Low FPS (i.e, 8 in KSEA - 20 in rural areas)

[veemaniq 1]

Hi fellow simmers,

I have tried every possible solution that has been discussed in these forums and still not able to figure out my low FPS situation. Even in the most dense autogen area my CPU utilization is at 60-70% max and my GPU is around 45-50% at most. I have a i-4770k CPU that can be overclocked to 4.3ghz but have not had any reason to go beyond the stock 3.9ghz boost performance. I have a GTX 1080Ti and it seems it is barely being put to use. Additionally, I have 16GB of RAM that runs at 2133 and notice that it also being only used 50% of its capacity. I am running x-Plane 11 on a Windows 10 pro rig and using a Samsung 1TB SSD drive. I have tried switching of Windows defender (i have no other anti-virus), followed with tweaks like switching off Threaded Optimization, max Power options etc.

Not sure if reinstalling will solve this issue. The only additional items that are not shipped with the official packages that i have installed are the Zibo Mod B737-800, Drzewiecki Design Seattle area airports and city, and plugins like freeware x-camera, Better Pushback etc.

Really perplexed as to what is it that I can additionally do to enjoy this sim, when I see such improvements in texture quality and aircrafts like zibo to enjoy.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[Murmur 3,941]

You need to provide more details. What rendering settings are you using? What version? (11.26 or 11.30 beta). What cpu and gpu times do you get? (ctrl+shift+f to show them).

[Paraffin 2,197]

Agree with Murmur, rendering settings needed (including monitor resolution). Try turning off shadows and reflections for a start, and fly with clear skies as a baseline.

Also, don't judge performance by % utilization of CPU/GPU. X-Plane will use whatever resources you have, in a way that may not correlate to those stats. For one thing, you may not see what other non-flight sim apps are burning resources under the hood. The aim is smooth flight, without interruption, and that sometimes means compromises in how all these systems work together.

So start with bare settings, and see what you get. Work your way up from there.

[turnandbank 243]

+1 for needing to know your settings and display resolution. I have a 4700K @4.2ghz, 16GB Ram at 2400mh and an older GTX780 with only 3 GB of vram. Even with max objects, I can maintain a solid (locked in NV inspector) 30FPS around KSEA or even heavy areas like KLAX on a 2560x1080p 21:9 monitor. My limiting factor is the GPU so I keep shadows off and use 2x SSAA+FXAA, but I am able to run with HDR on. Make sure you set reflections to minimum as they have a big impact on the CPU side.

[veemaniq 1]

Thank you Murmur, Paraffin and turnandbank for your prompt responses.

Below I have posted some screenshots. I have maxed out some of the settings, however you'll notice that I am in quite a remote area (KLEX) with hardly any buildings. I am using a Asus 27" monitor with 1920x1080 resolution running at 144hz (nothing amazing that would tax my system). Btw, I have tried lowering the refresh rate also with no changes. I have tried moving the sliders down but the most I gain is 2-3 FPS. Btw, shadows are unchecked and reflections are zero. This is why I am quite puzzled. Especially, turnandbank, you have pretty much like my setup except the graphics card and that should in fact, at least in theory, give me better performance between the two of us given that I running a GTX 1080Ti. Not sure if I should reinstall x plane and if that will help in any way.

Again, I really appreciate your responses.

Btw, how do I upload images?

 

 

Edited December 3, 2018 by veemaniq
Clicked too soon, I guess. Not sure what happened it just posted before I could complete my post.

[veemaniq 1]

 

 

 

I managed to figure out uploading the screenshots above. Hope this helps.

 

 

[Murmur 3,941]

Apparently, your cpu is bottlenecking. Are you using 11.26 or a 11.30 beta?

[soaring_penguin 428]

Things I tried that helped me in such a situation, from top to bottom:

- for Windows, in the NVIDIA control center, turn off "threaded optimization" 
- if you never reboot your system, maybe this is a good idea to do now.

In the sim:
- Turn visual settings one notch down (you can turn it back up if you see performance came back)
- I would also recommend to turn AA down while testing, it will free up additional resources.

