Longranger, I will try that when I have the time. I think it is so strange that it shows that my vram is less than 300mb when I just started the sim

Well, this is not so unusual. The OpenGL driver tries to fill the VRAM as good as possible. Perhaps i9t hits all needed graphics.

That's a totally usual behaviour for a cache algorithm. An empty cache doesn't make sense and the w12xp models gives more than enough material. But normally ti can determine within a few seconds which segments are really needed and which can be exancheged with needed materials.

 

Hmm, thias gives me an idea...

Yep. I guessed it. This cache strategy makes the VRAM and RAM reports of SkyMaxx Pro more or less worthless. On my computer it reports 133 MB VRAM, but this doesn't say anything since SkyMaxx Pro doesn't know if any objects in the cache can simply be replaced, since they are not needed at this moment.

You also might want to reduce water reflections to low...  Not much difference in what it looks like but a big difference in framerates.....  Even if you are not over water.

 

John

This cache strategy makes the VRAM and RAM reports of SkyMaxx Pro more or less worthless. 

 

Only if you assume that this cache is the only thing demanding memory at runtime, which it isn't. If caches are consuming all available memory, then any new memory allocation request that comes in still has to swap something out to disk (or slower memory).

Only if you assume that this cache is the only thing demanding memory at runtime, which it isn't. If caches are consuming all available memory, then any new memory allocation request that comes in still has to swap something out to disk (or slower memory).

No! SInce the complete cache is only a copy of objects in the RAM and/or on file, it can simply overwrite the oldest, or never used cache blocks with the new objects and textures without any worries.. You only get swapping problems if it has to delete content from the cache and reload it right in the next instant.

The advantage of the very fast access speed simply dictates, that you don't want to reload any content from the CPU, HDD/SD or RAM if you can avoid it. So it tries to prefetch as much information as possible.

 

In fact this behaviour is nothing new. At least on my GTX 770 I observed it from the beginning with the help of GPU-Z. If the drivers find any content to fill the cache, it will use it. Ahnd with world2Xplane or GB or Denmark Pro there are always enough possible objects, thanks to the models library.

 

It always runs with a nearly full VRAM but doesn't get into trouble even if it has to load a big airport. It simply overwrites data that wasn't used for some time. So the available size of the free VRAM doesn't tell you anything about the amount of VRAM that the GPU really needs at this time..

Maybe we're talking about different caches. What I'm saying is that there are plenty of things outside of X-Plane's internal cache for scenery that also need memory resources.

 

But whatever. I doubt people want to read us bickering over technical minutia.

It would be a technical minutia if SkyMaxx V3 wouldn't try to present the amount of free VRAM as a kind of reserve indicator. In fact I tried several different settings of SkyMaxx Pro V3 without significant changes of these values And I just found out that the 980 driver behaves the same. So I can only say SkyMaxx Pro V3 shouldn't show these values to normal users!

Well, I disagree. If I have cumulus clouds in the scene and turn up the cloud draw distance all the way up, and hit apply, I can clearly see VRAM getting consumed. Our clouds exist outside of X-Plane's internal caches, and if there isn't enough free VRAM on the card, that will pose a performance problem.

 

I do agree that how video cards manage memory is very complicated though, and there's more to the story than a single number. But I would still maintain that if the number we're showing gets too close to zero, you have a real problem.