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Anyone using P3D v2 yet?

Started by Chris Liu, Dec 06, 2013 17:27

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Chris Liu (1001)

Prepa3d v2 was released last week, are any of you chaps using it and if so what do you think to it?
Good news is that Majestic have announced they will support P3D at no additional cost.

For those of you that don't know, P3D is a flight simulator by Lockheed Martin, that is built on the Microsoft FSX codebase and hence many people consider it to be FSXI.

Bill Ant (1076)

Well, I am not using it myself.

But it seams to have a lot of compatibility issues right now!
Some people claim it is very smooth and the HDR/lighting effects appear good!
But still, a lot of addons don't work or are not fully working at this point!

So for me, I am going to wait it out for sometime till all these issues are fixed.
Hate to be a Guinee pig myself!

Just got a new Over clocked i7 computer with GTX 780 and FSX is smooth as butter right now!
I didn't even imagine FSX could be so amazing! WOW!

But I really believe that in a 2 year period or so, P3D V2 will be the dominate flight sim platform!

Bill
Visit my Flight Sim Blog! http://deskpilot518.blogspot.com/

Graham Woodley (1054)

Waiting for you to buy it Chris and let us know  ;D

I doubt I'll buy it - as I heard it doesn't support 64 bit and there's that licence issue to sort out - gonna pay $200 or $60?

If I switch to anything it'll be X-Plane but FSX does it for me for now with all my addons, heck, I'm still using FS9 for some things - works just fine.

Chris Liu (1001)

#3
64 bit support is not the holy grail that many make it out to be; although it would fix Out of Memory (OOM) issues, almost no existing addons would be compatible with a 64 bit version of FSX/P3D without major changes. And FSX with no addons doesn't OOM anyway!

The cause of most OOMs is poor memory management within FSX as it doesn't have any way of unloading items from memory, which means every single thing FSX loads stays in the memory, even if it no longer needs it! For example, on a flight from London to Edinburgh you will overfly Birmingham and Birmingham's airport scenery will be loaded in the memory as you pass over it and stay in the memory until you quit FSX! You can imagine if you have a lot of addon scenery how quickly the memory fills up. Playstation 3 only has 512 mb total memory but it can produce large and detailed worlds such as GTA 5's Los Santos, because the memory is well managed.

P3D supposedly has slightly improved memory management and also shifts some of the burden processing from the CPU to the graphics card by use of more modern Direct X implementation with modern shader support.

The licenses for P3D are a bit of a grey area, Lockheed Martin (LM) are using a very broad/general definition of "academic". Unfortunately, some developers (hint, starts with a P and is a 4 letter acronym) are using the licence/EULA stuff as an excuse to demand more money for the same product. Most FSX addons should work in P3D with minimal changes, the exception being airport sceneries that use a lot of FS9 legacy code.

I'm not buying P3D for now, I shall play it by ear and see how things pan out for the early adopters. I'm not use to paying for the simulator tbh, I was on the Microsoft Beta team for FSX and Flight so I got both free of charge!

Bill Ant (1076)

Quote from: Chris Liu on Dec 09, 2013 10:02
64 bit support is not the holy grail that many make it out to be; although it would fix Out of Memory (OOM) issues, almost no existing addons would be compatible with a 64 bit version of FSX/P3D without major changes. And FSX with no addons doesn't OOM anyway!

The cause of most OOMs is poor memory management within FSX as it doesn't have any way of unloading items from memory, which means every single thing FSX loads stays in the memory, even if it no longer needs it! For example, on a flight from London to Edinburgh you will overfly Birmingham and Birmingham's airport scenery will be loaded in the memory as you pass over it and stay in the memory until you quit FSX! You can imagine if you have a lot of addon scenery how quickly the memory fills up. Playstation 3 only has 512 mb total memory but it can produce large and detailed worlds such as GTA 5's Los Santos, because the memory is well managed.

P3D supposedly has slightly improved memory management and also shifts some of the burden processing from the CPU to the graphics card by use of more modern Direct X implementation with modern shader support.

The licenses for P3D are a bit of a grey area, Lockheed Martin (LM) are using a very broad/general definition of "academic". Unfortunately, some developers (hint, starts with a P and is a 4 letter acronym) are using the licence/EULA stuff as an excuse to demand more money for the same product. Most FSX addons should work in P3D with minimal changes, the exception being airport sceneries that use a lot of FS9 legacy code.

I'm not buying P3D for now, I shall play it by ear and see how things pan out for the early adopters. I'm not use to paying for the simulator tbh, I was on the Microsoft Beta team for FSX and Flight so I got both free of charge!


I would tend to agree with your assumption as to the why the unnamed developer's reasons against P3D.   It is interesting to note that almost none of the other developers had this problem.   
Visit my Flight Sim Blog! http://deskpilot518.blogspot.com/