P3DV5 Dynamic Lighting with 4K Monitor

[atco 161]

Evening all,

After finding the secret last year to running Dynamic Lighting in V4 was to run with no higher than 2xMSAA, I was finally able to start using this feature which on 4k monitors is otherwise crippling at higher AA settings. With my GTX 1080 I can run V4 quite happily now with DL on at 4K with my 2xMSAA with almost no difference to performance during the day.

Now running V5 I've found that once again DL causes crippling performance even at 2xMSAA. Even turning AA off completely doesn't match performance that I get using 2xMSAA during the day.
I'm running V5 at 4K with my GTX1080 with the beta atmospherics turned off. Getting a very pleasant and solid 50-60fps virtually everywhere with excellent visuals - so happy with how it performs in daylight.

However these are the figures at a few select airports:
Flightbeam SEQM     Day 44   Night 13
FlyTampa CYYZ        Day 52   Night 26
Orbx LOWI                Day 45   Night 24
Orbx LDPL                Day 57   Night 27
FlyTampa EKCH       Day 43   Night 25

Then came the outlier which now has me wondering.
I loaded up FSDT's KCLT and got exactly the same figures day and night there with DL on. I then tried FSDT's KSDF and had the same result, no difference in the performance.

So it seems this might be developer issue rather than the base sim issue.
I'm wondering if the issue is with DL using effects files. I know that some parameters have changed within the effects files, especially regarding AI aircraft and landing lights. All the problem sceneries use effects based DL, however I can't find FSDT DL effects files, so I'm not sure if they use their couatl engine for DL. I'm certainly no expert so I'm just guessing.

Before reporting to devs I would like to get any more data points (Is this just me seeing this?), are any other 4K users seeing the same issues at some of these addon airports? Note that all the airports are officially updated to V5 according to the devs, and all were installed using their own native V5 installers. I have not ported anything across from V4.
Would love to hear from other 4K users what they are experiencing with Dynamic Lighting.

[Peter Z KCLE_EDDN 336]

Hi there,

I’m running 4K on a rtx2080 and have no FPS impact regardless of texture resolution, but I have ended up with vram warnings at least twice. Still testing though, and after just dialing a setting here or there back. 
 

Having said that, I haven’t installed a complex aircraft yet, so that remains to be seen. I believe I’ve seen others importing fslabs with good success and performance. 
 

Cheers,

Pete

[atco 161]

Hi Pete,

So you have not had any FPS impact at all at night with dynamic lighting at airports?

If you have any FlyTampa or Flightbeam or Orbx scenery can you do me a favour and just head to any of their airports where you have dynamic lighting activated (any aircraft will do), load it up at night and put the aircraft at a gate, right under the lights and let me know if you see any difference from daytime?
You can use the Change date and time menu to scroll through day/night on the fly in real time so it should be easy to see if the numbers are the same day or night.

[JasonPC 173]

I would also look at some of the inibuilds dynamic lighting profiles for various airports. They usually optimize theirs much better than the default DL that comes with many addons. With the lighting changes in V5 though I'm not sure how some of them will look. Some lights seem much brighter than they were in V4.

[Peter Z KCLE_EDDN 336]

2 hours ago, atco said:

Hi Pete,

So you have not had any FPS impact at all at night with dynamic lighting at airports?

If you have any FlyTampa or Flightbeam or Orbx scenery can you do me a favour and just head to any of their airports where you have dynamic lighting activated (any aircraft will do), load it up at night and put the aircraft at a gate, right under the lights and let me know if you see any difference from daytime?
You can use the Change date and time menu to scroll through day/night on the fly in real time so it should be easy to see if the numbers are the same day or night.

I haven't installed any FT or FB sceneries just yet, and probably won't until official updates are released. However, last night I installed a number of smaller airfields out west, and I was completely blown away by the performance with nearly everything maxed, incl. 4K textures, but only 2xssaa. Unfortunately I don't know if any of those Orbx airfields have DL.

Cheers,

Pete

[cwburnett 1,809]

1 hour ago, Peter Z KCLE_EDDN said:

I haven't installed any FT or FB sceneries just yet, and probably won't until official updates are released. However, last night I installed a number of smaller airfields out west, and I was completely blown away by the performance with nearly everything maxed, incl. 4K textures, but only 2xssaa. Unfortunately I don't know if any of those Orbx airfields have DL.

