Back in the Bay Area again

[andy1252]

So, after a major clean up and reorg, and a bit of experimentation, I can finally fly again without the level of OOMs that had built up to a point of silliness. Still not perfect, and I still got a couple of them here, but at least I can get off the ground at KSFO now. I can live with the knowledge that I can now fly (carefully) around the bay and I could probably do more if I cut the visuals back a bit. In general though, I am now happy to take what I can get here while still in P3Dv3, I can fly in most of the world OK with everything maxed out and not OOM, and I guess I'll just have to hang on for v4 and hope that allows me to see those remaining tricky places in their full glory.

 

In the meantime, here's a few from around the bay in my new found slimmed down setup. All 4k, all sliders maxed, and this is with both Nor-Cal and Flightbeam's KSFO HD active in the scenery.cfg (but I've made sure no KSFO sightings here, so pure ORBX). I OOMed in the end approaching Oakland, but I'm still tweaking so I have hopes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Enjoy! (I did)

[Jack Sawyer]

Beautiful Andy!  Really beautiful.  So you're running 4K in settings with sliders maxed?  Amazing.  Please, for the love of yellow planes, tell me how you do it?

 

Do you use the NVIDIA Inspector?

Do you use the SCE, Scenery Config Editor?

Do you use PTA?  If so what preset?

 

I fly with this constant ProjectFly VAS meter on screen and with SCE I can unload a LOT of scenery I don't need, like if I'm flying Down Under why would I need SCA, or GEN or PNW?  So that saves VAS.

But when I increase to 4K I get low FPS.  You must have some magic formula.

 

Here's my hardware to compare with your's.

 

Jetline Hellfire GT2 PC

Win 7 Pro 64

Defender Off

Not one AV program.

CM Storm Scout II Advanced case

ASRock Fatal1ty Z97 Pro, Intel LGA 1150 mobo

i7 4790 Quad Core 4.66 GHz

Corsair Hydro H80i Liquid Cooling

8 GB Trident X DDR3 SDRAM 2133 MHz

500 GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD

500 GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD

500 GB Samsung 850 EVO SSD

1 TB Samsung 850 EVO SSD

Creative Sound Blaster Z SBX 

Integrated High Speed Network 10/100/1000

750 Watt Corsair RM Power Supply

20x DVD/CD Burner

Saitek PZ44 Yoke & throttle 

Saitek PZ35 Pro Flight Rudder Pedals

Samsung S27A550H Monitor

Buttkicker Gamer 2

[VH-KDK]

Beautiful shots from around the Bay Andy.

[BradB]

Sharp as a knife , with these fine shots Andy .

 

Cheers

 

John

[adambar]

Very nicely done Andy!

[luckyb52]

Looking super-sharp, Andy!

Cheers

Lucky

///////////

[paulb]

Great shots Andy!

[Iain Emms]

Great set of shots.

cheers

Iain

[andy1252]

Thanks folks, and it feels good to actually be enjoying the system again. I'd made things way too complicated for myself and it was all getting a bit tiresome. Looking forward to doing some flying and touring around again!

 

13 hours ago, Jack Sawyer said:

tell me how you do it?

 

Hi Jack, most of what I did is here - 

The SCE didn't do much for me in terms of VAS relief, but it does load quicker. The big thing for me was cutting down to only one or two active aircraft, plus I need to figure out about camera views and their effect on VAS. Don't know if the various camera add-ons would mitigate this or not - I might get one and experiment.

 

Only other tweaks are "Texture_bandwidth_Mult=100" in Prepar3D.cfg (default is 30), seems to reduce blurry distance, and some post processing sharpening in PTA. I'd have to try and dig back and see what I had set up there - I haven't touched it for ages and it's quite an old version. Once I'd got an effect I liked I just sort of forgot about it and haven't upgraded it for ages. Never even heard of NVIDIA inspector, so even if it's on my system I am not aware of using it. My basic PC setup is very similar to yours, only main difference is I have 16mb memory.

 

I still get really close to the mark with my VAS usage around the bay. Haven't been to Seattle or Melbourne yet so that'll be interesting. And I just did another flight around the bay where I got down to just 150mb VAS free. Stopped and saved the flight. Quit P3D, restarted and reloaded that flight and found myself with 1300mb free! So that's another thing to consider. Plus of course, I've not tried anything like a big complicated 747 or similar anywhere near the bay. But then I don't tend to use those anyway - I'm way more interested in what's outside the window than what's going on in the cockpit.

[Jack Sawyer]

14 minutes ago, andy1252 said:

Hi Jack, most of what I did is here - 

The SCE didn't do much for me in terms of VAS relief, but it does load quicker. The big thing for me was cutting down to only one or two active aircraft, plus I need to figure out about camera views and their effect on VAS. Don't know if the various camera add-ons would mitigate this or not - I might get one and experiment.

 

Only other tweaks are "Texture_bandwidth_Mult=100" in Prepar3D.cfg (default is 30), seems to reduce blurry distance, and some post processing sharpening in PTA. I'd have to try and dig back and see what I had set up there - I haven't touched it for ages and it's quite an old version. Once I'd got an effect I liked I just sort of forgot about it and haven't upgraded it for ages. Never even heard of NVIDIA inspector, so even if it's on my system I am not aware of using it. My basic PC setup is very similar to yours, only main difference is I have 16mb memory.

