Stuttering/Lag/Micro-Freezes

[LRBS 944]

Thank you Jim! 

I just turned mine off and as you pointed out textures are crisp and clear now.

[swallsgaming 2]

@Jim Young Do you have any other Ideas as to what may be causing my stutters? I have tried lowering my CPU's clock speed but they remain, I have used Matt Davies' preset on PTA to which the sim looks better but the problem remains

[Bert Pieke 7,584]

First of all, you need to start with a set of P3D settings that run well on your system, without payware planes and airports.

I also came from FSX, and this is what I would recommend as a starter set.

You can change all this later when you have things working well.

Since you do not have an HT option, forget about affinity masks, P3DV4 will make good use of your four cores.  Also forget about PTA etc for now..

You are taking too big a leap and as a result, you cannot tell what is causing the performance issues. 

When you have P3D running, have a look at the Windows Task Manager and see what is using CPU cycles.. you should not be at 100% CPU usage, at least not on an ongoing basis, only when loading scenery.

SETTINGS
within P3Dv4

Display:
FXAA off   
AA:  4XSSAA
texture filtering: anisotropic  8X
texture resolution: high 2048x2048
Vsync  off
Target framerate: unlimited
Wideview aspect: off
mipmap VC panels off
Screen resolution:  1920X1080

World
LOD radius:  high
Tesselation factor: high
mesh resolution:  5m
texture resolution:  1m
high resolution terrain: on

Scenery complexity: extremely dense
autogen draw distance:  medium
autogen vegetation density: normal
autogen building density: dense
Dynamic vegetation: unticked

water detail:  medium
Reflections: user vehicle only
Special effects: medium/medium

Lighting
shadow quality:  high
draw distance: low
casting and receiving: Internal vehicle only

Dynamic lighting: off

HDR on:
Brightness 0.85
Bloom 0.05
Saturation 0.97

 

 

Edited November 17, 2018 by Bert Pieke

[Jim Young 2,356]

40 minutes ago, killthespam said:

Thank you Jim! 

I just turned mine off and as you pointed out textures are crisp and clear now.

Good to hear!  I'm happy it worked for someone else.  For me the difference was stunning!

3 minutes ago, swallsgaming said:

Do you have any other Ideas as to what may be causing my stutters? I have tried lowering my CPU's clock speed but they remain, I have used Matt Davies' preset on PTA to which the sim looks better but the problem remains

In your case, I would suspect the video card memory but, if the video was you taking off from UK2000 Gatwick, For instance, my GTX 1080ti has 11GB of GDDR5X memory.  I think 99.9% will have the same lag as yours if flying out of Gatwick.  But it is a nice scenery so what can we say.  Yours is really not that bad and I would fix it by not looking out the window until you get away from Gatwick or from any payware scenery.  Watch the panel and make sure you are getting to VR1, VR2, etc.  That's what I was doing with my old i7 7700K. 

I would also try renaming your p3d.cfg to p3d.off (do not delete) and restart P3D and let it rebuild.  Leave it at default settings and see if the issue goes away.  If it does, then you know it is a setting your config that is probably causing it.  Same thing goes with taking off from payware scenery.  Try disabling the payware scenery and fly with the default airport.  Unfortunately, there is no magic wand for fixing this issue other than upgrading to the most powerful system you can find.  My system (in my signature) has turned out to be the best I have ever seen as it has the capability of overclocking each core to 5GHz.  The memory modules I have and overclocked have helped too.  I think my system is future-proof for many years.  (Did someone say P3DV5, 128-bit is being released?  LOL!).

[swallsgaming 2]

@Jim Young I will try to rebuild and run on defaults and see what happens, thank's for your help!

[Jim Young 2,356]

5 hours ago, killthespam said:

Thank you Jim! 

I just turned mine off and as you pointed out textures are crisp and clear now. 

I'm beginning to not understand what is going on but I was starting to see blurry textures with it off as the textures had been crisp and clear.  Just for kicks, I decided to turn HT back on and now the textures are crisp and clear again.  So I will now leave it on and see what happens.  .

[LRBS 944]

Jim,

I'm still good on my end. Something is going on here, I will keep you posted and maybe you guys have more traction in finding a good answer from P3D tech.

 

[Rossco 23]

Hi Alex,

Hopefully this might help.

I used to have a constant rhythmic stutter in P3Dv3 previously & nothing I did would eliminate it, even turning off all scenery & lowering graphics settings to zero.

What I did to fix this eventually was to uninstall the video driver in Windows, re boot in safe mode then run DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller). then reboot to windows & re install the driver. This fixed the stutter issue that was driving me crazy for so long.

This was a procedure we used to have to perform years ago if you wanted a clean install of the video driver & the general consensus is it's no longer necessary. Afraid I beg to differ.

