FPS Issues as flight progresses

[Richdem]

Hi All,

I have noticed some issues after my last upgrade to 3.2.1. When the flight begins all is good and I have pretty stable FPS even in heavy weather. As the flight progresses things seem to deteriorate.

I just did a short flight from EGPF to EGKK. Weather at departure was overcast and raining. No issues. As I got closer to EGKK there were only a few clouds but I stated to get FPS drops and stutters. I disabled SMP & RWC frim the plugins menu and immediately the frames went back to 30 and all was smooth.

I have been running GPU-Z and do not seem to be running out of the 6GB of VRAM on my Asus GTX980 TI Strix

I have tried adjusting settings in SMP but nothing seems to work (settings attached)

Hopefully someone can offer some advice

[seth]

i have exactly the same issue. After 20 or 30 minutes of flight , from 30 fps i am getting stable   08 to 12 fps with not even many clouds or bad weather.  When i disabled SMP & RCW fps return to 30 and everything is smooth....for sure this is weird as i am having also gtx 980 and i never pass the limit of 4g vram
 

[Richdem]

15 minutes ago, seth said:

i have exactly the same issue. After 20 or 30 minutes of flight , from 30 fps i am getting stable   08 to 12 fps with not even many clouds or bad weather.  When i disabled SMP & RCW fps return to 30 and everything is smooth....for sure this is weird as i am having also gtx 980 and i never pass the limit of 4g vram
 

At least I know I am not going crazy !!

Hopefully one of the developers can step in and offer some help

[seth]

51 minutes ago, Richdem said:

At least I know I am not going crazy !!

Hopefully one of the developers can step in and offer some help

you could check this topic :

similar issues and Sundog stated that is possibly v-ram limitation.

 

[Richdem]

1 hour ago, seth said:

you could check this topic :

similar issues and Sundog stated that is possibly v-ram limitation.

 

I just read that thread, I have come nowhere near the 6GB VRAM I have on board the 980TI Strix.

I am going to tray a couple of flights with it turned off and see for sure if the problem goes

[sundog]

You  might try turning off cloud shadows and cloud/terrain blending, but apart from that there's nothing really challenging about the SMP settings you have. It should run just fine.

If problems continue and you confirm it only happens with SMP on, please send us your log.txt after experiencing the trouble.

 

[Richdem]

2 hours ago, sundog said:

You  might try turning off cloud shadows and cloud/terrain blending, but apart from that there's nothing really challenging about the SMP settings you have. It should run just fine.

If problems continue and you confirm it only happens with SMP on, please send us your log.txt after experiencing the trouble.

 

OK thank you for the advice, I will try that.

Where is the log file located for SMP? Do I have to do anything special to get it ?

Richard 

[sundog]

There is no log specifically for SMP; it writes data into the same log.txt file everything else writes into. You should find that file in the top level of whatever directory you installed X-Plane into.

[Denco]

On 7/13/2016 at 7:52 PM, seth said:

similar issues and Sundog stated that is possibly v-ram limitation.

 

I find this hard to believe. SkyMaxx, otherwise a great product, does have a few issues. For one I sometimes get stutters when looking around even if my frames are above 40fps and there are a lot of clouds. Sometimes after a long flight like this topic describes fps can get really low. I bought a new gpu with more Vram hoping it will eliminate most of the problems but sadly it doesn't. 

 

So I'm keeping SkyMaxx on the side for now hoping and waiting for further improvements.

[frankbyte]

I have to admit that i have some issues with the stutters as well...i'm having a 6GB VRAM card and very often during climb or descend (beetween FL 100-FL250) i'm having some serious FPS-drops, from FPS 40 to 10-15...for 10-20 seconds. And it happens every 1-2 minutes (!), that means the flying experience is seriously affected. It's pretty disturbing...but otherwise it's an absolutely great product!

