Unpausing FS9 reduces frame rates

[martinlest2 58]

I have never noticed this before! I fly in full screen, BTW, but same thing happens in windowed mode too..

 

When I unpause FS9, once it is fully loaded, my fps immediately drops. I have the fps locked at 60: at UK2000's Gatwick Extreme just now, flying a PMDG 747-400, AI traffic at 80% and with ActiveSky producing a lot of heavy cloud, I get about 55fps. As soon as I unpause the sim it drops to an average of just over 40. (When I first noticed this earlier today, my heart sank - to put it politely, as unpausing fs9 caused fps to go from about 55 to just over 10! I closed everything down and rebooted, and the drop is now a lot less, fortunately!).

 

That is still smooth and no problem in itself, but why would the frame rates be so different? I am sure I would have noticed this if it had been happening before. (I did a Windows Update since I last flew FS9 - 130 updates installed: hadn't done it for a while! But could that explain it??).

 

Does everyone get a frame rate drop like this on unpausing the sim?

Martin

[Johan_Dees 84]

Windows processing the updates in the background ? will take a lot of time before it settles down.

[ronzie 21]

It could be ai being rendered in a catch up to their schedules. Pausing the sim may also cause other items to catch up after releasing the pause. If you are downloading real time weather that could be one item.

 

What Win version. Remember FS renders using the main motherboard CPU mostly with minimal use of the graphics CPU. If you run Win 7 it has been shown to redirect some rendering to your graphics processor as published in Computer Pilot magazine. There is an extract aso here somewhere in features.

 

After waiting a while unpausing the sim do the frame rates increase again?

[martinlest2 58]

The problem is/was that this had never happened before, so any of the events you describe would have been going on before, but were having little or no impact on frame rates.

 

I am just going to fly for an hour or two and will monitor frame rates. At EGKK I now have about 24fps, which is about half of what I might have expected yesterday.. and about 58fps the second I hit the pause key: love to know what this changes so immediately!

 

I've been having problems with BSODs (BSsOD??) too, so all in all...

[Luke 782]

What Win version. Remember FS renders using the main motherboard CPU mostly with minimal use of the graphics CPU. If you run Win 7 it has been shown to redirect some rendering to your graphics processor as published in Computer Pilot magazine. There is an extract aso here somewhere in features.

 

Got a link to this claim? I've tried Googling but without success.

 

Cheers!

 

Luke

[martinlest2 58]

Frame rates recovered but at the runway went down again - to about 10fps. Pausing had the usual effect - back up to almost 60fps. I wonder if I use Process Monitor whether I will be able to see what is going on. Or any better suggestions how to analyse why pausing the sim would have such a dramatic effect on the fps?

[Appliance 51]

You could also try using the free version of Process Lasso.

[martinlest2 58]

Never heard of it  - I have gone to the web page. Can't quite see how it monitors resources. I'd need a second-by-second list of what is happening at any given time - like the change in resource usage when I press 'P' in FS9 that would account for a fivefold increase in frame rates.

 

The other thing with software like this is that I just have to trust that it is doing my PC good and not harm. "Process Lasso allows you to change settings for select processes. Change process priorities, CPU affinities, I/O and memory priorities permanently, or restrict it to one running instance" it says, for instance. I have little technical knowledge of such things and I'd just have to set it and leave it according the the programme's defaults (as they recommend). The problem is there is just so much tweaking software out there of this kind that it is almost impossible to know which ones are doing anything positive and which may actually be harming the PC, or its performance.

 

I always suppose that between them companies like Microsoft, nVidia and Intel kind of know what they are doing and programmes like this may, in the long run, do more harm than good when they interfere with processes that the designers probably do not understand as intimately as the people that created them in the first place.

 

Do you use this software yourself? Can you say that it is doing a good job? If so, in what way? If I first identify a problem with process priorities that Process Lasso might fix, then it certainly may be worth installing.

 

Of course it may not be system resources that are the problem insofar as my fsp 'issue' is concerned: I have 16GBs of physical RAM and there is always at least 10GBs free, no matter what the frame rate is. I perhaps need to look at the page file too, though that is normally as 0% usage. I also need to check system file fragmentation... plenty to look at!

