And I must say, the first impression is – most impressive!!
I really don’t have much time to play with it long, there are these things called “working days”… but, two things I noticed immediately: smoother all around, when paning, or flying or turning, and way lower VAS consumption, even after loading back and forth, situation after situation, I am still at 2.1GB, which is even lower than an initial load of v2.1.
Go to LM, download and install it. I think everyone will be much surprised 🙂
I created a new section in the guide about the mouse-cursor FPS drop.
Just open my guide and use the browser find text button (just use the term “mouse”, I believe a 2nd search is the right one). It’s just before my FSX settings (screenshots).
My dear simmers!
This is the 3rd and most probably the last comparison I will do for P3Dv2. It has become apparent that my tests are considered unrealistic, and bogus if you will. The thing is, I read many forums, including the biggest ones too, and I see many negative reactions to my tests. I see also many happy simmers out there, and I don’t want to the one to sour the apple.
The thing is, P3Dv2 isn’t at all that bad, as some have come to conclude from my tests. People, I do the test, I look at the results and share them with you. Nothing else. And this test was actually a positive one, but more on that later.
This test was constructed to see the difference between the sims when using addons. I have chosen two really great products that I own:
Flightbeam KPHX
Aerosoft Airbus Extended
Let’s begin with showing off my basic situation, from which I conducted the test:
FSX:
P3D:
And the settings used:
As you can see, autogen is maxed, scenery is maxed, GPU stuff is turned off. In both sims, I have comparable settings (no, autogen is NOT comparable, but max nonetheless).
So what happens when we add Flightbeam KPHX, observe:
Alright, Aerosoft Airbus Extended:
Well, I can only say disappointing. Or, is it?
Now let’s do another another small step, which I admit didn’t want to do, but did it to really compare apples to apples. Let’s try what happens if I remove ALL the tweaks from FSX, and leave stock FSX + these addons. And for the sake of being correct, I made a screenshot with both mouse off and mouse on the sim results, as we all known that mouse on lowers the FPS in FSX.
FSX, mouse off:
FSX, mouse on:
And then, P3Dv2 (no mouse bug):
And this is what I was talking about before.
P3Dv2 actually performs on par with UNTWEAKED FSX. Not better, not worse. So LM team did a good job of importing many good stuff into the sim while retaining the performance of the STOCK FSX.
With my guide, users have become used to having good performance in FSX, under certain conditions of the tweaking guide.
I also now do understand why there are users out there reporting great results with P3Dv2:
These people are MOST LIKELY those that never had anything better than stock FSX running and were used to poor performance. To them, P3Dv2 is god-given, if it has no bugs. It is smoother than FSX, retains the “low” FPS number and it retains it steadily. But since I have a highly tweaked FSX, my FSX is performing better than P3Dv2 does. And the tweaks aren’t really working in P3Dv2.
To even throw a twist into the whole performance thing, I hit the situation with and manual overcast via weather page, and got this:
As the conclusion, I will simply say this:
If you had FSX running well and tweaked according to my guide, P3Dv2 is most likely going to be a slight disappointment. It will perform slower when it comes to FPS.
However, if you did not, P3Dv2 will be a joy, since the performance is same (or maybe even better?) and the stability is given or coming.
They still need to fix some quirks and give it Nvidia support, but to achieve the tweaked FSX level, they will need something else. Whatever that might be.
Hello again!
A very nice guy, Ben, who also posted here on my blog, was very kind to “lend” me his PC for an hour this evening, let me have his P3Dv2 installation as a test-bed for a comparison between my (supposedly weak GPU according to some people out there) GTX580 and his GTX Titan.
My hardware is as listed, shortly i7-2600K currently at 4.6Ghz, GTX580 1.5GB and 8GB of RAM and his system is i7-3770K @ 4.7Ghz and GTX Titan, and not sure how much RAM, but it ain’t relevant in this case. Anyway, his system is supposedly much more potent than mine, especially through the GPU.
So I went along and set up a small series of running P3Dv2 situations, just to see, if I were to decide to buy a Titan according to some high recommendations out there, if I would see better performance in the P3Dv2.