Edited July 15, 2016 by frankbyte

[seth]

Just downloaded  new GTX driver ( 368.81) and so far during my flight from LSGG to EGLL fps stays stable and smooth ( from 30 to 60 ).

try to enable v-sync to ON (  i always had this to half adaptive , but  now with On everything run smooth)

thread optimization always to Off ( even that gives more fps is reasponsable for stutters etc )

power management : Maximum pefromance  and use  single pc performance mode

i am near EGGL airport and didnt have any frame drop till now ... so i think it was nvidia  driver issue and not  SMP...

 

Edited July 15, 2016 by seth

[Tom Stian]

1 hour ago, seth said:

Just downloaded  new GTX driver ( 368.81) and so far during my flight from LSGG to EGLL fps stays stable and smooth ( from 30 to 60 ).

try to enable v-sync to ON (  i always had this to half adaptive , but  now with On everything run smooth)

thread optimization always to Off ( even that gives more fps is reasponsable for stutters etc )

power management : Maximum pefromance  and use  single pc performance mode

i am near EGGL airport and didnt have any frame drop till now ... so i think it was nvidia  driver issue and not  SMP...

 

What was your previous version on the Nvidia driver ?

[seth]

5 minutes ago, Tom Stian said:

What was your previous version on the Nvidia driver ?

368.39 , but at the end of the route near EGLL i had again frame drop  even with 368.81....so it was not nvidia driver.

from 30 fps i had again this weird frame drop to 08- 15

[sundog]

Seth, I wonder if the real hit there was getting close enough to the clouds for the landing light illumination effect to kick in. Perhaps your system is sensitive to the few extra shader instructions that happen in that case.

[seth]

47 minutes ago, sundog said:

Seth, I wonder if the real hit there was getting close enough to the clouds for the landing light illumination effect to kick in. Perhaps your system is sensitive to the few extra shader instructions that happen in that case.

i was suprised as with the new nvidia gtx driver everything was smooth even with heavy clouds/weather ...but after 1 hour of flight near EGGL again this weird frame drop appeared. I checked on skymaxx panel my vram and i have alsmo 1500 mb still available... this is really weird and as you see some other people have exaxtly the same issue.

Skymaxx pro 3 is by far the best add-on in X-plane right now but for sure there is an issue here with the fps as its impossible to make a normal flight.

X-plane default clouds with fs global real weather works perfectly , smooth even in the worst weather conditions , with HD mesh enabled and ultra high rendering settings.

regarding the frame drop hit ..its always unexpected after some minutes or even 1 hour after a flight....even sometimes with a really good weather conditions with rare clouds

 

Edited July 15, 2016 by seth

[sundog]

It still sounds like some sort of resource swapping; perhaps it's not VRAM but something else.

Does the issue go away if you don't use HD Mesh and/or ultra high settings? If so, that points to a general resource management issue as opposed to an issue with SMP itself.

[frankbyte]

It's indeed very strange...i dont understand it as well. I'm having long stutters even with 1GB of VRAM and 8GB of RAM left.

[Dino1981]

I also have this issue and I am happy that I am not the only one.

When flying from PAJN to KPDX I started with 30-50 FPS after 2 hours of flying they were dropping to just 5-15 FPS and further to steady not more than 5 FPS. I bought a new GTX1070 graphics card one week ago and just have the latest NVIDIA drivers 368.81. SkyMaxx showed 3-4GB of unused VRAM and around 8GB of unused RAM till the end, so this can't be a reason.

I streamed my flight (resolution isn't that good, because I have a bad upload-bandwidth, but you can see the FPS). I stopped streaming before the FPS droped to single digits, to be sure that this isn't a streaming releated issue - nothing changed when I stopped streaming.

This issue is reproducible - I couldn't end a lot of flights because of this fps problem the last days.

here is my stream - you can see how FPS changed at the end - but remember it goes further down, but wasn't recorded

https://www.twitch.tv/wingmandino/v/78391525

 

It would be great, if you could find the reason and solve it. Thank you very much.

