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P3Dv5 Excessive vRam usage

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System memory sends a signal called a Page Fault when there is insufficient memory in the current allocation. GPU does not do this, instead the programmer makes a call to the system to determine the available memory in the budget and if there's enough then the process will continue to load another object. So for example if the object is a texture of 2KB and the available is 4KB then the program will continue and load the texture. However if that texture is corrupt for example, that may look like a texture of infinite bytes to the GPU and the program crashes. Excessive use of the VRAM could indicate something like that is happening.


Steve Waite: Engineer at codelegend.com

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I also have high vRAM usage. I always fly B738 into addon airports, no default airports, and had to use default settings to not have any CTD. If I select "Use high-resolution terrain textures" I will get a warning about my GPU Ram, and that to me lowers the visual effect drastically.

This is my system:

1. ASUS Z170-K, i7/6700, GTX1080, 16Gb, SSD's (no overclocking)

2. Win10/64, P3Dv5.1. Active Sky, Orbx Global Base with LC, Vector, HD Trees, all their basic stuff. FreshMeshX and Addon Scenery.

These are my P3D settings (very basic):

p3d2.png

p3d3.png

This is my GPU Performance from Task Manager:

ped4.png

This is what I get visually, if their is bad weather with rain etc my GPU usage is in the 80-90's%.

p3d6.png

I used P3Dv4.5 before and in my opinion I had better GPU performance with higher "World" settings. Do you agree with me?

What do you think of my systems performance figures and the graphics presented?

Edited by portanav

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I can't even run v5 longer than 10 minutes in VR, 1080ti 11gb user here.


Current system: ASUS PRIME Z690-P D4, Intel 12900k, 32GB RAM @ 3600mhz, Zotac RTX 3090 Trinity, M2 SSD, Oculus Quest 2.

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This is my GPU and CPU performance. Look at how high my CPU core 0 is, I thought LM said (in their forum) P3D will use equally all cores. Does not look like that to me. I had the weather maxed out with low vis, heavy rain, low cloud and thunderstorms; aircraft on the ground.

What do you folks think of this, is this normal for my system, good or should I consider myself lucky?

Continued from post one above.

p3d.png

Edited by portanav

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11 minutes ago, portanav said:

This is my GPU and CPU performance. Look at how high my CPU core 0 is, I thought LM said (in their forum) P3D will use equally all cores. Does not look like that to me.

LM has never said this... and what you are seeing is normal. 🙂

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Bert

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Michael, I'm guessing you, or better your plane, was stationary while taking those screenshots. Start moving, and you will see P3D using the other cores as well, namely to load new scenery.

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Best regards, Dimitrios

7950X - 32 GB - RX6800 - TrackIR - Power-LC M39 WQHD - Honeycomb Alpha yoke, Saitek pedals & throttles in a crummy home-cockpit - MSFS for Pilotedge, P3D for everything else

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On 4/15/2020 at 5:20 AM, Dave_YVR said:

8GB isn't a lot of VRAM anymore. Adjust the sliders to make it work for your system.

Not a major problem tackled sensibly.

I have a 1080 8Gb card and have not yet run out of Vram. My settings are Normal to High and even with TE England and PMDG 744 landing at payware EGLL  I have only used about 6.5 of my 7.1 available. 

V5 gives equal results at lower settings than v4 did. IMHO.

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Intel i7 6700K @4.3. 32gb Gskill 3200 RAM. Z170x Gigabyte m/b. 28" LG HD monitor. Win 10 Home. 500g Samsung 960 as Windows home. 1 Gb Mushkin SSD for P3D. GTX 1080 8gb.

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26 minutes ago, IanHarrison said:

Not a major problem tackled sensibly.

I have a 1080 8Gb card and have not yet run out of Vram. My settings are Normal to High and even with TE England and PMDG 744 landing at payware EGLL  I have only used about 6.5 of my 7.1 available. 

V5 gives equal results at lower settings than v4 did. IMHO.

Add a little PBR and EA (if LM ever makes it worth using), and 8GB is suddenly obsolete. 

