Ortho4XP + XP11 Tile Loading Question?

[Republic DC9 234]

I've gone totally nuts creating a huge collection of truly gorgeous Ortho4XP tiles that combined with all of XP11s other great features have made me more or less forget about P3D+Orbx (unless P3D v.4 is fantastic).

My problem is that when first loading tiles and overlays (when the plane first appears on the runway) or "between" tiles there is a long period of struggle where the smooth 30 FPS comes to a stop and things get VERY jerky - but once loaded, I can fly wherever I want within the tile boundary with no FPS issues whatsoever.  Sometimes during this initial loading process XP11 actually crashes.

During this loading period, the hard drive (a normal hard drive with SSD cache) goes CRAZY trying to load the scenery, it seems, and the CPU frame time is much, much longer than the GPU frame time, which is surprising to me.  I've tried running the tiles off a USB 3.0 remote Seagate hard drive and it almost seems better.

Zero such issues with default XP11 scenery, at all - that is silky smooth for some reason?

And the issue is just as big around my Milwaukee tiles as it is around Seattle with its mountains.

My questions -

1) Is this behavior normal for others, what are your load times when flying between tiles, and if you don't have issues then what type of hard drives do you use?

2) What would help this situationand how can I ID the problem?  I think XP11 ignores default scenery if Ortho4XP is "above" it in scenery.ini, its not like I'm trying to run both?

3) Are there any .cfg tweaks that might help?

Thanks,

Steve

 

 

[soppie 24]

I've also caught the bug and have generated a couple of terabytes of tiles covering most of Europe and the USA. The majority is at zl 16 but the UK is 17. Around airports its 18. I don't have a drive large enough to hold them all so they are spread over several including an ssd, traditional hdd and an external drive which from memory I think is USB 2. I only have a gtx970 so have to keep the texture quality slider at high so as not to swamp its memory.  I don't experience any delays or stutters at all when transitioning across tile boundaries but I don't know how xplane preloads scenery, I guess it loads a circle of dds files around your plane in which case you might see a lot of hard drive activity well before you get to the tile border. However so long as your hdd is well defragmented and optimised I can't see  why loading dds files from a different folder should be an issue. 

[Republic DC9 234]

3 hours ago, soppie said:

I've also caught the bug and have generated a couple of terabytes of tiles covering most of Europe and the USA. The majority is at zl 16 but the UK is 17. Around airports its 18. I don't have a drive large enough to hold them all so they are spread over several including an ssd, traditional hdd and an external drive which from memory I think is USB 2. I only have a gtx970 so have to keep the texture quality slider at high so as not to swamp its memory.  I don't experience any delays or stutters at all when transitioning across tile boundaries but I don't know how xplane preloads scenery, I guess it loads a circle of dds files around your plane in which case you might see a lot of hard drive activity well before you get to the tile border. However so long as your hdd is well defragmented and optimised I can't see  why loading dds files from a different folder should be an issue. 

Very interesting, Soppie, thank you.

I should have posted my specs - GTX 960 4GB, i76700 4.0GHZ, 16GB RAM

I unfortunately can't defragment my HD due to the SSD to HDD connection to it.

Would love to hear others' theories on this too.

Steve

[ryanbatc 12,821]

I have the initial loading lag/stutters.  My initial fps are single digits to low teens, and the sim is very stuttery.  After about 30 seconds-1 min it's smooth.  But yes sometimes if I fly over to another tile it's pretty laggy.

i assume my video ram is saturated.  

2500K@ 4 ghz- GTX 970 (3.5 gb fast vram .5 gb slow), 8 gb ram (this is nearly maxed as well).  I would bet our vram is the issue here.  Get a real program like GPU-Z to monitor it.  The in game readout is erroneous I've found.

[alpha12125 213]

well it would be interesting to see your VRAM load during these times, it could be that the 4gb are running low and it started swapping.

 

Also what ZL are you using ?  With ZL18/19 i found that anything below SSD will start to suffer during load.

[ryanbatc 12,821]

Oh mine is pegged for sure.  It's pegged in the sim ha.  But generally fps are still ok after initial loading.  ZL16 here.  (Symlinked off my old HDD) But I also run payware like the new Aerobask Eclipse - rough on my system.  I do about 18-20 fps in SoCal with payware airports.  15-17 if weather shows up... fairly stuttery 

[Republic DC9 234]

13 hours ago, ryanbatcund said:

I have the initial loading lag/stutters.  My initial fps are single digits to low teens, and the sim is very stuttery.  After about 30 seconds-1 min it's smooth.  But yes sometimes if I fly over to another tile it's pretty laggy.

i assume my video ram is saturated.  

2500K@ 4 ghz- GTX 970 (3.5 gb fast vram .5 gb slow), 8 gb ram (this is nearly maxed as well).  I would bet our vram is the issue here.  Get a real program like GPU-Z to monitor it.  The in game readout is erroneous I've found.

Good idea on monitoring the GPU, Ryan....while loading my max memory load was 4045MB....I think I've found my problem, a 8GB card would probably help both of us?

Steve

[ryanbatc 12,821]

Yeah... and in my case I need a new pc as my 2500K won't withstand anymore than 4 ghz