No, obviously, I can’t test beyond the capabilities of my GPU, as in that case the Titan would win hands down, being simply stronger. My intention is to give a system a test in a simple scenarios and see how it holds. And then finally, how it performs vs FSX (this was done on my computer only, and will be put at the end).
Beau, a developer of P3Dv2, told me that autogen has been improved as to include instancing, so it should, by theory, perform better, making less draw calls on the system. And it should be most prominent in heavy scenarios. So I included all of those.
Also, as I am connected via Teamviewer on his computer, (and we checked this!!), the FPS are lost by a very small margin, talking about 3-5% or even less when connected. The FPS when disconnected are the same in most of situations, so if you see them a little lower, that is due to Teamviewer connection.
Let’s begin with a shot showing our GPUs:
And the same shot, showing the GPU load. This situation (previous, and next, being the same, features full scenery and autogen sliders).
In conclusion to this part, what we see is simply half of GPU usage on the Titan from the one of the GTX580, but the FPS remained the same, pointing out for me personally, that the P3Dv2 is still highly CPU-dependent.
Moving on, I wouldn’t like to leave, even the “weak-ish” GPU like my own, without doing some decent work, so let’s give it more or less 100%. I tried to not overload the card, giving it exactly 100%, and I think I succeeded. And I am gonna tell you why.
Because the Titan, in the SAME situation, SAME settings, gives again, yeah, you guessed it, same FPS.
This situation incorporates default shader settings, but the slider on max, max water setting, including all checkboxes set, vol. fog on, cars on 100%, HDR on. So now we see GTX580 is on max, and the Titan about 67%. This gives me a solid result that the Titan is about 50% faster than the GTX580. This result goes hand in hand with my GPU comparison result within FSX some time ago. Yet, since I didn’t overload my GTX580 really, the FPS are still the same.
This goes to contrary what is being said about P3Dv2 all the time: no matter what, stronger hardware will benefit P3Dv2. IT WILL NOT. At least not as long as you don’t ask too much of it. This is an old game, and the game hasn’t changed.
And finally, let’s add Aerosoft Airbus to the mix, and see how it performs. Yet again between the two systems:
Well, best thing I can say, I am disappointed.
Even on a significantly stronger hardware, P3Dv2 doesn’t benefit of the better hardware, as long as you don’t overload the current hardware.
At the same time, LM recommends the latest hardware, yet the benefit isn’t there except if you load all bells and whistles.
Also, what will happen if we were to load the PMDG NGX or 777 when it comes out for P3Dv2 into P3Dv2? If the overhead in the P3Dv2 is already so small and fragile, a monster airplane like PMDG will push the FPS waaaaay down below, way lower than FSX ever was. Into areas of non-playability…
Can anyone prove me otherwise? Can anyone post their 1:1 comparison and prove me wrong? Show me something, anything beside those meaningless subjective opinions I read everywhere…
And the said comparison of P3D and FSX @ Flightbeam KPHX and Aerosoft Airbus?… I’ll put that in another post, too late today already…
And finally, thank you Ben for lending me your computer for an hour, it was an eye-opener and helped me decide what I want to do next.
I don’t want to go into details, I just did a quick performance comparison between FSX and P3Dv2. Also, this is a comparison on MY computer, MY GPU, the (now) midranged GTX580… I am aware that P3Dv2 works better with faster GPUs, but this test was done to have a comparison grounds for other tests which will have other GPUs, for comparison reasons.
What matter to me is that the first shot is my fully installed FSX, with all bells and whistles, while 2nd shot is the same situation loaded in P3Dv2 (FTXG, mesh and landclass installed, to have same positions, same as in FSX), and autogen set on full. Now, as far as I know, they said there is way more autogen in P3Dv2. Let’s observe…
This is FSX:
Now let me load the same situation in P3Dv2:
Somehow, to my eyes, switching between the two pictures in a full screen, it doesn’t look like more autogen (best save all pictures manually, and then switch between them with arrows, best visible what the differences are). Moreover, the amount seems like the same too.
