AMD Setup in P3D v4 Information Vacuum

I have spent some amount of time looking on line for the "best" AMD graphics card settings for P3D v4. There is a dearth of information (at least I haven't found much) and I would sure like to get some feedback from others that operate AMD products.

To fill the information gap, I have been experimenting with my system to maximize the performance. Because my system is not one that will simply bend P3D v4 to its will with massive "computing power" I have attempted to get reasonable screen detail along with reasonable FPS performance.
For background my system is a Ryzen 7 1700 ("oc'd" to 3.65 GHz on “air” only), a low cost ASrock B350 Pro 4 motherboard, and a RX 580 (8GB) graphics card. (In terms of cost vs. what’s available today, I would call it mid-level.) My system is attached to a very inexpensive 4K 50’ class television.

I believe the biggest gains to system performance come from overclocking, but since there is plenty of information on the internet about that process I will not address it here.

The next recommendation is to use Affinity Mask in your P3D configuration file. The best number for my system is 65535. (I know the general statement from LM is that P3D v4 uses all cores, but I have seen better performance on my processor using AM.) There is a bunch of information available on the internet relating to Affinity Mask. (Just remember for AMD chips, it is not "Hyperthreading", it is CMT - Clustered Multi-Threading.)

I've found that to get better performance you have to use both the “Options - Display” page in P3D v4 and the “Radeon Settings” in your AMD graphics software for setting up. For clarity, I will address only the “Options – Display” (and the “Tesselation” option on the “World” page) page in P3D v4 as the other pages are addressed elsewhere more than adequately. In addition to better performance, coordinating the two (2) pages that contain similar items may help with “freezes” and/or CTDs that may occur if the pages are not coordinated properly.

First, in game P3D v4 “Options – Display” page:
FXAA – Off; Anti-Aliasing (AA) – None; Texture Filtering – Anisotropic 4X; Texture Resolution – Ultra 4096 x 4096; Resolution – 2560 x 1440 x 32; Vsync – Off; Target Frames – 30; and all other selections zero (0) or None. (Changing Texture Resolution to 2048 x 2048 will increase FPS and if you have some FPS to spare you could consider Anisotropic 8X. If you have spare FPS you may also want to consider using it for higher settings on other pages.)
On the P3D v4 “Options – World” page I turn “Tesselation” OFF.
On other P3D v4 Options pages my settings are mid to Ultra depending on the item. There is a lot of internet information available about these settings and the impact the setting has on FPS and picture quality.

Second, Radeon Settings – “Gaming” selection the to “Global Settings” selection (or you can set up a profile for P3D v4…I just use this as my “Global Settings”):
AA Mode – Override Application Setting; AA – 8xEQ; AA Method – Super-Sampling; Morphological Filter – Off; Anisotropic Filter – Use Application Settings; Texture Filter Qual. – Standard; Surface Format Optimization – On; Wait for Vertical Refresh – Enhanced Sync; OpenGL Triple Buffer – Off; Shader Cache – AMD Optimized; Tesselation Mode – Override Application Setting; Max Tesselation Level – 32x; GPU Workload – Graphics; Chill – Off; Frame Rate Target – Disabled.

I hope this helps those of you that have been looking for help with AMD settings. This is what works for me based on my equipment, so remember to consider equipment differences. Please add suggestions which might help AMD users get better FPS / Quality or if I’m handing out incorrect information.

A place to start looking for additional information is at this link - https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/5...gs-for-p3d-v4/

Thanks for sharing your findings! I stickied this, maybe other AMD users can also share their experiences (please stay OT to keep the thread nicely condensed).


Cheers,
Mark

Mark - Thanks for making this thread a sticky! There seem to be hundreds of moving pieces when setting up P3D v4 (AMD or Intel) and the many P3D v4 add-ons. Getting all those moving pieces "tweaked" right requires a recipe book. The visuals and performance that can be gotten from P3D v4 is well worth the tweaking. Hope to see some suggestions for performance and visual improvements.

Thank you Jay for taking the time to post your findings and settings. While I am currently over on the dark side, I have always had a soft spot for AMD. I want to see them succeed.

Thanks for your support of the underdog John (lol).

I keep an eye out for good threads in other locations that might contain valuable setup information. I focused on just two (2) setup pages and only one (1) within the P3D v4 program, i.e., "Options - Graphics". There is a bunch of performance to be gained by properly addressing other settings in P3d v4. Here's a link to a thread over on Avsim that addresses some of these other issues - https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/5...-antialiasing/ .

Note in the thread one poster (with a high level graphics card) recommends setting "Autogen" to sparse. I'm going to give that one a try. There are other good suggestions in the thread.

With the release (and installation) of P3Dv4.4 I have been seeing "better" performance (FPS and scenery load time) with an adjustment in just two (2) settings that I have been focusing on. (While I'm sure I'll find more adjustments over the next couple weeks, I wanted to share these tweaks because they gave me about 5 FPS.) These tweaks could be hardware dependent, so your mileage may vary due to that.

My hardware that is germane to these tweaks are 4K "TV" used for a monitor and RX580 graphics card. In the "Options" "Display" menu, my AA is set to 2xSSAA (based on having a 4K TV) and Texture Filtering is Anisotropic 8x. (FXAA is Off and Texture Res is 4096x4096.) With these settings I'm getting great views and mid-30's FPS.

Hope you all find some value in this. Regards.

A bit off topic, but looking for some perspective.

At the moment, I've got a i5 4430 / 8Gb RAM / GTX 600 / Win 7 machine.

For a small-budget video card upgrade, would folks recommend either the 8GB AMD or the 4GB Nvidia?

https://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX69154


https://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX67906

It appears my dollar goes further on the AMD, though I’m not seeing many folks running AMDs.

Thoughts?

Thx.

While I have not used either the RX 570 has a higher Passmark GPU score (6800 vs 4700) and the extra memory would not hurt.

Thanks all.

Bought both (store agreed to accept return of other I wouldn't like).

The 4GB Nvidia trounced the 8GB AMD. On smoothness alone, even though raw FPS on the AMD was a bit higher. Nvidia card allows me to have most sliders at least half or more (all scenery is maxed, I've minimized dynamic Lighting and my radiuses of viewability).

Just one person's experience, obviously - nothing more. Was a good experiment, glad I tried it.

cheers all,

dl

I've not been on SOH for a couple months (summer in MN means boating, fishing, golfing and RW flying), so I missed the original question about AMD graphics. I don't have an Nvidia card, but it has always been the community position that Nvidia does run P3D better than AMD. My AMD cards have given me adequate performance (for less $$ invested), so I haven't changed. To get good performance the setup for AMD cards is substantially different than that used by Nvidia cards. I'm not going to debate Nvidia vs. AMD, but I recently had a issue that I will share and hope that it may solve a similar problem for someone.

My son "turned me on" to The Division 2. I was running an RX 590 graphics card and had good performance except every so often my machine would shutdown while playing the game! The was not a "blue screen" or crash to desktop, his was a shutdown. I attributed it to the graphics card over heating, so I fiddled with the fans and a couple of other settings. Nothing made a significant difference. With card prices dropping (along with "free" game kickers) I acquired an RX Vega 56. I was excited, got it installed and, bang, crash, shutdown. So what was wrong? Power! I was running an older 550 watt power supply. I upgraded to a new 750 watt power supply and that was that. It fixed the problem.

I have not run P3D on my "new rig" (2700X CPU, 16 GB memory, RX Vega 56 12 GB) yet, but I'm confident it will run very well. The moral to the story is...make sure you're giving your system enough power to work right!