Trying to kill my new PC...

[New Light]

This is a Carenado Cessna 172 N Skyhawk "flying" east towards the Picayune VOR. You're looking over L31 St Tammany Regional (North of New Orleans, LA USA) with Lake Pontchartrain to the south. All P3D v4.1 settings are set to full blast with default ground, water, and sky textures featured.

[New Light]

This is the Carenado Cessna 172 N Skyhawk again. This is right over the Slidell, LA (KASD) DME between the Hammond (KHDC) VOR and the Picayune (KMJD) VORs looking down runway 36 with Lake Pontchartrain on the horizon.

I realized on the way back to Hammond that my VOR 2 was set to the Baton Rouge VOR freq - which was a normal run for me in FS9 and FSX, but the Hammond VOR works in P3D v4.1 And, I'm finally starting to get a grasp on how the ADF works! Usually, I just follow I-10 along the coast...

[New Light]

This is the MilViz DeHavilland DHC 2 Beaver on downwind runway 36 Hammond; Northshore Regional (KHDC).

Since my PC survived two 1 hour "flights" with only 3-4, 1/8 - 1/4 second freezes each, with settings on full blast, I proceeded with the next phase with confidence.

In this part of the PC torture test, I kept all default P3D v4.1 settings at full blast, and added REX Sky Force 3D with everything set to the highest quality and settings. I used real time weather. It happened to be cool (50's) and clear this particular afternoon and evening so I don't know how it will do with 3D clouds - yet. In, what ended up being a 3 hour "flight", the PC had about fifteen 1/8 - 1/4 second freezes and one 1-1/2 second freeze around the hour 2. I did notice they would happen on 3/4 - 1/2 mile final though. I also noticed some shimmering in the trees, much like the FS9 days when you had the mip-map set too high, so I'll tinker with the shadows at some point. The shimmering wasn't too bad, but it was definitely noticeable. No FSX/DX10 tearing, black or white, squares or triangles either - AND... NO. OOM!!!!!!

[Jetranger]

Now if ya wanna properly KILL your new PC,,,, this is the answer !

Guaranteed to KILL that Sucker !

Compliments of,,,, Inspector Callahan !!! and you should know who he is ??

SEE VIDEO : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_Y-MQm9DrM

[New Light]

On short final, runway 36, Hammond; Northshore Regional (KHDC) in the MilViz DeHavilland DHC 2 Beaver.

This had the same settings listed above only towards the end of the "flight". I love the way the default airport lighting, combined with Beaver's landing light and the REX starry sky look!

Unfortunately, the Beaver's cockpit is rather dark and doesn't have gauge (back)lighting, and four touch and goes later, I lost concentration right above the runway. I must have pulled back on the yoke a bit too much and... *I* crashed the aircraft Apparently I ballooned on the flair, stalled and the plane fell straight down on the centerline.

So, the PC did well. The simulator did well. The plane "flew" well. The "pilot" was, well... the weak link... So, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Hope you enjoy the pictures and the story behind it!

Dave

[New Light]

Now if ya wanna properly KILL your new PC,,,, this is the answer !

Guaranteed to KILL that Sucker !

In the early days of FSX, I lived in a 3rd floor apartment. After spending waaayy too much money on a few PC's that didn't work, the first two got sent overboard - THEN I took 'em to a private range and unloaded a bunch of .223 and 7.62 on them. Then I realized that was getting expensive too, so I started returning them. Years later, people would tell me they that they found some of one of my old computers. The Geeks at Best Buy hate me to this day too! Oh, the good ole days, may they never return!

[jankees]

isn't it wonderful to run everything at full blast!
Just got a new rig too, just great

[New Light]

Congrats Jankees!

Yes! It's great to finally have good equipment!

[New Light]

Touch & goes during dreary conditions at Hammond; Northshore Regional (KHDC) in the Carenado Cessna 152, REX SF3D, with default P3D v4.1

[Daube]

I know you're trying to make the most "expensive" choices for the settings to try to kill your PC, but these dynamic trees are really ugly and make your forest look too sparse.
I'd recommend you to untick that option and enjoy some very dense vegetation instead. You can always buy some very high resolution vegetation textures to compensate, if you want

Also, if you really want to "push" the details, don't forget one of the main advantages of P3Dv4.1: the autogen draw distance.
The setting is probably already set to max in your sim, but the main thing here is to increase the value of the TEXTURE_SIZE_EXP in the prepar3D.cfg to push the autogen (and crisp ground textures) further on the horizon.
Default value is 8. A video card with 4Gb onboard memory can handle the value "9", but you'll need at least 6 Gb to handle the value "10".
My GTX970 can only handle 9.

