Excessive stuttering at ORBX airports

[threexgreen 3,139]

I own Juneau, Palm Springs and Bozeman airports from ORBX and at all three I experience excessive stuttering. I think the frame rate itself is not the issue because it does go up to 29-30 which I've set it to in Nvidia Inspector which has always worked very well for me. It does however drop to 19, sometimes 10 for about 2 secs until it increases to 30 again. So it's not continually bad but drops low every 2 secs or generally when I pan around the camera or land or take off from the airports. I had KPSP on my other computer as well which is not as powerful as my current one and if my memory serves me right, I didn't have that paralyzing stuttering then. My settings are about the same as ORBX suggested in the airport guides. I use FTX Global + openLC NA, both of which are running perfectly.

 

I actually thought I was about to overshoot the runway when landing but a look at my GS told me 35. It kinda distorts how I experience the aircraft movement...

[Jimm 437]

I would highly recommend giving this a good read: 

 

Robin is a well-respected member of the community with a good amount of experience with tweaking and adjusting P3D to suit different hardware configs.  It wouldn't hurt to at least see what he recommends and working from there.

[threexgreen 3,139]

Thanks but I already know that guide. It's a very valuable help for sure.

[AoA 6]

Take a look at the airport config in central and deselect performance hogs, objectflow anims, VolGrass and level 2 and 3 stuff if present and see if that makes a difference. 

[Nurmblitz 59]

It is part of these sceneries, it does not go away.

[threexgreen 3,139]

18 hours ago, AoA said:

Take a look at the airport config in central and deselect performance hogs, objectflow anims, VolGrass and level 2 and 3 stuff if present and see if that makes a difference. 

Tried already. No difference.

 

18 hours ago, Nurmblitz said:

It is part of these sceneries, it does not go away.

There seem to be people reporting they can run the scenery perfectly. Plus, I'm fairly certain I could run KPSP properly on my other system. Back when the installer didn't even support P3D.

[AoA 6]

Next thing I would try is looking for duplicate airports with airport scanner for KPSP and disabling them with exception of Orbx Region adds.  

I was using flights from KSAN to KPSP to tune P3D, initially coming over the mountains near KPSP I would have blurriest and couldn't even find the airport. The stock or actually Orbx region KSAN airport gave me far more challenge than KPSP with a near slide show on take off.  Tessellation to Ultra helped tremendously with the terrain loading issues and frame rates.  I was using all 8 cores for P3D initially since my system is an old i7-950 X58 at 3Ghz.  i've since moved to a 244 mask putting the primary rendering core on core 2 and leaving core 3 unused thinking this would give Core 2 free reign and max performance.  To my surprise this resulted in blurries even though P3D had cores 4-7 in addition to 2.  Of all the AM masks I tried it seemed that having the primary render core on Core 0 was a requirement for best terrain loading performance.  To confirm this I tried an AM of 252 which basically gave P3D all cores but 0-1.  This worked!  When the primary core was on 0 it stayed pegged at 100% at all times.  Moving it to core 2 with 252 I couldn't believe that it was able to run at 75% on the primary render core.  It still pegs to 100% on high load times but at least now there's the possibility of dropping below it and I can see the improvement when it has to handle a huge load when cores 4-7 max.  The other thing I would discern from this is that if you're going to give P3D a core, give it the full core.

Processor Lasso is a great app to help monitor what your cpu is doing and how it's handling the load.  It also makes it easy to test different AM's to find the best config for your Prepar3d.cfg AM setting.  It would be curious to see what you system is doing when your getting these stutters at KPSP.  It may be that it's not the airport but the surrounding mountain details and terrain loading that's your actual issue.

 

[threexgreen 3,139]

On 2017-03-09 at 4:06 PM, AoA said:

Next thing I would try is looking for duplicate airports with airport scanner for KPSP and disabling them with exception of Orbx Region adds.

It did find KBZN and PAJN but not KPSP. I assume duplicate airports is not the issue here.

