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PeterR

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  1. Thank you Frank for quickly looking into it. I was enjoying my first flight with new version (SMP V4) and someone in Mexico has forced me to enjoy it again :-).
  2. Mine just crashed a few minutes ago - X-Plane 10, SMP 4.0.1, RWC 1.1, X-Plane built-in weather. I wasn't looking in the sim, but when I was few minutes back everything was OK. Peter Log.txt METAR.rwx
  3. Quite some time have passed and I think I still have to report back on my current situation. Since my last post I did clean install of Windows 10 (anniversary version 1607). I didn't have any problems with any of the updates, probably I joined in when all this was already resolved by Microsoft/NVidia. New install of X-Plane 10.51 performs more or less the same like on Windows 8.1 (perhaps with little less stuttering compared to older X-Plane versions). There is one notable difference though. I did several flights and also my test flight and there was heavy weather in some of these. So far I didn't see single digit FPS drop, which I am very happy about as there was no cycling of SMP settings required. I did notice some FPS drops in areas where there was very heavy cloud coverage - I guess there was overcast in these areas and I seen lot of clouds because I have overcast set to dense particles. However, FPS drop in this case was marginal, nowhere near as bad as before. I eventually settled down on 10 000 sq. km coverage, where I get very good performance in all scenarios. I am not that crazy about extending clouds to horizon, it's just nice to have item for me. Now in regards to SMP 4, we know that slider will be able to extend to higher numbers. However, is it just that we can extend clouds further or can we expect same or better performance with cloud coverage extended? For example, will I see similar performance when I keep slider at 10 000 or could I expect similar performance even when I extend to let say 20 000? I wish all the best for SMP 4 release. I personally am expecting to place order in first 60 days after some initial reports are in :).
  4. I repeated my usual test flight after returning from vacation, this time already on X-Plane 10.50 and SMP 3.3.2. I think overall performance and experience has improved a bit. Unfortunately I still experienced one single digit FPS drop in the middle of the flight. Quick cycling of SMP settings (increased drawing distance) recovered FPS. The route was covered with quite high number of clouds. Rest of the flight (after cycling settings) was flawless. I hope to do some more flights over the weekend and eventually install Win 10 with fresh X-plane installation. Overall I remain impressed with SMP as the occasional FPS drop (easily recoverable) is not big deal for me.
  5. Unfortunately with last test flight I had FPS drop again. At the point where it was worst (<10FPS), GPU utilization was under 40%, VRAM utilization at 65% and overall CPU at 65%. Quick cycling of settings fixed it (I actually increased draw distance a bit, not decreased). It remained stable afterwards for long time. This flight was very cloudy compared to previous flights and I think overall performance of SMP 3.3 improved a lot compared to previous version considering amount of clouds shown. And were they very impressive with gteat coloration - will compare from real airplane on Friday :). Frank I am looking forward for your next tweak you mentioned. Overall performance of SMP is great, it seems to be that only under certain circumstances it gets disturbed. I appreciate your support and dedication which will definitely lead to success in dealing with this particular issue.
  6. I did several more flights, all without FPS drops. First was, as I promised, with HD Mesh re-enabled and SMP terrain softness reduced to 0. The flight was smooth, so I was able to revert it to default 500. This was however with SMP 3.2.2, so with the weather data broken (although clouds were present along the route). The most recent flight was with SMP 3.3 and updated RWC set to Always so I get real cloud coverage at least. This flight was also very smooth. On the other hand weather conditions were good and there were not many clouds on the way. At this point I cannot conclude if SMP 3.3 fixed performance issues I experienced, but it may very well had. I need to perform additional flight in more severe weather. I hope I will be able to do it today or tomorrow, as I will be leaving for 2 weeks afterwards. I will report back as soon as the flight is completed.
