PROBLEM: Autogen rendering is major FPS hog!

[Guest OneTinSoldier]

Hello Johan,I tried your suggestion. My MAX_TEXTURE_LOAD was at a default value of 1024. I changed it to 2048. Absolutely no change in performance or, put another way, the stability and behavior of FPS. As soon as I left FS9, I checked my FS9.cfg file. It was back to the default value of 1024.Regards,One Tin Soldier

[Guest tascaso]

>Last evening I was flying the PMDG737 with virtual cockpit>enabled. I noticed that as soon as I go into VC, my FPS drops>from 25 (locked) to around 8. Display/AI/scenery settings etc.>have no influence. Even with every slider to the left this>happens. I have not tried the PMDG737 without VC yet, nor have>I tried if this happens with default MS planes.>The most interesting thing of this all is that after the FPS>drop, my FPS goes up to 25 again when I press Alt twice (when>I'm not in VC). IE make the menubar appear/disappear. Anyone>else noticed this? :-hmmm >My machine: AMD XP2600+@333, Asus A7N8X Deluxe, 512MB PC2100,>Radeon 9500 Pro, WinXPPro. FS2004 running in seperate>partition, all background apps killed...>The PMDG is a resouce HOG all on its own...I have been sticking to other aircraft when testing the various fixes to this sluggish behavior. So far this does not look good.Tony

[JimmiG 244]

OK first of all, this is not a problem caused by people not having powerful enough computers to run full detail. Sometimes, the FPS is just fine for me, above 30 FPS, then all of a sudden it's down to 10. Toggling some settings on and off again sometimes makes the framerate go back to 30. Worst case, I save the flight and exit FS9. When starting it again, framerate is normal...for a while. So, you don't need a 5 GHz PC to run FS2004 at full detail, you only need to find out what's causing these slowdowns and it should be playable on any 2-3 GHz system.I don't think it's caused by autogen itself. If you remember FS2002, there was a problem that caused framerates to go down over France. I think it had something to do with winds or turbulence modelling or something. Don't remember. Maybe something similar is happening here, but more often? Anyone who's using FSUIPC want to try out a few settings?It might also be that autogen textures are not cleared from the local video memory properly, filling it up and forcing FS to load the new textures over AGP.I have no idea, but something is clearly wrong here. Definitely warrants a patch from Microsoft.

[ulisses 1]

My autogen is OFF and everything is fine, yesterday I flew for about 2 hours without any major FPS hit.FS2002 also had a problem with ATC traffic in busy areas that full the memory/CPU and FPS went to 2-3 FPS, then setting the ATC to 0% brings the FPS back to normal.Ulisses

[Guest Turnbull2000]

Here's an example of what I experience when flying over urban scenery. Shot1 was taken soon after take-off from Tacoma and slewed until the framerate dropped. The fps has dropped from the 30 limit to around 19. Autogen is set to 'Dense'.http://www.paulturnbull.myby.co.uk/Shot1.jpg (Dense 19fps)http://www.paulturnbull.myby.co.uk/Shot2.jpg (Very Dense 28fps)Shot 2 is the same sitatuation, but with the Autogen slider moved up to 'Very Dense'. The fps is now hitting the limit again. Clearly, hardware restrictions do not apply.P4 3.06GHz1.5GB PC1066 RDRAM9700 Pro @350/330200GB 7200RPM48xCD-ROM/DVD+RW21" Sony TrinitronSBL5.1/Klipsch ProMedia 2.1

[rhumbaflappy 113]

When you went to the Display menu, moved the slider and clicked OK, the scenery reloaded.This will flush the texture and object buffer and will be the same as starting the flight anew. Framerates should improve.As I have said before, the "release" of the objects and autogen when not in the viewing distance is the problem. Objects don't use memory or CPU cycles before they are viewed, but after they are viewed, they continue to load the system resources, until the sim choses to release them from memory... which is probably controlled by BGL-header or landclass-distance settings. In BGLs this used to be adjustable, and when the SDK arrives, we'll see if it still is. With autogen, this would be controlled by the distance at which groundtile textures appear and disappear. We may be able to control that by sliders of CFG settings, if only we knew where to look for it. But FPS would never get to the point of a newly refreshed display, such as you triggered by changing the settings.Dick

[peppy197 165]

I did not see an Autogen building inside another autogen, but I did see three Mooneys flying in close formation, and on another occasion I had about 8 learjets at high altitude in formation. I did not have any add-ins for these a/c. I leave all sliders at Max-less-one(p4-2.4/512/128NVdia)There is a problem in assigning things i guess...Allen

[Bruce Nicholson KMFR 20]

Here's a new twist on this topic.Everyone is talking about autogen scenery slowing down the sim as the textures load and unload. My theory is it's not the autogen specifically, but any type of texture loading and unloading is causing the sim to slow down.Here is my experiment and others are welcome to try it to see if they get similar results.Start the sim and choose the clear weather theme, place your aircraft at a rural dirt strip (this elimates AI aircraft activity at the airfield) and only autogen trees in the background. Move to the outside view so you are looking at your aircraft and the surrounding background.Turn on the frame counter (better to have the average frame counter set up) and note the average FPS. My sim was set locked at 20 FPS.Check the sim again 12, 18, 24, 36, and 48 hours later. You'll find that the average FPS will decrease over time with no aircraft movement and no changes in the background scenery except for the sky, aircraft, ground, and autogen tree textures changing over time (plus an occasional AI aircraft crossing the sky - set AI to zero if you want to eliminate this as part of the test).My tests showed that the sim was averaging 19.6 FPS when I started. Then dropped to 18.2 FPS 12 hours later, 16.7 FPS 18 hours later, 15.1 FPS 24 hours later (same daytime textures as the start of the test), 12.5 FPS 36 hours later, and 10.6 FPS after 48 hours (again, same textures as the start of the test).I then stopped the test.This shows that with no changes in the autogen setting and no movement of the aircraft, only letting the local textures change over time, the average FPS will decrease. I also made sure that this was run on a clean system with no other processes running in the background that could affect the memory of the computer.So after 48 hours with no aircraft movement, the sim FPS was running at approximately 50% of the FPS when the sim first loaded.Obviously something is very wrong with the way FS9 handles memory and textures.I have not tried this experiment with FS2002, but it may prove to be an interesting comparison.BruceDell 8100 with PowerLeap 2.6ghz P4 upgrade512mb PC800 RDRAMGeForce3 500TiWinMEDirectX 9bSB Live