Curved screen for P3d v5

[jim05]

Hi!
I run p3d v5 with 3 Full HD Beamer over a 220 degree screen.

My system: i9 9900ks on a Aorus Xtreme Z390, 64 GB Ram, 2x 1080Ti

Since last week, I run my system with 2x 980 Ti and upgraded now to 2x 1080 Ti.
I also use immersive display to wrap the display over my curved screen. I havenˋt used the Nvidia surround mode. 2 beamers are pluged into one Gpu, the 3rd one is pluggend in into the 2nd GPU.
Till now, I use view groups, in order to get a nice display over the 220 degree curved screen.
I use many Orbx-sceneries and for new the EDDF v2 Professional.
On this airport I only get 15 fps, but only have a gpu-load: 3,2gb of 9,6gb.

I don‘t know, if there is a way to get better fps. Is it recommended to use the 2 gpus in sli-surround-mode (5940 x 1080), or should i only activate all displays, in order to get 3 different screens, each with 1980x1080).

Then... whats with immersive display. Till now, I used 3 seperate views. Each view for 1 beamer. If I run the surround-mode, i only have one „wide“ display.

I know, that there are several topics in the internet, regarding my problem, but I haven‘t found out, whats the best way to get best fps with a great view...
Sli or not? surround or not?

Perhaps someone could give me good advices.

Best regards,
Christian

[JorgenSA]

Christian,

Is your CPU overclocked, or does it run at the base speed of 4 GHz?

Jorgen

[jim05]

Is your CPU overclocked, or does it run at the base speed of 4 GHz?

Base speed!

[JorgenSA]

You might need to overclock, the issue could be that your graphics cards simply do not get fed data quickly enough.

On the other hand, I would also encourage you to keep the UPPER_FRAMERATE_LIMIT in Prepar3D.cfg at the default value of 30.

Jorgen

[jim05]

Thanks Jorgen!
And should I stay with View-Groups or should I try SLI and plug all 3 Beamers on one GPU?

Regards,
Christian

[JorgenSA]

This is where my lack of experience with multiple displays come in, I do not know the answers here.

But I seem to remember some comments from these forums that SLI does not work well with P3D. Not that it causes problems, if I remember correctly, but there seems to be no benefits from SLI. I may have it wrong....

Jorgen

[jim05]

Thanks anyway, Jorgen!!

[MHargrove]

Moving to individual monitors with undocked windows has its own issues and is not likely to improve your frame rates if they're unsatisfactory using surround mode. Indeed, with three monitors you're going to end up with two undocked windows. At 1920x1080 that MIGHT be OK (it's worth the experiment), but it definitely will not give good performance with 4K monitors.

I've not personally tried SLI mode, but have tried multiple graphics cards in the system, each driving one or two monitors (this was back when I still had HD monitors). That "works" but produces some very strange artifacts (some visual elements like fences will render on one monitor but not the other, for example).

Viewgroups, by the way, are exactly the right way to construct your views on your monitors.

-M.

[jim05]

Moving to individual monitors with undocked windows has its own issues and is not likely to improve your frame rates if they're unsatisfactory using surround mode. Indeed, with three monitors you're going to end up with two undocked windows. At 1920x1080 that MIGHT be OK (it's worth the experiment), but it definitely will not give good performance with 4K monitors.

I've not personally tried SLI mode, but have tried multiple graphics cards in the system, each driving one or two monitors (this was back when I still had HD monitors). That "works" but produces some very strange artifacts (some visual elements like fences will render on one monitor but not the other, for example).

Viewgroups, by the way, are exactly the right way to construct your views on your monitors.

-M.

Thanks Mark!

[neilhewitt]

Hi jim05,

I have a 180-degree curved display with two projectors rather than your three. Since you're using Immersive Display Pro, I assume you're using Immersive Calibration Pro to correctly fix the perspective across your display - so that straight lines look straight?

If so, then you have to go with the multiple-view solution. The perspective correction doesn't work beyond 90 degrees horizontal field of view, which is why Immersive Calibration Pro will generate a viewgroup with one view per projector. So in your case, three views.

A spanned solution (nVidia Surround) would cover your whole display but you'd get distortion at the sides and straight lines (like runways and taxiways) will appear curved around the display. Also, I don't think a single view can span more than 180 degrees FOV even in P3Dv5 (I could be wrong).

With multiple views come performance drops. From what I've seen in P3Dv5 that performance hit is less than it used to be, but it's still there. Anything up to a 20-30% FPS drop per view. So even with the fastest machine, three views is pushing it in very complex scenery. If you would get, say, 30FPS somewhere with a single view, you'll probably struggle to get over 20FPS in the same place with three views. This will be the same whether you use a multi-projector blended display or a multi-monitor one. This is the point at which people start to think about multi-channel solutions with multiple image-generator PCs.

