Aerofly FS2's fps over NYC on 4K screen ...

[FlyIce 354]

Thanks to HiFlyer, I now know to hit the Ctrl-F1 to see the display of fps. It actually turned out to be not so spectacular than I thought. 

 

I set fps unlimited and all graphics settings to Ultra. Over NYC I actually only got 60-70fps at 4K. Nowhere near a triple-digit fps

 

I guess this double-digit fps also explains why fps unlimited gives me least stuttering, as making AF2 lock to 240 fps or 120 fps just not possible. That worries me a bit in the future when AF2 adds all those extras, the fps probably can easily be halved. Of course, I'm sure on 1080p the fps can be much higher.

 

My system is 7700K@ 5 GHz, 32GB, Titan XP, 1TB SSD, Win10 Pro etc. On hardware usage, I can see AF2 pushes my Titan XP and two of 7700K's eight HT cores to 100% and that is quite satisfying. But all the rest of six HT cores are pretty much 0% loaded. So I guess if AF2 can use a few more cores in the future things might improve easily?

[HiFlyer 9,343]

The current shadow implementation eats fps for lunch. Turn off yer' shadows and try again.  :wink:

 

You should find yourself between 100 and 150fps at 4k

 

In fact, what I ended up doing was turning shadows to minimum, and then deleting func_shadowmap.tsm from the sim. I think the shadows are too shimmery, and I'm waiting for them to come up with either a less heavy solution, or one that looks good enough to make the fps hit worth it to me.

 

I'm pretty finicky about visual stuff like that.

 

Also, about any stuttering, try the experiment of turning down the cumulus clouds. They're also pretty heavy. One of the developers wrote this on their forum:

 

The cumulus clouds use an older code which has a bad performance. Ipacs is aware of that and plans on redoing the clouds in a future update.
In short: they don't look as good as the rest of the sim, they are not on top of the thermals and they are a real framerate killer.

Cheers,
Jan

[FlyIce 354]

Wow, I didn't know shadows are such a fps killer. Turned shadow to "medium" and everything else remain Ultra and I instantly get locked 120fps over NYC. Not only that, the stuttering is completely gone. 

 

We're talking about flying over NYC at 4K resolution at 120fps locked and glass smooth. Even more, I blasted through Manhattan in F-15 at 1300 knots multiple rounds and it's always 120 fps locked and nearly silk smooth. My TV can only do 30fps at 4K, but the smoothness is just awesome!

 

Never ever in my 20 years of sim flying I ever had dreamed about this kind of performance. How could this even be possible? 

 

Plus, shadows at medium actually still look plenty good. If AF2 can add weather, moving cars, AI planes etc and keep expanding their scenery, even at 60fps locked that will be heaven. This is dream coming true. 

[caaront 109]

Thank you for this thread, I had all but giving up flying over NYC, I turned my shadows to low, and my tree's to high, and cannot believe the increase in performance.

[Guest]

 

 

Plus, shadows at medium actually still look plenty good.

 

Indeed. It took me sometime to finally see this setting only influences the distance at which objects throw shadows on other objects. Buildings have shadow from the sun no matter what setting you use. The shadows on other objects slowly fade into view when you get closer. At Medium this is noticable if you really watch out for it but even then you have to really pay attention. Changing this setting is the cheapest way to get a huge performance increase! (Another one is not using cumulus.)

[rc_rodeo 4]

There are many posts about shadows and clouds already,

but I have hardly read about the visibilty setup in the weather menu.

 

Have you ever tried to reduce visibility?

Is there any influence to the fps rate?

Does it improve or reduce immersion?

 

I have to use this to run FS2 smoothly on my Qosmio laptop.

Would be interesting to see the result with your ULTRA settings!

 

Regards

Karl-Heinz

[HiFlyer 9,343]

Interesting! I've never noticed any FPS change from altering the visibility. I'll have to pay more attention to that.