Prepar3d 2.2 is out

[Dimus]

I agree with dropping Nvidia inspector for P3D and using whatever is in the application. Much better after I've done that, and being conservative with the sliders.

 

[paiken]

After a little bit of fiddling around with settings, I think I've finally found the sweet spot for my system. After installing the REX textures I was initially horrified by the frame rate drop, but tweaking the shadow settings has allowed me to make a flight without stutters and still have the cloud shadows on the ground. Someone mentioned in an earlier post to dial back the autogen settings to normal. I did and noticed an immediate improvement. Getting a steady 20 fps with only the occasional hiccup. Now to start adding on some planes...

 

[dvj]

Just got P3D v2.2. soooo....... FPS hit big time with REX and FTX. 5 sometimes 8 fps. cutting back shadows and autogen, maybe 12 to 15. REX clouds do not look realistic, kind of pasted in visuals. Much more work to do. Right now my tweaked FSX with Steve's DX10 fixer I'm running FPS of 40 to 60 on regular basis.

 

[falcon409]

Just got P3D v2.2. soooo....... FPS hit big time with REX and FTX. 5 sometimes 8 fps. cutting back shadows and autogen, maybe 12 to 15. REX clouds do not look realistic, kind of pasted in visuals. Much more work to do. Right now my tweaked FSX with Steve's DX10 fixer I'm running FPS of 40 to 60 on regular basis.

Yep, it'll take some work to get things tweaked. REX is a known problem right now. . .I stopped mine from loading and just use the textures. Don't use FTX so I can't comment there, but I would guess that since that's more a texture replacement that's it's more likely that the big hit is coming from REX. . .and possibly your slider settings and whatever texture resolution you have it set at. The sliders in P3D don't correlate to the same settings from FSX so it took a bit of playing with them to get things set correctly. Shadows, if set too high will also drag the fps down. I actually moved everything to the left and then slowly started moving them until I found a sweet spot. I'm pleased with the look I have now and that includes "some" cloud shadowing and interior/exterior aircraft shadows.

 

[Alan_A]

I need to amend my earlier commentary on one point - I've had to go back to NVidia Inspector to tame the (extreme) shimmering of the ORBX FTX Global lights. I get good results and not too much of a performance hit if I set transparency supersampling to 4X SGSS in Inspector and leave all the other Inspector settings at default.

Re: overall performance - keep in mind that clouds (especially with volumetric fog selected) and shadows have the biggest impact on performance. I'm having an easier time running clouds and shadows with a 780ti than I did with a 680. I still need to keep vegetation shadows off, and set terrain shadows to receive only ("cast" is turned off). I can set cloud shadows to 20,000 meters with medium shadow quality. Also, I keep my texture resolutions set to medium (1024x1024) - if you're having trouble with REX clouds, you might want to check your texture resolution and see if a lower setting helps. Autogen settings don't seem to affect my frame rates much but they do cause stutters and OOMs if set too high.

Hope this helps.

 

[Daube]

About the FPS impact with REX clouds: what texture resolution did you guys choose ?
I don't have REX and I use only freeware clouds, the HDE pack from Pablo Diaz. I tried many texture packs for clouds, both in FS9 and in FSX.
From my experience, the FPS impact of the clouds come from two distinct elements:
- the cloud texture resolution: clouds at 4096 are nice, but way to crisp. And heavy on the FPS. I gave a try to 512 textures, and never went back. The clouds are crisp 'enough' like that.
- the transparency antialiasing: unfortunately, unlike DX9, DX10 and DX11 give us no choice, we MUST activate that stupid Transparency AA. This AA is a real FPS killer, bringing your video card to its knees each time there are a few clouds or a bit of "smoke" effect on the screen. That setting must be kept as low as possible.

In DX9, you could get rid of the transparency AA and still get a fantastic picture quality with no shimmering at all.
In DX10 and DX11, no luck. If you deactivate the transparency AA, the picture quality will be absolutely terrible :/

 

[Chris Sykes]

Mine were at 515, i was getting hmmered when ever i used REX for weather. Even though Prepar3d used the same textures, im also now running REX4 and can hit the same issue. For some reason its more promenent when more clouds are about. Running Prepar3d at High Priority seems to help too for some reason...

 

[dvj]

About the FPS impact with REX clouds: what texture resolution did you guys choose ?
I don't have REX and I use only freeware clouds, the HDE pack from Pablo Diaz. I tried many texture packs for clouds, both in FS9 and in FSX.
From my experience, the FPS impact of the clouds come from two distinct elements:
- the cloud texture resolution: clouds at 4096 are nice, but way to crisp. And heavy on the FPS. I gave a try to 512 textures, and never went back. The clouds are crisp 'enough' like that.
- the transparency antialiasing: unfortunately, unlike DX9, DX10 and DX11 give us no choice, we MUST activate that stupid Transparency AA. This AA is a real FPS killer, bringing your video card to its knees each time there are a few clouds or a bit of "smoke" effect on the screen. That setting must be kept as low as possible.

In DX9, you could get rid of the transparency AA and still get a fantastic picture quality with no shimmering at all.
In DX10 and DX11, no luck. If you deactivate the transparency AA, the picture quality will be absolutely terrible :/

1024 in P3C, 1024 FSX Dx10. I'll try the 512. I do like 1024 in FSX. They look "softer" vs. the sharp edged HD rendered clouds at 2048.

 

[dvj]

As I continue to tweak P3D, I continue to notice that Rex clouds will often be over-saturated in the white. This is HDR, but it's even worse in non HDR. Is this a REX problem, or a graphics setting? I've seen it in other people's screen shots. These clouds are also rendered in 512 resolution. ORBX FTX southern Alaska scenery.