Cheers,

Pete

FB, LVFR and a few others have v5 installers available already FYI.

4 hours ago, atco said:

Would love to hear from other 4K users what they are experiencing with Dynamic Lighting.

I will check SEQM out in a bit.

[Uteman 51]

47 minutes ago, cwburnett said:

  5 hours ago, atco said:

Would love to hear from other 4K users what they are experiencing with Dynamic Lighting.

No problems with my 1080Ti but then again I NEVER use AA on either my 4k or 2kscreens. The night lighting looks great flying over the ORBX Gold Coast  with the A2A Skylane.

AA is totally unnecessary on 4k imo and kills smoothness which is the opposite of what I am seeking.

[cwburnett 1,809]

5 hours ago, atco said:

Would love to hear from other 4K users what they are experiencing with Dynamic Lighting.

So, SEQM I saw a small drop, though neither my CPU nor GPU were maxed, so that was odd. Also, I didn't have a shadow from the DL which I believe I did with 4.5.

I tried LVFR KMIA and FlightBeam KSFO as well. Small hit at KMIA, but no hit at SFO. But, again, at SFO, the DL was hardly visible with no shadow.  I lock via vsync at 30 FPS and never dropped below the low 20s at KMIA and the high 20s at SEQM.

4K and 2xSSAA.

SEQM:

KMIA:

KSFO:

[Nemo 1,305]

1 hour ago, cwburnett said:

FB, LVFR and a few others have v5 installers available already FYI.

I will check SEQM out in a bit.

Having v5 installers does not necessarily mean that those add-ons are already fully adapted for v5. I guess many updates are yet to come.

Edited April 18, 2020 by Nemo

[Peter Webber 340]

2 hours ago, Nemo said:

Having v5 installers does not mean that those add-ons are already fully adapted for v5. I guess many updates are yet to come.

Fully agree. I have the suspicion some developers have rushed out installers without their products being fully optimized (compatibility and optimization being two different beasts). Even ORBX (with their central installer still in Beta / Fastlane) have "known issues". Will hold back installing anything for now. PMDG seem to be looking into this in the correct way. Regards.

Edited April 18, 2020 by Peter Webber

[atco 161]

Thanks all for the input so far, been very interesting.

I've done a bit more testing and I don't believe this is an underlying sim issue, it has to be the way some addons have had their lighting done and now I'm feeling even more sure its related to the fx files that have been used.

I tested all the addon airports I have installed that have DL (Flightbeam KIAD and KSFO normally come with DL but its currently not working properly in P3DV5)
Flightbeam SEQM:
First Test: Frame Rate Umlimited
Day 57
Night 17
Truly awful jittery, stuttering performance

Second Test: Frame Rate Locked at 30
Day 30
Night 30

Third Test: Frame Rate Unlimited again
Day 56
Night 28

Interestingly at a locked 30 it was very consistent. Minor drop off when viewing the main terminal and jetways.
On my third test the performance with unlimited frame rate was much better at night even though the day was about the same. Very inconsistent.
I used the same aircraft and have no AI installed. Same settings as the first and second tests yet a much better performance although still significantly worse than during the day.

FlyTampa KLAS:
Day 51 Night 48
FlyTampa KBOS:
Day 60 Night 59
FlyTampa EKCH:
Day 58 Night 47
FlyTampa CYYZ:
Day 52 Night 40

CYYZ and EKCH had small performance drops, but KLAS and KBOS were absolutely identical day and night

MK Studios LEPA:
Day 54 Night 40

A drop off of 14 FPS, but still useable

Orbx KSAN:
Day 50 Night 11
Orbx ESSA:
Day 53 Night 31
Orbx ESGG:
Day 47 Night 31
Orbx LIEO:
Day 60 Night 25
Orbx LEAS:
Day 60 Night 60
Orbx LEBB:
Day 60 Night 40
Orbx LDPL:
Day 57 Night 27
Orbx LYBE:
Day 60 Night 44
Orbx LOWI:
Day 56 Night 29
Orbx EGPH:
Day 60 Night 27
Orbx YBCG:
Day 60 Night 25

Really bad performance at almost every Orbx airport and some like San Diego are an absolute slide show. Every airport showed a major difference between day and night dynamic lighting. If you are locked at 30 FPS though, there is probably not much difference. I'm one of those who has always had a much smoother experience at unlimited with Vsync on at a 60Hz refresh rate.

