FPS Issues as flight progresses

[sundog]

What version of SMP were you using previously, Muskoka?

[Muskoka]

2 hours ago, sundog said:

What version of SMP were you using previously, Muskoka?

Would have been 3.2. I do the updates as soon as I receive the emails saying an update is available. I'm currently using 3.2.1. Normally a heli guy, but have been flying the ixeg 737 pretty much all the time since it's release, and only one single route, CYYZ to CYUL, and return, but never at the same time. I'll do the return flight the next day, or whenever.  I can do this flight with my eyes closed, so I know what to expect visually, and when, the Toronto end being graphically heavier than the Montreal end. Basically it's a little over a 1 hour flight, start to finish. Like others, about 3/4's through that flight, so 45-50'ish minutes the fps will drop to 8-12 fps range (from 35-40+), and it does that within seconds with no visual warning. Everything will be fine, then just start stuttering. Disable SMP/RWC and all is fine, re-enable them, and all is fine. Leave them disabled, so all defaults, and all is fine. Perhaps I should try a longer flight and see if the issue comes back after re-enabling the plugins. As it is now I only have maybe 10-15 mins of flight remaining after I re-enable the plugins and it's never come back in that short amount of time. Maybe it would on a longer flight. I'll try that and see, maybe a CYWG-CYYZ flight.

I'll just add, using SMP gives me roughly 10-15 fps improvement over defaults, a huge increase, so I've no issues using it obviously. The only reason I've been disabling it in flight was to test the fps drop, which seems to alleviate the issue. Once enabled again the fps return.

Edited July 18, 2016 by Muskoka

[sundog]

That's really strange; I don't see any changes between 3.2 and 3.2.1 that would explain this sort of behavior suddenly starting. Any chance you also changed your video driver around the same time?

Regardless, I'll try again to get this to happen and see if it's something we can address somehow for the SMP 4 release. Right now my suspicion is that certain video drivers aren't properly disposing of our clouds' resources for some reason, or are leaving memory in an increasingly fragmented state over time, but there might be some workaround if so.

 

 

[Muskoka]

1 hour ago, sundog said:

That's really strange; I don't see any changes between 3.2 and 3.2.1 that would explain this sort of behavior suddenly starting. Any chance you also changed your video driver around the same time?

Regardless, I'll try again to get this to happen and see if it's something we can address somehow for the SMP 4 release. Right now my suspicion is that certain video drivers aren't properly disposing of our clouds' resources for some reason, or are leaving memory in an increasingly fragmented state over time, but there might be some workaround if so.

 

 

Last video driver change was 4 months ago (ver 364.51), it's not hardware at our end, nothing has changed on my system, nothing . How the software is interacting with our/my hardware is the issue, unfortunately I can't help you there, other than to say it was fine in the prior version. Again,  no hardware or system software change at my end.

 

I should mention though,  I am running the latest beta of xp, so that is a change that I should have mentioned. But, this sudden stuttering has been with me for a while.  Maybe your not using a beta version of xp? Also, what video driver are you using,  I'll try it and see what happens. 

Edited July 18, 2016 by Muskoka

[RudiJG1]

It's happening to me as well and I'm still running 10.45

[Muskoka]

Frank, here's my settings so you know where my system stands. Depending on weather of course but here I'm getting close to 40 fps on the ground at CYYZ, so my system is set for speed/function, not eye candy. I do run full screen, but that's not selected in my rendering options as you can see, or I can't take a screenshot (restored shift/space bar, all is well again). All I get is a black screen otherwise when I go to paste in Paint.

Edited July 19, 2016 by Muskoka

[seth]

today i made 2 flight routes just to be 100% sure  regarding this  weird "frame drop" issue.

LSGG-EGLL: the Sky while the plane was still in the airport was busy enough with clouds. fps was stable to  35 - 50 even in a payware busy aiport like LSGG. during the flight frames were stable to 35 - 40 and after 1h and 20 minutes fps had a huge drop to  08 - 15 fps ... couldnt even continue the flight as everything was like in slow motion with stutters and lagging.  tried to decrease cloud/terran blend  and Cloud shadows and i had again the stable fps to 30-40 but just for a while ! then again the frame drop appeard. when i disabled SMP and RWC with the default X-plane clouds + FS global real weather everything was stable and smooth  with average fps 40 to 60.

LGAV- LIRF: same story but with less clouds during the flight. the weird part here is that i tried to increase this time the cloud area covered sq.km and i had a huge increase from 15 fps to 50 fps .....but that was just for 3 to 5 minutes , then again the weird frame drop appeared.  For some reason every change that i make on skymaxx pro panel affects positive the fps but just for a while.

i had Skymaxx 2 and 3 and i never had similar issues like that. I think everything started after 3.1 update release ( if i remember correct ).

