First of all I would really like to thank all the guys who were working hard to bring us the new V2 including members of the forum who gave helpful feedback .
I first ran V2 last week , I was hesitant at first since I was reading many negative posts and crashes happening to many users and thought I would just stick to my stable 1.4 setup. however on the weekend , I said to myself why don't I install it side by side and give it a go. So i did, first impression was @!#@$$% as many users here frustrated with the performance, i always do my test flights around the bay area starting at KSFO. The bay area is a good mix of scenery has both water , city and good terrain . With the default setting It was stuttering and frame dropping like crazy, and my computer crashed several times. bare in mind that I have a high-end OC machine with 2X Nvidia 590's . I run p3d at 5760X1080 resolution with 4 windows (left,center,right,black-panel only used as a background for the windows) . I then tried bringing down AA and many other settings, barely made a difference , yes it ran smoother but not to what I was expecting.... Here I thought , if my computer can't run this then how could most users on the forum run it!? Then I started going on to Nvidia and investigate my issue, found out that even though the powerful Nvidia 590 is one of the most powerful cards on the market it is way outdated and doesn't have the new nvidia engines and technologies. So I went ahead and invested in the new GTX 780, installed it, made sure I had the latest drivers & Voilà !!!
P3D ran as smooth as butter with all settings maxed out except for traffic as for some reason it brings the fps down. I could not believe my eyes! I have never seen my Flight Simulator setup fly so smooth with such eye candy! My next step is to install the new REX and test it on a really heavy scenery and see the results!
In conclusion, Prepar3d V 2.0 is the best thing that has ever happened to the Flight Sim world! Keep up the good work LMT
V2 is the best thing that has ever happened to the Flight Sim world
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eminyilmaz
- Posts: 17
- Joined: Sat Jan 19, 2013 4:57 pm
Well, I am happy for you but I think you got a wrong idea. You were trying to run P3d 1.4 at 4 monitors with mediocre gpu, no wonder you were having hard times. The reason it became butter smooth is not P3d v2, it's GTX780 that you spent lot of dollars. Try P3d 1.4 (which you probably installed gazillion addons) with same card, most probably it's still better than vanilla v2 in terms of performance. As a happy user of 1.4 and long supporter of P3d, I am also optimistic about future of v2, but I think we're not there yet.
I am going to repost this here, as I do not see a way to link to my post...
I would like say while P3D favors higher end equipment it is much more user friendly to low end set ups than FSX running on 32 bit computers ever was. How do I know? I've done it with everything from FSX, X-plane, Aerofly FS, and both P3D 1.4 on 32 bits, and now P3D version two running on a 64 bit system.(as well as Xplane 10.25) You do not need a thousand dollar GPU!! you don't even need a 100 dollar GPU,
P3d hands down has the most potential of any of the above Sims. My set up consists of a core i5 3.2GHz Sandy Bridge, 8 gig corsair memory, Nvidia GTX440 DDR3 1 gig GPU. running windows 7 64 bit.
With this seeming paltry set up, I am getting consistent 26 FPS which is more than realistic and smooth, the human eye can barely discern differences above 30. (Motion pictures are traditionally 25)
FXaa on
antialias 4 samples (MSAA)
Anisotropic 4X
no tesselation
Vsync off
wide view enabled running TWO LCD monitors full screen YES!
frame rate locked at 26 might go higher.
SCENERY settings
LD Radius high
Mesh High
Mesh res 5 M
Texture res 30
Scenery complexity Very Dense
Autogen vegetation and buildings both normal
reflections - clouds and user vehicles
water detail low ( I don't fly in water)
special effects off
Lighting
HDR off lensflare on. shadows off although I can enable shadows in affects FPS and I find them personally not necessary
Weather
cloud draw 70 miles detailed clouds
Traffic
30
25
minimum
labels off
Realism maxed out
running Orbx Word, FTX Global Vector, Rex 4 at 1024 clouds
There are some limitations as one might expect, using super weather models, flying at custom scenery locations, and high end payware aircraft all degrade my results, however to say you need a super GPU to enjoy excellent over all results is just false.
