Duchess framerates

[sgabriel]

Greetings all,

I just wanted to express my disappointment! The Duchess is incredibly beautiful — no problem there, but it is the origin of my disappointment. It brings my system to a crawl.

While I'm used to between 40 and over 100 fps, depending on scenery and aircraft, the Duchess gives me 19 fps and fog without any scenery. I haven't seen anyone reporting this, so I'm surprised. Perhaps it's my system? (?)

MAC OS 10.5.8

3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS 512 MB VRAM

[YYZatcboy]

Could be that your operating system is out of date. IIRC there were lots of graphics and multi threading fixes in 10.6

[Oliver]

Turn off all pixel shaders (especially the fog one) if they are turned on.

Post back if it works.

[-TheoGregory]

There is no way the duchess should bring your system to a crawl. It is a very frame rate friendly aircraft. It was UV mapped and textured with performance in mind. And you seem to have a perfectly capable system. YYZatcboy is correct that 10.6 would be a better choice. But a delete of the x-plane preference might do the trick too so try that first.

[garrettm30]

I'm not sure how relevant this would be to your question, but is there some reason you have 667 MHz RAM in a system designed for 800 MHz? If not, you can breath some more life into your machine by putting in 4 GBs of the proper speed not just a whole lot.

[X-Plane Australia]

I think it has something to do with the latest X-plane update. Suddenly my system was crawling with the default C172. I can usually run aircraft that aren't frame rate friendly like the ERJ at Fly Tampa KSFO with 30 FPS.

My system:

Macbook Pro

2.4 Ghz Intel core 2 duo

2GB GB of Ram 1067MhzDDR3 (will update to 4 next month)

10.6.4

NVIDIA GeForce 9400M

[sgabriel]

Thanks everyone. I'll give your suggestions a try and get back.

[steven winslow]

I just did the latest X-Plane update to version 9.61rc2.  I deleted my preferences and then ran a batch update in Airfoil Maker like Austin recommended.  I'm actually seeing BETTER frame rates than rc1.  Also, I've played with the pixel shader thing.  With all pixel shading turned off my frame rates almost double.  Thanks for that reminder!

[sgabriel]

By process of elimination I've figured out that texture resolution is the factor for me.

With tex res set to "high": 90 fps.

With tex res set to "very high": 19 fps and fog. (With the default Cirrus Jet and "very high" tex res, I was getting over 20 fps)

Pixel shaders and all other settings don't seem to affect fps abnormally.

So, tex res set to "very high", which I normally run, is the cause. Now here's a three-part mystery:

1. Sometimes fps is bad from startup.

2. Sometimes fps drops only when I turn on the battery.

3. Sometimes the fps drop goes away after a few minutes.

Mysterious.

[sgabriel]

I'm not sure how relevant this would be to your question, but is there some reason you have 667 MHz RAM in a system designed for 800 MHz? If not, you can breath some more life into your machine by putting in 4 GBs of the proper speed not just a whole lot.

Yes. I'm privileged to have a 24" iMac that Apple produced for (I believe) less than a year. It's a 1.07 GHz bus that takes 667MHz SDRAM. I do have another two GB of RAM on order. I'm counting on it to improve my quality of life.

[garrettm30]

I can find no record (at least in the US) of such a machine being released. The Mid 2007 iMacs (with model identifier iMac7,1) had system busses of 800 MHz with 667 Mhz RAM, then the next line refresh was Early 2008 (iMac8,1) had system busses of 1.06 GHz with RAM speeds of 800 MHz. And there was also only one model--the 24" 2.8 or 3.06 GHz (of the Early 2008s)--that came with the optional Nvidia 8800 GS, and that computer has 800MHz RAM. The reason I noticed it is that I have that model, and I saw your specs match mine in every respect but RAM speed.

It of course makes no difference to me, but it seems to me you got cheated. It appears you got sold a machine with slower RAM than it was designed for. It may be (and I'm guessing here) that perhaps you bought from a company who had a promotion of an extra 1 GB. They may then have put in a 667 MHz. The system slows down to the slowest RAM speed, and that's the speed it will report, but it's not necessarily what it can support. Or else, perhaps the company just switched out the better RAM for the slower RAM. Anyway, you can go to your System Profiler and look at the Hardware Overview page (should be the first page to come up), and if the model identifier is iMac8,1, then you are good to go on 800MHz.

It's still slow, but I would want to get all I could out of memory. And anyway, you can put 800MHz RAM in a machine designed for 667MHz without any harm. If your machine is really designed for 667MHz, it will just run the RAM at that speed without any problem. Just keep in mind that all your RAM will run at the slowest speed installed.

I hope it works out for you.

[sgabriel]

I can find no record (at least in the US) of such a machine being released...

This is odd, indeed. I'm inclined to PM you for further discussion.

[Maxime]

I have the duchess on an iMac 3.06Ghz 8gb RAM 256mb VRAM

It runs from 40 to 80fps.

Best,

Maxime

[sgabriel]

By process of elimination I've figured out that texture resolution is the factor for me.

With tex res set to "high": 90 fps.

With tex res set to "very high": 19 fps and fog. (With the default Cirrus Jet and "very high" tex res, I was getting over 200 fps)

Pixel shaders and all other settings don't seem to affect fps abnormally.

So, tex res set to "very high", which I normally run, is the cause. Now here's a three-part mystery:

1. Sometimes fps is bad from startup.

2. Sometimes fps drops only when I turn on the battery.

3. Sometimes the fps drop goes away after a few minutes.

Mysterious.

[garrettm30]

I used to be able to run textures at Extreme before I bought any payware planes. I often flew the default Cirrus jet in 3D cockpit with textures on Extreme. When I bought the MU-2, I discovered it put me over the limit of my 512 MB VRAM, so I had to put it down to Very High, where it has been since without trouble.

Being that we have the same systems other than RAM and OS, I am surprised that you have such terrible performance with Very High textures. The difference can't be much attributed to the different OS, since it was 10.5 I used back when I first got X-Plane and had that good performance. The 2 GB of slower RAM might affect frame rate overall, but I didn't think it had anything to do with textures. On that note, I will be interested to know how much difference there is when you get your new RAM.

Could you take a picture of your rendering settings for us to study over? My first guess is that you have that setting about compressing textures or saving VRAM or whatever turned off.

[sgabriel]

In fact, my RAM seems to have been the problem. Having upgraded from 2GB 667 MHz to 4 GB 800 MHz seems to have corrected the problem. (I had previously upgraded from OS 10.5 to OS 10.6 to no avail, FYI.)

Thanks for the help everyone, esp. Garrett.

[sgabriel]

P.S. Affirmative: I have texture compression turned off, because it looks like crap!

[garrettm30]

I'm so glad it worked out for you. 

As for the texture compression, I think it is just a matter of what you are using versus what you have available. With that 512 MB card, it shouldn't make any difference in frame rate whether you use 100 MB or 500 MB, so you might as well use all you can. If you can turn off texture compression and stay within limits, then great! In fact, you are supposed to be able to get away with a little over your limit because not all of it is used at the same time. However, when you do run out of VRAM, it is suddenly apparent, as it will bring your system to a crawl. You can see how much X-Plane is currently using from the bottom of the rendering settings window. Does anyone know if that is total VRAM used or VRAM used by just X-Plane? If the latter, you will want to remember that your system needs some of that as well.

Some of the newer payware aircraft have better--and therefore more memory intensive--textures. I can't get away with the same settings when flying them as I used to with default aircraft. I have textures set to Very High with compression turned on, whereas I used to have it on Extreme. If I turned off compression, it would probably mean I would have to drop texture level. It's all about preference.