 

I still get really close to the mark with my VAS usage around the bay. Haven't been to Seattle or Melbourne yet so that'll be interesting. And I just did another flight around the bay where I got down to just 150mb VAS free. Stopped and saved the flight. Quit P3D, restarted and reloaded that flight and found myself with 1300mb free! So that's another thing to consider. Plus of course, I've not tried anything like a big complicated 747 or similar anywhere near the bay. But then I don't tend to use those anyway - I'm way more interested in what's outside the window than what's going on in the cockpit.

Hi Andy, this is all very interesting in that I see a huge VAS relief when I don't load airports or regions I'll be nowhere near.  And what do you mean when you say cutting down to one or two aircraft?  Do you mean only one or two in your virtual hangar or one or two per flight?

As for NVIDI Inspector, I think you have to download it, it's free, it changes certain settings on your card like V-Sync, Trilinear, anti-ailising and that sort of thing. 

It's amazing that you can save a flight and re-load it and have that much VAS left.

Anyway, 64 bit will soon be here after what I read on a site, seems like it may rerelease sooner than I expected, I hope.

 

Thanks Andy!

[andy1252]

48 minutes ago, Jack Sawyer said:

 And what do you mean when you say cutting down to one or two aircraft?  Do you mean only one or two in your virtual hangar or one or two per flight?

HI Jack, it's not particularly complicated, but it's all in that other post so I won't repeat it here. Short version is that I have a 'hangar' folder not seen by the sim, and move only the aircraft I want to use to the actual simobjects folder when I start a flight. So now I might have a couple of dozen entries in the 'select vehicle' menu rather than the nearly 3000 I had before. But the scenery thing didn't make any real difference to me.

[Jack Sawyer]

7 minutes ago, andy1252 said:

HI Jack, it's not particularly complicated, but it's all in that other post so I won't repeat it here. Short version is that I have a 'hangar' folder not seen by the sim, and move only the aircraft I want to use to the actual simobjects folder when I start a flight. So now I might have a couple of dozen entries in the 'select vehicle' menu rather than the nearly 3000 I had before. But the scenery thing didn't make any real difference to me.

I just read that post wand was astonished to see you had 2500+ planes!  Gosh, that's a lot!  

But when you move a plane from one folder to another what about the sounds and effects?  Do they always stay in the Sounds And Effects folders?

I really enjoyed reading that other post and posted back to it so I can keep up with any posts.

 

[andy1252]

1 hour ago, Jack Sawyer said:

what about the sounds and effects?

I don't touch those folders. I don't believe they take up much memory anyway and if there's no aircraft loaded to request them, they won't be loaded on their own (at least that's my guess). As to the large number of planes, that includes all the variations of each plane, but each variation seems to take up a bit more space. So for example, I've got a 787 package that comes with over 50 different liveries. I used to go through and modify the aircraft.cfg to remove paints/variations I wasn't going to use, but I stopped doing that as it was too much effort. This way, if I load something with a silly amount of skins it's less of a pain. Plus, I will still amend the aircraft.cfg to remove stuff I'm definitely never going to use. I probably have about 200-300 individual actual aircraft, but each one has various flavours.

 

As to 64bit v4, I'll no doubt grab a copy when it comes out, but I'm more than happy with v3 for most of my simming. And as we've said here before, it's by no means certain how much stuff will be portable over to v4, so I can see v3 staying in use very satisfactorily for a lot of my scenery and aircraft. I know the ORBX stuff will slowly migrate over but I've got a lot of other stuff as well, and that might well not be transportable.

[Jack Sawyer]

12 minutes ago, andy1252 said:

I don't touch those folders. I don't believe they take up much memory anyway and if there's no aircraft loaded to request them, they won't be loaded on their own (at least that's my guess). As to the large number of planes, that includes all the variations of each plane, but each variation seems to take up a bit more space. So for example, I've got a 787 package that comes with over 50 different liveries. I used to go through and modify the aircraft.cfg to remove paints/variations I wasn't going to use, but I stopped doing that as it was too much effort. This way, if I load something with a silly amount of skins it's less of a pain. Plus, I will still amend the aircraft.cfg to remove stuff I'm definitely never going to use. I probably have about 200-300 individual actual aircraft, but each one has various flavours.

 

As to 64bit v4, I'll no doubt grab a copy when it comes out, but I'm more than happy with v3 for most of my simming. And as we've said here before, it's by no means certain how much stuff will be portable over to v4, so I can see v3 staying in use very satisfactorily for a lot of my scenery and aircraft. I know the ORBX stuff will slowly migrate over but I've got a lot of other stuff as well, and that might well not be transportable.

I see.  Seems like a lot of work that's over my pay grade. 

 

As for 64 bit, I'm going to get it and load it up with all my Orbx stuff and if I have to fly a lousy piece of default junk or the PMGD 747 I will because I absolutely despise having to deal with VAS or OOM.  I'm so sick of it I was this close to just quitting simming.  I mean 100% of the time when I fly in the sim I can't enjoy it because I never know when something Is going to crash.  An OOM, low VAS, an add-on, all of it.  It's gotten to the point where I have to sit on the edge of my seat just waiting for something to mess up.

 

As I said a million times before, I've contacted every last developer out there, scenery and aircraft.  And the ONLY ones who have made public commitments to it are PMDG with their new 747 and Orbx.  And I'll bet a million bucks most of them have some kind of Alpha release as this is probably in beta from what I've been reading.  So if they refuse to commit or support it they lose my coin.

 

Orbx on the other hand has made that commitment and for that they get all my $, this is why I like Orbx.  I think Mr. JV is thinking way ahead unlike a lot of the other companies I've "spoke" to.

 

Rant off....