TheGrunt

It would be rather strange if they are loaded separately from normal scenery. Another thing is that Budapest and Germany doesn’t tell that much as it all comes to simulator caching the scenery and loading data to memory. Third is that there may be something wrong with the mods which causes them to behave abnormally from rest of the scenery. There are probably thousands of scenery mods currently already and I’d think that if slowing down would be generally an issue, there would be much more reporting of the issue as many people drop those mods in their community folder by dozens. Usually FPS problems I’ve seen reported are mods without proper LODs and they specifically point to the FPS hit in vicinity of the scenery.

ROFLMAO. I've read so many forum about MSFS that are repeating exactly the same things people complained about FSX from 2006-2007, that it isn't even funny anymore. I still remember these: runs like a word not allowed, FS9 is superior in every way, no addons etc. Like, duh. FSX was a mess at least up to the SP1 which was released about 6 months after launch. FSX (and pretty much any other civilian aviation sim) have included only very basic aircraft with the package, something that can be easily made with the basic SDK tools. Correct me if I'm wrong, but better 3rd party creations arrived to FSX months later and I think it is quite normal that sims that has been available for years and decades offer quite a bit more on the addon front compared to a product launched few weeks ago. I didn't even have FSX at launch, but my personal initial impressions with MSFS ahs been much more positive compared to those with FSX. Poor performance was just atrocious and even in the later days it was endless balancing act depending on the what aircraft, scenery and weather you had. I agree that there has been and still is issues with MSFS2020 and dellaying launch few months would've probably removed most issues. But in this regard it really is not that much different from its predecessor. MSFS at least on my system has much more consistent performance across the board no matter what daytime, weather or location you have, it looks extremely good out of the box and has more refined things such as weather engine.

Yes, I saw it. I didn’t actually reply directly to your post, but as you spoke true words about authorized sellers, I used your perfectly fine post to clarify how to find them easily, compare prices and what is the difference between G2A and for example CDKeys. And yes, authorized is a the proper term. The probably doesn’t have any true license 🙂 Isthereanydeal.com is a great place to find the cheapest price among authorized sellers (or check the all time cheapest price for example to see if the deal is good). Edit: And yes, Fanatical is a great store. Especially their Featured/Star Deals can be amazing!

The magic word is licensed reseller. G2A, Kinguin and every similar key marketplace isn’t. CDKeys isn’t licensed either, but it isn’t a marketplace, but namely a grey key seller. No one knows where the keys come from, but most likely they are taking advantage of regional pricing differences. I wouldn’t still put a dime in their pocket either, but its everyone’s choice if shady business model bothers or not. Just use isthereanydeal.com or look approved sellers r/GameDeals. Every single seller listed in either of those is a safe storefront to buy and keys are obtained from reliable sources.

So much this. Avoid these unlicensed stores like plague. Not only they list keys purchased with stolen credit cards, but have also sold stolen keys which makes them directly part of the warez business. At best, the cheap keys are ”grey” which means they have been bought originally from lower regional pricing countries/areas. Sure, your key might activate fine, even work indefinitely, but at worst it may cause your Steam account locked long after activating the criminally acquired key. More than thinking the risks of losing your account and/or software license, everyone should ask themselves if they really want to support business model which is tied closely to criminal activity? I sure don’t. More useful info here: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/wiki/keyresellers

I have had game pass for Xbox couple of years now and finally ultimate almost since it arrived. Game Pass offers quality stuff for both systems. One thing everyone should still take a note: some games may leave the service after the contract period (perhaps to return soon again). The catch is that you can’t play the game anymore after they have departed, even if you have the game installed and attached to your account. This really hasn’t been the problem for me and you get notifications of games leaving the service and most titles I’ve seen leaving have been smaller indie titles. Some really good PC titles currently in the service (tried to include different genres): Crusader Kings 3, Battletech, Final Fantasy VII, IX and XV, both Ori games, Yakuza 0 and Kiwami 1 and 2, Football Manager 2020, The Outer Worlds, Gears and Halo games. Complete list is here: https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-game-pass/games?=pcgames IMO it is a great service and absolutely no brainer if you enjoy gaming in general. It gets lot’s of brand new releases, not just older games available in sales for few bucks/equivalent. You can pretty much count every MS title getting game pass release like FS2020 did. Among other developers who I feel are actively pushing games to the service are Paradox and SEGA.

