s0cks

Haha, no worries! I'll be sure to try tonight.

You spent an hour on this and didn't even fly? :blink:

What use is P3D without Orbx?

Just so you know, normal AA (and SGSS AA) will not work if you use SweetFX (even if you disable SMAA in the SweetFX ini). That might be why you are having problems.

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You pretty much install FSX, buy the fixer and run it and that's it. If you wish to tweak further then check out the guides as Ron says.

So you pretty much agreed with my last paragraph! That was my point though. People are comparing two different scenarios. Of course reducing the load on the PC by not pre-rendering frames gives you a much needed boost in busy airports - so it's no wonder that people find unlimited to be "smoother". My point is that the technology works the same for everyone, it's not random. The difference in opinions is the difference in usage. If your PC could handle the 777 into Heathrow >40fps you would find limited to 30 much smoother. Those of us who enjoy VFR flight, we really require that super smooth experience for the sensation of flight. Unlimited introduces far too much frame time variance and you end up with perceived stutters, even if your framerate is >40fps. The other night, after a good smoke of the green stuff, I took the P51D out of a rural airport in NZ (using Orbx scenery) and nearly fell out of my chair when performing a roll. It felt so awesomely real! I then set unlimited frames and I completely lost that sense of flight. It was the icing on the cake for me - I have to have it on. But as said, each of us has our own preferences.

Just some pics of me messing around in the A2A Cub over Orbx NZNI!

I have to say I'm pretty surprised at people's findings. I know we all love to say "every setup is different" but there has to be some expected behaviour to technology. Higher FPS feels more responsive, especially using TrackIR, and I can understand how unlimited will help improve framerates. However, as SteveW rightly pointed out, this will cause frame time to be all over the place which results in a perceived stuttering. So on the one hand unlimited offers better frame rates and thus smoother response. But while limited means lower FPS it also increases fluidity, which is very important for flight. A good test, if you can be bothered, is to fly around a rural area, in a good VFR plane, in clear weather (a location your PC has no problem handling) with unlimited set. Turn off the FPS counter and just judge the sensation of flight using your eyes only - no instrument watching either, fly true VFR. Do the same again, but this time with it limited to 30fps. You should find the flight with limited frames to be much more fluid and flight like. Caveat is that TrackIR won't be as good as it's only updating your head position 30 times a second rather than up to 60. I think perhaps some people, especially those who fly commercial airliners have their head buried in gauges so that a fluctuating FPS isn't a major concern as you're not really looking out the window that much anyway. What these pilots need is every frame they can get as they fly their complex airliner into detailed and busy airports. In these situations where the framerate cannot be sustained in limited mode, unlimited is better. But this type of "flying" in my opinion, is just a numbers game - there doesn't need to be that same sensation of flight that one would get from flying a P51D out of a rural airstrip and then doing barrel rolls and loops.

I have to admit, now that I have FSX DX10 tweaked to my liking it does run very smoothly. I was always irritated by the lack of smoothness in P3D, but in saying that it's been a good month or so since I last used it (now removed as I needed the space) so my memory could be exaggerating. What bugged me the most was how the terrain continually redrew itself as you got closer - this happens in FSX but not nearly as much (it never happens in XP10). On the other hand, P3D is still in constant development. Things could completely change from one patch to the next. For me, this is the big draw to the platform. Looking forward to v2.3.

Ah yes, my bad. It guides you towards the approach, and the approach guides you towards the runway.

It's not that hard actually, I've been learning recently too, though i haven't done much "heavy" flying so I haven't put SID and STARS into practice. As said though, transition is the starting point. There will be a few different transitions depending on where you're arriving from (i.e. north, south, east, or west). STARS are basically just a bunch of waypoints (with altitude) that guide you towards the runway for landing. SIDS being a bunch of waypoints that guide you out of the airport airspace. At least that's how I understand it. A good way to learn, I found, was to start going over airport charts and getting to grips with them. I find VOR/DME approached by the chart particularly fun!

