vck

No complain here. Just updated objectflow and everything is back to normal.

As mgh said, all the flight sims are based on the 6 DOF equation of motion. P3d and FSX use the lookup tables to determine the aerodynamic forces and damping based on the attitude, velocity, angular rate and a lot of other atmosphere states. All the aerospace companies like Boeing and LM use this approach to design and simulate the real aircrafts. Instead of the simple lookup tables, they use the aerodynamic database contains vast amount of the wind tunnel data with corrections from the actual flight test. For the commercial aircrafts, the database has to be certified by FAA to be used in the fixed or moving base flight simulators manufactured by CAE, L3, Rockwell Collins, and others. I have to give credit to XP's creator by creating a plausible flight behavior (not flight dynamics) just like his plausible world. However, please don't confused it with the finite element methods used in the computational fluid dynamics analysis. XP simply kluges together a few elements (which has nothing to do with the actual 3D geometry of the airplane) and integrating those forces (from airfoil tables) to get overall forces and moments. There is no consideration of the interactions between those elements. The moment of inertia estimations are likely to be very inaccurate and there is no direct damping force calculated on any axis. No wonder some XP airplanes are less stable and more responsive, which confuse by some of the XP followers as the superior dynamics.

Wish Toulouse will have a professional soccer team that competes in the 2018 FIFA World Cup. If that happens, we may see a not-so-graceful whale jet or Beluga carrying their team's mascot flying over southern France. Either way, I know that I will enjoy watching a bunch of cannibals and Dracula trying to eat each others on the field. Go Hawks. Vince

I will try a barrel roll if Hawks win. Good luck to everyone's favorite team. Vince

IMHO, this is one of the most beautiful airplane flying in P3d world. Vince

Tinkering may be fun and actually producing good results for some individuals under certain scenarios. However, I have to agree with jabloomf that tinkering without knowing what’s going on under the hood probably will be futile at the end. On the other hand, I am getting consistent satisfactory results by applying the following three changes based on common sense and some useful tips found in this forum: Stop all the unnecessary services and applications. Make sure CPU usage under task manager shows no more than 1% before starting P3D. A clean system brings about the biggest improvement in FPS and smoothness on my system. Balance the GPU and CPU loads – Cranking up the shadow settings for complex scenery and lower it in less complex areas. Don’t use the wide-view aspect ratio. Turn it off usually results smoother simulation – I believe this has been discussed in length on this forum. After making the above changes, I can crank up all the scenery sliders to the max while achieving smooth performance flying over Seattle in dusk/dawn with ORBX PNW. See the videos below. My definition of smoothness is that there is no jerkiness between control inputs and airplane responses. I also believe that the smoothness will be lost if I run any other add-on because I only have a mid-rage system (i5-4670K@4.5 GHz and a 2GB GTX770 card) Piper Cherokee KBFI at Dusk 747-400 KBFI at Dawn Vince

I completely agree. V2.3 definitely improves over 2.2. I maxed out everything under the scenery tab over San Francisco bay (ORBX NCA) and was rewarded with the most impressive flight in any flight simulator I have seen. See the video below: The fps stays at around 20 but dips into teens momentarily that gives some judders. Same thing happens in PNW over Seattle. However it still gives you a great sense of immersion. I have cloned my HDD so I have two P3d V2.2 installed on the same computer. One is patched from V2.1 and the other is a full 2.2 installation. Both are patched to V2.3 by just clicking the update button. My experience indicates that there is absolutely no difference between the patch and full installation in 2.2. May be I will try the full V2.3 installation on one HDD to see if there is any difference.

I made a video of F-22 supersonic dash with all the scenery sliders to the max under Orbx PNW over KBFI in Seattle. The only tweak is AM=15. May be it can help to establish a reference for all the future V2.3 performance improvement to judge from. The blurry texture and stutter is worst during replay from outside view. This kind of stutter is caused by CPU overload with low FPS probably due to excessive draw calls to load PNW texture and is different from the stutter at high FPS. I don’t really care about the stutter as long as the smooth control is still there so I keep my fingers crossed that the upcoming V2.3 will perform better under Orbx stuffs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzUEhAnEg9w

The terrain for PNW took 3 times longer to load over Seattle comparing with P3d default on my computer. Moving the texture and mesh resolution sliders to the left helps much more than reducing the autogen density for me. Your mileage may vary though. The other thing to improve performance is minimizing the road traffic to around 5 to 10%. PNW traffic seems to be much heavier than the default at the same percentage. Other tweaking such as AM and tessellation are not conclusive for me. You may have to find your own optimal settings on a case by case basis.

