Afterburner

Do you see a black screen after you have installed the shaders? If yes, you need to wait until they show up in the simulator. If you don't see them after one minute of wait, then I would troubleshoot somewhere else.

Yes, that is correct, I forgot about it. But within 32- or 64 bit realm, there were no update charges.

The Dash-8 was first released in 2014, which is quite a long time ago. And to this day, this airplane has been one of the most realistic in terms of systems and flight dynamics (and yet FPS friendly). It was upgraded for P3D v3, v4 and now v5 free of charge, so the 20EUR is a sum that I have gladly spent for polished visuals.

Yes, your 30Hz monitor in combination with Vsync is an important factor that is not affected by the prefer maximum performance setting. If you want to test, you can set your monitor to 60Hz and limit the fps in NCP to 30fps and check your core 0 load.

Ray, but he wrote that he tried minimal settings, and I am sure that with them it is easily possible to achieve 48fps and much more. I asked him about his power management mode setting in NCP because if you go back a few posts earlier, you can read my discussion with Steve W that if you leave that setting at "prefer maximum performance", core 0 will always be 100% if you limit FPS via NCP regardless of the graphics settings (it doesn't mean that smoothness can't be achieved). Only if you select "Optimal power" will core 0 load be lower if there is performance overhead.

What is your "Power Management Mode" setting in NCP? The other cores are utilized once you start flying; standing at the airport makes them do very little, and no AM setting will change that. You are writing about 100% CPU 0 load, but how is the FPS and smoothness? Does the sim hold 48 fps?

Yes, there is a performance penalty if you leave the FFTF value at default. However, the program FFTF Dynamic adjusts that value with height, so that the performance penalty is eliminated at low altitudes (if the minimum value is set to 0.01), while at higher altitudes, that penalty doesn't affect the FPS so much due to the much higher overhead.

Yes, I also suspect that the AF setting is responsible for the blurries that you see at high altitude. Also, I advise not to use external FPS limiters in combination with FFTF; that program works best with the internal FPS limiter.

Don't worry, guys. Remember, the Leve-D 757 is still in beta 😄😄😄 Level D 757 Enters beta. - The Level D 767 | Wilco PIC 767 Forum - The AVSIM Community

It's been a while since you opened the thread, but since I have a Freesync monitor (non-premium), I can tell you a little bit from my experience. Generally, a Freesync monitor should synchronize the monitor refresh rate (Hz) with the FPS of your game. This works well if the FPS don't fluctuate too much and if they are within the monitor range. If they fluctuate a lot (and they can if you set the FPS in the simulator to unlimited), the monitor may not be able to follow the changes in FPS, so that you see stuttering. For example, there is the demo software "Pendulum" by Nvidia that can be used to test if Gsync/Freesync works. This program allows you to change the FPS yourself. On my Freesync monitor, which normally runs at 60 Hz, if I change the FPS in the said program from 60 to 55, the monitor changes the refresh rate to 55 Hz. If I reduce the FPS to as low as 28, the monitor runs at double - 56 Hz (it can't go to 28 Hz). This is the nice thing about a Freesync monitor. As I wrote, this works fine if the FPS is relatively stable. If you have even mild fluctuations, the monitor will try hard to "follow" the FPS, but it will not happen immediately, so that there will be an instantaneous mismatch between the FPS and refresh rate. For a flight simulator, I rather recommend to use a fixed refresh rate. Which simulator are you using?

On the first page, you wrote (and showed) that your frames were around 30. Later you added that you limit FPS to 30 in the Nvidia control panel. In that case, what's the problem?

Before you spend a lot of money on a new CPU, I highly recommend that you experiment with your graphics sliders. If you only have around 32 FPS, as from the image above, there is some setting that severely eats up CPU power, and buying a new CPU would only marginally improve the frame rate, since P3D is still very much dependent on the core0 speed. What is the location and what airplane are you using? A good start would be to post your settings. A lot of people expect that buying a new expensive video card will vastly improve the frame rate in all situations. What these people don't understand is that whether the CPU or the GPU is the bottleneck is very situation dependent. If you sit in the cockpit of a very complex airplane at a complex airport with tons of AI- and car traffic being active (and having autogen sliders all the way to the right), these elements eat heavily on your CPU, while the GPU does not have much work to do (you can check the GPU load in that situation). Buying a faster GPU will only reduce the GPU load in that situation, but most people expect the FPS to increase. A scenario that is heavy on the GPU would be running the sim at 4K with AA settings maxed out under heavy clouds with dynamic lights being active at the airport. If your previous GPU couldn't cope with this situation (the GPU load was at 100%), the new GPU will improve your performance in this specific situation. But there will be situations during your flight when your GPU will not have to do a lot of work (being bottlenecked by the CPU), which is not the fault of the GPU.

