I have also stumbled into this problem today when trying a flight on Iceland in the ORBX demo this point using real weather from Opus. It was raining quite heavily with a nice thick cloud cover. As soon as the real weather was loaded, my frame rate was halved.

I played a lot around with the settings, and landed on the following compromise. Moving AA from 8X to4X to 2X have the biggest impact on the frame rate, and I found that by using 4SGSS in Nvidia Inspector combined with 2x. It is not perfect, the runway does not look good at a distance when you're on the ground, but overall is not too bad. At least it is a compromise I can live with, and I can increase the AA when the weather is nice :-)

Well… another good reason to pray for sunny weather all year…  :rolleyes:

 

I am seriously thinking about not using OpusFSX (or any other weather engine) but to keep it simple with simple themes. I already have to struggle a little for performance (as if nothing has changed LOL) and I don't want some raindrops to spoil it even more!

 

Besides, I think the weather engines simply aren't prepared for Prepar3d. Yes, they are 2.0 compatible but certainly NOT 2.0 optimized, which is a complete different story! I do hope the weather-devs will have a close look at the new P3D 2.0 engine and work on their add ons to make things perform better. 

 

BTW I wasn't planning on using OpusFSX anyway for the time being because of all the heavy fog complaints I keep reading. The dev says the problem isn't with OpusFSX but maybe with P3D but it's common practice afaik to adjust the add-on to the sim and not the other way around.

I too is about ditching Opus for the time being, but havent decided yet .Hopefully AS Next will fullfill all our dreams:-)

BTW I wasn't planning on using OpusFSX anyway for the time being because of all the heavy fog complaints I keep reading. The dev says the problem isn't with OpusFSX but maybe with P3D but it's common practice afaik to adjust the add-on to the sim and not the other way around.

 

 

Im planning on waiting before i use real world weather as its to soon for a complex addon like that so i will use my own themes or maybe install fsx and use opus on that to create themes that i can use P3D v2 based on real weather. Some things it is really is best to wait for before you jump in and use.

 

 

I played a lot around with the settings, and landed on the following compromise. Moving AA from 8X to4X to 2X have the biggest impact on the frame rate, and I found that by using 4SGSS in Nvidia Inspector combined with 2x. It is not perfect, the runway does not look good at a distance when you're on the ground, but overall is not too bad.

 

At least, if you have bad enough weather where you need to turn down the AA, you're not going to be seeing that far into the distance anyways. ^_^

 

Does anyone know if the weather theme SDK from FS2004 is still valid for P3Dv2?  If so, I may just make myself a few varying themes to use as default, until such point as one or some of the major weather engines are optimized for use.

 

 

Besides, I think the weather engines simply aren't prepared for Prepar3d. Yes, they are 2.0 compatible but certainly NOT 2.0 optimized, which is a complete different story! I do hope the weather-devs will have a close look at the new P3D 2.0 engine and work on their add ons to make things perform better. 

 

Exactly.  Right now, P3D V2-compatible means the installer can find the right folder.  It doesn't say anything about performance.  It's possible we'll go through the same thing with scenery and aircraft.  I wonder if in a while, we're going to be talking about FSX-port-overs vs. native P3D V2 add-ons.  

 

 

Does anyone know if the weather theme SDK from FS2004 is still valid for P3Dv2?  If so, I may just make myself a few varying themes to use as default, until such point as one or some of the major weather engines are optimized for use.

 

Good question - not sure.  I was thinking of just setting up some weather situations by hand, but if you're adept at this and it works, I'd be open.  Keep us posted.

the weather theme sdk for fs9 has issues, you can create themes but they wont correctly as the format of the themes has changed a little but enough to break them.

Hi,

 

i noticed the same when i was flying in bad weather. I can remember that i had a flight in rany conditions where my frames stayed up in the 30´s.

 

Gotta check on that one again.

There's also issues with AS and bad weather, my frames drop by half and AS also has another issue which is the temp is stuck at 75c.

I don't think this is a weather engine issue.

 

Just tried on a default P3D install with absolutely nothing added.

 

I tried some of the weather themes and found that default weather, default textures, clouds etc that I got significant FPS drops with heavy cloud cover. Rain was not necessary, simply a heavy overcast.

My FPS drops were from 34 locked in everything else I could throw at the sim down to 24-25 when looking at the clouds. I saw FPS increased to 34 again when I panned so the clouds were not in view.

 

Tried fiddling with some settings and what I found was that turning the HDR lighting off restored my frames to 34 locked in all weather. Even running the heavy storm themes (Winter and thunderstorms) I had locked FPS at 34 panning all around the sky.

 

I would suggest for now in heavy weather try turning off HDR lighting and see if that restores performance.

I would suggest for now in heavy weather try turning off HDR lighting and see if that restores performance.

 

Bingo.  I just tested this, and while there's lots of settings that can affect clouds a little bit, turning HDR on and off had a major impact.

 

My test was simply to load up the 'Major Thunderstorm' weather theme while sitting on the runway.  With HDR off, I was sitting at 57(ish) fps.  Turn HDR on, it plummets to 35(ish).  Plus to be honest, in comparing HDR on versus off, I really prefer the look of it being off while raining.  HDR on makes both the rain, and the water reflections on the runway far too high in contrast and rather garish.

 

Good find.

 

I also tested snow, because I was curious about Dave's good performance that he mentioned getting in a snowstorm.  Again, a very noticeable hit, but not as much - went from 57 fps with HDR off, to 42 fps with it on.  Plus, snow is even worse looking than rain with HDR on!

 

I should note that I have both the cloud draw distance and cloud density turned up to max - I see very little hit from that, mostly only when the resulting injected cloud coverage is extremely thick.

 

[edit]

 

I kept playing around with HDR, and found that in extremely thick cloud coverage it also has a negative effect.  Not as much as the rain itself does, but still quite noticeable, in the 20% range.  Enough so that my test with the snow above could of simply been the result of the thick cloud cover.  Of course, as I noted above, I do have max clouds - if your cloud settings aren't as high, it's likely that you'll see less of an impact.

All very interesting. Frankly FPS down to low 20s is still pretty smooth though. 

 

I wonder if the default cloud textures are not optimized like they should.  Ill have to install the REX textures to see what happens. 

Great find about the HDR setting - looking forward to testing it as soon as I get back home tomorrow night.

 

Using the gray and rainy weather preset, I didn't notice that much improvement on my setup with HDR off. On the other hand, disabling volumetric fog made flying thru very bad weather much more enjoyable, frame-rate wise. 

Just an FYI - Opus's new beta has a new Volumetric fog setting.  Go to Weather - General User Preferences