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Benjamin J

Advice needed with trouble shooting

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Before you go plugging and unplugging hardware..

For your TE NL tests, try setting fps=30 in the sim.

We have all been saying that for maximum fluidity, unlimited fps settings are best, but I am finding that TE NL puts such a scenery load on my system, that I get blurries north of Rotterdam.  With fps limited in P3D, however, more CPU resource is dedicated to scenery loading, and my system can keep up.. no blurries!  :cool:


Bert

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Thanks for your contribution Bert! Though I've always had my FPS locked to 30 😉 If I don't, it becomes a gigantic stutter fest, as, like you say, the computer can't keep up.


Benjamin van Soldt

Windows 10 64bit - i5-8600k @ 4.7GHz - ASRock Fatality K6 Z370 - EVGA GTX1070 SC 8GB VRAM - 16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX @ 3200MHz - Samsung 960 Evo SSD M.2 NVMe 500GB - 2x Samsung 860 Evo SSD 1TB (P3Dv4/5 drive) - Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200RPM - Seasonic FocusPlus Gold 750W - Noctua DH-15S - Fractal Design Focus G (White) Case

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So just to circle back and provide an update. I put the i5 back in, but this has also not resolved the issue over TE NL. The computer appears to run fine, as does the sim essentially everywhere besides OrbX TE NL. What's especially infuriating is that I get a solid 30FPS despite the blurries. So I checked back to see when I last flew over TE NL, and found that I was still using v4.3 at the time, and with 4.4 came high quality textures as well as PBR. So I thought that perhaps this is related to the use of high quality textures, so I unchecked that... still no dice. If I pause the sim and sit around waiting, eventually the computer catches up and everything looks fine. Thne I fly for 10 secodns and CPU cores go back to 100% utilization and the blurries start again. I find that I'm having to dumb down my settings more and more, but am not really seeing much improvement, and it's starting to drive me nuts. I have no idea what happened that makes TE NL be such a disaster after it used to run pretty well. Of course, I haven't flown here for perhaps 4 or 5 months and I installed many additional sceneries in the meantime, so of course it's possible one of those sceneries is messing up TE NL.

One last thing I can try is not use the PMDG 747 around this area, and see if simpler aircraft will work, such as one of my (slow) GA aircraft, and possibly the PMDG 737NGX.

All to say that, in the end, it doesn't seem like the i7 had anything to do with it after all. But at this point I'm at a loss at how to go forward, other than simply removing TE NL altogether. I'm wondering if a reinstall of P3D will fix this, but than  might as well pop the i7 back in...


Benjamin van Soldt

Windows 10 64bit - i5-8600k @ 4.7GHz - ASRock Fatality K6 Z370 - EVGA GTX1070 SC 8GB VRAM - 16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX @ 3200MHz - Samsung 960 Evo SSD M.2 NVMe 500GB - 2x Samsung 860 Evo SSD 1TB (P3Dv4/5 drive) - Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200RPM - Seasonic FocusPlus Gold 750W - Noctua DH-15S - Fractal Design Focus G (White) Case

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Last thing you can try: go into your TE Netherlands config within FTX Central and untick "sheds". Does this change anything for good?

Besides that: can you post the content of your prepar3d.cfg here? Somewhere you have an issue that is not "normal", as I do not have any issues with TE Netherlands when using locked FPS.

Next guess: do you have Acronis Active Protection installed? (Comes with Acronis True Image 2019)


Greetings, Chris

Intel i5-13600K, 2x16GB 3200MHz CL14 RAM, MSI RTX 4080 Gaming X, Windows 11 Home, MSFS

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If you're not already doing it this way, try using a hardware frame rate limiter--either your display and GPU set to 30Hz refresh rate (if the display will support that), or the RivaTuner RTSS set to Scanline Sync X/2 with 60Hz refresh rate.  Hardware (external) frame rate limiting works much better than the internal software limiter for freeing up the CPU from workload beyond what's required to produce the target 30 FPS frame rate.