I have recently seen a stutter in P3Dv4 which although is not the same as the one I had in v3 would still be present with all scenery/graphics turned down. Quite obvious whilst taxiing in circles on the apron of an airport. Going through the same procedure fixed the issue again for me & I actually just did this earlier last week however WIN10 did an update just the other day & reintroduced the stutter again. I tried just a reinstall of the driver (clean install) but unfortunately this didn't fix it. 

Have just done a safe mode uninstall & have a smooth sim again!

Could be worth trying if you have exhausted everything else.

[airservices 133]

I have been having the same problem i7 8700k and gtx 1070 ti windows 10 pro build 1803

looked on the net and found this

go to start click on run type in chkdsk / R  C : let it run after reboot

took about 2 hours when finished everything was smooth as silk no more lag spikes or stutters

hopes this will help others

[LRBS 944]

Thank you Rossco!

[Mace 1,902]

On 11/17/2018 at 12:42 PM, swallsgaming said:

@Jim Young I will try to rebuild and run on defaults and see what happens, thank's for your help!

I would look at Bert's post above.  You have to start at a baseline, or else you'll have trouble finding out what the cause is.  I know you said you do not want to reduce settings, but, I would temporarily do it, just so I could find the cause.

I would start even lower than what Bert recommends.  For example, on my machine I noticed a stutter / long frame in certain places with the Special Effects slider.  I've got it all the way left for right now, and it did dial out a stutter I got at some airports.  I also would run a lower general texture resolution to start with...not 2048x2048, try lower initially, to ease the load on your 1060's low memory.  You should use GPU-Z to monitor your card's mem usage in that takeoff sequence.  Those situations hammer gpu vidmem hard, and you only have 3GB.

Also Rossco's advice is really good.  The DDU program can do wonders sometimes.  And couple that with deleting the files in the shader folder, and let P3D rebuild.  I would run the default shaders after I did that, to eliminate the shaders as a possible cause.

[Mikelab6 89]

@swallsgaming  I think some tasks or softwares are running in the background. Check what is starting up with Windows (Task Manager, Startup TAB). Also it's a good practice to exclude all your sims folders (and Addons) from being scanned or live protected by your antivirus software. It could slows down your PC.

Mike

[swallsgaming 2]

Thanks to everyone for all of the help, it seemed the more intense freezes were caused by something that has been corrected by something I have tried during the starting from barebones process that @Jim Young and @Mace suggested! I still get microstutters but as long as it's not freezing it looks great!

The problem I have now is that flying over ftx global roads, they all appear as a grass texture where the road should be? I have tried rebuilding the generated files in case of a corruption and also have tried different settings in VECTOR to which there has been no hope!

Anyone heard of this before?

Thanks again, Matthew.

[swallsgaming 2]

I also now receive black chunks of textures that load only when I fly directly over them also. Any ideas on a fix for that?

Matthew. 

[mikelockwood 3]

Hi Guys and particularly Bert Pieke if you're reading this,

I've very recently set up a new PC specifically for P3D V4 and found that stuttering can be quite bad over major cities. Now I do accept that there's a lot of autogen/rendering going on around these areas but I'm a bit disappointed with the new set up so far. After some experimentation I came across Bert Pieke's recommended settings listed above and thought that I would try these as a guideline. I get great framerates in the cockpit, anything between 40/60 fps and 70/80 fps outside, but those built up areas really make the sim stutter. Now you're probably thinking that I should be moving some sliders to the left and you maybe right, but before you suggest this, let me detail some specs for you, because I do feel that there is room for improvement here.

Intel i7-9700K processor overclocked to 4.8Ghz.

Aorus Pro Z390 motherboard

16 GB RAM at 3200 Mhz

Nvidia Geoforce 2080 ti graphics card

1 TB Samsung 970 Pro M2 SSD

Corsair 750w power unit

Corsair H115i cooler

So that's the set up which I must admit I thought would be able to give P3D V4 a run for it's money, but so far that is not the case.

Ok, so now to the software that I'm running.

Pilots FS Ultimate Global mesh

GEXP3D Global

UTX

REX Skyforce 3D plus HD Airports

PMDG aircraft

Chaseplane

Track IR

Ultimate Traffic Live

I think that covers the main items. I should add, that I had a similar set of software installed on my old PC running FSX Steam with reasonable results. I was hoping for something a little better with the new PC. Alas! 

At this stage, I have stayed away from any tweaking, which to be honest I was hoping wouldn't really be that necessary. I'm hoping that I can get a bit more out the graphics card and would appreciate it if anyone has any suggestions regarding NVidia inspector settings.

So, fellow flyers please help a downhearted enthusiast which a much lighter wallet than last month who just wants to get back to some smooth flying. 

Many thanks,

Mike