Visual System

Performance Issues
For the Microsoft Flight Simulators FS9, FSX, P3D the processor performance seems to be much more relevant than to have the latest fashion of graphics adapter. This has been proved by a lot of serious benchmarks. However, as soon as complex clouds structures or high end sceneries come into play, a powerful graphic adapter is required. An interesting comparison can be found on Kosta's Flight Simulation World. The results for the Titan, as demonstrated in Kosta's comparison are impressive. However, at this time I would not spend US$ 1.000,- for that super high performance graphic adapter with it's 2,688 NVIDIA CUDA® cores and 4.5 teraflops of gaming horsepower. Instead I will wait for P3D Version 2.0, which hopefully will make use of latest graphic libraries and DX11. Thus, graphic releated load will be moved from the CPU to the GPU and specially for games adapted algorithms can then be utilized.

Configuration
Hardware
- Core i7-2600K 3.4GHz PC, overclocked 4.3GHz
- Zotac Geforce® GTX670 AMP edition

The Zotac Geforce® GTX670 AMP is a heavely overclocked edition of the GTX670, reaching and even exceeds the performance of the GTX680 in some aspects. In combination with the overclocked CPU the available graphic performance is absolutely sufficient. Even with complex sceneries the frame rate is typically between 24 - 30 fps.

ZOTAC Geforce® GTX670 AMP Edition

NVIDIA® Inspector
The following screenshots are demonstrating the setup of the nvidia graphic features.




Click the icons to see the nvidia configuration full size.

Prepar3D®
The following screenshots show the General, Scenery, Weather, and Traffic setup.


The P3D target frame rate is set to 'unlimited'. Trials to limit the frame rate by P3D or external limiter to 30 fps did not give good results.The frame rate limitation of the NVIDEA® Inspector works much more better, without resulting in 'Stutters'.






Click the icons to see the P3D configuration full size.

Prepar3D.cfg
Maximum performance of the system can only be achieved with an optimal balancing of all relavant parameters. Some iterations may be needed to get the best performance out of your hardware- and software setup. Some parameters even affect each other or have a certain correlation.
If you start from scratch I would recommend you to do an online check of your Prepar3D.cfg at the following website: http://www.venetubo.com/fsx.html. The result is a good starting point for further optimization. Prior playing with the different parameters I would recommend to get familiar with the meaning of the cfg parameters. A good sorce for information is again Kosta's Flight Simulation World. Another good source: AVSIM.com
 

Last Change: June 2, 2013