[New Light]

I know you're trying to make the most "expensive" choices for the settings to try to kill your PC, but these dynamic trees are really ugly and make your forest look too sparse.
I'd recommend you to untick that option and enjoy some very dense vegetation instead. You can always buy some very high resolution vegetation textures to compensate, if you want

Also, if you really want to "push" the details, don't forget one of the main advantages of P3Dv4.1: the autogen draw distance.
The setting is probably already set to max in your sim, but the main thing here is to increase the value of the TEXTURE_SIZE_EXP in the prepar3D.cfg to push the autogen (and crisp ground textures) further on the horizon.
Default value is 8. A video card with 4Gb onboard memory can handle the value "9", but you'll need at least 6 Gb to handle the value "10".
My GTX970 can only handle 9.

Thank you for the advice! I never really liked the shimmering trees either, but never knew how to fix it since I started with FS9. I will definitely try the different settings you suggest.

Is there a particular vegetation texture set that you can recommend?

I am debating whether to add GE P3D and UTX USA, Canada & TAC, or drop the money for Orbx Global, Vector and OLC NA. Would these items fix this?

I have the 1080Ti 11G now, I also have P3D running on a single core @ 4.7 GHz, so hopefully that'll be enough. If not, I have 6 cores to hyperthread on @ 3.7 GHz (standard clocking, boostable to 5.0 stable - supposedly)

I haven't messed with ANY of the cfg's or default files yet. I'm brand new to Windows 10 and P3D, and I'm just happy to be "flying" without ANY technical difficulties

Thank you for any further suggestions or advice!

Dave

[Daube]

The shimmering is linked to your video card settings, not to the textures.
Your antialiasing and texture filtering settings are the key, here.

For the tress textures, it's a matter of taste.
I have bought the Terra Flora addon, which includes some beautiful, high definition tree textures for all seasons, but I don't use it anymore, because the colors are too flashy for my taste. They don't blend well with sceneries, excepted over OrbX regions.

Instead, I'm now using a freeware textures set made by Aime Leclerq especially for Prepar3D. The special thing is that the vegetation textures are semi-transparent in the distance. Thanks to this technique, the trees blend much better with the color of the forest texture on the ground, giving a much better rendering of the landscape, especially over photoreal sceneries.
You can download the version 1.1 of these textures from this link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzTKE8 ... sp=sharing
I got that link from a french forum on this topic (you should be able to use Google Translation to read it in english): http://www.pilote-virtuel.com/viewtopic.php?id=81192
Flying over the forests will then look like this:

[New Light]

Thanks for the info! Excellent picture! I realized last night that a video would probably express my new found joy of having a good simulator and good equipment better than a screenshot. The pine trees in my picture do look like a bunch of arrowheads sticking out of the ground

I did review some videos of Terra Florra and Orbx Trees. They both seem like nice texture sets. I think Terra Florra has too much yellow, but I liked the winter textures over the Orbx winter textures. The Orbx seemed to use a darker green (which I preferred) and orange with some red and brown. I will download Aime Leclerc's textures before I buy anything though.

I tried fiddling with the AA and mip-map settings in FS9 & FSX and never had good results even though I kept reading it was an AA issue through the years. It seemed my choices were shimmering trees or blaaahh... I see that there are more AA options in P3D, so I'll work on that next. Hopefully my next pictures will be better!

Thanks again,

David

[New Light]

ALRIGHT!!! I made these changes to my settings and cfg...

[SCENERY]
AUTOGEN_DRAW_DISTANCE=35000.000000
AUTOGEN_TREE_DRAW_DISTANCE_PERCENT=1.000000
AUTOGEN_TREE_MIN_DISTANCE_TO_LOD=3500.000000
TEXTURE_SIZE_EXP=15

[TERRAIN]
LOD_RADIUS=7.500000



It yielded an EXCELLENT VFR "flight" from Hammond, LA (KHDC), around Abita Springs, LA, St. Tammany Reg'l (L31), then along the northshore of Lake Pontchartrain, and back to KHDC. I used the default P3D v4.1 Piper J 3 Cub, default sky, standard weather with a winter texture set by "Amie LeClerq".

"Flying" out of Hammond; Northshore Regional (KHDC), runway 18, east departure



Here's a shot at about the same spot of my original picture, "flying" just north of L31 overlooking Lake Pontchartrain and New Orleans in the background.



On final, runway 18, Hammond




A HUGE THANK YOU to Daube for the advice and help! I will try out Terra Florra and Orbx Trees soon. I will also continue to tinker with my settings a bit more since my picture doesn't look quite as good as yours does -yet. The sim "flies" perfectly with the proper AA settings you suggested!

[Daube]

You forgot to disable the 3D trees :/
Also, You can remove the tweaks for the autogen draw distance, because you simply need to push the slider to the max in the game settings.
You should however keep the TEXTURE_SIZE_EXP tweak. But I don't think the value 15 can work... You should try with 10 at first, and see how it goes. That thing is kind of exponential, and I believe some values might be ignored if too high...