This is very typical for high profile launches. Big bunch of people are hurry testing the game when it is released and after that the user usage spreads and sets on more regular levels. There are certainly those, who tried it, refunded it or forget it among the other games in their back log and won’t look back, but this is how it goes. There will also be positive spikes when some major updates are released. It is of course possible that MSFS loses much of the user base and doesn’t gain long term momentum, but it certainly needs longer time period to make that conclusion and launch day is a poor starting metric how user base evolves. IMO MSFS has all the possibilites to maintain a steady player base even among the non simulator crowd. It is still very manageable for every casual player and successes of games like European and American Truck Simulator show that people do like relaxing open world games. I bet that if similar freight/passenger hauling/economy addon is released at some point, it will be huge success.

TIR needs to be running before sim has loaded.

They imitate CRT display’s scan lines. That particular filter tries to add other CRT-like effects, like color blending but I’ve much better overlays for MAME for example. As an owner of several CRTs for my vintage computers and consoles, I could go to lengthy posts about the amazing properties of CRTs and how they were utilized back in the day, but this is wrong thread and forum for such things.

I’ve pretty much noticed the same and for my setup (R9 3900x, 32GB DDR3400, 1080ti OC, 3440x1440@100Hz G-sync) performance difference between for example medium and ultra presets is very small. Then again, I am generally very satisfied with the performance even with ultra. Although I haven’t yet used the sim extensively, but all the planes, weather and daytime settings I’ve tested perform at least adequately and don’t give bad performance hit. I’m mostly getting at least high 30s even around NY. Experience is really smooth in general, but of course not perfect. It all depends where the bottleneck is. Oddly enough my GPU pretty much maxes out at 99-100%, but CPU doesn’t pretty much hit 100% in any of the cores except perhaps briefly. Because none of the cores get really maxed out, boost clocks remain low around 4150-4200MHz. This to me hints GPU bound setup, so graphics settings should have pretty high impact in general, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. I think that many people tend to forget that under the hood this sim and it’s engine work quite differently from the previous titles. Streaming introduces another layer all the other sims pretty much lack and how that data is processed can have a huge impact. For example, I haven’t so far seen any in depth analysis regarding how the storage performance affects to the overall performance. My gut feeling is that this title is very bandwidth sensitive, and I don’t mean the network here, but the system bus, memory and storage capability. I have the sim now sitting on my regular 2TB mid range SSD, but I will at some point try it on my nvme, which should theoretically provide several times better performance, just to see how it affects or doesn’t affect the performance.

I haven't yet bought V3 but most definitely will. I'll wait until I can have at least some of my ORBX regions with proper installers and make sure that few other most important addons work as they should. It is also good to listen early adopter's opinions, so I'll gladly wait at least for a few weeks. Besides, I don't feel like spending hours for a fresh install ATM

This. It is business after all. Besides, in the long run it is also a life cycle question. Windows 7's exended support is ending on 2020 and it is not in the Microsofts or end users interests that huge amount of legacy Win 7 OS's is floating around at that point. Releasing new features to only newer OSs pushes users to new platforms. EOL of XP was already a farce even though it lacked many features and was complete rubbish later years compared to newer OSs. And PC and Windows IS a gaming platform, and bigger than any of the consoles. Only mobile gaming market is growing more, but it more or less competes with console gaming as HC gamers stay and even migrate to PC. Also PC gaming is a profitable business for many gaming accessories and component manufacturers. MS perhaps isn't making that much money out of PC gaming directly, but still, many home users are using Windows just because it is by far the best OS for PC gaming. Only alternative would be buying the console as Linux (including SteamOS) and OSX are far behind, though OSX limitations are not the only hinderance for Apples success in gaming market.

I didn't see this "case" on the P3D forums, but I suspect it was a bot spamming junk on threads. Bots are a very common issue on many forums these days.

SSW makes awesome planes and I'd say they are on the level of VRS Superbug easily. They have extended the sal till the end of month.

This is a real bummer as I installed these betas because of the Elite Dangerous profile. Well, I guess I have to live without PAPIs for a while...

Man, it seems like Justin has really hit the bottom. I sure hope he can make a decent living again, whether it is with flight simming related stuff or otherwise. FSG was very well established and known brand in FS community and I also agree that he made bad business desicions by releasing cheap memberships. Subscription would be okay, but life time membership for a hundred bucks? That surely dries out the income sooner than later. I hope he can clear things up with the FSG sale and perhaps get the ownership back. I would really like too see Justin again on the helm of FSG, I have nothing bad to say about the products or customer service back in the day. I even miss all Justin's rants about the difficulties few years ago :wub:

Not at least during rush hour on M-highways leading to and from London, what I've seen travelling there. 1 mph is more close to the truth in my experience

I can get things easily CPU limited with my GTX780 flying over urban terrain with lot's of autogen, custom buildings and especially vector data and traffic. This means low GPU usage in those situations and high CPU loading. I see nothing strange in your results, if situation is somewhat comparable.