As for SLI vs single GPU - it used to be the received wisdom the SLI did nothing for P3D frame rates. In fact some seemed to think it made them worse. I haven't done any testing as I don't have two identical GPUs (I have a 1080Ti in one machine and a 2080 SUPER in another) but my gut tells me you'd get better performance across three views if they are all connected to the same GPU.

Hope that's in any way helpful - ping me if you want more detail on how my setup works.

[pierresflightsim]

Hi,

I'm installing a setup myself with a curved screen. 220 degrees. I'm using a geobox G804 to make from one output four outputs. The idea was to safe the GPU all the hard work. All the blending is done by the geobox now. But now it seems that the software doesn't allow me a field over 180 degrees. Unfortunately I couldn't upload any pictures in the forum. Does anyone have an idea how I could save my problem? Best regards, Pierre

Hi jim05,

I have a 180-degree curved display with two projectors rather than your three. Since you're using Immersive Display Pro, I assume you're using Immersive Calibration Pro to correctly fix the perspective across your display - so that straight lines look straight?

If so, then you have to go with the multiple-view solution. The perspective correction doesn't work beyond 90 degrees horizontal field of view, which is why Immersive Calibration Pro will generate a viewgroup with one view per projector. So in your case, three views.

A spanned solution (nVidia Surround) would cover your whole display but you'd get distortion at the sides and straight lines (like runways and taxiways) will appear curved around the display. Also, I don't think a single view can span more than 180 degrees FOV even in P3Dv5 (I could be wrong).

With multiple views come performance drops. From what I've seen in P3Dv5 that performance hit is less than it used to be, but it's still there. Anything up to a 20-30% FPS drop per view. So even with the fastest machine, three views is pushing it in very complex scenery. If you would get, say, 30FPS somewhere with a single view, you'll probably struggle to get over 20FPS in the same place with three views. This will be the same whether you use a multi-projector blended display or a multi-monitor one. This is the point at which people start to think about multi-channel solutions with multiple image-generator PCs.

As for SLI vs single GPU - it used to be the received wisdom the SLI did nothing for P3D frame rates. In fact some seemed to think it made them worse. I haven't done any testing as I don't have two identical GPUs (I have a 1080Ti in one machine and a 2080 SUPER in another) but my gut tells me you'd get better performance across three views if they are all connected to the same GPU.

Hope that's in any way helpful - ping me if you want more detail on how my setup works.

[neilhewitt]

Hi pierresflightsim.

You can't have a single view with greater than 180 degrees FOV in Prepar3d. If you could, it would be a huge performance boost for display systems like yours and mine, but as I understand it the maths used to render the scene breaks down beyond 180 degrees.

I don't have experience with hardware-based projector blending myself, but I'm assuming the Geobox corrects for the display curvature (warping) as well as edge-blending the overlapping images? And your input into the Geobox is a single display output, yes? It looks to Windows like a single ultra-wide display?

If so, you can define multiple P3D views to cover the FOV that you want, and place them all side-by-side on that one display. For 220 degrees you would ideally use 3 views but you might get away with 2 x 110 degrees. You can't use a viewgroup to do that as viewgroups work on a one-display one-view basis. So you'd have to save your display layout with each flight.

I understand (though I have not tried it as a I have a different solution) that P3D now has an anti-distortion filter you can apply to a camera to remove the fish-eye effect as the FOV gets wider.

[capteinjack737]

Hey Jim,

First of all , it is possible to have 30 Fps in Frankfurt Landing if your Settings are Not to high in the area autogen density and scenery complexity. These sliders are very CPU boundary, mostly in CPU core0! The key is to Save core0 Rendering Power By adjusting your Beamers to only 30Hz! The „more“Power you get from that can your System use to increase FPS.
Adjust VSync and TripleBuffering and set FPS unlimited. It will anyway Not exceed More than 30,then.

I run Four Full HD Beamer on one RTX3090 ,but Even my old GTX1080 could do That pretty good, with a 10 Core i910900k oc to 5.3
Ghz and i Fly with stable 30fps from Edds to Eddf with Orbx Germany North/South and Enhanced Atmosphere with Active Sky on with Prosim running and so much More.

My key was. –>>>30Hz in Nvidia Controll Panel for all my Beamers!
Watch your CPU usage with Core Temp and check out difference between 30 and 60hz! Its a huge difference.

CPU Need to be overclocked. As fast as possible.

Hope this helps a Bit.
Regards and happy new year

Jörg