Brain-Fried from Tweaking: Autogen loading slowly p3d v4

[dal330200 216]

Hi everyone,

Sorry for the question that's probably been asked a million times already, but I'm having difficulty searching for answers.  What is the general consensus about slow autogen loading in v4?  I know settings, what I'm flying and where I'm flying all factor into this, but it just seems slow, and when the autogen does load, it does in blocks, often after I've flown past the area, like it's trying to catch up. 

I'm on a SSD and you can see my specs in the signature.

Overall performance is fine with settings either maxed or pretty far to the right.  I've eliminated some of the performance bottlenecks by tweaking shadows and dynamic reflections, but for some reason I can't find the cause and effect relationship with loading times for autogen to pop up and specific settings.

Any ideas?

John

[JasonW 32]

Uncheck "use high resolution terrain textures".

[MadDog 353]

Locking framerate to 30 in the sim cured slow autogen loading for me.

[pmb 5,137]

I observe the same. It's not that distracting as it's far away and I use a PTA preset where it appears somewhat in haze, but it is observable and, yes, in blocks. And it is not only autogen, it is also custom buildings. I made a flight from Niagara Falls into Toronto over Lake Ontario the other day and the Toronto Skyline - which is not autogen but custom buildings - pops in at a point as well.

I'll see if setting the high res textures off does help, which I have indeed on at present.

Setting the framerate to anything isn't an option for me. I get 30 fps at KSFO/ORBX NCA without traffic which falls to ~25 when switching on UTLive but still remains smooth. If I set the fps counter to anything between 20 or 30 it falls to around 20 and becomes stuttery.

Kind regards, Michael

[AnkH 2,233]

1 hour ago, pmb said:

If I set the fps counter to anything between 20 or 30 it falls to around 20 and becomes stuttery.

Same here, already observed this in v3.x, I have absolutely no benefit from locking the FPS inside Prepar3d instead losing some good 10-15% overall FPS. What works in my case is using the frame limiter inside nVidia Inspector, although the FPS are a little bit jumpy then, it helps a lot regarding stuttering, smooth image and reasonable reloading of the ground textures.

[Farlis 2,280]

Three steps that I do that seem to cure the problem:

1. Clear the shaders

2. Run FTX Central once (if applicable). This rewrites the Autogen descriptions

3. Delete the p3d.cfg. Don't tweak the new one, only use the UI for changes.

Had the problem with the autogen in both v3 and v4. After those steps the problems were gone.

[Tomaz Drnovsek 440]

Isn't that normal behaviour in P3D?

[Farlis 2,280]

14 hours ago, 0Artur0 said:

Isn't that normal behaviour in P3D?

No. If everything works as designed you shouldn't notice anything about autogen loading slowly.

[pmb 5,137]

I made some tests today. Neither unchecking the high-res textures nor locking fps not raising LOD did any help on my system. However, there are two paramters which definitly matter - on my system.

(i) The AUTOGEN_DRAW_DISTANCE entry in prepar3d.cfg. This isn't my finding but I read it in another thread: 

https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/511531-p3d-v4-autogen-popping/

see the contribution by touchdown84. I can confirm it does matter - again on my system. The default value is 30000.000000. I tried values up to 60000.000000 cutting back my fps at KSFO from 30 to ~23 (without AI traffic), but definitely eliminating most (but still not all) of the autogen popping by shifting the borderline. 

(ii) This may come unexpected, but HDR off did help even more - again on my system. I knew this from Prepar3d3, but find it's effect even more pronounced in Prepar3d4. No only does it shift the borderline where autogen drops in but it makes the transition itself more soft. This is quite remarkable as it doesn't incur any performance loss and HDR, to an extent, is a matter of taste anyway.

For completenss, all tests were made with FB KSFO and ORBX NCA flying to the South into the Silicon Valley.

Kind regards, Michael

[dal330200 216]

Thanks everyone for your feedback.  I'll spend some time trying out some of your suggestions and see if they have an impact on my system.  I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought this was a little bit unusual. 

John

[steve40 7]

I'm not seeing the autogen problems you describe. I'm using a GTX 1070 with an i7 5820K and 16Gb RAM.

I have all P3D settings on max with the following exceptions:
- 4x SSAA
- Autogen draw distance slider at halfway.
- Trees Autogen one notch away from max.
- Buildings Autogen one notch away from max.
- SPEED TREES OFF

Speedtrees and autogen draw distance together are the biggest performance killers on my system.

[Dags 3]

Gday guys

I am having same problems as Michael has, its getting rather annoying.

In fact both Michael and I have reported this over at LM forums. The slow loading blocks of autogen is ridiculous, and its mainly blocks of urban autogen. I don't really know what to do about this as LM forums offering no help. Might even give V4 a miss until hopefully this is sorted out.

Cheers

[theskyisthelimit 48]

On 6/22/2017 at 10:42 PM, dal330200 said:

Thanks everyone for your feedback.  I'll spend some time trying out some of your suggestions and see if they have an impact on my system.  I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought this was a little bit unusual. 

John

Did any of the tips here work out for you?

[swiesma 625]

 

https://www.google.de/search?q=p3d+v4+autogen+loading&oq=p3d+v4+autogen+loading&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i60.4008j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

Well, the internet is full of those reports. So I guess this below is not the case.

Quote

 If everything works as designed you shouldn't notice anything about autogen loading slowly.