Keep in mind that the task manager (as you posted) shows the average CPU load across all cores. If you stand on ground in P3D, the first core/thread usually has a high load, while the other cores run almost idle, which makes the average value meaningless. It is during a flight that the other cores run at higher loads. Therefore, I recommend that you change the CPU graph to logical processors by right-clicking on the CPU load graph to see the load for each core. That's one way to find out if you are CPU (core 0) limited or not. (I guess that you are because if you move all sliders to the right, you activate a lot of CPU-intensive FPS eaters, such as traffic or autogen radius - and that is especially true if you use complex airplanes). As far as VRAM usage, most people have complained in the past that P3D v5 uses too much of it, so LM has reduced the consumption with the latest update. What is there to complain about? 24 GB is an overkill for P3D in my opinion, but since your GPU has so much, you can be almost certain to never run out of VRAM.

Looking forward for this update with excitement! The current visual model is still based on the 2014 FSX release, so an overhaul is overdue.

It doesn't matter for the smoothness of car traffic if you limit to 29 FPS internally or via NCP.

Sorry to dig out this old thread, but for those who are interested, I have found out that when limiting the fps to 30 (no matter if internally or externally), the car traffic is indeed quite jerky for some reason, which is why I think it came to attention to some. When I limit the FPS to 29 (the monitor being FreeSync compatible runs at 58 Hz in that case), the ground traffic moves as smooth as butter! Give it a try.

ORBX products add airports and global scenery (landclass, vector, textures), while ENVTEX changes textures related to sky, clouds, water, runway (at default airports), etc. As such, they complement each other. I own these two products, and they work quite well together. If you buy airports from ORBX, they usually bring their own airport textures, so they are not affected by ENVTEX. In my opinion, the sky colors alone are worth buying ENVTEX.

I would say yes for one important reason among others - it removes ground- and cockpit shadows if you fly in low visibility (and you can set the shadows up so that they are not present if you fly under cloud shadows).

Can you post a picture showing haze at high altitudes?

In my opinion, completely uninstalling (and deleting generated files) and then reinstalling P3D is the safest way to execute a version update, even though it takes most time. The official method of uninstalling the client (plus other components) is well intended, but it only works well if add-ons and special files are installed outside of the P3D folder, so that they don't touch any P3D original files. But with different kinds of files that are injected and replaced by some add-ons, such as shaders and certain dll files (sometimes the user doesn't even know about their existence), these files will remain after updating P3D by component, potentially becoming incompatible and resulting in some conflict. Add-on developers who are mindful of this don't change anything in the P3D root folder. I would always think in the back of my head that some problems with P3D that shouldn't show up may be due to these files.

The screenshot you posted from P3Dv5.2 looks very realistic to me. I don't know what more you expect. The picture measures up well to the following real-world images in my opinion when it comes to the coloring, Rayleigh scattering and depiction of atmosphere. There are always small improvements that can be made, but if it already looks quite realistic, you can't make it much better, can you? The sky color in FSX on your picture looks unrealistic, BTW. You never see purple skies at a high altitude.

I admire your patience when it comes to waiting for the new Concorde. I really do... I for one am not so patient. 😉

I don't think it's fair to say that there has been "nothing new in 20 years". After all, the little things and performance improvements may seem small, but they bring the sim step by step closer towards more realism - and further away from FSX (which looks cartoonish, I agree, but that's primarily due to the lack of atmosphere). As far as terrain, with the release of MSFS, people expect nothing less than photorealistic textures and photogrammetry (ideally based on Google Maps), so even if LM changed the global textures and landclass, it would not measure up to what is possible. And ORBX does a good job with Global Base + OpenLC, so I don't think that LM could do it much better. I agree though that the progress has been slower during the last three years, with the main focus on EA which is still bugged in some respects. From 2013 to 2018 (going from v2 to v4.4), LM added milestones like the new lighting system, volumetric fog, HDR, 64 bit architecture, PBR and other features, while from 2018 to 2021... there has not been that much.

Microsoft would need to pay me to give up Windows 10 and switch to 11 now.

Yes, it is true that the moon phase has an impact on the cloud brightness, but one has to keep in mind that the videos you posted were made with high-exposure camera setting. How can you tell? The moon is literally glowing, which can be used for interesting effects, but it's not nearly as bright in reality. On my night flights as passenger (when the cabin is dimmed), I have never seen it so bright. And if the clouds are brighter during a full-moon phase, they are lit from above, but dark at the bottom. This cockpit video has a reasonable exposure in my opinion: Boeing 737-800 Night Takeoff from Buenos Aires | Flight Deck GoPro Views - YouTube