smpetty

Rob, This describes my situation with ASN 921 and P3Dv3.2 - fresh install with all Orbx regions, airports, global, and vector. Flying the A2A C182, VFR with RTMM in the Pacific NW. With ASN on, I lose about 10 fps and have panning freezes with TrackIR where my view is locked for a second or two. I also have random P3D CTD which are new with this version of ASN. With ASN off and OpusFSI handling the weather, The problems disappear. I love Opus FSI for the cameras, but the abrupt changes in Opus weather decrease immersion. I hope that you and the folks at HiFi are able to sort it out soon. I appreciate all of the help that you give so freely to our community. Scott

Amazing screenshots. More and more XP10 looks incredibly realistic while P3D/Orbx has a more cartoon/artsy appearance. They're both beautiful, but shots like these make me think about jumping back into XP10 with both feet. Scott

It is much easier to do low to mid level overclocking - I've done it for years. And I agree that the real cost in equipment is probably negligible for those of us that keep near the bleeding edge of technology. But again we're talking about really small increases in actual computing power. When CPU clock speeds were lower, overclocking had much more potential gain than it does today. And in those days, the lion's share of the computing power rested on that one CPU chip. But today we have far less to gain in actual clock and bus speed increases relative to the stock speed of the components, and our mighty GPUs carry a big load of the work, particularly in games and simulations. Paying extra for overclock-friendly CPUs, paying extra for cases and fans and powerful air/fluid CPU coolers, putting up with small increases in system instability... all of it seems to be overkill when the actual gains are so small. I OC out of habit and because I enjoy tinkering - I've been building my own PCs for decades. In my experience, it is almost impossible in real world use to tell whether or not I'm using my OC profiles or the default stock profiles. In P3Dv2, with overclocking I pick up about a 5% increase in frame rates which is imperceptible to my eye. The sim is butter smooth regardless. YMMV :-)

A lot of talk about overclocking your CPU. It can be an expensive endeavor (new or additional case cooling, decreased lifetime of CPU and motherboard components) and you're looking at around a 10% gain in CPU speed. Since CPU speed is only one of several determinants of actual computing power, you'll gain less than 10% in game performance. So best case scenario, you may go from 40 to 43 fps. Is that really worth the trouble?

This should help.... http://www.orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/92886-orbxlibs-150215-released-features-new-objectflow-dll-patched-ftx-central/

Awesome shots and a beautiful paint job!

Thanks Gregg.... I'll give it a try...

Gregg - how exactly do you do this? Thanks in advance!

Beautiful shots - great mood and lighting! Which F-14 is this?

Have you seen this? It's the best thing going in soaring simulation... http://www.condorsoaring.com/ (the site is down right now (12:57 EST) - not sure why)...

Really enjoying this.... beautifully done!

Number 1 is superb!

+1 Couldn't have said it better!

Awesome - can't wait!

Man what a beautiful set of shots! As I got ready to go out the door for another grinding day at work, your post made me smile and remember what beautiful worlds we live in - virtual and real! Thanks Mitch! Scott

I found this evening that turning off Volumetric Fog really smoothed out my frame rates. Before I was having similar fluctuations in fps on the order of 30% or so. After turning off Volumetric Fog the fluctuations were no more than 10%. I also noticed that with unlimited fps I was able to maintain a significantly higher frame rate than with the slider set at even 2/3's of the frame rate I maintained in unlimited. For instance in New Zealand flying out of NZCH I wavered between 50 and 55 fps with the frame rate slider at unlimited. If I set the frame rate slider to fixed at 35 fps, the best frame rate it could muster was 30 or so. Very frustrating and confusing. I feel like we're all grasping at straws. Tonight I got so tired of the tweaking nonsense that I fired up XP10 and had a beautiful smooth stutter free flight at NZCH, no tweaking required. Not trying to pick a fight - I am HEAVILY invested in Prepar3D - but like most of us I've been tweaking way more than flying since the FSX days and I'd really like to become a better pilot and drop the nightly tweaking and debugging routines.

Hilarious

Thanks Dick - I've had the same problem and this does the trick...

The way I enabled vegetation (and building) shadows for send and receive without killing my fps was to go back and revisit my baseline graphics setup. I've been flying X-Plane 10 a lot lately and in my XPX setup I stay above 30 fps, usually 40 - 50 fps. I have a powerful system but I had to lower the graphics settings in XPX from max to get that framerate. I found that the sim experience on XPX is much more fluid and responsive when I am well above 30 fps. After seeing the original post in this thread and loving the way that vegetation shadows looked, I went back to my P3Dv2 graphics settings with the goal of having a framerate at or above 30 fps in almost all situations (luckily I stay away from the largest airports) and getting that framerate with vegetation and building shadows enabled. My previous settings had almost all of the sliders to the far right and I came off of those settings a good bit. Amazingly I find it very hard to tell the difference in graphic quality but the fluidity and responsiveness of the experience is much improved. Here are my settings: When I get around big airports or large cities I have to drop down my traffic settings to maintain a framerate > 30 fps. I've been very happy with this setup and can't stress how much more fluid and responsive the sim is as opposed to when I was averaging mid to low 20's in framerate and dropping below 20 in complex areas.

I would be happy to replicate my original post on the LM site. Good to know that I'm not the only one with this issue.... In the meantime I'll give UT a try and will report back with results. Scott Done!

Thanks Michael - Great point about the strange disparity in weather and traffic options for P3Dv2. I own UT2 and read Rob's thread about migrating UT2 to P3Dv2. It seems easy to do and I have the Estonia tool. Do you find the migrated UT2 preferable to native P3Dv2 traffic? Which option makes the biggest hit in framerates? I fly mostly GA and mostly outside of larger cities, so heavy metal traffic is less important to me than GA and cars/boats/ships. Best regards, Scott

Thanks Jeroen for the best tip I've gotten in a long while!! This simple change makes the world look so much more real. It adds depth and richness that I haven't seen in any flight sim before. Well worth the small hit in fps! FWIW I'm not getting any shimmer or sparkle with these shadows on. Scott

While clouds are an fps hit in v2.3, my biggest fps hit comes from traffic. A big part of the immersion in flight swimming is seeing other vehicles in action. Without the traffic, I feel as if I'm flying around in some post-apocalyptic world devoid of humans. It's a nice smooth post-apocalyptic flight with high fps, but it gets lonely.... So I like to have traffic running and realize there is a price in fps to be paid. I keep airlines at 10%, GA at 30%, cars at 10%, ships at 25% and pleasure boats at 25%. This knocks 10-15 frames per second off of my frame rate which wasn't such a big deal with v2.2 but makes me have to significantly lower other settings in v2.3 to achieve acceptable frame rates. So a few questions: 1) Does LM see the loss of fps with traffic use as an issue? If so are they planning to optimize the traffic code? 2) Are there any third party traffic programs that are in development built specifically for P3Dv2? 3) When using third party traffic programs, it it best practice to turn off the native FSX/P3D traffic flow? 4) Any tips for optimizing traffic in v2.3 as it stands now? Thanks in advance! Scott

I use a zoom level of 1.0 with wide view aspect on. This is the most realistic view and it gives me a much better feel for speed and distance. It also allows me to read the gauges and switch positions without zooming or squinting. If I didn't have TrackIR, however, I would open up the view a bit to 0.7 or so. TrackIR allows me to look around and gives me back the peripheral vision that I lose with the higher zoom ratio. I really can 't imagine flying without TrackIR. It's as essential as the throttle and yoke/joystick to my flight sim experience.

And many thanks for that. Your enthusiasm for flight simulation makes this forum a better place to be. :smile: