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fltent1184

Loss of FPS and stutter at arrival airport

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I am seeing a strange issue. When arriving at destination, there seems to be loss of fps especially at the airport. I have kept the AI limit to 100 via FSUIPC. If I stop and restart Voxatc after landing, the FPS is back to normal. I checked the fsuipc logs and it does limit the ai count to approximately 100. My voxatc ai percentage is set to 50%. I am using P3Dv4  ai models from AIG or FAIB.

I also experimented separately with Utlive and traffic at 200 limit and flying between same departure and destination airport. I don’t see this issue at all at the destination airport with using another ATC software like Proatc. 

If my system is able to handle 200 aircraft’s without any issues, I am wondering if the additional impact is coming from Voxatc?

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I just setup my VOXATC on a network PC as I was seeing the same thing. Coming into KCLT, sliders at 50, network PC, and frames dropped to around 5. I just re-downloaded and installed for a second PC hoping I would get much better frames. It was worse. 

Sorry, not a solution, but maybe there was a secret update? UTLive is off and using MyTraffic with the .MIL BGLs removed. 

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Drop the traffic slider in VOXATC to around 30% (both traffic sliders, of course at 0% in P3d4).

You need to use the FSUIPC5 traffic limiter, as there are way too many AI aircraft at 50% in what's termed the user reality bubble. You can check for yourself by using the Traffic Explorer from the P3d4 SDK traffic toolbox. More than 150 AI aircraft in the user's reality bubble cripples the sim (whether using either VoxATC or the default ATC) when combined with a complex 3rd party airport. These airports are almost always located in large metropolitan areas, where there is also a lot of highway AI traffic (check that settings also) and autogen buildings.

You can also try running VOXATC on only the topmost logical core or two via the VOXATC advanced settings utility.

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1 hour ago, fltent1184 said:

If my system is able to handle 200 aircraft’s without any issues, I am wondering if the additional impact is coming from Voxatc?

See my previous post for additional possible solutions. In my experience the sim's ATC at a level of 200 AI aircraft is much worse than VOXATC. UTLive is about the same as VOXATC, although I've stopped using it, because there are so many liveries missing.

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6 hours ago, jabloomf1230 said:

See my previous post for additional possible solutions. In my experience the sim's ATC at a level of 200 AI aircraft is much worse than VOXATC. UTLive is about the same as VOXATC, although I've stopped using it, because there are so many liveries missing.

I did multiple tests including getting into larger airports like EDDF. With UTLive & limit at 200 aircrafts, my FPS remained locked at 30 with small variation of dropping to 28 during approach, landing & taxiing. 

With VoxATC, as per FSUIPC traffic limit viewer, at 50%, I see ~250 AI aircraft. Now I have set the FSUIPC limiter to 100 so 150 aircrafts get deleted. So with ~100 AI aircrafts, approaching into EDDF, I see frames drop to ~18-20 all the way till gate. If I restart Vox at EDDF, I see the FPS back up to 30 with the 100 AI aircraft.

The anomaly is how is the sim able to handle 200 aircrafts with UTLive & another ATC & it struggles with 100 aircrafts generated by Vox? I don't know how internally Vox handles releasing aircrafts which are moved out of user's bubble but something seems off.

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9 hours ago, fltent1184 said:

I am seeing a strange issue. When arriving at destination, there seems to be loss of fps especially at the airport. I have kept the AI limit to 100 via FSUIPC. If I stop and restart Voxatc after landing, the FPS is back to normal. I checked the fsuipc logs and it does limit the ai count to approximately 100. My voxatc ai percentage is set to 50%. I am using P3Dv4  ai models from AIG or FAIB.

I also experimented separately with Utlive and traffic at 200 limit and flying between same departure and destination airport. I don’t see this issue at all at the destination airport with using another ATC software like Proatc. 

If my system is able to handle 200 aircraft’s without any issues, I am wondering if the additional impact is coming from Voxatc?

VoxAtc is very CPU intensive, at least on my PC so I am not surprised at the issues you describe. I have noticed the same thing depending upon the airport and traffic.

Colin

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There are so many possible causes for what you are observing and unfortunately you'd probably have to spend endless amounts of time trying to figure out a solution.  First of all, it's not just having 100, 200 or even 500 AI aircraft present in the user's reality bubble. It's that level of AI traffic in combination with other factors and also the hardware. One can fly nicely in a rural area of northern Canada with hundreds of nearby adjacent AI aircraft (assuming that one could concoct flight plans to create such a scenario) and never see a drop in performance.

