sundog

Bob, I think your situation is a little different from kneighbor's. If you look at the memory display in the SkyMaxx Pro configuration, you'll see you're almost out of video memory. Usually this happens from custom scenery, or just having a video card with a very small amount of VRAM. You're asking X-Plane to draw more information than your system can handle. When you run out of video memory, your graphic driver needs to start swapping data in a very slow manner, and this can kill performance. The easiest thing for now is to reduce the cloud draw area setting; this can at least reduce the memory needed by our clouds. SkyMaxx Pro's default cloud draw distance is higher in 3.1 than it was in 3.0, so if you were on the edge of running out of memory in 3.0, 3.1 can push you over that edge. The reason turning on reflections, or toggling any cloud-related setting, helps is because it forces the driver to reload our clouds into memory, which can clear up memory fragmentation issues the driver may have encountered when memory got scarce. You can see it gave you back just enough video memory to get things going again. But it's only a temporary solution. Short answer: reduce your cloud draw area setting. Turning off cloud shadows, reflections, and setting the softness to 0 can also help.

Your NVidia system information says you have two different NVidia cards installed at once. How exactly are those set up? Also, I tried what you suggested just testing with a clean demo install and going to YBBN. I enabled and disabled SMP several times, but consistently my framerate with SMP OFF was around 116, and with it ON around 132. Main differences I see between our systems is you have two cards installed, while I have a single GTX970. Also you're on Windows 7, and I'm on 10.

Well the difference is, in the full version my framerates are fine and basically unaffected by SMP. I'll try the demo version though, that's a good suggestion. I'm working on some changes too just based on my best guess as to what might be triggering whatever is happening to you.

The slider issue when resetting the cloud/terrain blending is at least something I can see. I've fixed that here for a future update. As for everything else you're seeing - I'm as puzzled as you are. I'm simply not seeing that behavior here, nor seeing similar reports from others that aren't VRAM-related. I've tried everything you described doing, and none of it affects my framerate. I'm tempted to blame defective hardware, but that would be a fairly fantastic claim to make. Have you tried totally uninstalling your driver prior to installing the latest? I'll keep trying to reproduce this and sleep on it, but so far I don't have a rational explanation for what's happening on your system.

SkyMaxx does in fact think the sun is a little bit lower than it really is, by just a couple of degrees. We did this on purpose, because some customers were complaining that Skymaxx Pro 3.0's clouds were too bright just as the sun was going down. I'm going to adjust it back a little bit for a future update, though, because personally I think you're right. It only affects a few minutes around sunset, though. Can't make everyone happy! In fact, that's been my main lesson in SkyMaxx Pro 3.1. Almost everything we've changed in response to customer feedback has been met with new criticism from the opposite direction, although I know the silent majority is really enjoying this update overall.

For what it's worth, you are literally the only person I've heard of this happening to, out of thousands of people using SMP 3.1. So whatever is causing X-Plane to hang at shutdown for you is something really unusual. It might be a good idea to install a fresh copy of X-Plane into a new directory, install SMP 3.1, confirm things are OK, and start adding other scenery + addons from there.

kneighbor, I think my system is pretty similar to yours, so I tried the same experiment. Went to YBBN (although that wasn't a lake for me) with a default aircraft and default SMP settings. But with or without SMP, my framerates were similar - between 70 and 80. I measured framerates using FRAPS and X-Plane's built-in framerate display with the same result. I suspect what you're seeing is very specific to your X-Plane rendering settings and/or NVidia driver settings. If you can narrow down which one, it would be helpful. Getting technical, what you're describing sounds like memory is getting fragmented by the driver. When you change cloud settings in SMP, it causes the old set of clouds to get discarded and a new set to be recreated, which could clear up fragmentation problems. I'm running the 364.72 driver here FWIW. I should point out that 45 FPS is actually a pretty good framerate; 30 or above will produce fluid motion. Keep in mind your brain can't even perceive framerates higher than 60.

If you look at the configuration screen for SkyMaxx Pro, how much available video and system memory does it report for your system?

Weird; it sounds like somehow your settings file for SMP got corrupt or unwritable, and re-installing cleared it up. kneighbor - reinstalling may be worth a shot for you too, but I still suspect fill rate if your bottleneck. The fragment shader for our clouds needs to run for every pixel a cloud draws over, and on high resolution displays that can add up. Turning down the cloud draw area means fewer clouds get drawn, which means fewer pixels get covered by clouds. But, you might find the cloud detail setting makes more of a difference for you - it should reduce the amount of "overdraw" the clouds do, which helps with fill rate.

My response was to rokisk8. I think your issue has more to do with the effective monitor resolution you're using. You said you're running 5 monitors at 4K? I didn't even know that was possible! In your case, the bottleneck is probably fill rate as opposed to VRAM.

You say you unzipped the installer, but you didn't say that you actually ran the installer. I suspect there's nothing but a settings file left in your SilverLining plugins folder, left over from your previous installation. Don't just unzip it. Double-click the installer that gets unzipped to run it.

