Hello everyone,

I need your input since I am very puzzled. I’m an IT guy and I believe I have enough information to deal with software/hardware issues and be able to solve most problems and conditions. But, this one is for Sherlock Holmes!

In a brand new installation of Prepar3D and without any add-ons at all, I fly one of P3D stock planes, Mooney Acclaim, to from a nearby airport distance to JFK. At about 20 miles distance from touchdown, the FPS begins to drop dramatically, to the point of having the system display the OOM condition. As far as I can make up, this actually happens in this area and some of the west coast areas like Seattle. In other areas, like Florida, my FPS goes between 38 to 70.The CFG file is left alone to default values and yet the rendering socks to a point of frustration, if you know what I mean.

The funny thing is that tweaking prepard3d.cfg and adding add-ons like MegaScenery Earth 2.0 – New York, and Aerosoft Manhattan X, do not change conditions to worse. The shown FPS continuous to be the same.

My system has one X79 Extreme4 I7 system with 16 Gigs of RAM and one GeForce GTX760 overclocked card, 2 Gigs of RAM, which is also DirectX 11 capable. 

What do you think is causing this condition around these areas?
Also, is there a way to manage this at all?

I'll appreciate any input you can give.
Thank you for your help,

George    

If you are getting an OOM under those circumstances either your install is borked or you have some serious issues. I also assume you have P3D installed on it's own drive and NOT in C:\ProgramFiles. W7 or w8 64 bit? 

 

A slight drop is common in those dense areas  - KSEA, KJFK, etc but OOM is not right. Try limiting frames to 30fps and I would reinstall.

 

This is not normal.

 

Vic

It is well known (at least by me as I found the problem after installing over 40 MSE V2 products) that photoscenery eats up Virtual Address Space (VAS) (remember you only get 4 GB's). All photoscenery around the world loads whether you fly over it or not (this includes Orbx/FTX stuff).  This is why I recommend downloading and running the utility SceneryConfigEditor.  This editor will allow you to enable/disable only the addon scenery you will need.  Manhattan X is a well-known FPS killer for many systems (one reason why I have not reinstalled it).  Most likely, if you have a Bufferpool setting of BP=0, that's possibly causing the problem.  The problem with FSX/P3D is that things work great when over Kansas but, when you fly over high density areas like Seattle and NYC, things go downhill fast, especially if you also have real world weather employed.  The fact you are getting warnings you are running low on memory is because you are running out of VAS and that happens especially on long flights (an hour or longer).  FSX/P3D is loading scenery you don't need.  For more info on this issue, read the Intro in the PMDG 777 manual regarding VAS and photoscenery.

 

Another thingy that eats up VAS is your Internet browser.  I have recently discovered that if I have 7 or 8 tabs open at a time and try to run FSX, it's slow loading to the setup and slow loading for the flight.  And it gets no better down the road.  If I close my browser, I will look at my resource monitor and it will show me that my CPU is being utilized almost 100%!!  So it is very difficult to open up FSX until I go into the task manager and manually shutdown all the Internet Explorer's still running (even though I shut them down some time ago).  Once I do that, my resource monitor goes to 1% CPU utilization and my system can operate again.  This is at least happening on my system and I'm doing some research to see if this is happening all over the Internet.  I use IE10.  So, run a resource monitor and check it frequently to see if anything is abnormal with your computer.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Best regards,

Jim

Dear Jim:

Thank you for your thorough explanation.

I was not aware that adding sceneries could slow down the system that bad, even if one does not fly the area in question.  I thought it was the hard drive getting busier, as one kept putting more scenery data into it.  Now I know  what’s really the cause the problem!

I have followed your recommendation and have downloaded “SceneryConfigEditor”. I will see how it can improve things in the areas of VAS and FPS.

On another note, some folks are saying that P3D V2.0 will correct the VAS limitation problems we are experiencing nowadays in both FSX and P3d. I am sure that the guys at Lockheed Martin’s are more than aware of this limitation and will eventually fix this along with many other things, like ATC, accordingly.
My only concern is if v2.0 will continue to be compatible with most of my FSX and P3d add-ons and my virtual hangar. One of my favorite planes is the RealAIr Turbine Duke. I read once in one forum, that the RealAir folks will not release any version for P3D. The Estonia Migration Tool made it possible for me to fly it in P3d.

Once again, thank you very much for your response.

Warm regards,

R. George Balzaretti

Just a thought, but what are your AI traffic settings like in P3D? If they are turned even half way up, try as a test turning them all off. Some areas of the FSX world are known to do this, and it has been shown it is due to the massive extra load of AI traffic in certain hot spots like LA, San Fran, NY, Paris, London etc. A possible cause perhaps. At least worth a try if you havent tested that yet already in P3D?