Video ram doubled from pb9 to 11

[ryanbatc 12,833]

I'm seeing my GTX 970 maxed out now

 

Has anyone seeing their vram usage spike?

 

I was just planning on adding more RAM but at this rate I'll have to get a new gpu

[Jimm 437]

I find that rather odd, but I personally found my gpu going into overdrive.  I found, in an earlier flight, that my gpu took some steroids and got upper 50's to low 60's for fps.  As for vram usage, I saw no spikes.  I have 8gb of vram on my 1080 and I was flying over some pretty dense place.

[RJC68 823]

I don't find this latest version as smooth as PB9.

 

I finally got around too upgrading SMP to V4 this afternoon and it definitely felt like it was lagging.

 

I was running tweaked stock clouds before I had SMP 4 and even these were better in PB9

 

Hopefully this will get fixed quickly

[ryanbatc 12,833]

Well perhaps the sim is needing/using more GPU power than CPU... which is good if you have a powerful card.  Mine is mid range I suppose nowadays but I think since XP is using the .5 GB of slow vram that I'm getting stutters.

[gpb500 10]

Ryan,

 

I recently upgraded from a 970 to a 1070.  One thing I noticed was using GPU-Z, the VRAM number went up to 7+ GB whereas before on the 970, it looked like I was a bit shy of the max (that is 3.7+ vs 4096 which I would see on occasion).  I figured, great I'll have that extra free 4GB.  Apparently it doesn't work that way.  Either the VRAM is used as a cache or something else is going on there.  Don't get me wrong...the upgrade was sweet and the 1080 would have probably been even better but for the time being I'm quite happy.  It just surprised me I'd see that extra VRAM as "used".  And this goes back to 10.xx.  I can't compare in 11, but in PB9 I was still seeing high numbers (7's) depending on the airport.  KSNA vs KJAC are quite different in performance so it really depends where you are and probably what the weather is doing.  With the 1070 what I don't see as much is the activity on the Bus Interface (traffic between VRAM and system RAM)...that signifies you've hit the wall.  Just my observations.  

 

-- Greg

[ryanbatc 12,833]

Hi Greg (master scenery maker), In my case both system RAM and video RAM are nearly maxed.  Though I only have 8GB of system RAM (there's a story behind that - I had 16gb but decided on doing a full system upgrade to DDR4 board etc so I returned the ram thinking I was going to do a full system update, then at the last second we had an undesirable budget adjustment so I canceled the entire plan).  Now I'm stuck back at 8GB and even with just a few Chrome tabs open and XP11 I'm nearly at 8gb usage.

 

And yes it is at your SNA where I'm seeing the high numbers, but I also have O4XP ZL16 loaded for socal area.  Do you happen to know if the ortho scenery is affected by vram, ram or both compared to default scenery?  I am not using the HD Mesh v3, just stock OSM data.

[gpb500 10]

And yes it is at your SNA where I'm seeing the high numbers, but I also have O4XP ZL16 loaded for socal area.  Do you happen to know if the ortho scenery is affected by vram, ram or both compared to default scenery?  I am not using the HD Mesh v3, just stock OSM data.

That's a tough area for sure...all around LAX.  I'm sure ortho is going to consume VRAM since it's drawn but I'm not sure it's going to be any more than stock.  When I went from HD Mesh v3 to Ortho, I actually noticed better performance.  A couple things to try, dial your textures down one notch to High from Max...this seems to lower the resolution of Ortho and I find that awful.  Turn off shadows...and if you have xenviro, I changed my from "high" to whatever it says...light or optimal...and that for me seemed to help quite a bit and that's with the 1070.  A bit disheartening.  If/when you upgrade, it might be worth stretching to the 1080 if possible...though I don't have regrets yet...I'm starting to waffle a bit.   If you're having a problem with the airport specifically (and it's barely or not usable), you can email me and we can work it out (i.e., disable some features).

[Jimm 437]

That's a tough area for sure...all around LAX.  I'm sure ortho is going to consume VRAM since it's drawn but I'm not sure it's going to be any more than stock.  When I went from HD Mesh v3 to Ortho, I actually noticed better performance.  A couple things to try, dial your textures down one notch to High from Max...this seems to lower the resolution of Ortho and I find that awful.  Turn off shadows...and if you have xenviro, I changed my from "high" to whatever it says...light or optimal...and that for me seemed to help quite a bit and that's with the 1070.  A bit disheartening.  If/when you upgrade, it might be worth stretching to the 1080 if possible...though I don't have regrets yet...I'm starting to waffle a bit.   If you're having a problem with the airport specifically (and it's barely or not usable), you can email me and we can work it out (i.e., disable some features).

Even with my 1080, I haven't changed my settings from what they were prior to my system upgrade, with my textures being set to max.  The performance of your airports in the LA basin appear to be doing better, with overall fps running much higher.  As far as texture usage, I haven't been able to figure out where I could monitor that yet (never thought I would have to worry about it), but in short, flights are performing much smoother, even the replays look movie quality.  As for Ryan's issue, it's hard to say what may be happening, and with his 8gb of system ram, I have to wonder if the sim is trying to offload more duties to the gpu?

 

I did try an experiment yesterday and I'm not sure if it was a success, but I did make some adjustments within the nvidia control panel, opting for the ever famous threaded optimization off option, as well as some rendering quality settings and they did seem to make a difference, though not conclusive that it would work for everyone or if it's a viable option.  Another theory that seems plausible is that we are nearing the end of the beta now and maybe the LR team started to work with the textures but possibly left out a key process to compress the textures, causing the jump in vram usage. 

