Hey Rob, did you make those tests with cloud shadows at a distance longer than 30.000m? No rush of course, but this is a weird matter especially after what Zach said about shadow resolution.

so I think it's "safe" to suggest cloud shadows are inducing the performance load.

 

Is it possible the shallow angle at dawn/dusk ends up generating a much larger shadow to be cast, effectively increasing the processing overhead just from the geometry involved?  These big drops in performance are so big in places even 2-way SLI w/ Titan won't cut it.   I came into KCLM, an former place of residence on the Olympic Peninsula in WA state, and frames in heavy clouds dropped down to the high 20's.  I decided to disable cloud REFLECTIONS and picked up about 25% higher frames.  It's a coastal town so easy to see how that could whack a single Titan.

 

And again, came into NCA's Ashland OR S03 with lots of scattered clouds /w their somewhat elongated shadows in somewhat early dusk it was gorgeous!  No frame rate crash there.  I will try your suggested test to duplicate it.

There is absolutely no point in sacrificing one core to some imaginary use by the OS, especially, if one only has 4 cores to start with. I think that LM has finally figured that out and I suspect that P3d 2.3 will use all cores available as default. The OS does the best job of scheduling what each core should be doing.

 

 

Hey Rob, did you make those tests with cloud shadows at a distance longer than 30.000m?

 

Yes, I found a significant performance hit going to 80000.

 

Cheers, Rob.

 

 

Is it possible the shallow angle at dawn/dusk ends up generating a much larger shadow to be cast, effectively increasing the processing overhead just from the geometry involved?

 

That's what Beau suggested in his post on LM's forum.

 

Wiki Quote (not mine):

 

 

One of the key disadvantages of real time shadow mapping is that the size and depth of the shadow map determines the quality of the final shadows. This is usually visible as aliasing or shadow continuity glitches. A simple way to overcome this limitation is to increase the shadow map size, but due to memory, computational or hardware constraints, it is not always possible. Commonly used techniques for real-time shadow mapping have been developed to circumvent this limitation. These include Cascaded Shadow Maps,^[1] Trapezoidal Shadow Maps,^[2] Light Space Perspective Shadow maps,^[3] or Parallel-Split Shadow maps.^[4]

Also notable is that generated shadows, even if aliasing free, have hard edges, which is not always desirable. In order to emulate real world soft shadows, several solutions have been developed, either by doing several lookups on the shadow map, generating geometry meant to emulate the soft edge or creating non standard depth shadow maps. Notable examples of these are Percentage Closer Filtering,^[5] Smoothies,^[6] and Variance Shadow maps.^[7]

 

The hard edges on the shadows do detract from the realism ... there are options (see above) but I don't know what their performance implications are.

 

Cheers, Rob.

I can't but think that they'll certainly end up finding a good compromise, because my good-old 2006 CondorSoaring, with it's historical DX7, does it beautifully :-)

 

I had to disable cloud shadows in P3Dv2.2. I know my rig is far from top with it's GTX 650 Ti 1 GB graphics board, but heck, Condor does it so smoothly .....

 

 

 

 

 

Ah! And clouds also look great and cast nice shadows in that other stuff I'm presently smoking :-) (and also DX9c "only" ): http://forum.il2sturmovik.com/topic/5899-how-about-some-pictures-those-new-clouds/

Yes, I found a significant performance hit going to 80000.

 

OK, but did that affect the quality of vegetation shadows, or did they remain crisp even at 80.000m? If it's the latter, you really need to report that in the Prepar3D forum because what Zach said makes no sense.

I found that HRD enabled increases the contrasting of the cloud shadows on terrain

 

I made a few pics of outstanding shadowing at 30000 settings

as can be seen here > http://forum.avsim.net/topic/440161-cloud-shadows-p3dv22-pics/#entry2971783

 

allen

What is HRD??

What is HRD??

 

He probably meant to say HDR (high dynamic range).

I've just installed 2.2 on a clean win7 pro 2 days ago. I don't have any addon installed yet, so it's all default. After 2 days, what I am experiencing is bad performance and heavy stuttering with minimal shadow and medium scenery settings. When I close all shadows including VC shadow, performance back to normal with minimal stuttering (still stutters though). Probably my mediocre GTX 680 is a bottleneck which I paid more than 500$ a year ago. Do you know any other tweak which might help me other than affinitymask=15? 

 

By the way, I ditched fsx long time ago for p3d, I am a happy p3d 1.4 user. So, I am not trolling or anything, just trying to make v2.2 work.   

 

 

OK, but did that affect the quality of vegetation shadows, or did they remain crisp even at 80.000m?

 

Crisp.

 

 

 

Probably my mediocre GTX 680 is a bottleneck which I paid more than 500$ a year ago.

 

Based on your sig, a GTX 680 with 3 monitors and turning up graphics settings in P3DV2.2 will be difficult to maintain fps ... so you'll either have to compromise graphics settings or go with a more powerful GPU.  P3DV2.2 has shifted processing load to the GPU where it should be as they are much easier to upgrade and can perform graphics specific process much better than the CPU.

You Coukd try fibre time fraction at 0.15

 

And have a play with the ai traffic and road traffic.

 

You have a 680 I have a 570 and on initial take off it's not so good but settles down shortly after and that's using orbx regions with an Airbus x

Crisp.

 

Thanks for your tests. This is really weird considering mh384's experiences with cloud shadows.

 

mh384, if you're still in here, can you bump again that topic in the Prepar3D forums? Hopefully you can get an explanation.

Based on your sig, a GTX 680 with 3 monitors and turning up graphics settings in P3DV2.2 will be difficult to maintain fps ... so you'll either have to compromise graphics settings or go with a more powerful GPU.  P3DV2.2 has shifted processing load to the GPU where it should be as they are much easier to upgrade and can perform graphics specific process much better than the CPU.

 

Thanks Rob. I realized what you're saying. I guess I'll buy one of those 6gb gtx 780 EVGAs when they release it. I need to have those cloud and terrain shadows. By the way, I am a subscriber of your videos at youtube, great job. 

You Coukd try fibre time fraction at 0.15

 

And have a play with the ai traffic and road traffic.

 

You have a 680 I have a 570 and on initial take off it's not so good but settles down shortly after and that's using orbx regions with an Airbus x

 

Thanks for the tip. It worked to some degree. At least I can keep VC shadows now.