Lower your cloud draw area then. You're probably tight on VRAM, as explained above.

Glad you're enjoying it Thanks for posting this! Just to clear up any potential confusion though, the "cloud reflection" settings in SkyMaxx Pro actually apply to reflections of the clouds in the water. The lighting of clouds by your landing lights is always active, provided your plane's landing lights are on and it is sufficiently dark outside.

Peter - the cache doesn't leak or grow unbounded or anything (I spent a LOT of time testing that), but if VRAM is tight the driver can start to struggle with memory management over time. I think that's probably what you're seeing. More VRAM (or fewer clouds) would help, but as a temporary solution, try opening up the SMP configuration when this happens and slightly change a setting like the draw area. That will cause the clouds to get regenerated, which somehow seems to help NVidia's drivers clean up its memory fragmentation in my experience.

A quick note on performance - I've been monitoring the forums and social media, and it seems like most people are seeing the same or better framerates with Skymaxx Pro 3.1 compared to 3.0. And people are noticing that "stutters" when new weather conditions are loaded are reduced, which is what we were hoping for! However, that reduction of stutters is done by pre-loading the clouds you might need when SkyMaxx Pro starts up. This means that if your system was already on the edge of running out of memory (video or system RAM,) SkyMaxx Pro 3.1 could push your system over the edge, leading to decreased framerates or even crashes depending on your driver. If this is happening to you, try reducing the "cloud draw area" setting in SkyMaxx Pro - that's the easiest way to lighten up its memory requirements without giving up your custom scenery, and whatever else is eating up your memory. Turning off cloud reflections is also a good way to reclaim some performance if needed. It's surprisingly easy to run out of memory in X-Plane if you're using custom scenery, high rendering option settings, high monitor resolutions, custom aircraft, and/or high settings in SkyMaxx Pro. "I have a good computer" doesn't mean you have enough memory for everything you're asking X-Plane to do, unless you stick to a default setup. And who does that? Hope this helps!

Clouds more than 50km away are, as Cameron said, drawn as "dynamically generated imposters." In order to preserve performance, we draw these distant clouds as 2D textures, and only update them when your viewpoint moves by some significant amount. The other big flight simulators use a similar trick as well. Usually it's not too noticeable, but if you're moving at high speeds and looking sideways relative to your motion, you start to see how the illusion works. As you've already found, bringing in the draw distance to less than 50km eliminates the imposters, leaving you with only true 3D clouds in the scene. It's working as intended; it's a trade off between perfection and performance.

We do simulate the effects of moonlight on the clouds, so that's probably what you're seeing. It's quite intentional.

I've thought about it, but I haven't been able to find a way to do this accurately enough. X-Plane doesn't have a dataref or anything that says "city lights cover this area" that a plugin can access. xenviro must be approximating this information somehow, but I don't know how to be honest.

Clouds are dark at night already. It sounds like you might be using an older version, or you're encountering a very specific time and place where the lighting isn't what you expect. There are some very minor tweaks to cloud lighting around sunset and sunrise in the 3.1 update however. 3.1 has a bunch of performance improvements in it. You may be able to get away with higher draw distance settings, with or without Real Weather Connector installed.

Yes, it mostly has to do with the time of day and the thickness of the cloud. Skymaxx Pro 3.1 will also brighten them up a bit more.

We just packaged up our release candidate 3 internally - so yes, soon!

In all seriousness, we've been hearing from a few very vocal customers lately who really do want SMP to show photographs. I know some cloud packages in certain other simulators take this approach, and it's usually people coming from FSX who expect this. However, we've never set out to replicate the cloud add-ons for FSX. Our clouds are created algorithmically in three dimensions, ensuring an immersive 3D experience as you fly around and through the clouds where no two clouds are exactly the same. That's not going to change anytime soon. If you have any questions as to whether SkyMaxx Pro is right for you, I encourage you to look at the videos and screenshots on our product page. We don't misrepresent anything. The upcoming 3.1 update adds landing light illumination on clouds, but focuses more on performance enhancements than visual changes.

That is usually a symptom of SkyMaxx Pro not authenticating properly. Is there a line anywhere in your log.txt that says: SkyMaxx Pro license check failed. Clouds will be disabled. ? If so, make sure you're connected to the Internet. Sometimes authentication will fail if you try to use SkyMaxx Pro on too many different computers, too. If that's not it, are you using some sort of external weather injector?

You might also consider turning off cloud reflections if you can live without them - that can help performance by a surprising amount.

The memory usage we report comes straight from your video driver. I would guess the negative value is its way of telling us that it's actually swapping into your system memory out of necessity, which is very slow. This isn't surprising; you've got a third-party aircraft, it looks like you've cranked up Skymaxx Pro's cloud draw distance all the way, and you've got a bunch of custom scenery too - all on a video card that I believe only has 1 GB of on-board memory. I think the easiest thing to do would be to hit the "reset" button on SkyMaxx Pro's configuration screen. Turning up the cloud draw distance can have a big impact on VRAM usage and performance, and I don't think your system is powerful enough to handle much beyond our default settings.