Prepar 3d V4 is announced

[antonvs]

I have put off swapping from FSX:SE to P3D for two years, I think the time is near. I will have to start thinking of the process involved as I will have to remove my existing install to carry out the swap due to space limitations on my SSD drives.

 

I'm guessing some full backups will be a good start.

 

Any advice from others will be very appreciated and will probably help many others as well.

[CZZ]

antonvs:

 

About a month ago I purchased a new more powerful computer.

I decided to go with P3D rather than FSX, and to use V3.4 of P3D rather than wait for the 64 bit version.

v3.4 is excellent with my many Orbx products.

 

I prefer to wait and see how well the 64 bit program runs with 32 bit addons.

 

Also, note that you have 60 days for a refund.

 

Take care

 

[Daynas]

This is really a great news. LM has worked well with the other developers to make sure their software is ready not too soon after the release on the 30th. What's amazing is that all the great developers (based on what I see in other blogs) will be compatible soon after the release. This includes FlyTampa, FlightBeam, PMDG, FSDreamteam. It seems that most will be providing an update free of charge for existing customers (including PMDG which is quite surprising). This also seems to indicate that LM is taking their flight sim very seriously in that they have spent time and resources to work with the other developers to properly coordinate this release.

The only drawback now that I can think of is that FSUIPC won't be compatible so that this may cause some trouble with opencockpits hardware (which I have a whole cockpit worth of) but I do see that there is already a SPAD.Next update for P3D V4 (which helps with Saitek hardware) but waiting to see what happens with OC4BA which is the payware addon to better configure opencockpits hardware.

To those who mention that this isn't a big deal, I have to disagree. For those of us who have spent the last 10-20 years obsessed with flightsim know that the main drawback to the hobby were the inability to properly make use of the computer hardware that we invested in with the hopes of "making it run faster". Developers have always been limited to the 32 bit limitations and gamers have had to limit the detail of the add-ons. This will all change. 

[Nick Cooper]

10 minutes ago, Daynas said:

To those who mention that this isn't a big deal, I have to disagree. For those of us who have spent the last 10-20 years obsessed with flightsim know that the main drawback to the hobby were the inability to properly make use of the computer hardware that we invested in with the hopes of "making it run faster". Developers have always been limited to the 32 bit limitations and gamers have had to limit the detail of the add-ons. This will all change. 

 

64 bit makes available an almost unlimited amount of VAS,

 

Quote

 

The theoretical memory limits in 32 and 64 bit machines are as follows:

• 32 bit = 4, 294, 967, 295 bytes (4 Gigabytes)

• 64 bit = 18, 446, 744, 073, 709, 551, 616 (16 Exabytes)

 

•  

subject to the maximum amount of RAM that you can install to your PC and which your operating system can address.

However, this does not mean that performance will necessarily increase, only that there will be no more OOM errors, until of course

the RAM on the PC is full.

 

[Stewart Hobson]

Don't be misled, folks.  No PC in our lifetimes will ever be able to address 16 Exabytes of RAM, so it seems OOM errors will not entirely be a thing of the past, only much less likely.  Personally, I won't be switching over to 64-bit P3D until I'm assured my favorite aircraft, of which there are several, can be successfully ported over.  In the meantime, I very seldom suffer from OOM errors and I'm satisfied with that.