3D or FSX. I was also on a budget that wasn't ready for the investment intothe DDR4 RAM that is required for a Z170 motherboard. I figured that I'll get a Z97 motherboard and use my current RAM. When we see the fabled 64bit version of Prepar3D come out, I'll probably start looking at DDR4.

I'm not seeing any negative issues with Prepar3D v3 running on Windows 10. I am experiencing some issues with my Saitek Pro Flight Yoke and their Windows 10 driver, which did previously work but broke for me after after Windows 10 Build 1151 was released. I have gotten the Yoke to work since then. I had to manually assign the driver. The good news is that my Saitek rudder pedals and driver work fine.

I played around with Matt's settings last night and found that my compromise is the same as yours. AI Traffic. I was seeing about 18-33FPS at KSFO with add-on when AI Traffic and Cars were 0%. When I set the AI Traffic and Cars to my prepared settings of to 30% and 15%, I would see about 12-20FPS. I didn't see that much difference between High and Medium Scenery Effects settings. I still saw the most impart from adjusting Traffic settings and Scenery Objects.

I've watched this a couple times now, but haven't gotten the chance to do anything with the setting that he presents. I'm to much into tweaking so I'll see what I can gleen from his settings. The two things I want to look at are the FTX Trees HD add-on and the Scenery Settings. In my AMD rig with a GTX970 I've noticed very little performance impact with the Terrain settings. Those settings do seem to be the cause of my hit on FPS right now. What does look interesting in the Scenery Settings is his Special Effects and Scenery Object values. These seem to be my problem at the moment. I'm particularly interested in what he metioned about putting the Special Effects sliders to High. I trust his word on it, but I had no idea about the impact of the value of the Special Effect sliders before this video. I alway just put them to High. From what Matt says, it seems like a noticalble impact. I'm curious to knock them down to Medium and see what the change in performance that I can see. I've known and have been playing around with the Scenery Objects to get FPS back, so always curious to see others' settings for this area. I do have to admit that I've caved in and bought an Intel 4790K and motherboard for myself. I just need to fly back to the States to pick it up.

I agree with this as well. The jury is still out on how much better the 6700K is over the 4970K, but going with the 6700K and a Z170 board will give you a good system now with more options for later. I also like the idea of saving the money by going with the GTX 970 overclocked. I have a GTX970 overclocked from Gigabyte and it was a great value for the performance I got. New GPUs are always coming, so save now to buy later. :smile: This is all coming from an someone playing Prepar3D on an AMD CPU who'd love to be able to afford the upgrade to an Intel CPU.

Nick's post is very interesting and the methodology he uses for his testing looks sound. Thank you for posting the link Vernon. :smile: ​ My biggest take away from Nick's post is his advice on what to look for in a good flight for testing. FSXMark had a good flight that could be loaded for a standardized benchmark for FSX, but I haven't tried to duplicate it in Prepar3D quite yet. I think I'll try re-tweaking my sim from Nick's suggested KSEA location. There is seemingly no magic bullet for getting the best performance from Prepar3D, but I think that having a good base to test from would help point us in the right direction for tweaking our own settings.

I did similar over my install of windows 8.1, and Prepar3D v2.5 was OK. I had a problem with the activation of add-on managed by the Stand Alone Add-on Manager, but a reinstall of that tool only fixed things.

I tried it out last night, and I'm not sure if I'm perceiving a difference. I'm going to go ahead and keep the HD Audio device disabled anyway because I'm not using it. I suspect that it might because I'm having performance problems due to other issues. I'm looking down. Down at my CPU.

Same here. The new recommendations sounds great, but I've been beaten so much by the number of times I've installed and reinstalled any version of Flight Simulator and Prepar3D that it's what I know. I can change. I know it! ...i can...

