Low FPS-HELP!

[SteveW 1,792]

First of all you need to profile the system. Instead of going for high settings and complex aircraft, you need to know the physical performance of the sim with the scenery. Should be pretty good on your system.

Choose a stock plane and no undocked panels, set to monitor resolution and stock Prepar3D.cfg.

First in Nvidia Control Panel make sure to set defaults on the 3d settings page main and P3D profiles, Restore/Apply.

In P3D display settings Set Unlimited on the slider and VSync = Off so there are no limitations set - this way you can see the fps capacity of the system.

When the fps capacity of the system is known and dialled in with the desired scenery and other settings, only then the locked fps or the VSync setting can be applied.

Now you can add a complex aircraft and if that adds too much processing in the loop, look to adjusting that for possible increases in performance. If you can't reduce that load, the simulator settings can be relaxed.

[Evros 310]

11 hours ago, TBurns22 said:

I have previously had better performance at Innsbruck, or at least it really appeared that way. I tried LSZH (Aerosoft Zurich) and got around 30 frames on unlimited frame setting. This is good but when looking at my task manager my cpu is at 35% and GPU is around 25%. I kept inching sliders to the right and the frames stayed basically steady but CPU usage didn't budge. Something isn't adding up. 

 

No road or boat traffic. Usually for weather I'm using ActiveSky weather engine with REX cloud textures. Have used once during the tests and no noteworthy impact on performance.

Just to clarify, are these observations takes with aircraft on ground and not moving? If so, then there is no need for system to go all out and work hard. There just isn't much work do be done. Also, you must look at your CPU utilization as per core basis. I am willing to bet that one core is pretty much pegged, while others are just along for the ride. That is completely normal. When airborne, then Westsim Innsbruck has some kinks, at least on my system. Depending on approach vector, some very localized areas could have a significant frame rate drop. It could also be only for me and be affected by other, adjacent sceneries.

Now, if you are rather sure that your sim's performance is really below the bar, then I would suggest you delete the contents of both AppData folders and ProgramData folder. P3D will generate new necessary files, but there are some essential files that you should back up and restore so that addons in your sim would operate correctly afterwards.

 

%APPDATA%\Lockheed Martin\Prepar3D v4

From this folder, you need to back up add-ons.cfg, DLL.xml and EXE.xml. After that, delete all of the contents of this folder. For good measure, I would move everything out of this folder (copy-paste) so you could keep it's contents in case something goes wrong or you need to restore more files afterwards.

%PROGRAMDATA%\Lockheed Martin\Prepar3D v4

From this folder, you need to back same three files. Well not the same, but they are named same. Contents are different. Same regime as before - wipe all contents after you are done backing up.

%LOCALAPPDATA%\Lockheed Martin\Prepar3D v4

Delete everything in this folder. No need to back up anything.

 

Once this is done, run P3D and it will recreate its required file structure. I would also run a scenario one just for a good measure. Once you have exited from sim, restore those three files in both AppData and ProgramData folders. If you are still on FTX Central, then you need to run it once for it to do it's things and insert itself in to needed files. Some other scenery developers might require same approach, depends on what you have. After all that is done, I recommend you follow @SteveW tips on establishing baseline performance readings and go from there.

I also recommend you create a graphics profile and assignment profile before you start. This will make it a lot easier to restore settings afterwards.

 

Hope this will be of any help to you.

Edited March 4, 2020 by Evros

[TBurns22 1]

7 hours ago, Evros said:

Just to clarify, are these observations takes with aircraft on ground and not moving? If so, then there is no need for system to go all out and work hard. There just isn't much work do be done. Also, you must look at your CPU utilization as per core basis. I am willing to bet that one core is pretty much pegged, while others are just along for the ride. That is completely normal. When airborne, then Westsim Innsbruck has some kinks, at least on my system. Depending on approach vector, some very localized areas could have a significant frame rate drop. It could also be only for me and be affected by other, adjacent sceneries.

Now, if you are rather sure that your sim's performance is really below the bar, then I would suggest you delete the contents of both AppData folders and ProgramData folder. P3D will generate new necessary files, but there are some essential files that you should back up and restore so that addons in your sim would operate correctly afterwards.