 

Carsten

my settings

i7 3770 @4,2 GHz
16 GB RAM
NVidia GTX1070 with 8 GB RAM
X-Plane 10.50 beta 5-7 with HD Mesh V3

Edited July 16, 2016 by Dino1981

[Denco]

@Dino1981

I would decrease that world detail distance to high, because it is very performance taxing, and instead increase the number of roads and objects instead. 

 

Regards

Edited July 16, 2016 by Denco

[Muskoka]

Won't bore anyone with the details as others have described this new "issue" well enough. Just here to confirm, and say, add me to the list of folks seeing the same issue. The issue didn't exist prior to latest update, and yes turning the plugins off, smp/rwc, and back on, resolves the issue. I'm also nowhere near my vram limit as well, usually 50% remaining as I run fairly lean graphically all around.

[jusku]

I'm currently flying in africa. The demand is really low, no HD Mesh, no ortho, just default xp. I experienced it during pretty much all my flights. Some were at bright daylight, some at night (so the lights illuminating the clouds shouldn't be the cause). Sometime during cruise, sometimes during descend. If I go to plugins and disable smp and enable it again while flying, everything runs fine again. I'm experiencing this issue since the last update, because I bought rwc. This something that needs working on. 

I'm running xplane 10.45, windows 10. And I'm running on an AMD Card, so it has most likely nothing to do with the driver! More than 1GB of VRAM and about 10GB Ram left!

Looking forward to a solution.

Edit: Attached my log from my last flight

Log.txt

Edited July 17, 2016 by jusku

[seth]

On 7/16/2016 at 3:05 PM, sundog said:

It still sounds like some sort of resource swapping; perhaps it's not VRAM but something else.

Does the issue go away if you don't use HD Mesh and/or ultra high settings? If so, that points to a general resource management issue as opposed to an issue with SMP itself.

i confirm 100% as i made all the tests  with or with out  HD mesh , w2xplane,  and high/low rendering settings. I dont think its a general resource management issue as  with X-plane default clouds + FS global read weather + Hd mesh + w2xplane flight route runs smooth with out any issue ( stable to 30 fps )   Looks like something is working behind when Skymaxx and real weather connector is enabled. Ultra weird issue as my cpu, vram and ram when i am running x-plane is not even on 60% of full use...

also its really important that i am not the only one with the same fps "weird" drop issue , as you could see from this topic other people ara facing the same exactly problem.

thanks

 

 

 

[frontendrob]

How many minutes / hours into the flight does this happen to you guys?

On one hour flights, I haven't had this issue.

[sundog]

For people experiencing this - have you all increased your cloud draw area setting significantly from default settings? Does resetting SMP to default settings make the issue go away?

Like frontendrob, I can't get this to happen on my system (unless I crank up settings in general beyond what my system can handle) - I'm just trying to figure out what's common between people who do have the issue.

 

[Muskoka]

1 hour ago, sundog said:

For people experiencing this - have you all increased your cloud draw area setting significantly from default settings? Does resetting SMP to default settings make the issue go away?

Like frontendrob, I can't get this to happen on my system (unless I crank up settings in general beyond what my system can handle) - I'm just trying to figure out what's common between people who do have the issue.

 

I have draw distance set at 10,000 sq km, same as it was before the update. I have all other options turned off, and the other settings at the lowest possible, same as before. Regardless of draw distance, it's something that's accumulating over time. Everything is fine for the first 45 mins to an hour or so, then out of nowhere the fps tank. Disabling and re-enabling SMP/RWC resolves the issue. I don't fly any flights long enough to see if the issue reappears, so I can't comment about that.

It's definitely not a hardware issue at my end, only thing that's changed is "the software". All settings are the same, distances..etc. My vram is most times 2gb free, with 4gb on board, and system ram is 10gb free with 16gb on board. That hasn't changed at all, those are my targets for smooth sim operation. So, everything gets adjusted "graphically" to maintain those numbers. Again, the load on the system is consistent, and, the same as before the issue with the latest release. Ram/vram usage, cpu loads, and temps are the same, and continuously monitored.

Edited July 18, 2016 by Muskoka