garrett_frank

All AGL. And I just realized there was a typo in my post. "1000 feet" should have been 10,000.

I agree with the OP's sentiment: 1000 feet often looks like 3000 feet and a typical cruise altitude looks like you're around the mid-teens. Every now and then I download the X-Plane trial and goof around with it and in addition to the incredible night-lighting, road traffic and flight physics, I find that the altitude sensation is also a little more realistic.

Strongly recommend getting a bracket for the card so that you can install an all-in-one cooler. It costs a few bucks and will require some effort but the card will run so much cooler and so much quieter. All of the stock video card coolers are so inefficient that it usually requires the [noisy] fans to quick in quite early...

I dare say that a lot of themes mentioned here--not the purely aviation-related items--are intrinsic to the general internet experience. The free flow of information has undoubtedly changed humanity for the better but with some, er, side-effects. And if I could add an item: not reading the manuals. This is of course important for aircraft but also for any product you may buy. I tend to gather that flightsim community is predomintantly male and, of course, we don't like to read manuals. But doing so would prevent a lot of repetitive posts and threads asking about issues that are plainly covered in the manual...

Is there a tl;dr version? I see a bunch of these types of, pardon the pun, threads pop up every now and then but there's never really a consensus. Which is odd because... ... it seems to me that the majority of simmers use an i7, such as the 2500k, 3770k, 4790k, 6700k, and so on. Given that they're all processors with 4 physical cores, should there be a basic rule of thumb at this point? I ran some pretty scientific tests a while ago (not sure if I still have the results) but I found I was getting a 10% gain in FPS in a CPU-bound scenario with HT off in P3Dv2.5. I've never bothered with AMs. So, what's the conclusion?

As someone with no experience with Imaginesim, this thread doesn't inspire much confidence in buying KATL when it comes out for P3D. As both a local and a flightsimmer, it never made sense to me that none of the majors wanted to tackle this airport, especially given how important it is...

The night lighting and highway traffic in XP is truly fantastic. There is even highway exit signage for cryin' out loud!

Price. I regrettably bought the 777 product from PC Aviator AU--who seems to never update release versions--and the NGX from you directly. You can't blame people for trying to save a few bucks; this hobby can get expensive pretty quickly. Both the U.S. and AU iterations of PC Aviator offer 10% off on Tuesdays and, further, buying from the latter while in the U.S. offers a distinct currency advantage.

Per the other posts, I think I've only ever installed FSGlobal once during the last year.

LM has done a great job with V3 no doubt, but I can't help but keep wondering about a lot of the VAS claims when one of the biggest offenders--ORBX global products--haven't been released for V3 yet. Are we all celebrating too early? Vector chews up not only VAS but I think some CPU cycles as well...

Just out of curiosity, is this also what happens to the wing whilst using a wing view? I noticed that soon after purchasing the 777... that the wing indeed has a moire pattern to it at night. ______________ Garrett Frank

I may be well out of my league to state this but in the relatively short amount of time between version releases, it looks like a lot of folks at LM toiled endlessly in order to find some significant VAS savings and performance improvments. And, to top it all off, this is all with a platform that they inherited--and did not develop (although they've had it for a couple of years). I'm not sure what the AVSIM consensus is but there seems to be some good, solid work going on over at LM's simulation and training division.

I wonder that, if nothing else, the introduction of SpeedTrees into P3D shows quite the diligent side of LM's development efforts; they're not so much focusing on SimDirector fixes but also platform upgrades and enhancements. While having just gotten back into a lot of this, it seems like a far cry from the FSX days. The FSX landscape--whether you take that figuratively or literally--seemed to resemble a Mad Max one.

Greetings. I'm relatively new to a lot of this myself but I seem to think that flightsim may very well be one of the cheapest hobbies there is. Just think.... In this day and age--with flightsim software being where it is--you can pilot an almost true-to-life 737 or 777 out of a wonderfully detailed OMDB, KSFO, etc. for a couple of thousand dollars. Of course, I'm calculating in some solid hardware, software licenses, etc. but whether you like to enterain the new P3D version or FSX or X-Plane or what not, all told, it's a hobby with relatively good value. But back to the P3Dv3, the much improved VAS architecture and sim engine appear to make it a great idea.

I recently had some professional endeavors pop up that will likely draw me out of flight simming for a little while but the short time I had messing around with V3 proved to be pretty great. Granted none of my ORBX addons were loaded into it, PMDG aircraft at FSDT and FlightBeam aircraft performed well and with a ton of VAS left into it. The changelog also shows a lot of improvements that maybe a lot of us won't notice but will prove helpful, such as many of the SimDirector issues.