Quote from Hangar45 Admin on December 18, 2017, 11:51 am

(Original thread started on 01-15-13 by Terry Collins)

Here is a guide to get better performance out of your Windows 7 machine so in turn you can get better performance out of FSX or P3D:

http://www.computingunleashed.com/speed-up-windows-7-ultimate-guide-to.html

 

There are also programs such as Alactricity and SmartClose which shut down services you can do without. I've heard SmartClose is more user friendly and is a newer program.

 

This site is the holy grail of making your FSX/P3D run the best it can:

http://kostasfsworld.wordpress.com/fsx-software-and-hardware-guide/

 

(Posted by Mark Speechley on 08-22-15)

The LOD radius has been a tweak for FSX and P3D for a long time to increase the distance detail. Many forum entries have people advising of using the maximum setting in the P3D menu which defaults at max to 6.5.( 4.5 for FSX ). Also if you access the P3D.cfg you can manually increase it with some people claiming wonderful distance clarity.

 

This post was released yesterday on the ORBX P3D sub forum from Rob Ainscough ( de-facto P3D tester and spokesperson )

 

"The LOD Radius of 6.5 is a limitation of the new Tessellation feature (with or without it being enabled) in P3D V2.x series ... DX11 doesn't operate the same as DX9/DX10 (which does not support tessellation). Main issues is with the texture array size limit of 2048 ... it is possible to add additional arrays, however, in doing so it would break considerable compatibility with the base graphics engine.  Perhaps in the future we'll see this change but for now it is what it is.

Cheers, Rob"

 

Hence any P3Ders note increasing the LOD beyond 6.5 should have no effect, except placebo.

 

(Posted by Ron Rollo on 08-23-15)

Are you saying that if your using P3D, do not increase the LOD beyond 6.5?

 

(Posted by Mark Speechley on08-23-15)

Yep, that is the way I read it. You could only increase the LOD beyond 6.5 by making a change in ( I think from memory) the [Terrain] section of the P3d.cfg file anyway. According to Rob Ainscough the tessellation is the reason you can't go beyond 6.5, whether you have it enable or not.

 

(Posted by Mark Speechley on 05-12-17)

Interesting thread in the Prepar3d Forum regarding whether this guy could run a triple monitor with his setup.

http://www.prepar3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6315&t=124283

 

He has an:

Intel Core I5 7500

MSI GeForce GTX 1060 Gaming X 6GB

16 GB RAM

 

The best answer is as follows and is relevant to most of us.  The following are direct quotes from Mark Hargrove:

 

"Bottom line: no, a 1080 card will not help, nor will a 1080 Ti or any other GPU -- you're not bottlenecked by the GPU, but rather by your CPU. At this time, the primary render thread in P3D runs on a single core. There is other stuff that can use the other cores (which is why you see them active), but P3D's overall performance is dependent upon both your single-core CPU performance and your GPU. One of them is ALWAYS going to be a bottleneck.

 

There is an easy way to tell which is your current bottleneck: get a flight going in some weather (i.e., with clouds present) and display the frame rate (by pressing Shift-Z until you see the frame rate display). Note the value displayed. Now resize the main window and make it tiny (don't worry -- the frame rate text will still be big enough to read).

 

If the frame rate increases when you make the window very small, your GPU is the bottleneck. If the frame rate doesn't materially change, the CPU is the bottleneck.  Unless you're running a pretty old GPU, you're very likely to find you're CPU-bound."

 

"You actually don't need to do the experiment I suggested -- I can tell you with 99% confidence that you're CPU-bound running an i5 processor.

 

A 64-bit version will not do much -- probably not anything -- to help with this issue. A lot of folks have WAY too many expectations of what a 64-bit version of P3D will do for us.

 

It is still very possible to run multiple PCs, and that's how a lot of folks solve the performance issue. I run 4 PCs for my simulator using OpusFSI to provide view synchronization between my "master" PC and my three "external view" PCs. The external view PCs run five 4K displays (left 45/90, forward, and right 45/90). My master PC runs just panels. I'm using i7-6700K CPUs on all systems OC'd to about 4.6 ghz (the highest OC that remains stable for me), and a GTX 1080 in the external view PCs (and an older GTX 980 Ti on the panel display). I've spent considerable time tuning the config, but really I'm not doing anything fancy or tricky at all -- just common-sense things. This setup gets me 60FPS (locked) under most flight conditions, and about 45 FPS on the two systems running two monitors with complex scenery. The worst I've seen was about 30 FPS on approach into KLAX in cloudy conditions. Most importantly, though, the views are smooth. I get very occasional momentary lags when scenery loads or weather changes abruptly -- but it's negligible and doesn't break the immersion for me.

 

I started years ago with 6 PCs in my setup -- one for each display. As CPUs and GPUs have improved I've been able to reduce down to four and maintain the performance I want.

 

In your case I'd suggest starting splitting the load between just two PCs, especially if you're running only HD (1920x1080) displays. You could run one PC as your master (with a panel, and say, the "forward" display), and a new PC as your left/right 45 displays (or whatever FOV they're covering). Alternately, you could build a somewhat stronger PC (an i7-based system with a GTX 1070 or 1080) and drive all three projectors from that system, using your existing system as your master showing just panels (and I should be clear what I mean by "just panels" -- my "panels" display is a normal virtual cockpit view with the camera set so that only the panel is showing. I'm not talking about anything fancy.)

 

(Posted by Ron Rollo on 05-14-17)

Good info Mark. First thing we have to have is the right equipment. An i5 processor for the main computer will not cut it for this fella. As a matter of fact, I think I have mentioned in another thread that I plan to up grade my two client machines from i3 processors to i7 processors. It may be overkill but at least it will eliminate the hardware being the weak link causing poor performance.

 

My plan is to rebuild all three computers and format them basically starting from scratch. I have learned so much over the years and trying to push the envelop on one i7 machine and two i3 machines has taught me so much. I also plan to move a few more key programs over to the client machines from the server. The server has enough to think about.

 

I have been on the sidelines waiting for P3D v4.0 to come out with 64bit so that I can upgrade everything at once. We will see if that materializes this year or not. If it looks like we will be waiting longer than not, I will upgrade to 3.4. I am still running 2.5 after all.  Thanks again for the info Mark!

 

This site is the holy grail of making your FSX/P3D run the best it can:

http://kostasfsworld.wordpress.com/fsx-software-and-hardware-guide/

 

If you have any tweak advise, tutorials or questions, please post here.