 

 

 

Edited July 18, 2016 by seth

[Muskoka]

Just completed the flight from the screenshots above, 46 mins in total, CYYZ to CYUL, huge tail wind. Not one issue like were describing, although there were some pretty wild fps swings, dipping into the teens at times for no apparent reason, but they always bounced back to mid 30's, low 40's. Thunderstorms at Montreal end and everything was fine. So I can't say it's repeatable every time, but it does happen. Not a fun thing to try and chase for sure. 

[sundog]

To answer the earlier question, I'm on NVidia driver 365.19 here. But it's sounding increasingly like this is just something that really hard to make happen reliably (or quickly.) It probably depends a lot on the specific weather you're flying through, as well as your settings and what other add-ons you have.

I know some people think I'm dodging the issue here, but I can assure you that SMP's memory management has been tested very extensively. I'm pretty sure we're not just leaking memory or resources over time or anything like that due to bad code. But, as you fly with RWC, we do keep a cache of cloud areas around so we can quickly swap them in as you fly into new weather. This cache grows over time, but does have an upper bound. This is how we avoid stutters as you fly into new weather.

So, I think this upper bound may just be too high for some systems. It's not actually consuming all that much VRAM, but it might lead to memory fragmentation issues in the driver or something. I can get into this state myself if I crank up my cloud draw area all the way and fly through bad weather for a long enough time, but not with a cloud draw area of just 10,000.

Short story - it's complicated. If this is happening to you, it probably means you need to reduce your cloud draw area setting - and an immediate workaround during flight is to tweak SMP's settings which causes it to clear its cloud cache and start over.

Longer term, I suspect we will need to adjust our tradeoff between cache size and stutter prevention in future versions.

 

[jujub]

Hi

Have been reading the post on frame drop during flight and have SMP AND RWC and have tried to no avail to get this to happen. But I only take short flights 45 minute or less.

One thing I have noticed in switching my settings on the ground at  a large airport when I hit apply my frame rate drops to one then goes back to normal.

[Dino1981]

On ‎16‎.‎07‎.‎2016 at 10:32 PM, Dino1981 said:

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

Yesterday I was flying the same route again, just to try to end this flight, and once more I had this frame drop after 01:30 to 02:00 hours. I use this high "Cloud Area Covered" setting to to take use of the features the Real Weather Connector brings at all.

Someone of another X-Plane forum wrote me, that he knows the problem and all I should do is simply open the SkyMaxx Confirguration and change anything, so that the clouds will reload. This can't be a solution forever, but I did that, though I used the button, that's below to reset the whole configuration as Frank from Sundog Software suggested - that helped me getting fps back immediately.

I will repeat this flight today but this time with standard configuration from the beginning. I will load the weather condition from yesterday using FS Global Real Weather to stay comparable.

 

thanks for trying to find the reason for this behavior

 

Carsten

Edited July 19, 2016 by Dino1981
issue

[Richdem]

Well I haven't visited this thread in a few days so I thought I would update,

I decided over the last weekend to format my hard drive and install windows 10. I installed the latest Nvidia driver then a vanilla installation of X-Plane 10.45 & the IEXG 737. I did a couple of flights with the basic settings and default weather & clouds without any issues. I then installed SMP & RWC and did a couple more flights. All is good so far. I started to install some airports along with the relevant libraries then the rest of my fleet, E175, 737-200, A320, A330 & FF767. Last night I flew from Cardiff to Majorca with no problems. I did begin to wonder if the issue was caused by the HDMesh. I haven't installed any yet. To be honest default scenery looks pretty good ! My next flight when I have time will be from Glasgow to Gatwick, one of the previous flights I had issues with. I will also install the HD mesh tile for the UK. The other thing that may be worth trying for those of you still having issues is to delete the preferences folder and let X-plane rebuild it.

One thing I have noticed is that X-Plane seems to run super smoothly with Windows 10 and so far I am glad I made the switch

I will report back after my next test

Richard

[ldts]

Same issue to me, i have an i7 3770k 12 gbs of ram and asus nvidia gtx 660 ti, 2gbs, and i got no more than 20 fps, the rendering settings of xplane says a 980 mgb of video memory consumption, and when i launch sky maxx pro config, it says to me that i have, only 150mbs of availiable video memory and sometimes 6 to 8 free ram, settings are set to low. I do not understand.

[JohnMAXX]

26 minutes ago, ldts said:

Same issue to me, i have an i7 3770k 12 gbs of ram and asus nvidia gtx 660 ti, 2gbs, and i got no more than 20 fps, the rendering settings of xplane says a 980 mgb of video memory consumption, and when i launch sky maxx pro config, it says to me that i have, only 150mbs of availiable video memory and sometimes 6 to 8 free ram, settings are set to low. I do not understand.

