sundog

I see you are using Active Sky XP as well... be sure to review the Real Weather Connector manual for instructions on connecting ASXP with RWC and SMP. Based on your log, it seems something is constantly changing the storm severity in X-Plane (specifically the sim/weather/thunderstorm_percent dataref) and I think this may be causing some problems. It's possible there is some other plugin conflict going on here, and you have quite a few installed. You may need to temporarily remove plugins until you find the one that is interfering.

You need to re download it, not just re install. To be safe delete the contents of the resources/plugins/SilverLining/sky colors/ default sky colors folder first, and run the x-plane installer to repair any corrupt files.

We're learning that most performance issues seem to be tied to people running with very high anti-aliasing settings and/or very high resolutions. If you can knock down your AA settings a bit, you may find that you can re-enable overcast volumetric clouds.

Me either I'm afraid. Knowing how things work internally I don't see how wind would affect our performance. There may have been something else going on coincidentally at the same time. So far most performance issues seem tied to people using higher anti-aliasing settings and/or very high resolutions, which is expected with the per-pixel rendering volumetric clouds do.

Try reducing your anti-aliasing setting and/or resolution. Volumetric clouds are very sensitive to these settings because they are computed per-pixel-fragment.

Performance depends almost entirely on your resolution and anti-aliasing settings. Volumetric clouds are very sensitive to how many pixel fragments you are drawing per frame. Simply turning down your AA setting a bit may help a lot, and likely with little to no visible change in quality.

I think 8x anti-aliasing at your high resolution is pushing at 8GB card a bit too far. It works out to 30 million pixel fragments that we need to compute every frame which will also tax performance. Memory management on the GPU is complicated and even though you may have something that says half is still available, it might not be available specifically for what's needed. Try reducing your anti-aliasing and see if that helps. If you go from 8x to 4x that halves the number of pixel fragments and probably looks just as good to the eye.

VR performance issues are probably driven by the same things causing performance issues on people using 4K monitors that we're seeing. Just too many pixels to render; at some point something pushes things over the edge. I'm going to spend some time today trying to understand what's going on under the hood better.

What resolution and AA setting are you running at? So far it seems a common theme in people with performance issues is that they are running at 4K resolution and/or high anti-aliasing settings. Volumetric clouds are rendered per-pixel-fragment, so their performance is very sensitive to these settings. For example on my system I can quadruple performance by just switching AA from 8X to FXAA.

Oh not at all. I fully understand that volumetric isn't everyone's cup of tea, and the non-volumetric clouds are still something we're proud of.

My best guess is that it's somehow associated with the custom scenery for KLAX you have installed - maybe something in it is putting things into a state we don't expect. But it might be "just a glitch" of our own making and something that's just going to take awhile for us to reproduce and track down. I have seen a similar report of lightning suddenly turning black and it may be related to that same issue, which I'm also having trouble getting to happen. Anyhow it's on my radar...

Hm, what monitor resolution and AA settings are you running at? If you can post your log.txt it might help us understand where you're memory is going (or if something else is going on)

It's possible it's not just you. I've asked X-Aviation if they are getting other reports via trouble tickets about 5.05 degrading in performance relative to 5.04. If so we will strongly consider reverting that shader change. Thanks for the report.

Hm, just went to KLAX here it and it seems to be rendering those clouds OK. So, seems it's one of those fun issues that's system or setup-specific. If you can post a copy of your log.txt it might tell me more about your system and the aircraft you're using, both of which might be relevant. Thanks for the report.

They are fast and optimized, but 4K with anti-aliasing is just too much for them on today's hardware. Volumetric clouds work by doing heavy computations for every pixel fragment. At the resolution and AA settings you want to run at, you're asking SkyMaxx Pro to compute clouds at 20 MILLION pixel fragments every frame. Computer graphics and flight simming has always been a game of choosing tradeoffs between quality and performance, and no piece of software can promise good performance on any system and any configuration you want to run at. Non-volumetric clouds compute lighting at a much coarser level and so are a better fit at the resolution you want. I do not work for X-Aviation and have no access to their payment systems. You're barking up the wrong tree here.

I'm not going to comment on claims made by X-Aviation; I just know what I've said personally. If you paid full price for v5 then you must be a new customer. Try setting the cumulus and overcast options to non-volumetric options and you should regain performance at higher resolutions. They look pretty good too. Unfortunately it is the nature of volumetric rendering that higher resolutions come at higher performance costs. There's nothing we can do about that. But for typical 1080 resolutions they do perform quite well, and we did do some novel things to squeeze some extra performance from them.

I generally fly under Vulkan without issue. But in Vulkan, X-Plane has a unified depth buffer where the cockpit and the rest of the scene are all drawn together. Under OpenGL, they are drawn separately and we're able to draw out clouds in between the two... so it works a bit more reliably in this respect.

Looks like one of our textures got blown away somehow... do you have any other add-ons installed that do rendering of their own?

I saw "looking into the clouds" in the post title and assumed that's what you meant. Volumetric clouds work by performing expensive calculations for every pixel fragment of your screen where clouds might be visible. If you're looking down, it does nothing because we know there are no clouds there. But when you look into the sky you incur the performance cost of volumetric clouds. To mitigate it, your best bet is probably to lower your resolution or anti-aliasing settings. On my own GTX1080 system it does perform better than non-volumetric clouds, but this is at 1920x1080 resolution. We've never promised that it would outperform them on every system or under every setting.

Huh. We literally added a single operation to the fragment shader for volumetric clouds in 5.0.5 in order to implement soft cloud/terrain blending. It didn't hurt performance on my own system but somehow it pushed yours over the edge, even though you have a much better GPU than I do. I'll have to discuss with @Cameronif we should revert that change. Might not be worth it. The intent was to get nicer cloud/terrain blending so we could remove the 500 meter lower limit on volumetric cloud layers to avoid terrain intersections.

OK, sounds like these files crept in somewhere between me handing off the 5.0.5 package and the installer being built for it. Thanks for the info.

Can't say I've noticed this myself under similar settings. It might be specific to certain aircraft.

That's a known effect and expected. When you are inside a cloud looking out, volumetric clouds must compute every pixel on your screen along a very long ray. It's basically the worst case scenario. Reducing the cloud draw area setting can help, but generally speaking framerates are less important inside a cloud anyhow. You don't need 60 FPS to see a gray wall in front of you

Almost certainly due to memory running out. When you change cloud settings it actually has to render both the old clouds and new clouds together as it fades the old ones out and the new ones in. If you were tight on memory that can push it over the edge. Solutions are to reduce your memory usage via some means... lowering graphics settings, not using photo scenery, or reducing your cloud draw area setting in SMP.

In general, crashes are almost always due to running out of memory. Volumetric clouds are very memory-hungry; if you have too many other add-ons or custom scenery installed you can push your system over the edge.