And when your CPU is running at 99%...that means it is at it's limit and can't calculate anymore. Right? :lol:

Noel I have a relatively lower end system (i5-4440 @ 3.1 Ghz and a GTX 770) and it can handle KSEA with all the scenery slides fully to the right, with 10km cloud, 20k terrain shadow, and fair amount of traffics in rainy day, no add-on, no tweak. My GPU always reaches 99% first and stay there while the CPU doesn’t max out. I just cannot handle KSEA with Orbx PNW on. Sliders to the left does not cure the stutter even the FPS looks OK. So my conclusion is that PNW is not optimized for P3d and a low end CPU can handle the autogen in the most challenging area in native P3d while feeding as much data as a higher end GPU can take. Therefore the bottleneck must be my GPU. I made two videos under the following conditions: No Add-on, No tweak FXAA: on, MSAA: 4 samples, Anisotropic 4X, 2048 texture, and unlimited FPS Seattle KBFI Rwy 31 L in day time with grey and rainy weather All scenery sliders max out with tessellation Medium shadow map count, 10 km cloud and 20 km terrain shadow, no HDR 25% sea and air traffics Airplane used in the first video is a Mooney Acclaim. Altitude throughout the flight is below 1500 ft. Average frame rate around 25 with some occasional short dips. The flight went well until the last moment when I tried to force the airplane to the ground. I was out of trim with some minor PIO. It shows that proficiency in flight sim probably can prevent real world disaster. The second video is a Boeing 737 in the same condition. Again the average FPS is around 25 and the flight is smooth enough for hand fly without autopilot. I actually tried the same condition in KDEN but the result is the same – smooth flight with GPU max out. I just got an i5-4560K from Amazon wondering if I should return it because I am afraid it won’t improve P3d on my computer. May be you or some other folks with a fast computer can help to run the above cases and let me know your results. I will definitely keep it if perceptible improvement can be achieved. Thanks. Vince

Orbx PNW in v 2.2 probably is not optimized since it is still the same old developed for FSX. V2.2 did a major revamp to overhaul the autogen architecture that set the CPU free. Therefore I expect that Obrx has to update their codes accordingly to keep pace with P3d in the near future. I can wait patiently because P3d scenery is already stunning good that I feel little need for the add-on. Anyway PNW still works fine in the rural areas so I can use it when flying in places other than Seattle area. With Orbx PNW turned off, the major bottleneck shifts to the GPU. A mid range Haswell @3.1 Ghz can handle KSEA easily with all the scenery sliders maxed out, 25% AI air/sea traffics, and 20 km shadows in fair weather. However, the FPS killer becomes the cloud shadows under overcast sky. You can click on the next screen shot to see that CPU is caught napping while GPU is under extreme stress when the cloud shadow is at 20 km (A quick question here: Is the low VRAM usage normal?). In this situation a faster CPU won’t help. You either move scenery sliders to the left or turn off cloud shadows to relieve GPU loads then the smoothness is back. I originally thought that upgrading from GTX 650Ti to 770 will last me a long time but V2.2 just bursts my bubble. Hopefully LM can do some optimization in cloud shadow rendering algorithm in the next version so I can get at least some money back for my investment.