Second, it is unfair to compare various models (UTL vs. MyT 6 vs. AIG/FAIB, etc.) as they all influence performance in different ways. Some have lots of LOD levels and the textures are mipmapped. Other have far more detail to both the wireframe (more polygons) and textures (higher resolution texture sheets, specular textures, etc.). In the past a model with 10 LOD levels might have improved performance, that may not be the case anymore. Recent AIG models have dropped the number of LODs to 2 or 3 at most.

As a test, I would turn off all  highway traffic, put VOXATC on its own logical core, drop running VOXATC across a network and lower the building autogen slider level. If that doesn't help then there is something else at play on your system.

One final point. Since AIG flightplans all have a 1% activity level for each flight, whether one sets the level in the the sim to 100, 50, 30 or even 5%, all flights will still be used.

 

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31 minutes ago, CKAJCA said:

VoxAtc is very CPU intensive, at least on my PC so I am not surprised at the issues you describe. I have noticed the same thing depending upon the airport and traffic.

Colin

That was my experiences too, which was why I moved it to another PC. But still got the same issue. I will try the FSUIPC AI traffic limiter and drop VOX slider to 30 as see how that does

 

 

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26 minutes ago, jabloomf1230 said:

As a test, I would turn off all  highway traffic, put VOXATC on its own logical core, drop running VOXATC across a network and lower the building autogen slider level. If that doesn't help then there is something else at play on your system.

4

Jay, do you recommend running VOXATC on the same PC? This statement infers that running it on a networked PC might not be recommended. 

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My experience has been that the performance gain of a networked setup is often cancelled out by the increased overhead of the client CPU managing the SimConnect channel. In other words, one could see either better performance with a networked setup or none at all.

 

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Dropped the slider to 30% ran it in network mode out of KCLT tonight, taxed and below 5 frames. Disabled it and it came back up. Will run same scenario tomorrow but locally. 

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18 minutes ago, kowen said:

Dropped the slider to 30% ran it in network mode out of KCLT tonight, taxed and below 5 frames. Disabled it and it came back up. Will run same scenario tomorrow but locally. 

It's a combination of VOXATC and P3d4 image quality settings that is stressing the CPU. VOXATC is just putting the hardware "over the edge". Do you have a utility which allows you to monitor the usage of your individual CPU cores and GPU? I use AIDA64 to do so, but there are also freeware options to monitor your hardware performance. Also, in P3d4, when you right click Views in the main window and look at the Air Traffic list, how many individual AI aircraft do you see? You can also see  a display of all the AI aircraft at your destination airport by running Little NavMap, which is freeware. The P3d4 SDK Traffic Toolbox has a Traffic Explorer, which also provides a dynamic  list of all the AI aircraft.

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I am investigating this to isolate the issue.

Here is my test setup:

Departure airport: EGLL (payware Aerosoft)

Time: 2p 

Weather: Fair (default)

Gate: 252

Aircraft: PMDG 737-700ngx in VC.

My config: i7 7700k (oc to 4.9ghz), 32gb ram, 1080ti 

Sliders: conservative; nothing to right.

Resolution: 4k in a 28inch monitor 

Frames: 30Hz and unlimited frames.

With Utlive: 200 aircraft, taxi towards runway 9, frames remain locked at around 29-30 and is very smooth (Confirmed by FSUIPC traffic data in logs that max aircraft generated is 201).

With VoxATC (slider at 30%): 77 aircraft (as per FSUIPC traffic data). Same conditions taxi towards runway 9 yields frames of 23 - 30. The issue is not low frames. It's the choppiness with stutters that makes it a problem.

I have basically stressed the system out at one (if not most) of the heaviest scenery areas and keeping all things equal, I see a poorer performance with VoxATC. 

I went next step to see the AI aircraft used by both. Utlive uses DJC, Aardvark and TFS models mostly. For VoxATC, I had a combination of FAIB, AIG and TFS (newest converts from AIG). When I inspected the models, the number of triangles and drawcalls used per LOD is much higher in FAIB and converted models vs. a Utlive model. Though some of the TFS models in Utlive do have higher triangles and drawcalls, the more common Airbus a320, 737s etc. have lower than the FAIB counterparts. The newer 767 from FAIB has 10k+ triangles (as compared to Aardvark models which didn't have more than 3k to 5k triangles at most).

My belief is as more animations such as nose wheel steering etc. are added, the drawcalls increase causing more impact on P3D. Also the number of LOD for some of the models is quite high.

I cannot conclusively say if the more complex models used in FAIB and others is the cause for poorer performance in voxatc as there is no bridge available at this point to plug the Utlive models and test. However what is a bit of a concern is that even with increased drawcalls considering that voxatc only renders 77 aircraft versus 201 from UTLIVE is still something that I am not able to completely resolve.

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