Prepar3d V2.2 Water

[OldAirmail]

Prepar3d V2.2 has five water settings; Off, .Low, .Medium, .High, and. Ultra.

The good news for most of you is that I have an aging AMD Radeon HD 6850 video card and a four core i5 2500 CPU running @ 3.3GHz, AND EVEN ON ULTRA there were no FPS losses.

If someone with an NVidia card would confirm that, they too, have no losses then crank it up.



On a side note - None of the maxed out settings under Terrain have shown any FPS loss on my system. LM seems to be doing an incredible job on the coding.



On the Ultra settings, the waves, and the plane, have a smooth undulating movement. GREAT JOB LM.

On the Medium and High settings, it looks almost like the waves are moving right to left, as the plane just sits in one location.



The settings

Water off



Water low



Water medium



Water high



Water ultra



In the pictures, the Water ultra doesn't look all that different than the Water high setting. But in real life, on-screen, it looks MUCH better.

[Fozzer]

One thing I spotted, very useful in the Scenery Settings for P3D...

Independent, instant slider settings for....

Autogen Vegetation density.
Autogen Building Density.

Very useful for certain areas where the vegetation (trees) density needs to be reduced, eg; agricultural fields, etc, without affecting the building density.

It would be very handy in my FS2004/FSX countryside!... ...!

Paul... ...!

[G.K.]

I have a Nvidia GT640 2 gig.

I wasn't disappointed by the water settings because I wasn't expecting much......Realistic water must be incredibly difficult to achieve.

On ultra high settings landing on the water gives a nasty wake that is blocky (or buggy)....at least it does on my rig. As you say though not much of a FPS hit.

Turning up the wind strength also gives larger swell.....maybe 3 or 4 metre high if the wind is strong enough.....How come I can still take off on it in the FSX beaver Sea state of those conditions would trash a real life sea plane.

Whilst the larger waves do give extra realism the overall effect is let down by the plane's lack of up and down movement. The swell rises and falls 3 metres but the plane stays stationary, so sometimes it's hovering a meter over the water and the next moment it is swamped up to the windscreen wipers....

From the sky though the water looks better than it did in FSX.....and as you said Oldairmail, not much of a FPS hit either.

[OldAirmail]

I could get it so that there was no wake, but this is something that they'll have to work on.

[Daube]

The highest setting for the water makes the surface become in 3D. You get real waves, which is nice. However, these waves have absolutely no effect on your plane, which is not nice.
I ended up setting the water quality one crank below. Flat surface but still nice texture animation: good enough for me

[OldAirmail]

That's probably the best bet. Thanks

[papituwall]

I have a Nvidia GTX660, in general, the scenery adjustments don't change my performance, that is affected by some planes.

Concerning water I'm a little dissapointed with the special effects, there is no white "foam" in wave crests as in FSX.

Also with water detail maxed, nice wawes (no foam, no real) but the plane, as Daube reports, remains flat.

I have set in custom weather wind to max in order to test if the wind effect has been taken in consideration for the waves and it has been but looks stupid, the plane is flat and dissapears behind the wáter but the reflection is complete...



I had this from X-plane, just for information.

[papituwall]

Note: Xplane10 picture was taken with my old Nvidia GTX260

This one is FSX DirectX10, with GTX660