  7. I did some more test flights. All of them started with draw area set to around 14 000 sq km. Flight 1 - all plugins (except default XP plugins, SMP, RWC, Gizmo) were moved out of plugins folder. FPS drop shortly after takeoff. Cycling settings was only very short-term solution and in order to finish flight I had to reduce draw area to about 3 000 sq km. Flight 2 - all plugins moved out of plugins folder as in flight 1 + HD Mesh V3 was disabled. Although I experienced some FPS drop, reducing draw area to 10 000 helped and I was even able to return back to 14 000 without any more FPS drops. Flight 3 - same as flight 2, but in this case no single FPS drop and draw area was set to 14 000 all the time. Might have been influenced slightly by XP weather data problem mentioned elsewhere, but I had weather and clouds along the way. Resource utilization seemed to be similar across all 3 flights. Only difference worth mentioning is that GPU peak utilization was actually highest on smoothest flight 3 (73%) and VRAM usage was lowest on flight 3 (51%). Seems that plugins (at least the ones I use) do not have effect on performance. However, what does have effect is HD Mesh v3. Seems that HD Mesh and SMP don't like to run together. My assumption is that HD Mesh is very memory hungry, but if memory is not a boggleneck, it should not require too much computing resources. I have following plan for next tests: - HD Mesh and plugins enabled but XP texture resolution slightly lowered and SMP terrain softness reduced to 0. - Some tests with XP 10.50 when release. - Some tests with Windows 10
  8. Another flight today and some new observation. GPU utilization never crossed maximum of 59%, VRAM utilization maxed at 74%, GPU temperature maxed at 63 °C (it starts throttling down only at 70 °C and above so no issue here). Aside from occasional high usage of single CPU core I didn't notice any high resources utilization. When FPS dropped I noticed that after cycling SMP settings to restore FPS, GPU utilization actually increased. It seemed almost like SMP or X-plane turned handbrake or something to slow the sim. To me it looks less and less like resources bottleneck in the end. This reminds me something I noticed when I first started using SMP v3 (this was my first version), which may be completely unrelated, but I will mention it anyway. On X-plane without SMP, Zulu time and clock run at same rate - when FPS dropped, both clock slowed down. With SMP/RWC when FPS drops, in plane clocks slow down, but Zulu time continues to run on correct speed. Now I didn't check for this behavior for long time to confirm, but might be worth if others could look, too. Just throwing an idea here, unsynchronized clocks may not be good. I will certainly be looking at this again although I might be not able to see it as I no longer have such huge FPS drops.
  9. I've now done very first test with new GTX 1070. Great card by the way and I learned 2 things - first you can push everything much further and second you still cannot push enough it to maximum values. If you need push everything to max, probably wait for the cards that will be introduced in 2025 (if you will be still on X-Plane 10) :-). As regarding to FPS drop during the flight, I still noticed it. Not to single digit numbers like with GTX 960, but to numbers below 20. SMP was still reporting more than 4GB VRAM and 20GB RAM available. Quick cycling of SMP settings (for example turn cloud reflections on water to OFF and back ON) resolved it immediately. However what I noticed this time was interesting - overall CPU utilization was around 25%, but when FPS dropped, one of the CPU thread (1 of 8) was saturated to almost 100% while others were underutilized. Cycling SMP settings reduced that CPU thread utilization back to 70s. So maybe CPU is bottleneck or CPU optimization is not good enough. Not sure how much can be done here since X-Plane is limited because of its OpenGL engine. I am still keeping an eye on it.
  10. Are you using custom sky colors? I recall I've seen this once in the past once I placed my custom sky colors into X-Plane 10\Resources\bitmaps\skycolors instead of X-Plane 10\Resources\plugins\SilverLining\skyColors Try to put them into SilverLining\SkyColors folder. You can even create new directory for them. It will appear in SMP configuration screen and you will be able to select your sky colors from there. Also, this is described in SkyMaxx Pro manual.