 

[Daube]

I don't know the origin of that "problem", but what I see in your screenshot, especially in the red circle, is pretty close to what I see when I'm in a plane in real life.

 

[dvj]

REX clouds are the problem. Turn'em off and the FPS jumps 100%. Or go to low definition clouds setting, which does not look so good.

d

 

[Chris Sykes]

Are you running REX for weather? Ive noticed a huge difference when running REX for weather. I have a support ticket open at their forums...

 

[falcon409]

Are you running REX for weather? Ive noticed a huge difference when running REX for weather. I have a support ticket open at their forums...

I think it's already been mentioned in here several times (more than several actually) that running REX Weather engine is a known problem. I don't believe LM is going to be interested in doing anything about it either. This will fall to the developers of the weather engines themselves to correct or not as they see fit. There are other weather programs that don't have the same problem but they're also too expensive for my limited income, so I just use the themes.

 

[AussieMan]

I am still using AS2012 and I have not noticed any hit on my FPS.

 

[Chris Sykes]

From the Prepar3d forums http://www.prepar3d.com/forum-5/?mingleforumaction=viewtopic&t=6607 It looks like the number of cloud layers is causing the hit on FPS. When i had the issues with REX i noticed that it was a very cloudy day with a few layers of clouds, i didnt check how many because the sim was too unuseable. Ive got to give some screen shots of my REXe settings to REX for my issue on their forums so ill post here if they agree that this is the cause.

 

[modelr]

Applied Hotfix 2.2, and now BOTH my P3D installs EMPTY!!!

WHAT happened????

I just read about the 2.2 hotfix on the FSUIPC upgrade site, so I downloaded & installed it 2 days ago, 5/2/2014. All the files and folders were in place in both sim versions before the installation. In fact, I had just flown in 1.4 to check something out that morning. Everything worked fine. Did not fly anymore since, as was not home. I turned on computer this am, and read about the MilVis updates to the Cessna310 and T-38 to make compatible to P3Dv2. Since I had just done the earlier update on the Cessna 310, (which is why I tested P3Dv1.4) and was checking something in those folders in FSX, then comparing to P3D, when I went to my P3D folders, which are on my C drive. (FSX on different add-on drive,) all that was in the main folders (both) was the folders. NO FILES!!! NONE! All my other folders on the disk are ok, programs seem to work ok. ONLY P3D! Any ideas??? I don't want to have to go through all the BS I did last time P3D wouldn't install, and have to manually clean the registry of any and ALL P3D files, well over a thousand!!

 

[Dangerous Beans]

I dont know what could have screwed up your P3D, have you uninstalled a plane or some scenery recently ? if so maybe that screwed it up.

As for doing a reinstall I found its best not to uninstall P3D through Control Panel/Programs and Features.
Instead run the P3D installer and as its already installed it will give you the option to uninstall, that seems to clean everything out properly.

 

[modelr]

I dont know what could have screwed up your P3D, have you uninstalled a plane or some scenery recently ? if so maybe that screwed it up.

As for doing a reinstall I found its best not to uninstall P3D through Control Panel/Programs and Features.
Instead run the P3D installer and as its already installed it will give you the option to uninstall, that seems to clean everything out properly.

Beans, as to the reinstall, that's the way I tried to do it for the v1.4 update, but the installer couldn't find v1.3. Even after pointing it to it. Then, it wouldn't install, because it said I still had v1.3 installed!!?? I had to manually remove EVERY item in the registry, which included individual GUI's for EVERY SINGLE individual item in the scenery library. Took me almost a week. I would retry installing every so often, and would still get the same error. It would not install until the very last item was removed. I do not know which item was the magic one, because I would start at different places in the thread each evening. But, after the last item was removed, and I did one more search, finding no more, then I tried the install routine again, and it installed! No errors, no questions asked!

Now, as to my current problem. Before the latest update, everything was there, and working. After doing some more investigating, it turns out I did not lose as much as I thought. What I lost is almost all my add-on aircraft, including AI. This is from BOTH V1.4 and V2.2. A lot of scenery is also missing. ALL the folders are still there, for everything, but the contents are gone. Some of the add-ons are still there, but others by the same authors are missing. Not even all of the default stuff is still there, but most of it is. However, the sim runs fine. I did a short flight in V2.2 after my original post, in the Alabeo Cessna 195, Ant's T-28A, and SimSkunkWorks F-84 Demo. However, I had none of the other aircraft from those editors. Even though I own all of them. And, I had no VC in Ant's T-28. The thing is, with each of the missing aircraft, ALL of the stuff in their support folders in the main P3D folder is gone also. Manuals, paintkits, everything. Flightplans, you name it. Even their instruments are missing from the gauges folder. It's as if Lockheed Martin put in some kind of Trojan horse that eliminated anything that didn't have a license to be installed to this sim is eliminated. As an example, Just Flights P-38 is there, but none of their other aircraft. Since there is no "last edited" date on any folder, except the last time I installed something, like a new texture or whatever, I can't tell when this happened. All I know for sure is that a couple weeks ago, everything was fine.

Since all of the folders are still there, I am going to try to reinstall most of them. As for the possibility of something I removed/uninstalled causing it, I haven't uninstalled anything in months. So...

Hopefully, someone will read this who might have an idea. Till then...

 

[Chris Sykes]

I did a reinstall from 2.2 patched to 2.2 new download as i needed to move drives for the install, went well and Prepar3d now running better and i havent got the lights issue now.

 

[Phantom88]

Hello,I just installed P3D V2.2 and am wondering if The "High Memory" tweak or any of the FSX tweaks still needed? Any suggestions would be great,Thank You.