 

Thanks for the reply!

 

EDIT: No, I don't need to look at fragmentation: I momentarily forgot, the PC runs with SSDs only!

[Luke 782]

Probably a good start is to see what's going on with other processes. Make sure you display CPU usage from system processes and all other users.

 

Cheers!

Luke

[ronzie 21]

Got a link to this claim? I've tried Googling but without success.

 

Cheers!

 

Luke

 

I recalled the author of the article and he is now back here on AVSIM as a contributing author. I believe the article referred to is referenced in this thread:

 

http://www.avsim.com/topic/325610-benchmark-testing-results/page-5?hl=%2Bdoug+%2Bhorton#entry1935313

 

As I recall he ran benchmarks under Win 7 and either XP or VISTA on the same hardware using FSX.

 

Doug ran a whole series of articles on FSX benchmarks in Computer Pilot just before CP closed down as published by PC Avitor. CP resurfaced under a new publisher, the faded, but  I just got an e-mail stating it is back up.

 

This article concerns test speeds with different graphics cards concluding most rendering was about the same and depended of the main CPU clock speeds:

 

http://www.avsim.com/index.php/_/reviews/hardware/benchmarking-fsx-with-three-models-of-500-serie-r1592

 

In the CP magazine check out his benchmarks in his Horton's Hints column here in this sample issue starting on page 70:

 

http://www.scribd.com/doc/65036925/Computer-Pilot-Magazine-Volume-Issue-September-October-2011#scribd

 

Another related article is:

 

http://discuss.extremetech.com/forums/permalink/1004427364/1004427364/ShowThread.aspx

 

Anyway I searched for doug horton FSX benchmarks and got lots of hits, some restricted.

[Skywatcher 133]

If you hadn't had the fps counter on and it dropped from 60 to 40 would you have noticed? At a fps of 10 you would have noticed. I would suggest turn the fps counter off, lock fps at 25-30 and fly. I think this would be the best place to start.

Regarding GPU, it does make a difference. I just upgraded my machine with the GTX 970 and nothing else. Ran both FS9 and FSX and it makes quite a difference. FSX could not even be run on my old card. Now I can max almost everything out but have clouds turned down. CPU is certainly heavily used, likely more than the GPU but I think you need both CPU and GPU for FS9 or FSX. For FSX you simply need a better CPU than you do for FS9.

 

[martinlest2 58]

Yes, I would certainly have noticed the drop without an fps counter, when it falls to around 10fps. That is very obvious... If the fall is to 40fps, then I have no problem of course, but I still would want to know what changes occur when the sim is paused. I will look further into that when I have the time, using Process Monitor and so on, although the results are not always easy to interpret (PM may show increased call on fs9.exe when you unpause the sim, but what would that prove?).

[sascha 314]

I always have some fps loss when unpausing, but I always attributed this to the fact that there are no graphics being loaded (and probably other processes not updating) because the plane is stationary. An average of about 15%, by the way.

 

Cheers,

Sascha

[Appliance 51]

"Do you use this software yourself? Can you say that it is doing a good job? If so, in what way? If I first identify a problem with process priorities that Process Lasso might fix, then it certainly may be worth installing."

 

 

Yes. I own the paid version.  Yes it does a good job.  Yes it is complicated to setup to get the very best from it.  No I haven't fully exploited its capabilities ... by nature I am not a tweaker.  The author regularly updates the program. 

 

I recommend you download the free program, select ProBalance enabled and Gaming mode enabled and see if there is any improvement. Lasso has a small footprint and uses little in the way of resources.  It can be a set-and-forget program.

I forgot to mention it shows all processes in real time and can keep a log of them for later perusal.

[Dazzlercee23 66]

For me, over many years with FS, pausing the sim always shows an increase in FPS, and then un-pausing brings it back down to normal levels.

 

My assumption, especially when using a heavy payware aircraft, is that the behind the scenes processing for the aircraft systems, gauges, VC etc, etc is also paused and therefore the base FPS increases due to freed CPU cycles.