8-14 FPS sitting at airport in P3D v4?

[glider_uk 17]

What resolution do you have your clouds at in ASCA?
Maybe dropping them down a bit may help.

[BusheFlyer 87]

FSXWX might be worth a try (it's free) to see if you see any improvement. Personally I have been using FSXWX and it's been running really accurately whilst not being a resource hog.

[MikeT707 1,181]

6 minutes ago, captain420 said:

Rob, that setting is the terrain detail resolution level I believe. the default is 8, and setting it to 10 quadruples the default value if I'm not mistaken.

Within the Graphics/World tab, what happens if you uncheck the "Use high resolution terrain textures" checkbox and change the Autogen draw distance from Very High to High?

[captain420 3,099]

11 minutes ago, glider_uk said:

What resolution do you have your clouds at in ASCA?
Maybe dropping them down a bit may help.

They are currently 2048x2048 (32 Bit)... I definitely should lower these. In P3D v4 with REX Texture HD/Soft Clouds I was running clouds at the very lowest resolution, I think 512x512. But which is better DXT or 32Bit clouds? I will try lowering this.

[b1bmsgt 207]

22 minutes ago, BusheFlyer said:

FSXWX might be worth a try (it's free) to see if you see any improvement. Personally I have been using FSXWX and it's been running really accurately whilst not being a resource hog.

Is this in v4?

[BusheFlyer 87]

1 minute ago, b1bmsgt said:

Is this in v4?

Yes in V4, it works flawlessly as far as I can tell and other users also report it working just fine.

[captain420 3,099]

1 hour ago, Rob Ainscough said:

What's this?

Disable Orbx NorCal, OR turn off some of the options in Orbx NorCal (especially docks).

Disable MyTraffic 6.  (UTLive can work in V4 also but you need to manually setup and it's not offically supported and seems to have less of an FPS impact)

Turn your AG distance down one notch.

Use 2XSSAA or less.

For that CPU/GPU and list of add-ons, you're asking it to do a lot at 4K res.

You may also want to play around with AffinityMask to see if that helps, but I'd do that as a last option.

You can save graphics settings ... I have several based on what my load will be and even day vs. night (I like DL at night).  The benefit in V4 is you can change graphics profiles while flying without having to worry about OOMs.

Cheers, Rob.

Rob, saving custom graphic presets in P3D v4 doesn't save everything, its frustrating because it doesn't save anything under the weather, traffic, etc tabs... the only thing it saves is under the 'graphics' section only. I wish LM would change this so we can save complete profiles. This would make things so much easier.

[BusheFlyer 87]

15 minutes ago, captain420 said:

They are currently 2048x2048 (32 Bit)... I definitely should lower these. In P3D v4 with REX Texture HD/Soft Clouds I was running clouds at the very lowest resolution, I think 512x512. But which is better DXT or 32Bit clouds? I will try lowering this.

For clouds 32bit is far better generally because they depend on Alpha channel and therefore are free of the artefacts you get from DXT compression. Marketing-ware(REX) clouds have generally sloppy work on the alpha channel and honestly at a 512 resolution you would be better with the default clouds.

[Mir // Flightbeam 541]

You are simply asking too much from your PC. You're running at 4k resolution, with some of the heaviest addons.. and most of your P3D settings in the medium to max range. 
I know for FTX Norcal there is a fix involved where you remove cranes, it supposedly causes heavy performance issues. 

Other than that, the best scenario is to first run P3D vanilla, then install addons little by little while keeping an eye on your performance. If you add everything at once, it's difficult to judge which is causing the heaviest fps drops. Most of the time it's not the airport causing the biggest fps drop (we get blamed all the time). As an example, try uninstalling KSFOHD.. you'll notice the default airport has similar performance with all the other addons together. 

[captain420 3,099]

ASCA doesn't offer 32bit for 256x256 and 512x512 resolution clouds... only 1024x1024 and up. So I am running the 512x512 (DXT), for performance reasons. I have to cut back on something, so clouds will be it...

[captain420 3,099]

1 minute ago, Mir // Flightbeam said:

You are simply asking too much from your PC. You're running at 4k resolution, with some of the heaviest addons.. and most of your P3D settings in the medium to max range. 
I know for FTX Norcal there is a fix involved where you remove cranes, it supposedly causes heavy performance issues. 

Other than that, the best scenario is to first run P3D vanilla, then install addons little by little while keeping an eye on your performance. If you add everything at once, it's difficult to judge which is causing the heaviest fps drops. Most of the time it's not the airport causing the biggest fps drop (we get blamed all the time). As an example, try uninstalling KSFOHD.. you'll notice the default airport has similar performance with all the other addons together. 

Thanks for your input, I believe what's causing the most impact on performance is FTX Global Northern California and Active Sky

[Noel 4,499]

1 hour ago, Rob Ainscough said:

The benefit in V4 is you can change graphics profiles while flying without having to worry about OOMs.

Cheers, Rob.