  11. OK, some people are experiencing this, others are not. Some people seem not to be even VRAM constrained (I would focus on these people). As it is not easy to figure this out, it might be a worth idea to extend the discussion to new area - differences in environment people are operating in. For example, I do not recall anyone with ATI card reported this. Is anyone with Windows 10 experiencing this? Are non-default NVIDIA Control Panel 3d settings in place? Do you have other apps open at the same time as X-Plane? Although I have the same problem, I do not qualify as good test subject right now as I have only 2GB of VRAM. GTX 1070 is expected to arrive next week, that will qualify me as good test subject. Other notable facts on my end are: sufficient CPU, 32 GB RAM, NVIDIA card, Windows 8.1 (I have suspicion this may be the key), no non-default NVIDIA Control Panel settings, X-plane 10.45, plugins are subjective, maybe X-Camera is worth mentioning, scenery/mesh/w2xp packages although resource intensive I do not consider relevant to report as RAM and VRAM meters are more important. When I sim I run Chrome and Navigraph Charts at the same time (these are quite VRAM heavy by the way). I am looking forward to report back once new GPU installed. In the meantime I wish you luck in identifying the root cause.
  12. Hi Frank, Just had X-Plane crash with SkyMaxx 3.2 and RWC. Now I am VRAM constrained (just 2GB), so wouldn't be surprised if because of that. However, as attached log suggests, it may be related to METAR file processing. I am using X-Plane to inject weather (no NOAA). Timestamp of METAR.rwx and log.txt is same, so I guess crash happened just when X-Plane did weather download. Unfortunately, when it crashed I was away, so I don't know if it was accompanied with framerate drop, but I have to say that with 3.2 framerates are pretty stable for me and I think this is big improvement compared to previous versions (especially for VRAM constrained users like me). Log.txt METAR.rwx GizmoLog.txt
  13. I've noticed this also with Google Chrome, which seems to be also big VRAM consumer. When my fps dropped, closing Google Chrome helped to recover fps. However, this seems to be always temporary and fps will drop again after some time. If there is still a bit of VRAM available, cycling cloud reflections on water setting to OFF and back to ON again helps to deal with VRAM fragmentation and restore the fps. However, if the scenery is heavy and there is not enough VRAM headroom, even the above will not help and you will need to reduce cloud area setting. I am VRAM constrained user with 2GB VRAM only. I've already reduced X-Plane rendering settings, disabled HD Mesh v3 and reduced cloud area settings. I have very good fps, but there is always point in flight where fps will drop below 15 and I have to do some of the tricks above. This is the first time VRAM fragmentation issue is so prominent for me. Until now, when I pushed X-Plane to the limits, it was enough to turn your head (camera) to area with less objects, fly to less heavy scenery area and/or reduce something in rendering settings and everything auto-recovered. With SMP 3.1.1. it seems fps recovery is not that trivial and drop seems to be persistent.
  14. I like this update, visual representation of clouds is impressive and configuration dialog improvements are good. However, I do observe performance degradation in longer flights. I think this may be problem for VRAM constrained people. I have Nvidia GTX960 with 2GB of VRAM and 32 GB RAM. RAM is not an issue, but VRAM may be. I was today flying from London to Barcelona and although quite cloudy in London, performance was pretty good. Over the English Channel, same amount of clouds below me and performance still good. However, about 1 hour in flight and frames dropped about 50% or more despite the similar cloud coverage. I tried to move some sliders down left but not much help. GPU monitor was showing only about 50% GPU usage, but VRAM was around 90%. CPU 30% or less, so no issue there. There was nice weather in Barcelona, but performance never recovered. I repeated the same flight with clear weather just to ensure it is not related to amount of scenery or HD meshes and no significant performance drops along the way. @sundog you mentioned clouds are being pre-loaded for future use. This supports my theory VRAM can be depleted in-flight even in low cloud coverage. May it be that this cache overloads VRAM when lot of weather stations are crossed? Is this cache ever optimized and cleaned up during the flight? Is there any way to remove pre-loaded clouds from VRAM? As RWC will know exactly which clouds will be needed, may it in theory improve performance of SkyMaxx Pro by optimizing the cache? I am very much looking forward to RWC as it may make everything even better. However, I may also need to get new graphic card with more VRAM, too. Thank you for your support and keep up the great work. Peter
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