On 2017-03-09 at 4:06 PM, AoA said:

Processor Lasso is a great app to help monitor what your cpu is doing and how it's handling the load.  It also makes it easy to test different AM's to find the best config for your Prepar3d.cfg AM setting.  It would be curious to see what you system is doing when your getting these stutters at KPSP.  It may be that it's not the airport but the surrounding mountain details and terrain loading that's your actual issue.

I remember taking a look at my hardware with MSI Afterburner and the CPU was running rather low. I'm not familiar with assigning different cores etc. at all.

[Gregg_Seipp 568]

You don't mention your other add-ons.  Are you running Active Sky?

[AoA 6]

What's the surrounding terrain look like, is it fully rendered or low detail?

AM is mostly important if you're running external apps like a weather app, ATC app, Navigation App, you can dedicate cores to these apps and cores to Prepar3d for better performance.  There's also an argument that Prepar3d runs better with <5 cores although I'd append that with if you're running a 4Ghz+ processor.  

 

 

[threexgreen 3,139]

On 3/11/2017 at 9:41 PM, Gregg_Seipp said:

You don't mention your other add-ons.  Are you running Active Sky?

Ah right, forgot that. AS16 is a constant companion. REX textures, NGX.

On 3/12/2017 at 4:10 PM, AoA said:

What's the surrounding terrain look like, is it fully rendered or low detail?

It kinda looks detailed, however I always thought it could be more detailed... is it perhaps not fully rendered and therefore causing performance drops?

[AoA 6]

Yes, when your settings have your system under heavy load and falling behind things only get worse from there and stuttering is a common symptom.  I adjust my terrain settings with the F22 at 500kts+.  If it can keep up here the rest my planes should be fine.  What plane you're flying is a huge consideration on your terrain tuning and you'll want to save different settings based on that.  I have GA prop, BizJets, and HeavyMetal configs.  Slow planes can get away with higher settings, complex aircraft will have a higher VAS requirement.

There's a circle of a level of detail (LOD) that's surround your aircraft and is controlled by that first terrain setting, higher settings = larger circle, more VAS usage, more terrain loading and system demand. The setting just under ultra equates to a LOD of 4.5 and is a good place to start.  You can can clearly see where terrain is sharp and where it's blurred in the distance.  Ideally you want to see that edge being rapidly updated vs popping here and there.  You should be able to look straight down and ahead and always see sharply rendered terrain.  If you have any doubt as to whether or not it's fully rendered, hit the pause key, watch and wait till it is then continue and ensure it's keeping up.

I also monitor my CPU while doing this to be sure it's not maxing out for extended periods, that's a sure sign you're going to start seeing blurry terrain and need to back down some settings.  You also need to monitor individual cores, overall utilization means nothing here.  P3D's primary render core, usually the first available tends to stay maxed and that's not a good place to be at least on a 3Ghz system.   The only solution I've found for this is setting an AM in processor lasso.  Setting AM in P3D alone will only move the primary render core, it doesn't work to balance the load across the cores. Using Processor Lasso I get much better performance.  If I set an AM of cores 2-7 in P3D and then 2-7 in ProLasso it doesn't effectively load balance, virtually no change at all.  I can get it to load balance by manually going in and making the 2-7 assignment again once P3D is loaded but I've found a better way.   If I set P3D to 4-7 and ProLasso to 2-7 then I see load balancing on initial load of P3D.  It's the difference between my system keeping up and not.  I would seem if ProLasso initially sees P3D is already set to it's AM settings it just leaves it alone and doesn't actively manage P3D's threads.  I'm having to do this because I'm on a 3Ghz system, you most likely will not need this... However.. with this I'd bet you could move sliders right even further.

Back to the point, make sure your config is keeping up with terrain loading and then once you're sure of that try KPSP again.  Test with a variety of terrain, big city autogen, mountains, lots of clouds, bad weather.  Enjoy... you can spend weeks tuning P3D.