Safe to say you need to explore your rendering settings inside x-plane, SMP memory usage is more accurate you are running out of vram causing poor performance.

[jatar]

Hi, I have a decrease fps only in the arrival to airport, I stop skymax and restart it, and the fps come back again. If you need more information, tell me how support you, if you want a video I can do it.

Thanks.

[JohnMAXX]

6 hours ago, jatar said:

Hi, I have a decrease fps only in the arrival to airport, I stop skymax and restart it, and the fps come back again. If you need more information, tell me how support you, if you want a video I can do it.

Thanks.

A log might be helpful, also a pic of the smp config when this happens.......custom airport scenery I suppose?  My best guess as you approach the airport the scenery begins to push on your hardware resetting smp clears the cache freeing up some resources.....

[Richdem]

OK so last night I loaded up the HD Mesh V3 tile for the UK and flew from Glasgow to Gatwick without any issues whatsoever using these settings

My Flightsim is currently setup in our spare bedroom/office and gets the sun all afternoon. It can get quite warm in there even with the A/C going full tilt. One of the things I did notice before is that with my current overclock (i3570K @ 4.7GHZ) my pc temps were getting a little higher than I would have liked so for my initial testing I reset my bios to defaults and performed a few of the vanilla flights like this. The temps were back in the mid 40's. On Tuesday I used the auto overclock feature of my bios and ended up with a respectable 4.2GHZ overclock. I have been running like this since then and monitored VRAM usage & temps on every flight. My max temp on any core never exceeds 60 degrees Celsius and they typically sit around 45 degrees Celsius.

As I mentioned in a previous post X-Plane has never run so well, Maybe I just found the magical sweetspot   you will see that the settings I have are pretty high and I am beginning to wonder if the root of my problem as described in my opening post was my pc temps getting too high so maybe the advice I could give those still having issues is to run several tests using appropriate software to monitor both VRAM usage and CPU temp. I also tweaked the settings of the water cooler for my CPU to start ramping up at a lower temp.

I am planning to move my whole sim-pit/office down to the basement where it is much cooler and may try pushing the overclock back to the previous levels.In the meantime I will carry on adding more HD Mesh back to my install and see what happens.

Hope my experience helps others that are struggling

Richard

Edited July 21, 2016 by Richdem

[jatar]

6 hours ago, JohnMAXX said:

A log might be helpful, also a pic of the smp config when this happens.......custom airport scenery I suppose?  My best guess as you approach the airport the scenery begins to push on your hardware resetting smp clears the cache freeing up some resources.....

Thanks for your response, I will do a flight and save it. I think it is a problem with cache too, It should be a solution to do a reset with thr charges of meteo.

I shall post after the flight 

Thanks

[ldts]

Ok I'll try a new fresh installation. Hope this helps.

[Muskoka]

Just finished a flight CYWG-CYYZ and 95 mins into the flight the fps suddenly dropped to mid to low teens, up until then everything was fine, and 30+ fps. Looked at my system resources, free system ram 11gb of 16gb, and 1.5gb of 4gb vram free, temps fine all around, so no issues there. Immediately (within a minute) disabled and re-enabled SMP/RWC and the issue was gone, and the remaining 20 mins of the flight were fine, back to 30+fps, same weather obviously.

There's definitely a issue with SMP somewhere, something is "building up" and almost causing the system to crash. You can see it coming (within seconds), the video out of nowhere starts to stutter, everything gets jerky, and the fps plummet. The flight was fine up until that 1.5hr mark, the fps tanked, reset SMP/RWC and all is fine until the end of the flight. Most definitely not a hardware issue, for sure.

If the problem was hardware, the issue would persist. As it is, the system comes back graphically just fine immediately after resetting 2 plugins. And it continues to look just the same, same amount of clouds, same demands on the system, as it did seconds before the issue started. If it were hardware this simply wouldn't be the case. There's a "bug/glitch" somewhere with software, SMP, RWC, or Xplane (beta). 

Also, if I do a flight with just the defaults (no SMP/RWC), where the clouds are much more demanding on my system, I don't see the issue at all. I did a CYUL to CYYZ with defaults last night and all was fine, although the fps suffered more than when using SMP/RWC.

Frank, sorry I don't have more to offer. When it happened I was 100 mi out from CYYZ, just started descent, clouds were light, and that's reflected in my system/vram ram numbers above.

Next flight I'll try without RWC and see what happens.

