Stutters - CPU0 okay but not others. How to fix?

[Ray Proudfoot 8,932]

@Mace, being retired all my flying is in daylight as I gather night flying does impose an additional burden. Dusk and dawn arrivals / departures are nice though with the lighting.

[Ray Proudfoot 8,932]

Gotcha. Only one flight with those new settings so it should become clear if it’s preferable with a few more.

[Ray Proudfoot 8,932]

42 minutes ago, SteveW said:

You can measure the initial loading time and that performance is reflected throughout the running of the sim. If it loads a scenario faster, it loads additional scenery and planes faster during the simulation as well. However, as I said, the fastest loading does not always add up to the best simulation smoothness so you are looking for balance.

Quicker loading times seems to result in fewer resources for providing a smooth flight. You can have your cake but you can’t eat it. Or you can eat something less desirable than cake. 😁

I shall get my stopwatch app loaded tomorrow.

[AnkH 2,233]

Personally I could not care less about loading times. All I want is smooth flying and no blurries. As long as I achieve that, I dont mind if I lose 30 seconds for loading...

[SteveW 1,792]

That's right, but we maybe won't want to lose 30 seconds loading as that is also reflected throughout the simulation whenever it comes across new scenery.

Instead, loading time is just a useful metric, handy to know about a given system. As each core or LP is added the loading time always comes down. Initially we see big gains in loading speed and there we have overhead - available reserves. Later with many LPs, only small gains in loading speed but we have lost the overhead. With few cores the system is not stressed because it's not saturating the system and we have available reserves - overhead. With too many cores the system is over saturated and the loading speeds do not increase so much.

If we are converting a movie to another format we don't care about resources we want to use every LP we can get to reduce that rendering time. With P3D we have the main simulation task and we want to preserve its performance.

[Ray Proudfoot 8,932]

Assuming I’m reading this correctly a core (or LP) can be used either to prioritise loading scenery or to enhance the presentation of P3D to the user.

It cannot do both optimally. Depending on how you assign LPs one will be better than the other. From my experience yesterday assigning fewer LPs to P3D definitely resulted in a smoother sim at the expense (presumably) of slower loading times. But those slower loading times whilst the sim was running were not obvious to me.

Presumably they would show up when on final with airport buildings taking longer to draw. If that is the downside I can live with that. I’m firing up the PC shortly for a flight.

[SteveW 1,792]

That's right. The Simulator when running fills in the scene concurrently the background tasks take seconds to complete. The simulator continues with the best fps as usual, but is interrupted by the system servicing the request for the queue of objects entering into the scene. So a balance will be found depending on the setting in the simulator and the power of the system. Remember that making some settings too high flatline a resource and then results or outcomes of tests don't compare in a reliable way.

[Ray Proudfoot 8,932]

Steve, how much have L-M improved on this balance between loading time and smoothness since they produced P3D? Is there room for improvement with future sub-releases or v5?

I guess the more VPs you have the better the situation notwithstanding the clock speed of course which I guess remains paramount.

Very smooth taxi out at LPPT and now enroute to Bilbao. GPU not being tested much with clear skies. I shall have to find some grotty weather. Stopwatch not employed yet.

[SteveW 1,792]

Experimentation like that can be helpful but it's not essential. So we can get a feel of how the system performs noting the loading time accurately, remembering to do it a few times to stabilise the caching. Boot up fresh and load P3D takes longer than it does on subsequent loading. P3D would basically require a minimum of four LPs 0,2,4,6. What the optimum will be depends on so many factors. It is likely that where you see only small gains in loading speed, you have probably got enough LPs by then.

[Ray Proudfoot 8,932]

Just landed at Bilbao and whilst the taxi out at Lisbon was smooth as silk the approach into Bilbao was anything but.

FPS dropped into the teens and it was very stuttery. How come with ORBX scenery? Do these use photorealistic files that hammer the system? Very disappointing. I shall have to test here with my previous core loading and see if there's a significant difference.

Here's the last bit of the FSUIPC log. 12.5 is crazy with my system at such a quiet airport.

 8038765 === Closing the Log ... Bye Bye! ...
  8038765 System time = 25/03/2020 12:46:13, Simulator time = 13:29:43 (12:29Z)
  8038765 *** FSUIPC log file being closed
Minimum frame rate was 12.5 fps, Maximum was 31.9 fps
Average frame rate for running time of 7692 secs = 29.6 fps
Maximum AI traffic for session was 60 aircraft
Traffic deletions 0 aircraft
Memory managed: 9799 Allocs, 9798 Freed
********* FSUIPC Log file closed ***********

 

Edited March 25, 2020 by Ray Proudfoot

[micstatic 4,316]

I have no experience with Bilbao.  But I've noticed that many orbx sceneries hammer my system with their DL.  I still keep it on with them, but not optimal.  

[Ray Proudfoot 8,932]

@micstatic, thanks. I’m going to ask the question on their forum given the severity of the performance at a small airport and with scenery sliders well off max.

They do seem to be the rebels in the FS community. Great products but not always going by the SDK.

[Ray Proudfoot 8,932]

Just to update the position regarding relatively poor performance approaching and landing at Bilbao. I performed a series of test flights and the author is going to release a slightly less heavy package for me to test.

He has incorporated lots of complex objects in both the airport and the nearby town. As they are loaded the system is struggling and it shouldn’t be really given it’s a relatively small airport and my system can cope pretty well at all other airports.

I suspect they have gone a little over the top with high-res ground-based objects. The slimmed-down package should help.

Nothing to do with my revised AF settings fortunately.

[SteveW 1,792]

Getting affinity right doesn't make up for too much high resolution and objects in the scene, just loads it all up quicker.