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23 hours ago, portanav said:

I thought LM said (in their forum) P3D will use equally all cores

As Bert already pointed out, that's not what they say. P3D does use cores other than Core 0 (or whichever main core it's on), but the number of things it can do so for is limited by the nature of the task. To distribute load evenly across CPU cores you have to be able to divide the workload equally. You can't do that in a flight simulation (or really a game of any kind). Simply put, calculations for which you need the result in order to do the remaining calculations have to be performed in order, so cannot usefully be put onto separate cores, and there are a lot of those calculations going on in order to render each frame. Any workload which is separate enough to have been split onto a separate thread, has already been.

Is it possible to design a sim engine from the ground up that can put more work on separate cores than P3D does now? Most likely. Is it possible to design one that can split its load equally across whatever number of CPU cores you have? No. It isn't, and it will never be. And even if it were, once you start fully-loading multiple cores at the same time, other performance limiters kick in, notably I/O and memory access. You might be surprised how much of the time a CPU core is effectively doing nothing at all because the code it is executing is spinning in a loop waiting for data to be loaded from RAM or from a device. Storage, even super-fast storage like NVMe, is glacial compared to the speed of the CPU and you can burn many cycles waiting on a data load. Finding ways to break off and do productive things with those cycles (instead of waiting) and then come back exactly at the point when the data becomes available is where all of the big gains are being found right now and is the subject of lots and lots of research into parallel programming. If we could fill all those gaps all the time you could gain back significant processing power. 

Generally, though, multi-core is not the answer to CPU speed limits for anything other than highly parallel tasks. The whole reason chip designers went multi-core is because they had reached the practical speed limits of single-core designs - and chip-makers had to find somewhere to grow in order to sell new products. Single-core improvements do still happen: a current Intel or AMD CPU is still faster, clock cycle for clock cycle on a single core, than a CPU from a decade ago. But those gains are small and will not continue forever. 

Basically, we hit a speed limit a long time ago and PCs are not going to have the same doubling of performance that they used to have back in the days of Moore's Law ever again, barring fundamentally new technology that allows us to run chips faster and cooler, or something completely new like optical computing. 

The onus is now on software developers to improve their code and make it more efficient and more parallel, but there are hard limits on how much you can do that depending on your software's purpose. The DX12 update was about the biggest single thing LM could do to increase performance, but that has come at the cost of increased instability and most often the reason for that has nothing to do with P3D itself (though some is also clearly down to bugs in the sim). There's lots of good discussion of this up-thread. 

Simmers need to realise that there's no silver performance bullet waiting in the wings, either via hardware or software. We're in the age of small gains now.

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Temporary sim: 9700K @ 5GHz, 2TB NVMe SSD, RTX 3080Ti, MSFS + SPAD.NeXT

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13 hours ago, Chapstick said:

Add a little PBR and EA (if LM ever makes it worth using), and 8GB is suddenly obsolete. 

EA would make 0.6Gb difference (but is not in use) and PBR is running at present. So no major problems that can't be handled.


Intel i7 6700K @4.3. 32gb Gskill 3200 RAM. Z170x Gigabyte m/b. 28" LG HD monitor. Win 10 Home. 500g Samsung 960 as Windows home. 1 Gb Mushkin SSD for P3D. GTX 1080 8gb.

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Someone mentioned on this thread I believe, that their may be some improvement in a coming windows update (21H1) to the handling of vRam. I upgraded today to that version on my sim, and I have noticed an improvement. I was able to raise my LOD from High to Ultra, and select "use high texture terrain" and not have my sim crash due to vRam overload. This test was done at an heavy piece of scenery, KMEM from FSDreanTeam in heavy weather. So I do think something may have been done in Win10 as suggested by the member.

It would be nice if others who upgrade to this new version of windows report their findings, confirming or not my observations.

Thanks,

Michael.

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1 minute ago, portanav said:

Someone mentioned on this thread I believe, that their may be some improvement in a coming windows update (21H1) to the handling of vRam. I upgraded today to that version on my sim, and I have noticed an improvement. I was able to raise my LOD from High to Ultra, and select "use high texture terrain" and not have my sim crash due to vRam overload. This test was done at an heavy piece of scenery, KMEM from FSDreanTeam in heavy weather. So I do think something may have been done in Win10 as suggested by the member.

It would be nice if others who upgrade to this new version of windows report their findings, confirming or not my observations.

Thanks,

Michael.

Watching this for sure… New windows and new P3D V5.2 

Curious to know how LM helped out the vram usage.  

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