LOD_RADUIS is it more CPU or more GPU bound?

[ols500 43]

Hi I love LOD_RADUIS when its set to the 7.5<  it makes p3d look fabulous! For it to go higher and sustain the same FPS (30) do I need a better GPU or CPU. My 1060 is limited to 6GB's so yeah.

 

Cheers, Ols.

[fluffyflops 1,846]

Good question... Id say the issue is autogen?? "maybe I'm wrong 

[ZLA Steve 370]

"Ultra" or 6.5 is the hard coded limit of LOD Radius. Any tweak you set in the cfg greater than that value it will default back to 6.5 on launch.

To answer your question, it's a setting that's tied to the CPU. You're 8600 should be more than sufficient to display it at max with a moderate overclock in the mid 4.x range.

[fluffyflops 1,846]

Steve which setting would you say caused the most proformance issues. ? 

Scenery complexity 

Texture resolution 

Mesh resoultion

Tessalltion 

Etc etc etc

What I don't get is how can uk2000 egkk or flytampa cyyz be an absolute stutter fest, but an airport the same size like KMCO taxi2gate isn't. 

Please be honest here. 

 

Edited May 29, 2019 by tooting

[Mace 1,902]

1 hour ago, tooting said:

What I don't get is how can uk2000 egkk or flytampa cyyz be an absolute stutter fest, but an airport the same size like KMCO taxi2gate isn't.

 

To make a long story short, there are many reasons -- I'm sure more than I know about.  One reason has to do with how the objects at the airport are constructed (in terms of drawcalls), and how the materials and texture sheets are applied. 

[ZLA Steve 370]

Quote

 

which setting would you say caused the most proformance issues. ?

 

There is no simple answer to what is affecting the performance on your machine. I know that's not what you want to hear, but that's the hard truth.

 

The wordy, honest reply is that a combination of those settings will have different effects depending on a broad range factors. P3D is a fluid and dynamic sim that is processing millions of calculations every second so nothing will ever add up to "one and done."

 

To quote your example, I wouldn't dare compare the Orlando region to a mega city like London or Toronto. Orlando is flat, there isn't much going on in the way of complex scenery, and the t2g rendering of Orlando, while pleasing in all accounts isn't exactly a beast of polygons and models.

In dense areas like London, Toronto, LA or Tokyo,  the massive amount of 3D objects are what's killing your perf. Reduce your AG and Scenery density settings (or get better gear). Consider turning down your shadows or flying without any AI traffic. Limit the amount of weather you display at once. 

 

Tessellation is useless for flat areas like the examples above. (I've found that tessellation really doesn't "enhance" 3rd party mesh anyway as it's mostly already at it's LOD limit)

 

Texture and Mesh resolution on their own have minimal impact, but as I stated before. P3D is the sum of all parts.

 

 

 

Edited May 30, 2019 by ZLA Steve
grammar

[fluffyflops 1,846]

thanks rhett and steve for the detailed reply.

[Mace 1,902]

I will also mention I have found the following settings to be very cpu-bound:

Autogen Radius
Autogen Veg
Autogen Buildings
AI cars slider (ships and aircraft too)
Special Effects sliders (both)
Scenery Complexity (varies highly depending on the airport)

Not sure about YYZ but if Lake Ontario (or is it Erie?) has the wave fx file going on its shorelines that kills framerate, at least on my machine.  The wave effect is controlled by the Special Effect sliders.  That also accounts for a lot of New York City area issues.  There are a ton of wave fx around Long Island.  The waves can be immersive, yes, but if I'm flying that Canarsie approach into La Guardia I do not care about the surf fx.  I wants my smoothness and frame rate.

But as was said your machine should be stout enough to handle lots of autogen.  Probably what is hurting at YYZ would be a combination of the way the airport objects were constructed, combined with possibly the wave fx or some AI.

I think I renamed the extension on the default traffic bgl file (to .OFF or something like that), to make sure that bgl isn't being loaded.  I use UTL at present.

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

Just a small note on autogen vegetation. This is an update covering autogen trees that goes all the way back P3d 2.2:

Quote

Autogen Re-Architecture

The instancing system for trees was given a massive overhaul to improve memory usage, to increase performance, and to reduce stutters. The system (VAS) memory footprint per tree was reduced from 276 bytes to 16 bytes (that is a 17x reduction in system memory per tree). Some of the work previously done each frame was completely eliminated while other work was reduced or moved onto background threads and the GPU (graphics card). Visually, trees can now LOD (Level of Detail) in progressively while still scaling in to prevent popping. Random rotation of trees was also fixed, which means that trees will be more varied looking and will again load in at the full density near the camera. A max autogen default flight has had it's system memory reduced by over 550 megabytes!

Note that some vegetation autogen work was offloaded to the GPU and to background CPU thread. There has been no subsequent update for building autogen, which seems to me to be far harder on the CPU than trees do.

[bean_sprout 1,201]

bump

Edited May 30, 2019 by bean_sprout

[pads103 37]

Just my 2 cents:  After lots of trial and error, I found that the wave effects caused a lot of my stuttering problems in certain areas, like those mentioned above.  It was especially noticeable at KTPA.  If you want to remove the wave effects, go into the terrain.cfg file and comment out (put // in front of each line) all entries that have a wavecontroller effect-there will be many entries.  If you have Orbx files, there will be several terrain.cfg files and you will need to do it in each file.  I was amazed at the difference it made to the smoothness.  Note - there are different entries, such as "wavecontroller", "lakewavecontroller", etc.

Edited May 31, 2019 by pads103

[Mace 1,902]

45 minutes ago, pads103 said:

Just my 2 cents:  After lots of trial and error, I found that the wave effects caused a lot of my stuttering problems in certain areas, like those mentioned above.  It was especially noticeable at KTPA.  If you want to remove the wave effects, go into the terrain.cfg file and comment out (put // in front of each line) all entries that have a wavecontroller effect-there will be many entries.  If you have Orbx files, there will be several terrain.cfg files and you will need to do it in each file.  I was amazed at the difference it made to the smoothness.  Note - there are different entries, such as "wavecontroller", "lakewavecontroller", etc.

Thanks for this.  This is much better than just blanket sliding the Special Effects sliders off like I have been doing.  It allows you to cherry-pick just the wavecontroller fx.

[paj 21]

8 hours ago, pads103 said:

(put // in front of each line) all entries that have a wavecontroller effect-there will be many entries

Do we just comment out the effect=xxxx_wave_xxxx_controller lines

Or do we comment out every line in each [Texture.xxx] entry that has a wave controller effect?

Thanks

[Nyxx 6,993]

10 hours ago, pads103 said:

Just my 2 cents:  After lots of trial and error, I found that the wave effects caused a lot of my stuttering problems in certain areas, like those mentioned above.  It was especially noticeable at KTPA.  If you want to remove the wave effects, go into the terrain.cfg file and comment out (put // in front of each line) all entries that have a wavecontroller effect-there will be many entries.  If you have Orbx files, there will be several terrain.cfg files and you will need to do it in each file.  I was amazed at the difference it made to the smoothness.  Note - there are different entries, such as "wavecontroller", "lakewavecontroller", etc.

What a sim changer this could be since I fly high all the time, waves are of little interest to me. Thank you very much for this.

[Christopher Low 5,332]

I hate the wave effects, so I will be delighted to see the back of them even at low altitudes.