Tweaking hardware and p3d v4. Questions for Prepar3d

[Oahmed]

Prepar3d V4 and Prepar3d V3 work differently and perform differently. This we understand. It would help if we understood not just how to better tweak p3d v4 but also how to tweak our hardware. It can also help us with our hardware buying choices. With that in mind I have a few questions regarding Prepar3d V4.

1) What is better, a 4.0 GHz processor running 4 cores or a 4 GHz processor running 6 cores? Does it make a difference?

2) What is the return on processor speed vs processor cores?

3) Is Hyper threading relevant in P3d v4 because I read it wasn't in P3d v3. If so, briefly, how?

4) Default P3d can probably work just fine with 4 GB RAM. But if we put Orbx Base, Orbx Vector, Orbx Continent (North
America, Europe etc), Mesh (Pilot FSGX), Scenery (FlyTampa, Fsdreamteam, Flightbeam etc), Ultimate Traffic, Rex or
Active Sky, PMDG or other favorite aircraft and probably more, how does memory play into all of this. For some of us
who prefer to use multiple add ons as listed above, how much memory would you suggest?

5) What are the top 5 hits on CPU when running Prepar3d v4 starting with the highest to the lowest?

6) What are the top 5 hits on GPU when running Prepar3d v4 starting with the highest to the lowest?

7) What exactly is "Scenery Complexity" and does it affect the other 3 options in Scenery Objects Settings?

8) What kind of impact does "Dynamic Reflections, Shadow Quality, and Shadow draw distance have? If I had to disable one,
which one should it be?

9) When looking at busy cities with add on (like fly Tampa Copenhagen for example) I see a lot of buildings untextured (black) and as I swirl my view towards them, the textures start to roll on them. I have a GTX 1070 with 8 GB and my machine has 32 GB RAM. Is this a RAM problem or something else? How can I avoid this and which setting affect this?

Thank you in advance for your advice.

[Yeager74]

Awesome questions asked. Shouldn't be too hard for a P3D tech specialist to answers. Thx.

[Beau Hollis]

1) If they are all the same speed, more is always better. Prepar3D can and will use all cores.
2) The speed of the primary core will be the determining factor FPS assuming your settings have you CPU-bound. For raw FPS, less cores at a higher clock will yield better results. On the other hand, more cores will improve the speed at which new terrain textures, and autogen data load in. Maxing out the new draw distance and terrain resolutions setting will request several times more data than v3 was able to. When paging performance isn't fast enough to keep up with flying speed, you will get blurry textures, models popping in, and reduced autogen draw distances.
3) We create a job queue per core (including HT cores). Background jobs do tasks like generating textures and loading terrain data.
4) More is always better. You'll need to check with each add-on provider for guidance on memory/GPU usage.
5) This really depends. Generally speaking it's simulation and rendering work. Cranking up traffic and using a heavy VC models with lots of draw calls will increase your work load quite a bit for example.
6) Not sure of the exact order here but the heaviest hitters are Dynamic Reflections, Shadows, Dynamic Lighting, Ultra Water (3D waves) and anti-aliasing.
7) This determines how many scenery model placements draw. Rather than using a percentage like autogen does, scenery models are tagged by the scenery dev as to which scenery complexity level they should draw in. For this reason, this setting can be very dependent on how add-ons are built. If an add-on really wants you to see every model, they may flag them all to show up on the lowest setting.
8) These setting are heavy hitters because they require rendering many additional 3D views which are sampled for creating shadows and reflections.
9) This is happening because the textures haven't loaded in yet. We have a ticket to look into improving this. You might be able to improve this by tweaking some texture entries in the Prepar3D.cfg. I believe there is a bandwidth multiplier used to determine the number of textures per frame that can be streamed to the card. Increasing this might speed up texture loads at the cost of potential stutters on frames where large amounts of texture data are streamed.

Thanks

[Oahmed]

Thank you Beau for the quick response. This helps immensely.
I was over 60 frames easy on vanilla install with no addons and with everything maxed.
Now with Orbx and other addons, I have a hard time hitting 18 frames, especially when I am on an airport (like fsdreamteam JFK).
Maybe I am wrong but I think that once developers start developing for p3d v4 specific instead of porting v3 addons, we might see the full potential of V4. That and some hotfixes that I am sure will follow from your wonderful team.
Thank you again for breathing new life into this already vibrant hobby :)

[Raphael_Chacon]

Wow, excellent questions!.....

About the black textures, i just had the same problem today during my first tubeliner flight on V4...



I will play with the settings for now and wait for the future fix.

[Lipuprepar3d]

It is not nice to fly with black textures sometimes. I have the same trouble in Copenhagen scenery. I checked my ram and vram and p3d v4 is not using all. Only 5Gb out of 16Gb ram and 3Gb out of 6Gb Vram. Why is it not using more?
I have a 7700k oc 5Ghz and 16 Gb ram 3600Mhz.
The experience is also bad with New York X. A lot of flickering textures as you get close to the buildings. This doesn't happen in xpl... 11 so LM has to do it better if they want us to buy and recommend this flight simulator.

[Raphael_Chacon]

I checked my ram and vram and p3d v4 is not using all. Only 5Gb out of 16Gb ram and 3Gb out of 6Gb Vram. Why is it not using more?

What program do you use to check that. My situation seems simmilar. Also, im trying to use the tweaks but it is not working. Testings with KLAX FSDT + ORBX NCA.


TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT= 120 -160
texturemaxload=12 - 30

But it is not working yet for me.

[Raphael_Chacon]

Found that using PTA (Tweak Assistant), i get the black textures. Reinstall sim / delete shaders and return again to KLAX + PMDG + ORBX SCA --> Working normally.

Something to review definitely.