ColeThePilot

This is really interesting you guys. Afterburner was right. The sliders/P3D providing higher end scenery with sliders turned up wasn't the culprit. It's about how the two sims manage the FPS degradation as addons become a factor. I installed the NGX into both sims, as well as Orbx FTX scenery, and selected the thunderstorm weather preset. FSX:SE's frame rates went from approx. 120 FPS, to 45 FPS. P3D's frame rates went from 60, to 50 FPS! It seems Prepar3D doesn't allow it's frame rates to reach the same dramatic levels of FSX, but the frame rates also seem to drop very little when addons become a factor. Here is the new comparison screenshots. Top image is FSX. I'm very happy about this. It's true the two sims cannot be compared 1:1, and I was wrong in my assumption that performance would be severely impacted once addons were installed into Prepar3D the same way they're impacted in FSX. Sorry for doubting.

Umm...I care? For me, flying around at 12 FPS isn't acceptable. The reason I'm able to get acceptable frame rates in FSX is what we're trying to address here. It's not misleading at all. Telling me I'll maintain 30/ "smooth" frame rates with GSX, addon scenery, PMDG aircraft, traffic, and complex weather scenarios when FSX just barely handles that and is performing better for me is what's misleading. You may be on to something with this. I'll load up some addons and see if my assumption turns out to be true. Maybe it won't scale the way I'm thinking.

I was only trying to set them up similarly because I could tell after a fresh install that my performance shouldn't have been so low. That's when I started trying to set them up with the same scenery complexity, mesh resolution etc. MSAA is off, the in game AA setting was turned up a bit. I don't believe Nvidia control panel had changed anything by itself. I hadn't messed with that yet. The only in game setting I've found (so far) that gets me up near FSX's performance is the scenery complexity, which when turned to its lowest setting gets me up to about 90-100 frames. I'll post my settings later tonight, as well as my CFG file. I'm leaning towards something CPU/sim complexity related, since hardware tessellation being off doesn't make a noticeable difference, and in game AA/AF settings do not make a noticeable difference either. Though I could be completely wrong. AviatorMoser - I'll check all of that tonight and report back with those screenshots and CFG file.

If I were to load up ORBX scenery, and fly over it in the NGX with traffic, weather, and REX textures using FSX:SE I'd drop from 100+ FPS down to 30-40 FPS. That's doable. Considering my performance in P3D is half that, I'd be dropping down as low as 15 FPS. Lower in bigger cities. No, I'm not happy with that. And no, that's not massive FPS. I'm not about to start shooting slide-show approaches in a $200 sim that behaves virtually identical to FSX but runs at half the speed. Obviously something has to be wrong with my set up somewhere. I'm sure there's tons of people out there running the sim on high settings without issues. This would be an extremely common complaint if every i7/900 series GPU owner started feeling like they were in 2007 again.

Let me be clear and preface everything from here on out that I have not altered the sims or the hardware controlling them, aside from tweaking in-sim settings to get them close to each other. I went ahead and turned off all shadows in Prepar3D. I noticed about a 5 FPS increase, about 50 FPS away from our target of getting it to run as smoothly as FSX:SE. Not that I'm okay with running the sim without shadows turned on. This changed things by maybe 1 or 2 FPS. I then went through both FSX.cfg and Prepar3D.cfg side by side. In Prepar3D.cfg I verified the LOD value was 4.5. I verified all values with the same names were identical, especially settings under [sCENERY], [TERRAIN], and [GRAPHICS]. I even completely stripped the SIM of ALL autogen by adjusting the sliders below Scenery Complexity to "None" and I'm holding steady at 77 FPS, still over 40 FPS away from what I achieve in Steam Edition. Sorry, I was under the impression there was a setting within Prepar3D not present in FSX that was known to cause severe performance decreases. If this is considered normal due to all of the amazing features and possibilities of Prepar3D, and I'm going to have to reduce my sim to a level that's visually nowhere near FSX's level, then I don't think it's for me.

I haven't made tweaks to either version. They're both in their default states with the exception of adjusted sliders. HDR lighting is already off in P3D since it's not an FSX feature. Bathymetry is off by default. Hardware tessellation being off yeilds the same results in FPS even with a restart of the sim.

Gigabyte Z97X-UD5H-BK i7 4790k @ 4.6 GHz w/H100i cooling Reference GTX 970 16 GB DDR3 Memory @1600 Installed on Samsung 840 EVO SSDs in RAID0. EVGA 1000W Supernova PSU On Windows 10 Pro x64 Just to make sure I'm understanding you guys, I should have lower than 38 m mesh complexity in FSX in order to see something similar to 38 m of mesh complexity in P3D? What possibilities and features are being processed in the sim that are cutting performance virtually in half? Also, isn't increased performance one of P3D's proposed features?

Thought I'd try making the switch to Prepar3D Pro since the FSL A320 Pro will be a Prepar3D exclusive, and I'm appalled by the performance I'm seeing given the same exact settings... I'm gonna go ahead and assume I've done something terribly wrong in the set up process. Can anyone think of what that might be? Linked below are in-game screenshots I've taken at KBFI, in-game sliders matched as closely as possible (with the exception of hardware tessellation), fair weather, system time, and the default Maule aircraft. No mods installed on either sim. P3D averages 65 FPS, FSX:SE averages 120 FPS. http://imgur.com/a/gfkIv