increase clouds view distance needs PC reboot

[gcharrie]

I noticed several times that increasing the cloud view distance in 3.1, the FPS dropped a lot :

- increase the 'Cloud area covered' from default to 10 000 or max.

- Clic on 'Apply'. It takes very long .... just wait few minutes (I sometimes had nvidia crash)

- when modification is applyed your FPS is horrible (10 FPS instead of 25 for example)

- stop x-plane and reboot your PC

- reload same plane, weather, same airport, my FPS is 25 or even 30 (back to good value with Cloud Area covered to max).

 

This topic is just to give advice to people having bad perfs with high cloud distance : try reboting your PC

 

notes :

- as seen in another post by sundog this morning (edit : the post : here), I deactivated hd mesh. My free  VRAM went from 600 to 1500M (out of 4G on a GTX 980).

So yes I can run with high cloud distance with good FPS... after rebooting... (needed even after deactivating hd mesh)

- the need to reboot may be because of vram fragmentation, skymaxx bug ?, my nvidia driver or configuration... I had no time to do more test.

 

Guillaume

 

 

Edited April 18, 2016 by gcharrie

[gcharrie]

update : 

this evening, when I restarted x-plane to start to play, I had only few FPS.... bad :-(

If you read my previous post, I was happy this morning because I had very good fps after rebooting.... 

 

Well, after some tests, I could figure out why : Thunderbird (the mail program) was open. Yes, you read well  !!!

I'm running on windows 7 in windowed mode and even when Thunderbird is reduced in the task bar, my fps is bad (VRAM from SMP is still 1100Mb with or without Thunderbird open).

See attached images : one is with thunderbird on (1.6 FPS) and one off (20fps) with always 25% of free vram.

 

This clearly shows that even with some amount of free VRAM, FPS can be very bad (here because of external program).

 

So : close all your not needed program ! Don't have a look at your e-mail when flying 

 

So, why is this happenning ? Thunderbird seems to block something with the GPU.

 

Can someone try to reproduce this issue ? 

 

I have : thunderbird 38.7.2 - windows 7 64b - NVIDIA 355.82 (I will try with the latest drivers and version of thunderbird if a newer one exists)

 

 

Log.txt

[PeterR]

I've noticed this also with Google Chrome, which seems to be also big VRAM consumer. When my fps dropped, closing Google Chrome helped to recover fps.

However, this seems to be always temporary and fps will drop again after some time. If there is still a bit of VRAM available, cycling cloud reflections on water setting to OFF and back to ON again helps to deal with VRAM fragmentation and restore the fps. However, if the scenery is heavy and there is not enough VRAM headroom, even the above will not help and you will need to reduce cloud area setting.

I am VRAM constrained user with 2GB VRAM only. I've already reduced X-Plane rendering settings, disabled HD Mesh v3 and reduced cloud area settings. I have very good fps, but there is always point in flight where fps will drop below 15 and I have to do some of the tricks above.

This is the first time VRAM fragmentation issue is so prominent for me. Until now, when I pushed X-Plane to the limits, it was enough to turn your head (camera) to area with less objects, fly to less heavy scenery area and/or reduce something in rendering settings and everything auto-recovered. With SMP 3.1.1. it seems fps recovery is not that trivial and drop seems to be persistent.

[sundog]

Just ran some tests here, Peter. Even with no add-ons at all (including SMP, RWC, etc.) and no custom scenery, I can blow through 2GB of VRAM just by having the "high" rendering preset on.

I think upgrading your video card would be a wise investment, if possible. HD Mesh V3 + SMP + good rendering settings probably means memory thrashing is all but unavoidable on a 2GB card. Laminar recommends 4GB just for X-Plane itself.

 

[gcharrie]

For information, I updated both thunderbird and my nvidia driver to the latest versions and my fps drop seems to have disapeared. I will confirm this with more flights (I didn't take time to check if it was thunderbird or the driver version that caused issue but my thunderbird version was old).

 

I could do a full nice flight with SMP and RWC ! 

 

PeterR, thanks for your advices and I will check Chrome too.