 

[Gregg_Seipp 568]

20 hours ago, AoA said:

Yes, when your settings have your system under heavy load and falling behind things only get worse from there and stuttering is a common symptom.  I adjust my terrain settings with the F22 at 500kts+.  If it can keep up here the rest my planes should be fine.  What plane you're flying is a huge consideration on your terrain tuning and you'll want to save different settings based on that.  I have GA prop, BizJets, and HeavyMetal configs.  Slow planes can get away with higher settings, complex aircraft will have a higher VAS requirement.

There's a circle of a level of detail (LOD) that's surround your aircraft and is controlled by that first terrain setting, higher settings = larger circle, more VAS usage, more terrain loading and system demand. The setting just under ultra equates to a LOD of 4.5 and is a good place to start.  You can can clearly see where terrain is sharp and where it's blurred in the distance.  Ideally you want to see that edge being rapidly updated vs popping here and there.  You should be able to look straight down and ahead and always see sharply rendered terrain.  If you have any doubt as to whether or not it's fully rendered, hit the pause key, watch and wait till it is then continue and ensure it's keeping up.

I also monitor my CPU while doing this to be sure it's not maxing out for extended periods, that's a sure sign you're going to start seeing blurry terrain and need to back down some settings.  You also need to monitor individual cores, overall utilization means nothing here.  P3D's primary render core, usually the first available tends to stay maxed and that's not a good place to be at least on a 3Ghz system.   The only solution I've found for this is setting an AM in processor lasso.  Setting AM in P3D alone will only move the primary render core, it doesn't work to balance the load across the cores. Using Processor Lasso I get much better performance.  If I set an AM of cores 2-7 in P3D and then 2-7 in ProLasso it doesn't effectively load balance, virtually no change at all.  I can get it to load balance by manually going in and making the 2-7 assignment again once P3D is loaded but I've found a better way.   If I set P3D to 4-7 and ProLasso to 2-7 then I see load balancing on initial load of P3D.  It's the difference between my system keeping up and not.  I would seem if ProLasso initially sees P3D is already set to it's AM settings it just leaves it alone and doesn't actively manage P3D's threads.  I'm having to do this because I'm on a 3Ghz system, you most likely will not need this... However.. with this I'd bet you could move sliders right even further.

Back to the point, make sure your config is keeping up with terrain loading and then once you're sure of that try KPSP again.  Test with a variety of terrain, big city autogen, mountains, lots of clouds, bad weather.  Enjoy... you can spend weeks tuning P3D.

 

A good writeup.  One thing I've noticed is that limiting my frames helps the sim keep up around the aircraft.  If I fly a faster airplane with unlimited frames, sometimes the autogen lags behind.  Seems to me that the sim is so busy cranking out frames that it doesn't spend enough time on autogen.  Limiting frames to some value, usually 30 or 31 helps with that.

In terms of Orbx airports, I use them but I nearly always leave the regions off unless I'm flying a slow airplane.  In general, they seem to cost my sim about 5 FPS...my computer can't keep 30 FPS and things start to get jerky.   To me, OpenLC with full autogen trees looks better than a region with autogen turned down.  Also, less chance of an OOM. 

[threexgreen 3,139]

On 2017-03-17 at 5:37 PM, AoA said:

Yes, when your settings have your system under heavy load and falling behind things only get worse from there and stuttering is a common symptom.  I adjust my terrain settings with the F22 at 500kts+.  If it can keep up here the rest my planes should be fine.  What plane you're flying is a huge consideration on your terrain tuning and you'll want to save different settings based on that.  I have GA prop, BizJets, and HeavyMetal configs.  Slow planes can get away with higher settings, complex aircraft will have a higher VAS requirement.