Hey Rob, this is only tangentially related to your comment above, but what do you think about the feasibility of this concept for a utility which I think of every time up when I stop to adjust, in particular, the more GPU-related sliders in V3.  Brief background:  I run GPUeze to monitor GPU utilization and aim to stay below 90% at all times by adjusting for example terrain and cloud shadow distance, shadow quality, cloud density, all of which greatly affect GPU utilization on my 4y/o Titan.  I will have to stop my flight, move a slider or two, then proceed.   

Do you think it would be possible to create a utility which looks at GPU utilization to determine which of those lighting related slider values could be modulated in realtime to keep GPU utilization below a certain threshold? Ideally it would be best to also be able to modulate LOD, cloud density and distance, etc in real time as well but I don't know w/ the architecture that is at all possible..  The utility would have an user GUI allowing the user to prioritize which slider values get modulated according to user preference.   In my mind this would be a killer application that would work for all users to get the very most out of P3D relative to what they like to see and what hardware they are running.

As I side point, do you have a good feel for how much GPU load goes towards scenery detail, autogen, vegetation, etc?    And when are we going to see AA removed from cloud rendering if indeed that is why my system can sometimes choke in certain cloudy situations?

Thanks!

[Guest]

2 hours ago, captain420 said:

Sorry I meant TEXTURE_EXP_SIZE

Ok, that's not correct either, the setting is TEXTURE_SIZE_EXP.  If you have high resolution terrain checked (which you do in your screenshots) then you are essentially operating with TEXTURE_SIZE_EXP=9. if "Use High-Resolution terrain textures" is not checked then any TEXTURE_SIZE_EXP you specify will be ignored (essentially at default which is TEXTURE_SIZE_EXP=8).

Also, some graphics settings require that you exit and restart P3D.

The V4 Autogen Draw Distance of Very High is higher than what P3D V3 supported (i.e. more AG is rendered - if you are running Orbx NorCal that's going to be a considerable amount of AG).

SSAA was not an option in V3, this is a new AA option for V4.

If you compare Apples to Apples, V4 performs about 15-20% better than V3.  So 15 FPS in V3 with 15-20% improvement is 17-18 FPS in V4 ... not going to be very noticeable when your base FPS is already very low.  So not sure what your expectations were/are.

As far as HiFi AS16/ASCA V4 public beta, I'm using Full Dynamics in ASCA and not having any performance issues.  But like I said the big FPS consumers in your scenario are: 

• Orbx NorCal
• PMDG 747
• FB KSFO

2 hours ago, mikeymike said:

My fps drop dramatically and stutters

From using 4xssaa 

Moving to XP11 will definitely not solve your performance problems, especially if you like 4XSSAA and 4K resolution (I typically see 50-70% lower FPS in XP11 with similar graphics settings and add-ons). XP11 can look pretty good (especially night time), but it definitely needs more processing power than P3D V4.  There are some tweaks you can make with XP11 (like disable 3D water) to recover performance but your back at square one with working on visual compromises regardless of platform of choice.

Cheers, Rob.

[bonchie 2,305]

2 hours ago, captain420 said:

They are currently 2048x2048 (32 Bit)... I definitely should lower these. In P3D v4 with REX Texture HD/Soft Clouds I was running clouds at the very lowest resolution, I think 512x512. But which is better DXT or 32Bit clouds? I will try lowering this.

Pointless IMO. Lower that setting right away.

Just run 512x512 DXT for clouds. You can't hardly tell the difference in the sim and clouds are not sharp or HD in real life anyway. I think that's why I liked soft clouds so much.

[newtie 533]

5 hours ago, captain420 said:

This is sad and painful at the same time. I will be using the current scenario: FB KSFO HD, FTX Global, FTX openLC NA, FTX Trees HD, FTX Northern California, Active Sky P3D4, ASCA, MyTraffic Pro 6, Global Ships AI Package and ChasePlane. I am getting around 8-14 fps (it the weather is raining and very cloudy it'll be 8), just sitting at the runway in the PMDG 747 v3 in P3D v4. But if the weather is not so bad I'll get around 14fps, which is still acceptable to me, once I'm up in the air, it'll speed up. I am running at 4K but my graphic settings are very reasonable. This only happens while I'm sitting at the airport, as soon as I take off, fps starts increasing to 20fps and up, and after awhile through midflight, it'll stabilize at around 30+ fps.

Can someone else with the following add-ons test to see if they can get better performance? Who knows what it will be like once FTX Vectors and Meshes are in the mix as well. :( Things aren't looking so good no more as I thought.

The only tweak I am using is TEXTUREMAXLOAD=30, and I was using TEXTURE_EXP_LOAD=10 as well, but I removed that and it didn't seem to make much of a difference. I tried lowering my AA down to 2xMSAA from 4xSSAA and the fps is still the same.

I really hope that either PMDG, LM, or FB or ORBX can optimize this somehow. Because sitting at the airport should give me better frames than that. This is dynamic lights and reflections off too. Such a shame because I really wanted the dynamic lights on. Not sure if I can fine tune Active Sky for better performance while sitting at the airport. Here are my settings:

 

 

 

 

You're kidding, right?