By changing the Orbx dynamic lighting to the inibuilds ones (V5 compliant from this evening) resulted in KSAN being:
Day 51 Night 37
An improvement of 26 FPS over the Orbx lighting.

Also using the inibuilds DL at FSDT KLAX gave me this:
Day 51 Night 42
So their DL mods seem to be working very well in V5.

In V4 I've never had to change out the default DL because of performance, it looks like V5 may be much less forgiving.
Turning Anti-Aliasing off makes virtually no difference (perhaps a gain of 2-4 FPS). I wonder if there is something in the fx files, given that large airports like KLAS and KBOS both show little to no drop in performance between day or night.

I would totally agree that it looks like many of these products have simply been made able to be installed in V5 rather than having much if any work done on them to ensure they comply with any changes demanded by the new SDK.

Again, thank you to everyone for their input

 

 

Edited April 18, 2020 by atco

[mpo910 2,112]

I am also seeing this with my setup.

I8700k 5.1 GhZ

3200MHZ 32GB RAM

RTX2080TI

4K 32inch Monitor

Orbx FB FlyTampa installed. 

All have this enormous FPS and VRAM impact. Especially ORBX KSAN AND LEBB. 

Also in the default mooney airplane turning Landing and Taxi Lights on. With VR Panning the view down while Taxiing and Lights on at night enormous stuttering. Kills my FPS to low 10 FPS

There must something be wrong with Dyn.Light. 

Marcus

[atco 161]

Marcus thank you so much for confirming. Glad to know I'm not crazy!

My suspicions lie in the fx files or the effects texture files. In older versions of FS there was a known problem where DXT3 textures without alpha channels would cause crippling stuttering. I haven't had time to check the various textures and see if something is going on there and I don't have enough knowledge about fx files to understand if there are issues there.

I do know from my work within AIG that fx files have undergone changes, there are new variables and parameters in there. This is one reason why our OCI has not been updated for V5 yet, work is going on the fix the fx files to make them V5 native. That would be where the bulk of my suspicion lies with these performance problems and why some airports are seemingly unaffected.

[mpo910 2,112]

12 minutes ago, atco said:

Marcus thank you so much for confirming. Glad to know I'm not crazy!

My suspicions lie in the fx files or the effects texture files. In older versions of FS there was a known problem where DXT3 textures without alpha channels would cause crippling stuttering. I haven't had time to check the various textures and see if something is going on there and I don't have enough knowledge about fx files to understand if there are issues there.

I do know from my work within AIG that fx files have undergone changes, there are new variables and parameters in there. This is one reason why our OCI has not been updated for V5 yet, work is going on the fix the fx files to make them V5 native. That would be where the bulk of my suspicion lies with these performance problems and why some airports are seemingly unaffected.

Today i tested the dynamic lights on orbx Gold coast airport. Stood at the gate.

Daytime 50 fps

Nighttime 24 fps and stuttering like mad

There is definitly something going wrong.

I am a little concerned that not all scenery devs are aware of that. Like orbx which already updated their products but the issue is i  there.

Also the default planes from LM have these problems. Especially with VR on and looking down in the cockpit has stuttering effects. Also outise views on the airports gates with dynamic lights....if you are standing in the light glow it has a horrible impact on the frames.

Regards Marcus

[mpo910 2,112]

19 hours ago, atco said:

Marcus thank you so much for confirming. Glad to know I'm not crazy!

My suspicions lie in the fx files or the effects texture files. In older versions of FS there was a known problem where DXT3 textures without alpha channels would cause crippling stuttering. I haven't had time to check the various textures and see if something is going on there and I don't have enough knowledge about fx files to understand if there are issues there.

I do know from my work within AIG that fx files have undergone changes, there are new variables and parameters in there. This is one reason why our OCI has not been updated for V5 yet, work is going on the fix the fx files to make them V5 native. That would be where the bulk of my suspicion lies with these performance problems and why some airports are seemingly unaffected.

I also posted a explaination on LM Support. Did you also post overthere? I think it is necessary to become attention on this topic

Massiv FPS Impact "being" in a dynamic light bundle without and with VR

Edited April 19, 2020 by mpo910