SkyMaxx & RWC Performance Issue After Longer Sim Session

[Bonanza123d]

Hey all,

So I have been having this problem for the past few months now on and off. At first, I was thinking it was addon aircraft related (showing up in the TBM900 and FF767 but not in Zibo), however after looking deeply into it, I might have deduced it's correlated to SkyMaxx and RWC.

What happens is, usually when I am entering the terminal environment after a long flight (probably 6,400 seconds since start of the sim) and a lot of WX, the frame rate abruptly goes from 35 down to 2. If I can get into the WX menu, I set it to clear conditions and my frames jump straight back up again. In addition, I tried changing RWC settings when the frames dropped and they shot back up again.

I am running a 2015 iMac Retina 5K with 12GB ram and the R295x graphics card.

As of writing this post, I am just stepping into work, so it'll be a little bit before I can provide a XP11 log file. Since I also have XCode on my system, I am more than willing to hook up a debugger to XP11 (Ben Supnik showed me how to do it at Flight Sim Expo) to try to resolve this issue. I have a feeling something is looping within the plugin and it's taking the entire sim with it.

Edited October 9, 2019 by Bonanza123d

[sundog]

It sounds to me like memory fragmentation on your video card. You're probably running out of VRAM over time, which leads to this sort of behavior.

The best solution is to turn down your "cloud area covered" setting, or other graphics settings within X-Plane, to ensure you stay within the bounds of your video card's memory.

[xZone]

Any news / details / about the SMP next release ?

[sundog]

12 hours ago, xZone said:

Any news / details / about the SMP next release ?

Not yet! It's only been 4 months since the last update, and my "day job" has been getting most of my attention during that time.

We have a couple of minor fixes teed up so far, regarding cloud coverage and precipitation.

[xZone]

There is still  fps drops, when clouds transition 

Manually, ASXP, RWC... 

Which is very very annoying 

Could you please do something about that? 

Thank you 

[Bonanza123d]

On 10/10/2019 at 5:50 AM, sundog said:

It sounds to me like memory fragmentation on your video card. You're probably running out of VRAM over time, which leads to this sort of behavior.

The best solution is to turn down your "cloud area covered" setting, or other graphics settings within X-Plane, to ensure you stay within the bounds of your video card's memory.

Thanks for the clue. The interesting thing though is I looked at that and I have my cloud area covered down to its absolute minimum and I still had problems. I have a feeling it's the 767 tossing it over that edge and busting the memory limits (it's Flight Factor after all). The TBM900 used to have this same problem with me before they optimized everything. That being said, the problem with their aircraft wouldn't go away after resetting the WX. I had to reset the entire sim to get my frames back.

What I might do is disable most of the WX and FX plugins and see if that helps.

I did spin up Instruments recently when the frame rate dropped and got about 2GB worth of logs and such if that might be useful to you. That being said, Ben just sent me a very long email detailing some additional debug methods to extract what's going on. If you're interested in that level of system profiling for your own personal reference, I am more than happy to provide it!

[Bonanza123d]

A bit of an important update.

Recently I received my brother's older Windows gaming computer. Spec for spec, except for the graphics card (which is a GTX 980TI), it's the same as the iMac. Long story extremely short, with all the plugins loaded, I encounter a similar problem, however it's not as bad. I'm still going from 30 FPS to around 15-16 (which is below the 19 minimum).

This could be related to the Ivy-Bridge architecture. Maybe it's time I looked into building a new computer on a modern processor architecture.