I would like say while P3D favors higher end equipment it is much more user friendly to low end set ups than FSX running on 32 bit computers ever was. How do I know? I've done it with everything from FSX, X-plane, Aerofly FS, and both P3D 1.4 on 32 bits, and now P3D version two running on a 64 bit system.(as well as Xplane 10.25) You do not need a thousand dollar GPU!! you don't even need a 100 dollar GPU,
P3d hands down has the most potential of any of the above Sims. My set up consists of a core i5 3.2GHz Sandy Bridge, 8 gig corsair memory, Nvidia GTX440 DDR3 1 gig GPU. running windows 7 64 bit.
With this seeming paltry set up, I am getting consistent 26 FPS which is more than realistic and smooth, the human eye can barely discern differences above 30. (Motion pictures are traditionally 25)
FXaa on
antialias 4 samples (MSAA)
Anisotropic 4X
no tesselation
Vsync off
wide view enabled running TWO LCD monitors full screen YES!
frame rate locked at 26 might go higher.
SCENERY settings
LD Radius high
Mesh High
Mesh res 5 M
Texture res 30
Scenery complexity Very Dense
Autogen vegetation and buildings both normal
reflections - clouds and user vehicles
water detail low ( I don't fly in water)
special effects off
Lighting
HDR off lensflare on. shadows off although I can enable shadows in affects FPS and I find them personally not necessary
Weather
cloud draw 70 miles detailed clouds
Traffic
30
25
minimum
labels off
Realism maxed out
running Orbx Word, FTX Global Vector, Rex 4 at 1024 clouds
There are some limitations as one might expect, using super weather models, flying at custom scenery locations, and high end payware aircraft all degrade my results, however to say you need a super GPU to enjoy excellent over all results is just false.
Quote:
Quote from eminyilmaz on January 7, 2014, 23:45
Well, I am happy for you but I think you got a wrong idea. You were trying to run P3d 1.4 at 4 monitors with mediocre gpu, no wonder you were having hard times. The reason it became butter smooth is not P3d v2, it's GTX780 that you spent lot of dollars. Try P3d 1.4 (which you probably installed gazillion addons) with same card, most probably it's still better than vanilla v2 in terms of performance. As a happy user of 1.4 and long supporter of P3d, I am also optimistic about future of v2, but I think we're not there yet.
Hi eminyilmaz. just gave 1.4 a run no change in performance, yes I do have many add ons there but settings are below 1/2 , i have to use p3d booster as well as multicore environment for it to run properly whereas V2 cannot compare to it in performance .
I don't want to start a problematic thread about the performance of P3D V2. In my case, even with almost all the options deactivated (shadows, HDR, water effects, autogen and lod radius at normal level, etc.) P3D V1 runs much better that V2 in all sceneries, simple and complex ones.
Probably my hardware is the problem. I have an Intel Sandy 2600K OC 4.8 ghz, and an old Nvidia GTX 660 OC, running over an ancient PCIE 2.0 bus.
I am sure P3D V2 is much more optimized than V1, but the fact is that it seems that you need a very powerful system to really take advantage of the new options. PD3 V1 still is a excellent option for medium level hardware.
Probably my hardware is the problem. I have an Intel Sandy 2600K OC 4.8 ghz, and an old Nvidia GTX 660 OC, running over an ancient PCIE 2.0 bus.
I am sure P3D V2 is much more optimized than V1, but the fact is that it seems that you need a very powerful system to really take advantage of the new options. PD3 V1 still is a excellent option for medium level hardware.
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Beau Hollis
- Lockheed Martin
- Posts: 2452
- Joined: Wed Oct 06, 2010 3:25 pm
JD, Thanks for posting your settings. The key there is that Tessellation and shadows are disabled. While there are some big feature trade offs doing that, it will drastically reduce the workload of the GPU. The tessellation option was added in specifically as a fallback for old hardware that was better suited for v1 but needed to use the newer SDK features of v2. I had to talk Wes out of calling it "Laptop Mode" 
. We did this to provide as much flexibility as possible for hardware support while still being able to build our system to take advantage of high-end hardware.
The tessellated terrain pages faster on the CPU-side and is required for some of the cool new stuff:
- Real-time lighting of terrain and time preview
- per-dem-point materialization for sensors and specular lighting. (eg Ice is shiny and sand isn't) This is fairly subtle unless you use the IR view and doesn't work for photo-scenery because it uses the texture generation process to create the materialization data while the textures are generated, but it does have tons of potential.