 

%APPDATA%\Lockheed Martin\Prepar3D v4

From this folder, you need to back up add-ons.cfg, DLL.xml and EXE.xml. After that, delete all of the contents of this folder. For good measure, I would move everything out of this folder (copy-paste) so you could keep it's contents in case something goes wrong or you need to restore more files afterwards.

%PROGRAMDATA%\Lockheed Martin\Prepar3D v4

From this folder, you need to back same three files. Well not the same, but they are named same. Contents are different. Same regime as before - wipe all contents after you are done backing up.

%LOCALAPPDATA%\Lockheed Martin\Prepar3D v4

Delete everything in this folder. No need to back up anything.

 

Once this is done, run P3D and it will recreate its required file structure. I would also run a scenario one just for a good measure. Once you have exited from sim, restore those three files in both AppData and ProgramData folders. If you are still on FTX Central, then you need to run it once for it to do it's things and insert itself in to needed files. Some other scenery developers might require same approach, depends on what you have. After all that is done, I recommend you follow @SteveW tips on establishing baseline performance readings and go from there.

I also recommend you create a graphics profile and assignment profile before you start. This will make it a lot easier to restore settings afterwards.

 

Hope this will be of any help to you.

Steve and Evros, thank you both so much for your recommendations. I did this test and it was amazing to see how much addons truly effect even high spec rigs. I can easily get 50-60 FPS flying around LOWI with basically max settings but as soon as I add in the NGXu it drops substantially to around 30 FPS. 30 consistently is perfectly fine especially when it can be locked. Cleaning up the folders that you guys asked me to definitely helped and I scaled back a few settings that don't really make much difference. It is a much smoother experience now!

[TurboKen 221]

You could double your FPS by reducing the shadows quality and draw distance and also turn off vegetation and also building shadows that will drop FPS at an airport even with your card. 

Edited March 4, 2020 by TurboKen

[TBurns22 1]

13 minutes ago, TurboKen said:

You could double your FPS by reducing the shadows quality and draw distance and also turn off vegetation and also building shadows that will drop FPS at an airport even with your card. 

Thanks for the suggestion Ken. This did not really have much effect. I had already turned the shadow distance down and that did have an effect. Looking at my resource monitor my core 0 is saturated while the others are ~40% and below. I do have an affinity mask of 511 in my cfg from other tuning. Could this be robbing me of frames? 

Edited March 4, 2020 by TBurns22

[TBurns22 1]

Update: I opened Process Lasso and forced P3D to run on cores 3-8 (2-7 logically). This substantially improved my performance. I also forced ActiveSky and REX to operate on cores 1-2 (0-1 logically) and it has made a world of a difference. I tried using LM's internal frame limiter to 30 but noticed I got about 10FPS worse than when I used NVI set to 30.5 and set to 1/2 refresh rate. I now can run p3d at 30 frames very easily and messing with my settings has had no effect on frames. This was a really interesting process and eye-opening. If you remember one thing just know that what works for others MAY NOT work for you. Tweaking is trial and error. I notice that P3d still loads about 60-70% of core 2 but my performance has dramatically improved flying into heavy scenery's with PMDG aircraft. Hopefully LM can optimize P3D to work better across all cores in the future. Thank you all again for your help. I hope that this can help someone else one day

[Evros 310]

Glad to see that it worked out well for you. Are able to run without blurries when not locking frames internally?

And disabling cores 0 and 1 is a good measure when you have 8 cores or more. Applications typically gravitate towards those, so it's best that P3D doesn't have to compete there for resources. My personal experience also shows that core 0 is often weaker on CPU's that run on 300 series chipsets.

[TBurns22 1]

1 hour ago, Evros said:

Glad to see that it worked out well for you. Are able to run without blurries when not locking frames internally?

And disabling cores 0 and 1 is a good measure when you have 8 cores or more. Applications typically gravitate towards those, so it's best that P3D doesn't have to compete there for resources. My personal experience also shows that core 0 is often weaker on CPU's that run on 300 series chipsets.

I do not have blurries when locking with Nvidia Inspector. I do have a minor stutter issue that I'm trying to work through but it's still so much better than it was.