Prepar3d

[DaveG]

Yep, I got the academic version. Their license does say home use, but they also say it can't be used for entertainment purposes. I guess it's ok to use as long as you don't enjoy it

[Rick Piper]

Hi Ben

Ok gone with academic for now

Regards
Rick

[Adrian Petford]

Reposted from the Ambassador thread for those who may not have seen it:

I've been flying PREPAR3D for a couple of months now and would definitely recommend anyone to give it a try. On my system it's a huge improvement over FSX even at version 1.3.

Framerates are higher (a solid 40-60 as opposed to 30-35 for me in FSX) and, most importantly P3D is much smoother regardless of framerate. The stutters are gone and it performs well even if the actual framerate is low. There are no black graphical spikes over dense vegetation even with settings maxed. Autogen textures have been redone and are much improved. In fact the texture maximum size can now be set to 4096x4096, so no having to repeatedly reset that in the config file. Remember that amazing water you thought looked lovely in FSX but only tried once because it reduced your machine to a crawl? Well, it's the default in P3D and runs fast and smooth. The new P3D 1.3 adds two additional LOD levels as well (up to 6.5) and these result in a great visual improvement without much hit on performance. The interface in P3D is much nicer and more professional looking. When flying Aerosoft's Bronco (the only official P3D addon I have so far), I got 50+ FPS on this very complex model after using their supplied startup flight.

There aren't many downsides as I see it. As with FSX, you'll have to spend some time tweaking P3D for your set up as out of the box it didn't impress. I found I got a massive improvement in performance by disabling bathymetry. P3D always loads straight into a flight which can be very annoying (apparently a full GUI is coming) although I think this can be changed to whatever you prefer. Some of the default aircraft from FSX were not licenced to Lockheed Martin and so are missing by default, although I believe everything can be ported in. The current upgrade procedure involves a total uninstall and reinstall which could cause major problems if you have a lot of addons installed. The download is about 9Gb across three files so getting it will use a lot of your quota if you are capped.

I took the month's free trial (with Computer Pilot) and then a monthly developer subscription, as I was waiting for v2.0 before buying outright. On the strength of P3D even as it stands now, I would have happily paid the $500 US for it so at $49 US the new academic licence is an absolute steal. I'm about to move over to it myself. At present I am not flying P3D with any addons installed as I am waiting for official support but can well see myself based exclusively on this platform in a year or so. It really is very exciting for the future.

Test rig:

Intel Core i7 920 D0 Stepping (SLBEJ) 2.66GHz (overclocked to 4.00 GHz) 64-bit CPU
Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 Intel X58 PCI-Express DDR3 Motherboard
Corsair XMS3 6Gb (3x2Gb) PC3-12800C9 DDR3 RAM
Enermax Galaxy DXX 1000W PSU
MSI GeForce N580GTX OC Twin FrozR II 1536MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card
Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
Lockheed Martin PREPAR3D 1.2/1.3

Hope that helps,

Ade

[DaveB]

That's a pretty beefy setup you have there Ade

Nice to see the 'spikes' have gone from dense vegitation.. one thing that annoys the cr@p out of me when it happens

Thanks for the input
ATB
DaveB

[TSR2]

Does anyone know how to point prepar3d at the FSX GenX scenery libraries (or am I being stupid)

It seems that REX works with LMP too, but dont think you can have it installed for both FSX and LMP on the same system

[DaveG]

Hi Ben,

I just added the Gen X libraries in the same way as FSX

I'm having a few issues with setting the weather. The presets work OK, but the custom settings don't work unless I go into the advanced settings.

Also some AI doesn't want to show regardless of settings. Looking on the P3d forums, it seems to be GA AI doesn't work but airliner type stuff does I tried Active Sky & FS Open Clouds with it. Both worked, but I'm not convinced of the accuracy of the weather depiction compared to FSX.

Anyone notice the P38 (Just Flights) included is a FS9 portover?

[TSR2]

Hi DG,

I'll give that a go. I get some GA, in particular a smattering of "ACME Twin Turboprop" which I haven't managed to get close enough to see what they are. The ships work a treat though, found Fearless and Intrepid tonight in the Irish Sea

Haven't looked at the default stuff yet, although I must try that submersible!

[DaveG]

The AI I was trying was the traffic files I'd brought over from FSX, so maybe there's an issue there (AI aircraft were ported over too )

[TSR2]

I haven't ported my AI aircraft jet, just the ships, so I'll try when I get back home on Friday night. I found it very chuggy when I added the VFR from genx. The gen x is on a spinning disk at the moment which is slower than the SSD's, and its also V2 rather than V3, but not sure if that makes a difference. It also probably doesn't help that I was doing 400 kts at 1000ft in the hunter

[robcarrich]

I have discovered that,using AI Flight planner, the AI flight plans need to be IFR otherwise they dont show, but by doing that the aircraft will not touch down when doing circuits as they did in FSX.

Rob