Hi

 

I appreciate this may be a very common question, but whenever searching for a solution to this kind of thing, the choice of words becomes very confusing and leads to going round in circles!

 

I am a beginner. I have Steam X-Plane installed on an SSD (Samsung 850 Pro), and am seeing what I would call hitching, but others might call it stuttering, momentary lag etc.

 

Basically the sim is nice and smooth all the time, however I am seeing momentary, quarter second lockups similar to what I used to see in sims when I ran off a mechanical drive when it was loading scenery. I had hoped that 16GB RAM and an SSD would prevent this? I don't have any scenery packs loaded and apart from some carenado planes I added, the sim is stock.

 

I understand there is a difference between frame rate and smoothness of running? I have all settings at max, and am seeing good frame rates (above 25 for Carenado Cessna Centurion and 75+ for a freeware Tupolev I found on here) so I am assuming turning some stuff down will help, however I would like to know exactly whats causing it and why. Any ideas?

 

My setup is:

 

5820K (4.0GHz)

GTX980 superclocked (not running the second one for X-Plane as it hates SLI)

Corsair Dominator 16GB RAM 2666MHz

Samsung 850 Pro 512GB SSD

Cooling is provided by a Corsair H105 AIO.

Does this occur when using default aircraft without any plugins?

 

Eg:

The C172.

The Cirrus Jet.

The C400.

Is it over cities?

I see the same thing. I thought getting the 5820 might eliminate it and was most disappointed when it didn't. I'm glad I saw your post though to find out that a chunkier graphics card wouldn't help either before I shelled out.

I just built a new system - super fast, similar to the OP's machine - and I get the same thing.  I'm running the HD mesh v2, SkyMaxx Pro at high settings, and UrbanMaxx.  During normal flight over dense scenery (near London Heathrow for example), my CPU/GPU percentages are around 22% with frames smooth as glass in the 40's to 50's most of the time.  I have XP-10.31 on a very fast Seagate 4TB hybrid drive with 64GB cache feeding a SATA3 6GB connection, and my Win 8.1 OS runs from an SSHD.  Loading times shouldn't be a factor, but they appear to be the cause. 

 

The CPU/GPU are loafing along at 22%, then suddenly they pause for a split second, peak around 50% for an instant as frames resume and immediately return to 22% load.  I don't know if this is due to the heavy SkyMaxx cloud generation load (there were many heavy and scattered clouds at the time), the cloud draw distance setting or the XP scenery draw distance setting, or the altitude and speed (220kts) of my (C47) Mustang 510 jet.  So, yes, it shouldn't happen.  On the other hand, when I'm low and slow on approach (for example), I don't get any split second glitches, so it doesn't impact my approach control.  I'm still setting my system up and tweaking, so I don't know if this is a problem with GA aircraft at low altitudes or not.

 

I've also heard that when you set AAAF high that the video card pulls in the image, upscales it 4X, applies the AAAF, then downsizes it back to original resolution.  If that's the case, it may be that the video card can handle the load OK even at 1920x1200 that I run, and the CPU can handle the load easily, but the pipeline between them may be a bottleneck.  We are running much higher powered hardware than that under which XP was originally coded.

Yes this seems to be a common problem (including myself) affecting many system configurations, all is smooth and then fps drops for about 1 or 2 seconds and then all smooth again, even with default planes and scenery.

Weather updates maybe?

Weather updates is certainly a possibility because it would require a slower internet feed (compared to internal computer data transfer), and it would "reset" the visual features of the sim, including and especially clouds which are resource-hungry.  Might be worth trying a flight w/o active weather connections.  My pauses have never been more than one second, but I haven't flown XP10 much on my new system yet.

I too get this problem, and I disabled weather and all plugins to try and solve it months ago. The only thing that solved it was turning off objects all together. So annoying.....

Try going back to the nVidia 337 vintage drivers and see what happens. Helped my 770.

 

John

Try uninstalling SkyMaxx and see if the stutters go away.

I've done both suggestions, alas to no avail.

I've done both suggestions, alas to no avail.

 

Likewise

Although I don't have framerate problems, it is my understanding from other posts that SkyMaxx is actually better on framerates than the default clouds in XP10.  I wouldn't expect it to cause "hitches" unless the code somehow loads the clouds before generating and displaying them - apparently that is not the case here.

 

I did notice that the last update to 10.31 included some sky bitmaps and possibly some clouds (I'm not bored enough to sit for 20 minutes and watch all the filenames scroll past...).

Also, if you have TrackIR, try flying without and see what you get.  I have made some adjustment and it seemed to help.

 

John