I also use the Dynamic FFTF utility set to 0.4 at altitudes above 5000 ft to give my CPU a bigger slice of the processing time pie for scenery loading. 0.33 is the default, and if you set 0.4 statically in the config, it can cause issues on/near the ground when the CPU is getting hammered with airport scenery and AI workload.  So I have FFTF Dynamic set to range from 0.01 on the ground with an increase to 0.4 at/above 5000 ft AGL.  It helps keep the CPU gainfully employed at altitude when it has a lot more headroom available for scenery loading.

w/r/t your hardware changes, reverting from the 9700K back to your 8600K did not undo the driver changes that were made when the 9700K was installed...it overwrote them (again).  So you're not necessarily back to where you started in software as a result of going back to where you started in hardware.  That said, it's definitely not clear that this is a hardware issue now...before it appeared that this behavior change was incident to your hardware upgrade, now it turns out that your software platform changed as well.

Regards


Bob Scott | President and CEO, AVSIM Inc
ATP Gulfstream II-III-IV-V

System1 (P3Dv5/v4): i9-13900KS @ 6.0GHz, water 2x360mm, ASUS Z790 Hero, 32GB GSkill 7800MHz CAS36, ASUS RTX4090
Samsung 55" JS8500 4K TV@30Hz,
3x 2TB WD SN850X 1x 4TB Crucial P3 M.2 NVME SSD, EVGA 1600T2 PSU, 1.2Gbps internet
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Sys2 (MSFS/XPlane): i9-10900K @ 5.1GHz, 32GB 3600/15, nVidia RTX4090FE, Alienware AW3821DW 38" 21:9 GSync, EVGA 1000P2
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Corsair RM850x PSU, TM TCA Officer Pack, Saitek combat pedals, TM Warthog HOTAS, Coolermaster HAF XB case

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3 hours ago, Benjamin J said:

 I have no idea what happened that makes TE NL be such a disaster after it used to run pretty well. Of course, I haven't flown here for perhaps 4 or 5 months and I installed many additional sceneries in the meantime, so of course it's possible one of those sceneries is messing up TE NL.

 

TE NL was updated recently and more complex scenery objects added..

I had to uncheck a number of items in the FTX Config app for this scenery to get back my earlier performance, maybe this happened to you also..


Bert

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Thanks all for the comments and suggestions. Much appreciated! Truth be told, it's because of constrictive discussions like this that I keep coming back to Avsim!

 

13 hours ago, AnkH said:

Last thing you can try: go into your TE Netherlands config within FTX Central and untick "sheds". Does this change anything for good?

Besides that: can you post the content of your prepar3d.cfg here? Somewhere you have an issue that is not "normal", as I do not have any issues with TE Netherlands when using locked FPS.

Next guess: do you have Acronis Active Protection installed? (Comes with Acronis True Image 2019)

Let me disable the sheds and get back to you... If things don't change for the better I'll post my prepar3d.cfg, though I deleted my original one and had P3D generate a new one, so there shouldn't be anything weird in it.

 

12 hours ago, w6kd said:

If you're not already doing it this way, try using a hardware frame rate limiter--either your display and GPU set to 30Hz refresh rate (if the display will support that), or the RivaTuner RTSS set to Scanline Sync X/2 with 60Hz refresh rate.  Hardware (external) frame rate limiting works much better than the internal software limiter for freeing up the CPU from workload beyond what's required to produce the target 30 FPS frame rate.

I also use the Dynamic FFTF utility set to 0.4 at altitudes above 5000 ft to give my CPU a bigger slice of the processing time pie for scenery loading. 0.33 is the default, and if you set 0.4 statically in the config, it can cause issues on/near the ground when the CPU is getting hammered with airport scenery and AI workload.  So I have FFTF Dynamic set to range from 0.01 on the ground with an increase to 0.4 at/above 5000 ft AGL.  It helps keep the CPU gainfully employed at altitude when it has a lot more headroom available for scenery loading.

w/r/t your hardware changes, reverting from the 9700K back to your 8600K did not undo the driver changes that were made when the 9700K was installed...it overwrote them (again).  So you're not necessarily back to where you started in software as a result of going back to where you started in hardware.  That said, it's definitely not clear that this is a hardware issue now...before it appeared that this behavior change was incident to your hardware upgrade, now it turns out that your software platform changed as well.

Regards

Some very insightful comments, thanks Bob! I'm using P3D's frame limiter. I have it set to 30FPS, though my monitor is at 60Hz. I do seem to have a provision to set it to "30Hz, Interlaced", but it looks awful. The display becomes all fidgety and quite irritating to look at. I'm not too sure about a hardware frame limiter, where could I find this?

