Quote from Ron Rollo on December 7, 2025, 9:28 am

Good news Mark!

I am happy to see P3D is continuing with their products.  As you know, I just recently installed P3D v5 and was planning to use this sim until the Just Flight Lear45 was released for MSFS2020/2024.

But I have to say, when I first opened the P3D v5 sim a few weeks ago, I was very disappointed to see that for the most part, the visuals and the performance was no better than my P3D v2 initial setup from 10 years ago.  It's not until you spend a couple hundred bucks on Orbx scenery and other addons until the sim starts to look satisfactory.  And even then, it's disappointing compared to what you get out of the box with MSFS2020.

Lockheed Martin/Prepar3D has been using the same base sim engine (MS FSX) from 2008 and honestly, the roots of that sim go back prior to 2004.  In other words, the brand new sim P3D just released is over 20 years old.  I don't want to knock P3D too hard because it's still a great simulator that arguably has the easiest way for third party developers to create addons, it's just that the outside visuals can only be pushed so far until they hit the wall.  I think P3D has been at that wall for several years now.

Since Prepar3D acquired the rights to FSX, it has been packaged as a "training tool" for military outfits and from the screen shots they recently posted, they are leaning into military training even harder now.  It could be considered a "War Games" simulator but focusing on the technical, procedural and strategic aspects of it.  For crying out loud, in their next release we might see that they have added ICBM launch simulations.  They already have the subs modeled.  (Or maybe this is already modeled?  What do I know.)

P3D's roots began as a flight sim and we will always be able to use it as such, but these days, it has a much different purpose as a military training tool that we just happen can still use as a flight simulator.  The thing that we have to realize is that the performance and visuals may get slightly better from release to release, but the sim over all will always be the same base sim engine until they acquire the rights to another simulator.  (It doesn't have to be another MS product by the way.)

Bottom line, us full scale Lear45 builder are in a unique situation because we are locked into this ONE aircraft and really have no choice but to fly with P3D....for now.  95% of all flight sim enthusiast have moved on to MSFS2020/2024 for obvious reasons meanwhile, we have been temporarily "left behind" where we can clearly see the difference between the old sim technology and new sim tech.  I guess in that aspect we are lucky!

All that to say......MSFS2020/2024 is our future but thank goodness for P3D continuing to support the older sim technology.