Weird low FPS problem

[fraxy]

Hello everyone,

I have been using SkyMAXX Pro for quiet some time now and I have a very weird problem.

When I start up my X-Plane 10.5 everything is working fine for a few hours. But after some time my FPS drop from 40-50 to around 20. Now things get weird: There are a few "fixes" that make me wonder what the actual problem is.

What I do is:

1) Close one or more programms that run in the background. Sometimes it is enough to close one, sometimes I have to close almost all of my programms except X-Plane. There are times where it is enough to just close Firefox, or Spotify, or Plan-G.. sometimes I need to shut down all of them.

2) The second way of getting my FPS instantly back to 40-50 is by changing the Cloud/Terrain Blend Softness in SkyMAXX. I do not even necessarily have to lower the value, I can just change it from 0 to 6.

Next thing is: as soon as these problems start, they get more frequent. While it takes maybe 5 hours from first X-Plane startup to first FPS drop, it takes only about 30 minutes afterwards. I even tested it up to 8 hours, and FPS dropped a few minutes after doing one of the two fixes I mentioned above.

I tested the simulator without SkyMAXX and with running several background programms for up to 8 hours as well, and there was no FPS drop.

I am really really confused. :-/

System Specs are:

Intel Core i7-4790K GPU  @  4 GHz

16 GB Ram

Nvidia GTX 1070

I am pretty sure that my SkyMAXX settings don't matter anymore, since I have tried several options. Nontheless here is what I am currently using:

 

Thank you for reading and I would appreciate any help!

[sundog]

My guess would be that all the clouds that are coming and going are causing memory fragmentation or paging within your video driver. Normally I'd advise lowering your cloud draw area setting, but it's already quite low in your settings - so I'd make sure you have the latest video driver for your video card installed as a next step.

 

[Boxin]

Just a thought... do you monitor your GPU and CPU temperature? Make sure you have an aggressive fan curve on the 1070 and see if that makes a difference. You may already do this, but just an idea.

It's also really important to tell us what resolution you are running on your display. This can make a huge difference if you are running 4k.

If you are running a high resolution (higher than 1080p) try down sampling and turning up your AA settings.

Also to put your mind at ease, the same happens to me in weather heavy areas. I see a 82fps to 22fps hit. A lot is going on out there though and I am a new SMP user so I don't have any experience with earlier versions yet.  :-) Also my cloud area is around 70km though so i'm asking for it.

Edited July 23, 2017 by Boxin

[fraxy]

Hey guys,

I will update my graphics card driver and have a look on the GPU and CPU temperature and will report how it goes!

Thanks so far

[sundog]

Could it be you were flying into an area with thunderstorms? Those are heavy on performance, although they should be much faster in our upcoming SMP 4.6 release.

[Boxin]

I fixed my FPS problem and wanted to stop back and share. I had quite a few altered files and scripts. I have only had SMP a few days so I did a few things to trouble shoot my FPS dive, and it worked. I went from bottoming out 22fps to 42fps at it's lowest.

What I did was uninstall SMP (Using add/remove programs) and backed up some custom textures then ran an integrity check through steam. It replaced 400 something files...

I reinstalled SMP and .... fixed. We mod our flight sims so much that we need to look in other places. Anyways, it doubled my FPS by doing this. As far as weather goes I do not mod anything... I have just SMP and RWC running. 

If you have had the install a while, and installed quite a few mods and plugins, try the same thing. I purchased X-plane through steam so I just run the integrity check, but from what I have read the X-Plane launcher has a similar thing.

Always try and keep your drivers up to date. The most important one is your graphics card when it comes to sims.

Just a heads up; Your 3rd party aircrafts, custom data folder and plugins folder wont be touched. Everything there will stay as is.

Edited July 24, 2017 by Boxin

[fraxy]

Hello guys,

unfortunately I don't have success yet.

On 22.7.2017 at 7:07 PM, sundog said:

My guess would be that all the clouds that are coming and going are causing memory fragmentation or paging within your video driver. Normally I'd advise lowering your cloud draw area setting, but it's already quite low in your settings - so I'd make sure you have the latest video driver for your video card installed as a next step.

 

First of all I updated my graphics card driver and reinstalled SMP.

 

On 23.7.2017 at 4:32 PM, Boxin said:

Just a thought... do you monitor your GPU and CPU temperature? Make sure you have an aggressive fan curve on the 1070 and see if that makes a difference. You may already do this, but just an idea.