Edited July 22, 2016 by Muskoka

[seth]

11 hours ago, Muskoka said:

Just finished a flight CYWG-CYYZ and 95 mins into the flight the fps suddenly dropped to mid to low teens, up until then everything was fine, and 30+ fps. Looked at my system resources, free system ram 11gb of 16gb, and 1.5gb of 4gb vram free, temps fine all around, so no issues there. Immediately (within a minute) disabled and re-enabled SMP/RWC and the issue was gone, and the remaining 20 mins of the flight were fine, back to 30+fps, same weather obviously.

There's definitely a issue with SMP somewhere, something is "building up" and almost causing the system to crash. You can see it coming (within seconds), the video out of nowhere starts to stutter, everything gets jerky, and the fps plummet. The flight was fine up until that 1.5hr mark, the fps tanked, reset SMP/RWC and all is fine until the end of the flight. Most definitely not a hardware issue, for sure.

If the problem was hardware, the issue would persist. As it is, the system comes back graphically just fine immediately after resetting 2 plugins. And it continues to look just the same, same amount of clouds, same demands on the system, as it did seconds before the issue started. If it were hardware this simply wouldn't be the case. There's a "bug/glitch" somewhere with software, SMP, RWC, or Xplane (beta). 

Also, if I do a flight with just the defaults (no SMP/RWC), where the clouds are much more demanding on my system, I don't see the issue at all. I did a CYUL to CYYZ with defaults last night and all was fine, although the fps suffered more than when using SMP/RWC.

Frank, sorry I don't have more to offer. When it happened I was 100 mi out from CYYZ, just started descent, clouds were light, and that's reflected in my system ram numbers above.

Next flight I'll try without RWC and see what happens.

this is exactly what i have with almost every flight which is more than 60 min. This time when i had this frame-drop appeared , i tried something different. I increased/decreased just the cloud covered area sq/m number , which always had a positive feedback ( gain fps) but just for a while...!

[Muskoka]

On 7/20/2016 at 8:12 PM, Richdem said:

Well I haven't visited this thread in a few days so I thought I would update,

I decided over the last weekend to format my hard drive and install windows 10. I installed the latest Nvidia driver then a vanilla installation of X-Plane 10.45 & the IEXG 737. I did a couple of flights with the basic settings and default weather & clouds without any issues. I then installed SMP & RWC and did a couple more flights. All is good so far. I started to install some airports along with the relevant libraries then the rest of my fleet, E175, 737-200, A320, A330 & FF767. Last night I flew from Cardiff to Majorca with no problems. I did begin to wonder if the issue was caused by the HDMesh. I haven't installed any yet. To be honest default scenery looks pretty good ! My next flight when I have time will be from Glasgow to Gatwick, one of the previous flights I had issues with. I will also install the HD mesh tile for the UK. The other thing that may be worth trying for those of you still having issues is to delete the preferences folder and let X-plane rebuild it.

One thing I have noticed is that X-Plane seems to run super smoothly with Windows 10 and so far I am glad I made the switch

I will report back after my next test

Richard

I'll try it and see what happens, still not a "solution" to the problem though.

 

[Richdem]

3 hours ago, Muskoka said:

I'll try it and see what happens, still not a "solution" to the problem though.

 

I actually repeated one of my test flights last night, EGFF to LEPA. This time I added the HDMesh V3 for the whole region the route occupied. I also was running GPU-Z & Core Temp. Interestingly enough I did see the FPS start to dip to mid 20's as I approached the Pyrenees. While this happened my VRAM was up around 4GB. I do expect to see this with HDMesh & Extended DSF on but my GTX980 TI Strix still had 2GB headroom. Temperatures were also exactly where they have been for the last few days. I immediately disabled SMP then re enabled it and as everyone else states the issues goes away.

It would seem that this is an issue with SMP. I think the degree of FPS degradation does depend on individual situations.   

[ldts]

Hi, after a new fresh x-plane, reinstallation, i got same results, only installed few pay ware crafts, no hd mesh and no Addon sceneries, in LEMD I got depending on daytime only 270 or 170 free video memory, and 7 or six gb of free vram, with the actual x-plane graphic settings, I have 900 mbs of video memory consumption.

[sundog]

14 hours ago, ldts said:

only 270 or 170 free video memory

That's probably your main issue (the video memory consumption reported in X-Plane's graphics settings only counts textures allocated by X-Plane; you can't use it as a measure of how much memory is actually in use on your video card.)

Once you get down to 100-200MB of available video memory, most graphics drivers start needing to "swap" which leads to degraded performance.

If you don't have many add-ons installed, all you can do is reduce your graphics and/or cloud draw area settings further, or upgrade your video card. X-Plane's recommended system configuration calls for a 4GB video card. (http://www.x-plane.com/desktop/system-requirements/)