I don't understand why so many people need to install their photoscenery again every time they blow up their installation? Pretty much from the beginning I've installed all my sceneries on a separate folder from the application if it is just easily possible and just add them to my library. When they are on different drive from OS, they are there even after OS reinstalI and fully usable after. If there is an effects folder with the scenery, it is easy to copy its contents to new P3D install folder. Same goes with ASN and other external software, just make sure you add proper entrys to exe.xml/dll.xml or use backups. When I do my reinstall after deleting the prepar3d folder, it is mainly just the aircraft and ORBX stuff I need to add, that is those things that pretty much force themselves to the P3D directory or overwrite . Two hours tops and I'm back in business.

Passmark is IMO quite bad CPU test mainly for two reasons: 1) it is very synthetic and close to the architecture, which means that it scales for example pretty much linearilly with the amount of physical cores and represents very badly the performance of many real life software. 2) It is known to give if not bad and erroneus, then at least very odd results. I myself have a 3930K running 4.6GHz and based on the reviews and different benchmarks I see no reason to upgrade at least because of P3D. I may opt the 5960x some day if I happen to have a chance to get it for a "decent" price like I had my 3930K back in the day, but I definitely not do it for P3D.

Actually cheaper LCDs are usually with 6-bit color reproduction per colur, which makes them capable of displaying 262144 colours compared to 8-bit LCD which again puts out 16.7 million colours and then some. These 6-bit LCDs use dithering technique, which applies slightly different shades for adjacent pixels to fool the eye and display those "missing" colours. This may again cause banding for surfaces which naturally have low variance for different shades and dithering can't make up for the difference. On the otherhand, fastest panels (TN) are usually 6-bit so speed is their advantage. Best and most expensive monitors designed for photoediting and such professional tasks, where best possible colour reproduction is required, are always 8-bit panels. They are in most cases very bad choice for gaming, though, as they usually have very slow response time and tend to display ghosting and may also have extensive input lag. There are some PVA panel models out there that are capable of good colour reproduction and decent response time. One example that comes to my mind are Eizo's Foris multimedia/gaming monitors.

To the question, I don't know about the possibilites of the platform in the video, but in general why on earth it wouldn't be a preferred idea to develop new sim platforms and why someone would want to vote against something like new sims? I'm baffled by the amount of NO answers already at this point. No one is after all forced to buy a new sim and can stick to the FSX/XP/P3D for the rest of their lives if they want to. If there would be new platforms popping up even now and then, it would be just good for hobby and take simming software technology forward thus offering best possible performance and compatibility with new hardware and OS. I see many people complaining about FSX/P3D/XP problems and restrictions all the time and it is strange if some of those still choose to vote no. I'm quite happy with my P3DV2 right now, but new sims are always welcome and I will gladly try them out to see the potential.

It is not the limitation of the CPU but the type of software. Multithreading efficiently so that the task can be distributed between several cores is very difficult if not even impossible for a complex real time software like P3D or almost any other modern game for that matter. It is way easier to efficiently multithread tasks like encoding/decoding or encryption/decryption. You can offload stuff to different threads, but ultimately as everything needs to be in sync, the performance is always according to the slowest thread, which usually is the main one, no matter what. Now, as P3D still carries quite a lot of old code from the days when multicore processors were nonexistent or just in their beginning and multicore OS scheduling for windows was bad (XP), there may still be room for optimization and improvement to a certain point. But in the end, main thread will be the one that is going to be loaded the most, but it pretty much also needs to be so.

I think one difference could be the amount of vector data. For example, with ORBX Vector some urban areas have vector roads a lot. I've noticed that if you keep all the smaller roads enabled, they can have huge impact of FPS even without any traffic turned on. This might be one explanation, so that the autogen buildings aren't actually the main culprit.

I have had no problems with EZCA with any of the P3D versions since the "beta" P3D patch arrived. Camera config tool has also worked flawlessly with EMT with every addon, although it is not a big deal to edit them manually. There is one mistake in EZCA itself that might cause an error during the launch of the sim, though. If you have quotation marks (") on the aircraft title, EZCA will fail because it tries to write .ini file based on the title name to its directory concerning the aircraft specific camera setups. Because quotation marks are illegal in Windows file name, .ini file also fails and EZCA most likely crashes. This has nothing to do with P3D, but it is the only problem I've run with the program. It took a while back in the day when I bumped in this problem the first time until I realized what was causing the failure with certain AC