And, what is needed to retain the FPS we had back in the FSX? Observe:
Now, the same comparison in a bit flatter area, to see the reach of the autogen.
Again, FSX:
Now comes the P3D, fully autogen:
And all autogen to sparse yet again:
In a conclusion, I can say following:
The P3Dv2 is barely able to maintain the same FPS (first scene yes, 2nd no) as FSX does with full autogen vs sparse autogen. And before some people come with more density, yeah, I can see, further away from the aircraft, there is more density, but in general, autogen distance is the same. Yet, the FPS are 1/3!!! So we are paying with 1/3 of the FPS in P3Dv2, just to have a little bit more of autogen (just compare the shots!) and have it not pop-up? Sorry, too high a price for me. And since autogen is still a CPU thing (we confirmed that in the analysis), it bogs down the system.
And finally, two comparison shots on dense AG and very dense scenery. This is the setting I am running in my original FSX and wanted as a comparison in the P3Dv2. It is very clear that LM put less autogen under the aircraft, and loaded more autogen far away. So however this system is working, does it make sense? And also, why do FPS drop by half???
FSX:
P3Dv2:
And before you ask about other settings, I’ve turned off water, shadows, and anything else, just like I did in the analysis testing.
LM needs to seriously undergo the autogen system. I’m not a programmer nor do I really understand what is under the hood, but I see the result. And I am not really happy about it.
What do you think?
Well, for anyone wanting an easy porting tool, this is the solution. Use FSX installer to install addons into P3Dv2. Highly recommended and I tested it too 😉
Well, for my own sake and to know how to compare the two sims and to know how to set it up, I ventured into deeper analysis what causes how much performance drop in the P3Dv2, and that between the GPU and CPU.
See it here:
https://kostasfsworld.wordpress.com/p3d-v2-performance-analysis/
As I had some questions on this, and some users say that v2 “looks like FSX”, the screenshots don’t do it justice, especially this: AAPS (Autogen Anti-Popping System).
It works with trees the best, however with some buildings it doesn’t work. I’ll leave it to LM to explain it best, they just said it wasn’t possible for all. However, the distance is so large, that you won’t notice it.
And I am sorry for the bad quality of the video, as this was taken with the iPhone, I own no camcorder and I don’t want to record the sim. Shadowplay isn’t supported as of yet.
As if the Prepar3D v2 beta testing wasn’t enough for me, and while some were asking why there aren’t more screenshots showing more features, details etc, well, it is maybe because at the same time I was flying FSX (well, not at the *same* time, but you get my drift!) and beta-testing the new Activesky Next weather engine.
What I really like about ASN is the promptly fast loading of the engine. It’s the one most needed feature when it comes to the weather engine. Furthermore, the depiction has been completely revamped, so what you have seen from Opus or FSGRW, ASN now has and in my opinion way better. Actually, Activesky is the oldest player in the house. With the longest experience on the Microsoft Flight Simulator series. The screenshots I am about to show are just some random screenshots from my flights I did with ASN testing it.
Some neat things I like about ASN:
– in program update notifications
– way more simpler and more clean menu (with still all the features AS always provided easily accessible!)
– removed texturing, making the program way lighter and faster loading
– the configuration for the flight couldn’t be simpler (which under ASX wasn’t bad, but now there is a bonus I really like and often use -> the average route winds calculation, you don’t have to search for it in the briefing lists, but it’s displayed on top of the Briefing)
– Depiction! Wow… I really didn’t expect this when I entered the beta.
– the Wx Configuration window – it has historical time, yeah old known thing, but there is also “Force Historical Time to Sim Time” -> I absolutely love the feature. Imagine having some old flight saved on the disk, and then you had to set historical time according to the sim. Now just check the checkbox. Maybe ASX had it, don’t know, but this is the first time I noticed it!
There are countless other features, which I am sure are going to be presented to you when the program comes out, but for now, enjoy some shots.
Well, I just thought, leaving you with that bad old legacy texturing, is just criminal. Shame on me… now, this is more like it!
Besides, a little bit toned down settings, for more realistic performance on a “lowly” GTX580. Details soon, don’t worry!
Kosta's Flight Simulation World 
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