Dynamic FFTF is something I'd been thinking of acquiring for a while now. I never really went for it as I felt my computer was generally doing okay at the graphics settings that I generally went with. Like I said, OrbX TE NL used to run quite well. At this point, and especially keeping in mind areas such as LA and NYC, FFTF might be worth looking into. As it happens it's on sale now - so I ent ahead and bought it and will give it a whirl. You might need to explain to me how scenery loading and FPS are connected though, because it's not entirely clear to me how I can get 30FPS but see blurries over OrbX TE NL, but at the same time have my computer struggle at 10FPS on the canarsie approach into JFK? Does it have to do with a multithreaded approach to the former, and a unithreaded approach to the latter?

But I agree that this doesn't appear to be a hardware issue anymore. I feel somewhat stupid not to have checked OrbX TE NL performance before switching to the i7, as it would have clarified a lot. All I can say now is that there was zero difference in performance at the NYC area - not in FPS or blurries. Hence I will return the i7, as I'm not going to mes around with Windows or P3D at this point in time. Simply no time or patience. And if that's what I need to do to get the benefit out of the i7, then it can wait a while until P3Dv5 comes out...

 

10 hours ago, Bert Pieke said:

TE NL was updated recently and more complex scenery objects added..

I had to uncheck a number of items in the FTX Config app for this scenery to get back my earlier performance, maybe this happened to you also..

Bert, this is some important information that I had not considered. Last time I flew the PMDG 747 over TE NL was back in November 2018. I'm not sure when 1.1 was released (EDIT: looked it up, and it was March 1st 2019, so some four months after I last used OrbX TE NL!), but it's certainly possible that it came out after I did that flight. I'll certainly try disabling some of those options. Are there any particular ones that are dragging down performance?


Benjamin van Soldt

Windows 10 64bit - i5-8600k @ 4.7GHz - ASRock Fatality K6 Z370 - EVGA GTX1070 SC 8GB VRAM - 16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX @ 3200MHz - Samsung 960 Evo SSD M.2 NVMe 500GB - 2x Samsung 860 Evo SSD 1TB (P3Dv4/5 drive) - Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200RPM - Seasonic FocusPlus Gold 750W - Noctua DH-15S - Fractal Design Focus G (White) Case

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57 minutes ago, Benjamin J said:

Bert, this is some important information that I had not considered. Last time I flew the PMDG 747 over TE NL was back in November 2018. I'm not sure when 1.1 was released (EDIT: looked it up, and it was March 1st 2019, so some four months after I last used OrbX TE NL!), but it's certainly possible that it came out after I did that flight. I'll certainly try disabling some of those options. Are there any particular ones that are dragging down performance?

I did not study it, but disabled all VFR landmarks, except for:

Greenhouses, Sheds, Windmills, Bridges


Bert

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Bert, according to various reports in the ORBX forums, you basically have exactly those landmarks (especially sheds and greenhouses) still active, that result in drastically increased loading times (and I guess also in worse performance):

https://orbxsystems.com/forum/search/?q=sheds

However, to be honest, it is strange that this seems not to be uniform. I have all VFR landmarks active and no issues at all...


Greetings, Chris

Intel i5-13600K, 2x16GB 3200MHz CL14 RAM, MSI RTX 4080 Gaming X, Windows 11 Home, MSFS

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9 hours ago, AnkH said:

Bert, according to various reports in the ORBX forums, you basically have exactly those landmarks (especially sheds and greenhouses) still active, that result in drastically increased loading times (and I guess also in worse performance):

https://orbxsystems.com/forum/search/?q=sheds

However, to be honest, it is strange that this seems not to be uniform. I have all VFR landmarks active and no issues at all...

My guess is that you simply have to decrease the workload/complexity.. it does not matter which straw is breaking the camel's back.. just remove some load and things improve.. :wink:


Bert

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17 hours ago, Benjamin J said:

You might need to explain to me how scenery loading and FPS are connected though, because it's not entirely clear to me how I can get 30FPS but see blurries over OrbX TE NL, but at the same time have my computer struggle at 10FPS on the canarsie approach into JFK? Does it have to do with a multithreaded approach to the former, and a unithreaded approach to the latter?

