FPS Issues as flight progresses

[Denco]

6 hours ago, sundog said:

Denco - have you tried the new SMP 3.3 release? Your issue sounds like you just have more add-ons installed and/or high rendering settings or resolution than even your very beefy system can handle, but SMP 3.3 uses fewer resources which may help.

I'm using 3.3. I honestly have no idea on what's wrong. I tried many things like low buildings, roads, forest's, without HDMesh v3 etc. What I can say is that when the low fps and stutters start appearing I have sudden CPU spikes and high usage and nothing else is running in the background. The most definite fix is to set clouds to default or 5000 square km.

[sundog]

Denco - if you only see problems occur at or above cloud draw area settings of 10,000 square km, then that would be consistent with the bug I just fixed. Might be the same thing after all.

 

[Denco]

10 minutes ago, sundog said:

Denco - if you only see problems occur at or above cloud draw area settings of 10,000 square km, then that would be consistent with the bug I just fixed. Might be the same thing after all.

 

I really hope so because I like Skymaxxx a lot

[PeterR]

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.

[niebieski]

I have had this problem before, but just now i have closed X-Plane after lengthy 7,5 hour long session and ... i'm happy to report SMP did not eat my frames permanently!
Flew Europe from south to far north (LFKC-EPWR-EFRO) with the IXEG and SMP 3.3.2+RWC+FSGRW+MaxxFX (+XSquawkBox, X-Camera etc.). This included ~2 hr stop at EPWR with FSGRW constantly updating weather in the background (again, without shutting down X-Plane!). It might be worth adding skies are mostly clear over Europe today, no CB - but still SMP generated a lot of occasional cloud formations during that period.
Apart from some RWC issues (clouds sometimes popping right in front of my face at cruise) and IXEG VNAV/MCP bugs (i hope next hotfix is around the corner) i'm pretty happy with stability. I've alt+tabbed in and out of X-Plane around 200 times (the infamous Windows 10 update uninstalled), 20+ applications running in the background and X-Plane loaded/unloaded gigabytes of add-on scenery (including hogs like HD Mesh, Warsaw City+airport and Helsinki VFR with extended scenery on).

FYI, my SMP settings:

[lanmancz]

btw: Perhaps this is related to what you guys are reporting but I have noticed that SMP 3.3.2 keeps rendering clouds that I have passed way back in the distance behind me, outside of the set radius which considerably lowers the FPS when looking into that direction. Moving the view range slider slightly and pressing Apply which recalculates the clouds brings FPS back to normal.

Edited September 21, 2016 by lanmancz

[PeterR]

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.

[Denco]

57 minutes ago, PeterR said:

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.

 

 

I still experience this, but the funny thing is I never experienced this before the 3.3.2 update and at this point I don't know if it's Skymaxx or windows updates.

Edited September 22, 2016 by Denco

[Denco]

This is definitely not Skymaxx's fault. I disable it for a flight and the same problem thing was happening. There were 3 windows updates after this problem started appearing and none of them fixed this. I'm getting quite worried and frustrated

[omhar]

On 9/22/2016 at 9:33 AM, Denco said:

This is definitely not Skymaxx's fault. I disable it for a flight and the same problem thing was happening. There were 3 windows updates after this problem started appearing and none of them fixed this. I'm getting quite worried and frustrated

Hi Denco,

Could you list the three Windows 10 updates? I removed KB3176938 but the single digit FPS problem persists.

[Denco]

11 hours ago, omhar said:

Hi Denco,

Could you list the three Windows 10 updates? I removed KB3176938 but the single digit FPS problem persists.

 

KB3176936 - This is when it started and sadly I'm not able to uninstall it.

KB3176938

KB3189866

KB3193494

[PeterR]

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 :).

[sundog]

SMP4 features a new "HD puffs" overcast setting that is much faster than sparse or dense particles. With it, you should be able to draw clouds out farther than before with the same or even better performance.

Glad to hear our latest updates got you moving in the right direction!