It's also really important to tell us what resolution you are running on your display. This can make a huge difference if you are running 4k.

If you are running a high resolution (higher than 1080p) try down sampling and turning up your AA settings.

Also to put your mind at ease, the same happens to me in weather heavy areas. I see a 82fps to 22fps hit. A lot is going on out there though and I am a new SMP user so I don't have any experience with earlier versions yet.  :-) Also my cloud area is around 70km though so i'm asking for it.

I checked my GPU temperatur which is very stable on 68° - 70 °C. I am running my sim on 1080p. I will upload a screenshot of my X-Plane settings in the end of this post.

On 24.7.2017 at 1:14 PM, sundog said:

Could it be you were flying into an area with thunderstorms? Those are heavy on performance, although they should be much faster in our upcoming SMP 4.6 release.

Since I am flying helicopters, I stay away from shitty weather The problem even occurs when there is almost blue skies with just a few clouds.

This is getting frustrating. One more thing I forgot to mention: IF the fps are getting low all of the sudden, they obviously stay low until I do one or both things of the two "work arounds" stated above, but only if the horizon is in sight. So if I watch down to the ground of way up into the sky, and the horizon is out of sight the FPS go to normal again.

 

[fraxy]

On 24.7.2017 at 3:35 PM, Boxin said:

I fixed my FPS problem and wanted to stop back and share. I had quite a few altered files and scripts. I have only had SMP a few days so I did a few things to trouble shoot my FPS dive, and it worked. I went from bottoming out 22fps to 42fps at it's lowest.

What I did was uninstall SMP (Using add/remove programs) and backed up some custom textures then ran an integrity check through steam. It replaced 400 something files...

I reinstalled SMP and .... fixed. We mod our flight sims so much that we need to look in other places. Anyways, it doubled my FPS by doing this. As far as weather goes I do not mod anything... I have just SMP and RWC running. 

If you have had the install a while, and installed quite a few mods and plugins, try the same thing. I purchased X-plane through steam so I just run the integrity check, but from what I have read the X-Plane launcher has a similar thing.

Always try and keep your drivers up to date. The most important one is your graphics card when it comes to sims.

Just a heads up; Your 3rd party aircrafts, custom data folder and plugins folder wont be touched. Everything there will stay as is.

I will try this. I have reinstalled SMP, but I haven't run the integrity check through steam while having SMP uninstalled.

[sundog]

1 hour ago, fraxy said:

So if I watch down to the ground of way up into the sky, and the horizon is out of sight the FPS go to normal again.

Any custom scenery in the mix here? The main thing that changes when you do this is that very little terrain and scenery is drawn.

[fraxy]

Yea. I got ZL18 orthophoto and a few very small heliports sceneries in the area.

But, this should be affected too, right?

Quote

2) The second way of getting my FPS instantly back to 40-50 is by changing the Cloud/Terrain Blend Softness in SkyMAXX. I do not even necessarily have to lower the value, I can just change it from 0 to 6.

 

Edited July 26, 2017 by fraxy

[sundog]

When you adjust SkyMaxx's settings, it deletes all of the existing visible and cached clouds and recreates them. This both frees up a lot of video memory and clears up some memory fragmentation that may have piled up.

So it may be that you have a more general problem of memory running low or becoming fragmented on your video card, due to the pressure of that ortho scenery. When you change SMP's settings, it clears up enough memory to get you going again for awhile. Video memory is a shared resource, so just because changing SMP's settings clears things up, it doesn't mean SMP is the culprit for using too much of it.

I'd try flying without that ortho scenery and see if that helps.

 

Edited July 26, 2017 by sundog

[fraxy]

I'll give that a go

[fraxy]

Hey guys, hope you all have a nice weekend!

I wish I could report some progress, but even without using any orthophoto my FPS is getting really really bad. As soon as I stop the SMP plugin in the plugin admin they jump to normal agian.

[sundog]

Puzzling. The next time your frame-rate drops, can you open up your SMP settings window and take a screenshot of it? That will give us more information about the state of your VRAM usage etc. at that point.

Posting your log.txt might also turn something up - again after you've experienced this problem so we can see what was going on under the hood.

[mga010]

Did you try lowering the amount of world objects? If you look to the horizon those may come into sight, textures load in your card, jamming the graphics RAM.

[fraxy]

Ok guys, I will do so and get back to you as soon as I have more information.