P3D dedicates a portion of its time processing each frame for ground scenery loading...including loading and merging the ground textures and vector data (roads, coastlines, rivers, etc) together.  The maximum percentage is, by default, fixed at 33%, and can be altered either statically by setting the FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION in the Prepar3d.cfg file, or dynamically with FFTF dynamic.  Or, alternatively, you can slow your frame rate down and then the actual amount of time allocated to scenery loading increases, even though the percentage does not (the same percentage applied to a bigger block of time for each frame).

Blurries happen when there isn't enough processing time available in the frame to fully deal with the ground scenery loading/processing in real time.  When the maximum amount of allotted processing time has been spent, it moves to the next frame even if it didn't finish the ground scenery work.  So scenery loading beyond the CPU's ability to process it won't slow down your frame rate, but the frames that are produced are not complete (blurry, because the lower LOD was processed and the higher, more detailed level(s) were not finished).

OTOH scenery objects, like autogen, AI acft/vehicles/boats, buildings, clouds etc have to be processed each frame, so too much and the frame rate bogs down as the CPU will not move on to the next frame until they're all done. So having your autogen density and LOD distance up too high in a high-density urban area like NYC will slam your CPU with tens of thousands of objects to process each frame, bringing your frame rate down to a crawl. 

On the ground at an airport, there isn't a lot of ground scenery workload, since you are moving very slowly and your visual range is limited by the low altitude.  As you climb away from the airport, the scenery object workload generally drops off and the ground scenery workload increases as the line-of-sight range increases with altitude and your increasing groundspeed drives faster crossing of scenery tile boundaries.  The dynamic FFTF allows you to vary the processing time allocation to better accommodate the shifting balance in workload.

In FSX, the FFTF only affected the main thread workload, so multi-processor systems saw less of a benefit in ground scenery loading from increasing it.  Not sure if its implemented the same in P3D.  Low values of FFTF on the ground show improvement in smoothness during ground ops by giving the CPU more time for objects, like buildings/AI etc as you turn corners with high angular rates bringing large numbers of objects into view over short periods.  The days of jerky, stuttering ground ops are largely behind me now.

Regards


Bob Scott | President and CEO, AVSIM Inc
ATP Gulfstream II-III-IV-V

System1 (P3Dv5/v4): i9-13900KS @ 6.0GHz, water 2x360mm, ASUS Z790 Hero, 32GB GSkill 7800MHz CAS36, ASUS RTX4090
Samsung 55" JS8500 4K TV@30Hz,
3x 2TB WD SN850X 1x 4TB Crucial P3 M.2 NVME SSD, EVGA 1600T2 PSU, 1.2Gbps internet
Fiber link to Yamaha RX-V467 Home Theater Receiver, Polk/Klipsch 6" bookshelf speakers, Polk 12" subwoofer, 12.9" iPad Pro
PFC yoke/throttle quad/pedals with custom Hall sensor retrofit, Thermaltake View 71 case, Stream Deck XL button box

Sys2 (MSFS/XPlane): i9-10900K @ 5.1GHz, 32GB 3600/15, nVidia RTX4090FE, Alienware AW3821DW 38" 21:9 GSync, EVGA 1000P2
Thrustmaster TCA Boeing Yoke, TCA Airbus Sidestick, 2x TCA Airbus Throttle quads, PFC Cirrus Pedals, Coolermaster HAF932 case

Portable Sys3 (P3Dv4/FSX/DCS): i9-9900K @ 5.0 Ghz, Noctua NH-D15, 32GB 3200/16, EVGA RTX3090, Dell S2417DG 24" GSync
Corsair RM850x PSU, TM TCA Officer Pack, Saitek combat pedals, TM Warthog HOTAS, Coolermaster HAF XB case

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6 hours ago, w6kd said:

P3D dedicates a portion of its time processing each frame for ground scenery loading...including loading and merging the ground textures and vector data (roads, coastlines, rivers, etc) together.  The maximum percentage is, by default, fixed at 33%, and can be altered either statically by setting the FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION in the Prepar3d.cfg file, or dynamically with FFTF dynamic.  Or, alternatively, you can slow your frame rate down and then the actual amount of time allocated to scenery loading increases, even though the percentage does not (the same percentage applied to a bigger block of time for each frame).

