P3D V5

[Fast_Eddy]

The Hot Fix 1 is up!

[Lewis - A2A]

Yes public now have access to HF1

https://www.prepar3d.com/news/announcem ... 04/116506/

thanks,
Lewis

[Buffalo Alien]

Excellent!

[Ron Attwood]

And what a difference! You can now work your GPS and A2A pop ups from within VR. I really didn't expect that to be fixed just yet. VR is absolutely been ramped up. I LOVE IT!

[twsharp12]

Hey Ron,

What kind of VR headset would you recommend? The VR world is beyond me so I've never really delved into it.

[Ron Attwood]

I wouldn't recommend any of them. Read reviews, posts, opinions, of which there are milyons, and take your pick. I have an Oculus Rift S. Doubtless there are better ones available...At a cost. The S suits me just fine. See if you can try one somewhere.
They're a bit like graphics cards, there is ALWAYS a better one just round the corner.

[twsharp12]

Local library has one I can try. I’ll see how it goes. Thanks for the advice

[AerialShorts]

Twsharp - it’s so different from regular sim flying. You’re in for a very new experience.

And VR does eat computer power the more you crank up detail. Fortunately, P3D5 has DirectX 12 which helps take some of the load off CPUs and put it on the graphics card. And, Nvidia is having more hints drop that the new 30 series is a significant jump in performance over the 20s.

But wait until you see out the windows when taking off or landing. Things get kind of personal. You’ll see.

[ClipperLuna]

For those of you who have tried V5, what are your impressions? Does it run any smoother than V4?

[MrMe85]

V5 runs smoother, the clouds and water look better, the terrain and airports are updated, and has a lot of potential.

The drawbacks is that it's release was incredibly buggy. There was a bug where you would crash on approach at around 500' AGL, although that has reportedly been fixed. There are currently no weather engine that works 100% with it yet because there is a bug in the software that messes up the winds aloft, resulting in violent rides. It also demands a significant amount of VRAM to not crash, which means you definitely need a high end card that has this on reserve (even my RTX2070 crashes sometimes too). There is an optional gimmick included in the latest v5 hotfix that reduces your texture resolution if you get close to your VRAM cap, but I'm not sure if that is necessarily a good solution.Another drawback is that a lot of 3rd party developers have been rather slow in getting their products compatibility with v5. Unless addons are compatible out of the box, there are simply not many developers that have installers for v5 yet.

I don't really recommend v5 at this state. Personally, it's hard to fly this thing without a weather engine and greater support from 3rd party developers. When this happens, maybe I'll endorse this a little more.

[Adam_NZ]

I have to admit that I was suckered into buying v5 - when I saw many comments about how it was going to improve both visuals and performance. NOWHERE did anyone say that it will absolutely not run with my old GTX970 - even though 4.5 runs with most sliders maxed out.

OK ... my 970 was on borrowed time anyway, so I lashed out on an 8GB RTX2060. Cards are hugely expensive here in NZ, so that was all I could afford. I hear people struggle with v5 even with newer 11GB GPUs.

Yes - v5 is buggy as hell. IMHO it was rushed out for 2 reasons:

1) Stay at home under COVID: keep everyone busy tweaking.
2) Get in early - as any later and people will just hold off on the LM platform altogether and go for MSFS 2020 instead.

I suspect many developers aren't rushing to support v5 for the same reason (2).

To be perfectly honest, I see nothing in v5 that we don't already have in 4.5 - apart from the beta lighting/atmospheric function - which is very buggy (and looks terrible IMHO).

Sadly I had limited HD space so had to ditch v4.5 to go to v5. My advice is to *stick with 4.5*!!!

Adam.

[AKar]

I am so far positively impressed by the P3Dv5 HF1. It is far from polished yet, but performance is significantly improved over the v4 (everything counts on my ancient system!); with A2A Bonanza I appear to get framerates that would have been "very good" for me in v4 in areas that were previously completely unflyable. But perhaps even more importantly, stability seems to be improved by much: no longer do I get crashes on alt+tabbing, switching views, going windowed and back and so on. It is not without its issues, but I think this will be the best one yet.

Release of AS open beta should happen fairly soon, according to their announcement.

-Esa

[ClipperLuna]

Thank you all for the info on V5. Looks like it's showing a lot of promise, but I think I'll be holding back until they get the bugs out of it. By coincidence, YouTube recommended this video to me this morning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzVpgBBg_zA. It's a week old but the person who made it seems to be saying the same thing.

[Mace]

Thank you all for the info on V5. Looks like it's showing a lot of promise, but I think I'll be holding back until they get the bugs out of it. By coincidence, YouTube recommended this video to me this morning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzVpgBBg_zA. It's a week old but the person who made it seems to be saying the same thing.

I disagree with some of flightsimguy's opinions in his vid, as well as his choice of presentation. For example, if I were making a vid showing v5, I would certainly want to run with Enhanced Atmospherics on. That is like test driving a Corvette and going 30 miles per hour the entire time.