- 3D water
All that said, the Tessellation basically builds and renders the entire world mesh in 1 to 3 draw calls. Doing this puts a LOT of strain on the GPU, and older GPUs just don't have the pipeline bandwidth to handle it. Even new ones can struggle if you're using very high resolutions, multiple views, etc.
This is why terrain reflections and shadow casting are also so expensive because it has to draw the terrain multiple times.
Shadows in general are expensive because they basically work the way reflection views do, where the scene is rendered in another pass. Multiple passes are required for shadows though (2-12 passes depending on settings) and each pass writes out to a 2048x2048 map. We use some GPU tricks to write out to all 2-12 maps at once, but this also stresses pipeline throughput.
. We did this to provide as much flexibility as possible for hardware support while still being able to build our system to take advantage of high-end hardware.The tessellated terrain pages faster on the CPU-side and is required for some of the cool new stuff:
- Real-time lighting of terrain and time preview
- per-dem-point materialization for sensors and specular lighting. (eg Ice is shiny and sand isn't) This is fairly subtle unless you use the IR view and doesn't work for photo-scenery because it uses the texture generation process to create the materialization data while the textures are generated, but it does have tons of potential.
- 3D water
All that said, the Tessellation basically builds and renders the entire world mesh in 1 to 3 draw calls. Doing this puts a LOT of strain on the GPU, and older GPUs just don't have the pipeline bandwidth to handle it. Even new ones can struggle if you're using very high resolutions, multiple views, etc.
This is why terrain reflections and shadow casting are also so expensive because it has to draw the terrain multiple times.
Shadows in general are expensive because they basically work the way reflection views do, where the scene is rendered in another pass. Multiple passes are required for shadows though (2-12 passes depending on settings) and each pass writes out to a 2048x2048 map. We use some GPU tricks to write out to all 2-12 maps at once, but this also stresses pipeline throughput.
Beau Hollis
Prepar3D Software Architect
Prepar3D Software Architect
Thanks, Beau, for that explanation. Tessellation has been a mystery to many of us - it's very helpful to know how it works and what it's supposed to accomplish. I've spent years tuning settings like water rendering in FSX in order to hit the sweet spot between graphic richness and system performance. Not really understanding what tessellation did, I've been holding it high, but now it'll be possible to make some informed decisions about tradeoffs, and about how to set the balance among tessellation, shadowing and other settings. Thanks again!
Thanks for the detailed explanation of why tessellation is a killer Beau. In my practical experience tessellation issues only really matter in rendering "fuzzy or bumpy" stuff in a fast moving action game. (my non tech explanation) In a flight simulator we spend most of our time sitting in a cockpit looking out of the window at what we hope to be a realistic world below.
If your flying a fast aircraft doing tight circles at low altitude using an external view, this in my mind tests tessellation capability. Please correct me if I am wrong on this.
I have to add that I can turn on shadows and still get acceptable FPS but with my system as is I will trade FPS for shadows. I have tried tessellation on and by changing LOD radius and scenery complexity it also works, but I want to point out everyone has his or her own perceptions and preferences when it comes to sim performance. what I find with V2 is that there are many options and choices. I get real tired of guys with i7 CPU's and Titan GPU's saying they can't get performance, the object after all is to deliver a reasonable simulation of flying, not to justify how much expensive hardware you can buy. I posted my settings so the average computer user won't get discouraged about using V2.
Thanks again for your insights.
If your flying a fast aircraft doing tight circles at low altitude using an external view, this in my mind tests tessellation capability. Please correct me if I am wrong on this.
I have to add that I can turn on shadows and still get acceptable FPS but with my system as is I will trade FPS for shadows. I have tried tessellation on and by changing LOD radius and scenery complexity it also works, but I want to point out everyone has his or her own perceptions and preferences when it comes to sim performance. what I find with V2 is that there are many options and choices. I get real tired of guys with i7 CPU's and Titan GPU's saying they can't get performance, the object after all is to deliver a reasonable simulation of flying, not to justify how much expensive hardware you can buy. I posted my settings so the average computer user won't get discouraged about using V2.
Thanks again for your insights.