There's a circle of a level of detail (LOD) that's surround your aircraft and is controlled by that first terrain setting, higher settings = larger circle, more VAS usage, more terrain loading and system demand. The setting just under ultra equates to a LOD of 4.5 and is a good place to start.  You can can clearly see where terrain is sharp and where it's blurred in the distance.  Ideally you want to see that edge being rapidly updated vs popping here and there.  You should be able to look straight down and ahead and always see sharply rendered terrain.  If you have any doubt as to whether or not it's fully rendered, hit the pause key, watch and wait till it is then continue and ensure it's keeping up.

I also monitor my CPU while doing this to be sure it's not maxing out for extended periods, that's a sure sign you're going to start seeing blurry terrain and need to back down some settings.  You also need to monitor individual cores, overall utilization means nothing here.  P3D's primary render core, usually the first available tends to stay maxed and that's not a good place to be at least on a 3Ghz system.   The only solution I've found for this is setting an AM in processor lasso.  Setting AM in P3D alone will only move the primary render core, it doesn't work to balance the load across the cores. Using Processor Lasso I get much better performance.  If I set an AM of cores 2-7 in P3D and then 2-7 in ProLasso it doesn't effectively load balance, virtually no change at all.  I can get it to load balance by manually going in and making the 2-7 assignment again once P3D is loaded but I've found a better way.   If I set P3D to 4-7 and ProLasso to 2-7 then I see load balancing on initial load of P3D.  It's the difference between my system keeping up and not.  I would seem if ProLasso initially sees P3D is already set to it's AM settings it just leaves it alone and doesn't actively manage P3D's threads.  I'm having to do this because I'm on a 3Ghz system, you most likely will not need this... However.. with this I'd bet you could move sliders right even further.

Back to the point, make sure your config is keeping up with terrain loading and then once you're sure of that try KPSP again.  Test with a variety of terrain, big city autogen, mountains, lots of clouds, bad weather.  Enjoy... you can spend weeks tuning P3D.

 

I observe that circle of detail radius sometimes when I switch into exterior view and quickly pan around the camera. It takes a second to render the textures which are not within that circle surrounding my aircraft. Happens with openLC and probably even default textures too but it doesn't appear to be related to Orbx sceneries.

 

On 2017-03-18 at 2:38 PM, Gregg_Seipp said:

A good writeup.  One thing I've noticed is that limiting my frames helps the sim keep up around the aircraft.  If I fly a faster airplane with unlimited frames, sometimes the autogen lags behind.  Seems to me that the sim is so busy cranking out frames that it doesn't spend enough time on autogen.  Limiting frames to some value, usually 30 or 31 helps with that.

In terms of Orbx airports, I use them but I nearly always leave the regions off unless I'm flying a slow airplane.  In general, they seem to cost my sim about 5 FPS...my computer can't keep 30 FPS and things start to get jerky.   To me, OpenLC with full autogen trees looks better than a region with autogen turned down.  Also, less chance of an OOM. 

I have set my frame rate to 30.5 in Nvidia Inspector which works perfectly for me.

 

I'm only using Southern Alaska and Central Rockies. No Southern California for KPSP, just Global + openLC. I'm with you here, I think openLC looks amazing and I don't think the regions look significantly better.

[AoA 6]

3 hours ago, Canuck said:

I observe that circle of detail radius sometimes when I switch into exterior view and quickly pan around the camera. It takes a second to render the textures which are not within that circle surrounding my aircraft. Happens with openLC and probably even default textures too but it doesn't appear to be related to Orbx sceneries.

 

I have set my frame rate to 30.5 in Nvidia Inspector which works perfectly for me.

 

I'm only using Southern Alaska and Central Rockies. No Southern California for KPSP, just Global + openLC. I'm with you here, I think openLC looks amazing and I don't think the regions look significantly better.

So with the settings you've chosen were you able to determine if your system is keeping up as you fly along for some distance, preferably staying in one view?

Looks wise I don't think you'd notice a difference, the difference would be in accuracy of the mesh & landclass, you'd have to compare screenshots to notice.  There's also a lot of airports and probably custom objects in the regions, how much they've been improved however I've not bothered to investigate. Considering they'd supersede the default with more accurate data, I don't see the logic in not using them.