Blurries happen when there isn't enough processing time available in the frame to fully deal with the ground scenery loading/processing in real time.  When the maximum amount of allotted processing time has been spent, it moves to the next frame even if it didn't finish the ground scenery work.  So scenery loading beyond the CPU's ability to process it won't slow down your frame rate, but the frames that are produced are not complete (blurry, because the lower LOD was processed and the higher, more detailed level(s) were not finished).

OTOH scenery objects, like autogen, AI acft/vehicles/boats, buildings, clouds etc have to be processed each frame, so too much and the frame rate bogs down as the CPU will not move on to the next frame until they're all done. So having your autogen density and LOD distance up too high in a high-density urban area like NYC will slam your CPU with tens of thousands of objects to process each frame, bringing your frame rate down to a crawl. 

On the ground at an airport, there isn't a lot of ground scenery workload, since you are moving very slowly and your visual range is limited by the low altitude.  As you climb away from the airport, the scenery object workload generally drops off and the ground scenery workload increases as the line-of-sight range increases with altitude and your increasing groundspeed drives faster crossing of scenery tile boundaries.  The dynamic FFTF allows you to vary the processing time allocation to better accommodate the shifting balance in workload.

In FSX, the FFTF only affected the main thread workload, so multi-processor systems saw less of a benefit in ground scenery loading from increasing it.  Not sure if its implemented the same in P3D.  Low values of FFTF on the ground show improvement in smoothness during ground ops by giving the CPU more time for objects, like buildings/AI etc as you turn corners with high angular rates bringing large numbers of objects into view over short periods.  The days of jerky, stuttering ground ops are largely behind me now.

Regards

Thanks for an insightful and wonderfully well-explained piece of text. So it sounds like bad frames stem in large part from scenery object detail as opposed to ground scenery detail. I had always assumed it was a combination of both. Well I'll certainly give FFTF Dynamic a whirl - it soudns like it might be exactly what I need to balance out performance from NYC to OrbX-type crazy photoreal sceneries.


Benjamin van Soldt

Windows 10 64bit - i5-8600k @ 4.7GHz - ASRock Fatality K6 Z370 - EVGA GTX1070 SC 8GB VRAM - 16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX @ 3200MHz - Samsung 960 Evo SSD M.2 NVMe 500GB - 2x Samsung 860 Evo SSD 1TB (P3Dv4/5 drive) - Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200RPM - Seasonic FocusPlus Gold 750W - Noctua DH-15S - Fractal Design Focus G (White) Case

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11 hours ago, Bert Pieke said:

.. and it is on sale right now.. :wink:

Indeed: I already bought and installed it, but didn't have the opportunity to give it a go yet. Perhaps tonight or this weekend :) 

Two questions:

  1. Does the use of FFTF Dynamic means I could set my autogen settings a notch or two higher, since the CPU will be allotted more time to deal with the loading of the scenery objects? Of course I understand that if FFTF manages to bring my FPS from 10FPS on approach to 15FPS on approach, probably there's not much sense in increasing any sliders. Or would I be looking at more generous FPS increases?
  2. Since FFTF Dynamic will drop FFTF below a certain AGL, this will certainly impact ground texture loading at low altitude. I understand that you're typically moving slowly on the ground and you don't have a large field of view. I assume this means that within the departure airport environment, upon loading the scenery everything is loaded completely, and so blurries won't be an issue. However, how will this work upon approach into your destination airport? Being the opposite procedure, I could see blurries becoming a real issue when on final approach. My question therefor is how you go about optimizing FFTF Dynamic for best performance (in terms of FPS vs graphical settings)? For example, would you set the detail radius higher in order to combat blurries on approach, since until 5000ft AGL FFTF is still set to 0.4, allowing the CPU to load as much as it can before you get down to final approach altitude. Any advice here would be appreciated!

Benjamin van Soldt

Windows 10 64bit - i5-8600k @ 4.7GHz - ASRock Fatality K6 Z370 - EVGA GTX1070 SC 8GB VRAM - 16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX @ 3200MHz - Samsung 960 Evo SSD M.2 NVMe 500GB - 2x Samsung 860 Evo SSD 1TB (P3Dv4/5 drive) - Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200RPM - Seasonic FocusPlus Gold 750W - Noctua DH-15S - Fractal Design Focus G (White) Case

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I would be surprised if you could set your settings higher.. if you do not have a problem, you do not need this tool..

It is meant to give you slightly more headroom than you might otherwise have..

Still experimenting.. :wink:


Bert

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