I was kind disappointed when I updated to V2.2. It seemed to run worst than V2.1 with Obrx PNW over Seattle metro area. I even experienced stutters and single digit FPS at lower AGL. Lowering the setting did make P3d run better but the problem is still there. I even upgrade my GPU from GF 650Ti to GTX 770 with no avail. When the bad things happened, either the CPU maxed out or both CPU and GPU were not doing much. GPU never got maxed out. Finally I decided to switch off PNW and what a day and night difference. Even with almost all the scenery settings fully to the right, terrain and cloud shadows at 20 km, and 25% air and sea traffic, P3d runs like a dream. The surprising thing is when the good thing happen, my lowly i5-4440@ 3.1 Ghz drives the GTX 770 to its full. The GPU stays at around 99% and temp rises from 27 to 64 degrees from my climb out from KBFI, to circle around KSEA, and to the final approach. The CPU kept working hard but never max out. Put it another way, all the pistons are firing in harmony. See the meters in the next two screen shots. I tried the same settings in other nearby major airports such as KPDX and CYVR and observed the same smooth runs at even higher FPS with no stutters. Since Seattle area is one of the most challenging areas in FSX (and perhaps P3d), if an i5-4440 can handle it, higher end CPU may not help much or even reverse this delicate balance? The other thing puzzles me is that the system RAM and VRAM usage stayed very low. It looks like you don’t even need more than 1G VRAM to run P3d smoothly. May be the meters are not showing the correct usages. Anyway it is still too early to draw any conclusion but I think it confirms my belief that balanced CPU and GPU usage is the key to a smooth run. The earlier problem must be caused by Orbx PNW. The inner working of P3d has been significantly updated twice but there is no change to PNW. Do you still believe their claim that PNW is compatible with P3d V2 (which V2?)? Running that feels like throwing a monkey bar into a well oiled machine. We better turn off PNW in V 2.2 before Orbx can optimize their part. Spending big on expensive hardware to mask those add-on problems is not very cost effective at this moment. I think my case proves that you don’t need a very high end system to run P3d smoothly with very high settings. Although what I report here may be an isolated case, I think P3d V2.2 is a vast improvement over the previous versions. Any future LM improvement should ensure harmonizing the CPU and GPU work flows.

It’s a balance act, isn’t it? If you fly a lot over metro area doing touch and go, especially over KSEA and KBFI with Orbx PNW installed, CPU can become the choking point of frame rate. At that point the graphic card becomes irrelevant. In other situation such as IFR condition in heavy cloud with shadows and HDR on then graphic card will choke and FPS suffers. You just have to know your type of sim flying and choose the right hardware to maximize the bang for your buck. Since I am happy with P3d 2.2 for most of the time, I will hold off the CPU upgrade for now. It is very frustrating to find out my system built just 4 months ago will become obsolete by 3Q this year because the new Haswell refresh K chip is not supported on my Z87 board. IMHO, it is better to start saving money for the next system in a couple of years to enjoy a huge performance jump than throwing money to the old one getting only small incremental improvement.

Mad Dog I did a full 2.2 installation after replacing the card so the shaders is not an issue here. My point is when you have some doubts about your HW spec for P3d, fast CPU probably gives you more bang for your buck than a new graphic card.

I did three things yesterday: Replaced GTX 650Ti with a GTX 770 card (at least double the graphic power") Installed the "wonder driver" 355.70 Installed v 2.2 I see no improvement in some challenging places such as KSEA and KBFI over Orbx PNW. It still turned into a slide show occasionally. In less challenging areas, P3d is extremely smooth before and after the upgrade so I couldn't tell the improvement. Of course your mileage may vary with a new video card, I think I will return the $300+ GTX 770 and replace it with an i7 4770K at about the same price. I believe my lowly i5 4440 @3,3 Ghz is the performance bottleneck. Anyway this is just my personal experience for your reference.

Both are set at 110 miles. The P3d weather is clear while FSX is fair.

Of course it is still there but you can not see it from KBFI in P3d because it smears off the distant objects with hazy air ( I still believe it is due to overly aggressive VAS management in P3d). The air in FSX is more translucent so you can see Olympic Mountain range to the west and Mount Rainier to the south once you lift off and that's what you expect to see in real life. May be I expect too much from P3d. After all it is developed as a training tool so the visual pleasure is of secondary importance to LM.

This is my first post in VASIM since I found this site and P3D in December last year. Everyone knows that Mont. Reiner looms over Puget Sound in a clear day. However, no matter what I tried in P3D, I cannot see the major landmark when I did a few touch and go from Boeing Field in Seattle. See the following two screen shots in P3D in both clear day and dusk. I just brought P3D V2.1 on last Friday and freshly installed without any add-ons so the only reason I can think of is P3D aggressive VAS management that suppresses the distant objects. To add salt to the injury, I got OOM from both F-35 and F-22 after about 15 to 20 minutes flying over Puget Sound. I then went back to FSX and tried the same thing. And sure it is, the majestic mountain looms over the south end of the runway and I can fly around all day long without OOM. See the following two screen shots in FSX for both day and dusk. The only improvement of P3D over FSX, as far as I can see at this moment it the general smoothness of the sim with much less autogen pop up in P3D. I am sure LM will fix the OOM bug in the near future. It will be a much more mature product by this time next year (If LM doesn’t pull the plug on P3D.You never know.). In the mean time, does anyone know how to force P3D to show the distant objects?