 

EDIT:  Just a hunch, who's using Xenviro?  I just read a post at the org that changes are coming to a new release, and they mentioned something about controlling the overuse of the gpu (or something to that effect).  Perhaps testing your rig Ryan, without XEnviro would be a viable option to see if your gpu surge ceases?

Edited February 13, 2017 by Jimm

[Jimm 437]

I've been doing a little more research into what is developing for XP11, and after reading this article ( http://developer.x-plane.com/2017/02/public-beta-10-metal-scenery-and-painted-cdus/ ), I had further thoughts on what could be causing the jump in gpu memory usage.  Since we are still in Beta, and in the most basic sense of the term, this Beta is a little different, compared to Betas that are released from other developers.  I like to look at it as a "WIP Beta", meaning that we aren't getting the whole enchilada from the start, for people to use and test and I believe this is the source for many issues and a lot of people's anger, frustration, and overall dissatisfaction of XP11.  

 

Not understanding the premise behind Betas, especially for XP11, we start complaining that this is broken, that is broken, why isn't this there, etc., but in truth, we still have time before release and anything can turn up fixed.  When we accepted the agreement to download and test XP11, we are also encouraged to file bug reports to LR because it was our feedback they wanted.  I can understand people wanting an outlet to vent frustration over things not working or just blatantly come out and say XP11 is disappointing (putting it very mildly), but have reports been filed?  Coming here to complaint is certainly people's right, but I highly doubt Ben and his team are keeping an eagle eye on the forum for the feedback.  They want to know what doesn't work, and if you don't file a report, they won't know.

 

With that said, how many people are actually testing the beta with as close to out-of-the-box as possible?  I can honestly say that aside from introducing an HD mesh, my tests have been default.  Yes, I have tried FlyWithLua scripts, but have since ditched them in favor of the pure weather generation, despite the horrible looks, but the LR team is well aware of that issue and it is understood that it is being worked on, so with that, using XEnviro or SMP Pro is not helping the cause, even if you are being told they work with XP11.  This can also hold true for aircraft, and it was already mentioned by the team that no one should be creating new aircraft or updating old, specifically for XP11 as it is still not finished and yet, I see people talking about things being broken in their 3rd party aircraft and are upset, and bashing the sim.  Yes, I attempted to run an XP10 aircraft in XP11 and while it worked, I am not sold that it doesn't need updated or I received some magical download, sprinkled with fairy dust and unicorn blood.  Curiosity can get the best of us, and we can experiment, LR can't prevent us from doing so, but if something breaks or fails, it's not necessarily LR's fault.

 

X-Plane 11 is Beta, not RC, or RTM so please keep that in mind.

 

I know we are all so anxious the have XP11 complete, and we can argue and discuss the issues until we are blue in the face, but until we get results, based on everyone's bug reports, we have to be patient and wait.  We are given a healthy helping of aircraft, the entire world and a decent amount of gateway airports (pre-approved by LR) to use for the test.  Use it, test, break it, report it but keep in mind that they only want to know what is relevant to the core sim and not the third party content you used when something went wrong.

 

I know I will be proven wrong in what I said, and I know some "experts" will say I don't know what I'm talking about, but given that I have maintained unbiased and subjective testing, I can only report on what I have tested, good and bad.

 

Personally, I think some developers pulled the trigger too early in releasing updated or new content for XP11, but that's my opinion and I've passed up offers and discounts on that content because I wanted to wait and see what the final version of XP11 would turn out to be.  It appears that so far, this version is shaping up to be a pretty decent simulator.  I can't stress enough to people who are experiencing issues to disable their add-ons and run the beta as vanilla as possible and then test it to see if they incur any errors.

 

Anything that I have stated here, has already been addressed elsewhere, though it was more blunt and to the point, but overall, it has been repeated countless times.  A beta is a beta and if we don't do our part to report issues we have, they won't get implemented.  I know that no simulator is ever complete, in the general sense, but the goal is to get it to a point where it is stable and then other non-essential fixes can come later on down the line.

[Guest]

It all depends if the GPU RAM is used or just filled.

 

Saturating the GPU RAM doesn't necessarily mean, using it. It might even be the opposite.

 

Hard to say if this is the case or not

[ryanbatc 12,833]

I'm definitely not using XP11 in a vanilla state  :wink:

 

But what's the fun in that?

 

However nothing had changed from pb9 to pb11 as far as my sim and the addons I put in it.  Oh well, the fps are about the same but I'm still wanting to do a system upgrade (pretty much mobo, cpu, ram and gpu) if my better half will let me.

[Pugilist2 878]

I am also going to do a system upgrade soon when XP11 reaches RC or RTM.  Here are my plans.

 

1. CPU: Kaby Lake i7-7740K when available, which will be a higher base and easier to overclock to 5ghz.

2. Motherboard: Asus ROG Maximus IX Formula LGA1151 DDR 4

3. RAM: Corsair Dominator GT or G. Skill Tridentz RGB Series DDR 4

4. Waiting for the 1080ti when released.

 

Did not mean to get off topic.

[ryanbatc 12,833]

Same CPU, ROG code and GSkill 3400mhz ram and a GTX 1070 hopefully