P3Dv5.3 now available

[YoYo]

New patch, changelog is here:
https://www.prepar3d.com/news/announ...021/12/120925/

[Dangerous Beans]

Sounds good but I think I'll wait for the inevitable hotfix

[wombat666]

Worked straight out of the can,

[Spad54]

Worked straight out of the can,

Is it worth the effort to install? I've got it downloaded

[Naismith]

Was rather hoping for a P3Dv6

[DaveQ]

Is it worth the effort to install? I've got it downloaded

At first glance.

No.

I was rather hoping the blue channel might work in PBR. Doesn't look as if it does.

DaveQ

[BendyFlyer]

Worked fine for me as well! Does indeed seem to have got a mixed reception - which I find perplexing.

Performance is better, stability is fine, EA and True Sky are very much improved. Affinity masking and multicore threading is now properly supported. There are a lot of little almost unnoticeable enhancements that are evident to me - cloud shadows, particle reflections etc light shifting (for eg snow flakes sparkling on a runway) and the way it all works smoothly with zoom and panning. Sim Director now works properly and there is a hell of a lot of functionality (fixes patches and improvements) for multiplayer or grouped training simulator environemnts on shared networks that is not really noticeable to the average user at all. The update did not break or disturb a single addon that I had - not one! VRAM use is a significantly less and FPS remains butter smooth and stable at 30 for me no matter what!

It may not have the total appeal of the gee whizz graphics of MSFS but this is now a really serious piece of networkable, multi-user multi input sources and scripting capacity which I guess is where it was going anyway - not single users but training schools and similar environments with dozens of users all doing the same thing at the same time. There are a lot of bugs fixed with GPS behaviour and a connectivity to real time GPS data that is well cutting edge. Yep you can have student fly a sim session in a real aeroplane and feed it all back with the GPS data and see it in the sim and the sim instructor can feed back - that is what it can do now!

[BendyFlyer]

Proof of concept- Old FSX model, new sim, new functionality with new visuals.

[wombat666]

Like I said, no problems, ORBX Western Port and weather and a relatively old aircraft port. Installation as easy as.

[DaveQ]

After a bit more of a look and a bit of tinkering, yes the weather and shadowing is better and the blue channel does work - just doesn't do what I thought it would. Seems to determine contrast as much as anything.

Apologies for any misunderstanding but I did say it was a quick look....

DaveQ

[BendyFlyer]

DaveQ - no need to apologise. I think it is much improved in terms of stability etc and what I always suspected with P3D small incremental changes. After all they had already done DX12, EA and True Sky plus all the terrain and airport upgrades. Most of the stuff is under the hood changes imperceptible to the single user (hobby flier but lets call ourselves academic students) I guess. Sim Director is at last working which is a bonus for somebody like myself who likes to tinker with scenery for weird places that do not have aerodromes. I did note that they have tidied up the behaviour of shall we call it the stock GPS display and behaviour which was always a bit flaky so I guess they have aligned that to display real time GPS data now - bonus, even my dodgy Aerosoft KLN90B is now operating properly. I did a whole bunch of tests with the affinity masking and the FPS remained constant but the demands it now does not make on the GPU are significantly reduced, my NVIDIA card is running at about 45% capacity now at locked 30 fps so it is not throwing stuff at the GPU like the old systems used to. Yet the graphics look damn good. Try somewheres like Iceland where the snow ice contrast with shadows is actually a real challenge to look good they nailed it there. It is actually really good to see LM are looking at this level of hardware integration and operability, that is using the capacity of the chipsets out there properly and leading on this, even Steve of DX fixer fame gives them points for at last doing this sort of under the hood stuff.

A lot of folk focus on how it looks but I noticed something today that I had not seen before - the only way to get a FPS drop or change for me was with the way the aircraft model was performing or behaving, rapid power changes, attitude changes, speed etc etc this tells me that they have the sim core ESP (FDE etc) functions being given priority by the CPU for fidelity and accuracy and the CPU is doing that properly now!

Bottom line I guess is it is stable, smooth and I get to buzz about with a whole bunch of stuff that will never see the light of day again in MSFS. My gut feeling given the PBR stuff and the resultant scenery changes is that there are significant changes in the pipeline there for scenery and graphics vis a vis terrain and the world but maybe that will be V6.

[YoYo]

Hotfix 1 for v5.3 out too:
https://prepar3d.com/news/announcements/2021/12/120943/