For the next actions you will need to have the sim stopped:
- remove output/shadercache (don't worry, it will rebuild next time) => especially if you installed the 11.30 beta.
- remove all plugins, especially FlyWithLua, they often touch private dataref controls which  may impact performance really hard.
- make a backup of "X-Plane Keys.prf" and "X-Plane Joystick Settings.prf" in output/preferences/ (or better: backup all directory), only then:
-> remove output/preferences (except "X-Plane Keys.prf" and "X-Plane Joystick Settings.prf") this will allow to start over in case some setting got corrupted.

If you deleted or corrupted something from the basic sim you can always run the installer to get them back to standard. My system is much weaker then yours, and is able to maintain much higher framerate under similar settings.

[Old_As_Dirt 160]

If possible, attach a link to your log..txt just as soon as you shut down x-plane as it will list everything that is going on in the session you just finished for analysis.  Don't open and copy the information, just post a link to the log.txt found in your x-plane root directory.

John 

[leinsters 42]

I noticed your settings are very high. I fly this area on a 1080 and am getting 30FPS in VR but with much lower settings. In my opinion Drzewiecki Design Seattle is not as well optimized as ORBX True Earth (Southern England) which I can run at higher settings in the London Area. World Objects impacts frames significantly. In this area I'll use medium  - or high - if using a GA plane. Lower settings as low as you can tolerate them, and then slowly build them back up.

Edited December 3, 2018 by leinsters

[ryanbatc 12,836]

Turn your AA down to 4x SSAA 

8x really kills my CPU

[Longranger 148]

And you should lower the texture setting. Modern Graphic cards no longer use their best performance if they can't use compression algorithms. The data transfer of uncompressed material takes more time than the transfer of compressed material and the decompression if necessary.

[veemaniq 1]

Thanks everyone for your suggestions. I deletd the shadercache and preferences as suggested by soaring_penguin and that seemed to do the trick. Now I have 40-50 fps in Seattle area with DD airports, city and photo-real scenery. Sorry, Old_As_Dirt I forgot to save my log.txt with the earlier issues in the middle of all this experimenting, however, I am providing the link to the new one created, in case, there is still any value to it. I tried different graphics slider configs and I settled with the same settings as before. However, I am experiencing micro stutters as I pan around or change views (external & internal). For now I am happy with this improvement and will tackle that in few days. Btw, I have Threaded Optimization turned off, vsync off in sim & in Nvidia Control panel, tripple buffering off, and I reduced the monitor refresh to 60hz (IN THE SIM) at the same 1920x1080 resolution as before, hoping to resolve the stutter issue but does not seem to help (I'll continue to experiment with various combinations and share what I find).

Btw, my version of x-plane is 11.26r2 (Build 112601 64-bit) and where can one get 11.30 Beta (I don't see it on their site)? On second thought, I should probably stay away from it till a stable version is introduced.

Screenshots:

 

 

Log.txt:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FGxiyL8pstMb5n_0uFgUsW9qNyVMpezB/view?usp=sharing

 

Again, thanks everyone for you prompt help. Now I can again enjoy this sim.

 

Cheers & Happy Flying!

veemaniq

 

 

 

 

[Paraffin 2,197]

If you want to try the current beta, launch the installer (X-Plane 11 installer.exe in your XP directory). Click the box for beta versions, and then run a check for updates. You can revert to the current official version by un-checking that box and running another check for updates.

Micro stutters while flying over complex scenery usually indicate a higher graphics setting than the GPU can handle. Try backing off your graphics sliders to see if it stops. A stutter when transitioning from one scenery tile to the next one, even if there aren't many scenery objects visible, is usually a result of not having enough system RAM. 

[Old_As_Dirt 160]

On 12/4/2018 at 1:27 AM, veemaniq said:

Sorry, Old_As_Dirt I forgot to save my log.txt with the earlier issues in the middle of all this experimenting, however, I am providing the link to the new one created, in case,

I don't see any problems in this log.txt, so you probably have a good copy now.  I keep the original and make two copies of it - labeled A and B.  I use the A and B copies to "leap frog" through the betas and still have my "virgin" copy of the final release.  If you have the hard drive space, this works pretty well.