Low FPS in stormy conditions

[Gradl]

Hi Skymaxx-Team,

I'm a Skymaxx user since version 2 for X-Plane 10 and was always quite happy with the program. I upgraded to X-Plane 11 and version 4.6 this year and getting troubles with my fps in stormy conditions. I have constant 25-35 fps in all weather conditions exept storm systems. If im entering a stormy aera my fps drop sigificantly and I can only achieve 10-15 fps and my simrate drops (IVAO ATC starts yelling at me :-D) 

Is suspect the storm rendering of SMP 4.6 causing this drop, is there a way to disable, tweak in that area. It is the only big problem I have with SMP 4.6. Can you investigate, patch this ?

 

Hardware: Intel i5 2500k @ 3.2 Ghz (old but working fine)

GPU: Nvidia 1060 6GB 

RAM: 16 GB

Weather: NOAA Plugin (default weather seems currently broken) 

 

Regards

Florian

[sundog]

Storms involve rendering a very large number of clouds, including some very large cumulonimbus and towering cumulus clouds. Accurately depicting these sorts of conditions will consume extra resources on your system; there's just no avoiding it.

All I can suggest is reducing your "cloud area covered" setting further if you plan on flying into stormy areas, and making sure your X-Plane graphics options are tuned properly for your system.

[Ben Russell]

While your i5 might be "working fine" it's also working at almost half the speed of a modern i7.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i5-2500K+%40+3.30GHz&id=804

 

[sundog]

Yes, when there are lots of clouds present SkyMaxx Pro will demand a lot from the CPU and not just the GPU. So that would definitely be a factor.

[Gradl]

I know the 2500k is and old cpu and the bottleneck on my system (fps counter shows that). I'm quite happy with the performance in overcast or broken situation, only storms/turbulence cause fps drops. 

[sundog]

Storms require us to draw many more clouds and larger clouds, and this taxes your CPU more, impacting performance.