Yes, I did just uninstall the drivers using the "Programs and Features" app in the Control Panel for the yoke and pedals. After that I rebooted, then installed the Windows 10 beta drivers. I haven't confirmed the version number through Device Manager yet thought, but my problems with the yoke are gone. I think that might be the issue. I believe the Saitek rep on Facebook mentioned that the beta driver was for Pro Flight Yokes only, and that the team were working on a separate version for the Pro Flight Cessna Yoke. What the difference is in hardware, I don't know, but they need different drivers. I've got a Pro Flight Yoke and Cessna Pedals. The shop only had those in stock so i mismatched.

It works!! I've got home and installed the beta driver after a clean uninstall and reboot of the old Windows 8 driver, and my slowdown/freezing of Windows 10 is gone. Hooray! :smile: I'm going to plug in my throttle quadrant and pedals and see if that changes anything.... Update: I tested the yoke with the throttle plugged in and it works very well with no problems when unplugged. I then tried with the pedals plugged in as well, but it failed. Windows 10 hung and slowed down and became unresponsive. I had to hard reset to fix it. So it looks like the pedals are still a work in progress.

Noticed that as well. There are a lot of comments asking about where their driver for the Cessna yoke or other non-post-related hardware was, but noone saying anything about if the driver fixed anything. Time for us to try it and post something useful. :wink:

Cool. I'll like that page so I can keep up to date. It looks like they announced a beta driver release on September 28th for the Pro flight yoke.

I'll try this tonight.

I know that a couple of us were during the build up to the release of Prepar3D v3 were talking about the troubles that we were having with our Pro Flight hardware and Windows 10. I checked back with the Mad Catz site for driver downloads and found their download page for Windows 10 beta drivers. http://www.madcatz.com/downloads/beta/index.html I previously found an FAQ article about Windows 10 beta drivers for Saitek HOTAS flight sticks, but it appears that this new download page offers beta drivers and software for the Pro Flight Yoke as well. I'm at work as I type and download the driver so I can't test them yet. My suggestion would be to uninstall any currently installed drivers and software, reboot, then install the beta driver. I'm hoping the driver fixes the problem with Windows slowing down to the point of freezing every time I unplug my yoke. The issue appears to have been fixed as reported in the beta driver for the Saitek HOTAS hardware.

Mad Catz/Saitek is slowly but surely trying to get their drivers updated to Windows 10. I want to share the link to the beta dirver download page: http://www.madcatz.com/downloads/beta/index.html

Lol. This is the same problem I've been having with the yoke and Windows 10. Like you, if I keep the yoke and pedals plugged in I'm fine. If I unplug the yoke my mouse freezes for a minute then comes back and frame by frame tried to catch up to my inputs while making a fault sound each frame it moves. My PC won't even fully restart, so I have to shut it down by holding in the power button. After the restart I'm fine again. If I plug the yoke back in I'm fine. It's just when I unplug it. ... Just checked Mad Catz' site and it appears that our problems might be happening across other Pro Flight as well. I saw a notice about new Windows 10 beta drivers for the Saitek HOTAS. http://madcatz.kayako.com/Knowledgebase/Article/View/604/0/windows-10--saitek-hotas-beta-drivers-and-software-release Looks like it also has a bug when the cable is unplugged from the PC.

Are you noticing any preceivable improvments in performance/presentation with the v1.3 on Prepar3D v3? Version 3's release notes seemed to imply that more of the particle handling was moved to the GPU to free up the CPU.

While looking around don't be afraid to look at some AMD cards vs. nVidia branded ones. nVidia does have better DirectX 11 drivers for some games than AMD, but I don't believe that is the case for Prepar3D. From my own experience of going from a AMD R9 270X to a nVidia GTX970, I saw only a marginal difference with the same settings. I would like to note that I only tested with v2.5 and not v.3. The AMD card had 2GB, and the 970 had 4GB. What I have noticed is that I can increase the value of the settings that are more GPU dependant over what I used with the slower R9 207X. I think you'll benifit from getting anything with more VRAM and a price tag that fits into your budget.