You clearly have no forward thinking then. Sure addons might not work, but that's why you'll still be able to load up you're old copy of P3Dv2. I get the feeling that a lot of people are stuck in a rut that they don't want to leave. One would hope that after a decade (maybe more) of the Microsoft ESP/FSX engine, that we might be able to advance significantly. I'm thinking procedurally generated urban areas (no more repeating urban ground textures which is sooooo old school), SSAO, gradual night lighting (not just on or off), tides, etc... you name it. If it had all that, but you had to give up your addons and go back to vanilla, who would care? It would be the start of something really exciting.

Nothing you mentioned probably has anything to do with 64bit. A badly executed 64bit application will still be a badly executed application. Though I have to say that my personal experience with XP10 is that it blows P3Dv2 out of the water in terms of smoothness (so long as you don't hit that VRAM wall). There's plenty of resource on the net to find the advantages of 64bit applications on a 64bit OS. But like you say, it's not the secret cure for everything. The concern I have with P3D is that we are entering, or rather, we have already entered the next generation of computer hardware. If this is supposed to be the next generation of flight sim then we should be forward thinking here. The thinking that 32bit is "good enough" isn't really innovative. Sure, we can make the sim look better than a fully loaded FSX, but in my opinion it's time to crank it up a notch further. I want to see far more going on in my sim, and a hard 4GB limit (among other 32bit limitations) just seems counter-productive to this. P3Dv2 is a 32bit application, fine. P3Dv3 needs to be 64bit though, and if it isn't, well that'll be a sad day.

VAS isn't the be all and end all. There are other advantages to 64bit.

Yup, I watch their thread with much anticipation. I fly in New Zealand though, and those are yet to be converted. Looking forward to the new night lights it will introduce too.

I have P3Dv2, I'm a scenery guy who likes to fly GA. I'm still using FSX. The only reason is that there are just so many more addons for FSX. I got fed up of trying addons in P3D and finding certain switch sounds didn't work, or certain features didn't work as expected, or you had to tweak something as a work around. I just want things to work, and I'm an IT technician so it's not like this stuff scares me, I just CBF! Vanilla + P3Dv2 compatible addons is fine, but a lot of the addons I have are not P3Dv2 compatible (officially) so I went back to FSX just for ease of use really. However, I would switch back again once my ORBX scenery has a P3Dv2 installer, and if v2.3 offers some serious performance improvements. Until then it just doesn't feel like it's worth another, who knows how many hours of my time.

Can't edit my post.... meant creates not greats (yikes).

Can confirm that frame-limiting to 30fps gives the best smoothness, though not completely stutter free. As said, you won't see this sort of smoothness until we can achieve 60fps or 1/2 refresh rate VSYNC.

From what I understand you will rarely see beyond 30miles on even the best days, often less than 20miles. As stated, try setting the visibility from 15-20miles - or just experiment.

If find the volumetric fog both good and bad. Good for fog, but it also greats this solid line on the horizon, where everything above it is clear as day, everything below it is faded. It looks really odd. Could be some setting I need to tweak maybe?

I'm sorry but nothing has come close to the raleigh scattering artwork tweaks done in XP10 to simulate atmospherics. And cloud shadows are great, but they destroy performance when there are thick layers of cloud. No doubt P3Dv2 is far above and beyond FSX but it still has it's compromises. I'm not bagging P3Dv2, it's my favourite flight sim, but these kind of posts aren't particularly productive. Every flight sim does some things better and some things worse. It's great to point out its strengths, but we must also acknowledge it's weaknesses so that it can improve

If it was using onboard you would notice a massive drop in performance. You can use something like nVidia Inspector to monitor the graphics card temps and usage. Shouldn't be too hard to work out if it's using the onboard or GeForce.

Well that's just bad sportsmanship! Thanks for letting me know though, I won't bother

Access times are the real benefit over traditional hard drives. But loading 200 small files to start a game isn't going to be noticeably quicker between older and newer SSD's (0.05 secs vs. 0.02 secs to load a 10mb file). Copying large files should be much quicker though.