Good Framerates - major stutters / pauses

[SorensenDK 1]

Hi All.

I am still struggling with P3D V4.5, and now try this forum.

My problem is that even though I have good framerates, the sim still stutters bigtime, not microstutters, but large like 1/10 sec pauses. This happends both on gorund and in the air. In the air I can see it is connected to P3D loading textures or placing trees/autogen etc, so when every it needs to work, it hangs for a very short while.

The performance also decreases over time, meaning that If I fly from one airport to another, then when landing I get lower FPS as if I started from the airport, making a circuit - and when parked I maybe only have 25 FPS, saving the situation, restarting the SIM in the same situation, WX etc have 45 - 50 FPS. 

I am aware that P3D is sadly so poor programmed that not one computer are able to run it very smoothly, but I know others have a much more smooth simulator. WHat si wrong with my system?

I have three projectors for my wraparound view, each running 30 hz, and a fourth touchmonitor for instructor panel, running 60 hz

Trying to figure this thing out, I formatted my WIN7 disc, and made a complete  new installation with WIN10 PRO / P3D.

I am normally able to get around 45 - 50 FPS with the below mentioned settings on AS EDDK or UK2000 EGKK - and then limit it to 30 to match the projectors 30 hz

I have BTW also discovered that if I activate the P3D framerate limiter to below unlimited, eg 100, then sometimes it will make the frames drop even though it has not reached the limit? 

I have tried FSPS FFTF dynamic without any improvement.  

Hope some one very smart and wise can give me some advise - I am about to give up....really frustrating that my SIM is not flyable... 😞 

I thank you in advance

/Bjarne

My Specs:

ASUS ROG Maximus X Hero Z370 ATX
I7-8700K 3,7 GHz - Running 5 GHz
2 x EVGA RTX 2080 ti XC Ultra
2 x 1TB Samsung 970 Evo m.2 SSD HD
16 gb G Skill DDR4 PC 3000 CL 15 
Corsair Hydro Series H150i Liquid CPU Cooler
Windows 10 PRO - 64 bit

Installed add-ons:

P3DV4.5 - newest version

ORBX Global BASE Pack
ORBX VECTOR
ORBX England
ORBX Germany North + South

Aerosoft EDDK
UK2000 EGKK

Active Sky For P3DV4

Main PC also running Prosim, Prosim MCP, Prosim Audio, FS Flight Control, Fly Elise Immersion PRO - but closing all other software does not give any improvement.

P3D Settings:
FXAA . OFF
AA: 8xSSAA
Texture Filtering: Anisotropic 16x
VSYNC / Triple Buffering: OFF.
Target Frame Rate: 31 (gives 30 in SIM)

LOD Radius: High
Tessellation Factor: High
Mesh Resolution: 19m

Texture Resolution: 1m
No High Res textures
Scenery Complexity: Sparse
Autogen and Scenery draw distance: Medium
Autogen vegetation density: Sparse
Autogen Building Density: Sparse
No Dyn. 3D Vegetation

Water detail: high
Reflections: Clouds

No Special effect detail or distance

HDR LIghtning: ON - Bright: 1,00 / Bloom: 0 / Saturation: 1,00
Dynamic Refelctions: Off

Dynmaic Lightning: ON

Landing Light Illuminate Gorund: ON

Shadows: OFF

...so technically we are about to below FSX standard, and FSX will probalby run smoothly 😕




 

[gronji2004 8]

Hello,

Do you have FSUIPC autosave enabled?

Cheers,

Alex

[SorensenDK 1]

Hi Alex.

Autosave disabled. 

It seems to ba problem with loading textures. If I set the texture resolution to the left, the stuters becomes less frequently.

Best Regards
Bjarne 

[Christopher Low 5,352]

I experience big stutters in specific locations around the UK, and it has never made any sense. I can fly over massively detailed locations like the FlyTampa Amsterdam Schiphol/ORBx TrueEarth Netherlands combo (with everything in the latter enabled, and at maximum scenery complexity and autogen density) with hardly a flutter, and yet I get a big pause in the middle of nowhere flying over the mountains in Scotland! I get a big stutter near EGGP Liverpool, turning left after departure from runway 33 at EGBB Birmingham, just south of EGNX East Midlands, and a straight out departure from runway 20 at EGCN Doncaster Sheffield....and yet I can take off from Aerosoft London Heathrow Professional with ORBx TrueEarth GB South running at maximum scenery complexity and autogen density, do a circuit (whilst looking down the barrel of central London), and then land without getting anything close to the same level of stuttering.

Frankly, it is baffling.

Edited May 27, 2020 by Christopher Low

[Quasimodo 505]

3 hours ago, SorensenDK said:

My problem is that even though I have good framerates, the sim still stutters bigtime, not microstutters, but large like 1/10 sec pauses. This happends both on gorund and in the air. In the air I can see it is connected to P3D loading textures or placing trees/autogen etc, so when every it needs to work, it hangs for a very short while.

The performance also decreases over time, meaning that If I fly from one airport to another, then when landing I get lower FPS as if I started from the airport, making a circuit - and when parked I maybe only have 25 FPS, saving the situation, restarting the SIM in the same situation, WX etc have 45 - 50 FPS. 

I am aware that P3D is sadly so poor programmed that not one computer are able to run it very smoothly, but I know others have a much more smooth simulator. WHat si wrong with my system?

I have three projectors for my wraparound view, each running 30 hz, and a fourth touchmonitor for instructor panel, running 60 hz

Trying to figure this thing out, I formatted my WIN7 disc, and made a complete  new installation with WIN10 PRO / P3D.

I am normally able to get around 45 - 50 FPS with the below mentioned settings on AS EDDK or UK2000 EGKK - and then limit it to 30 to match the projectors 30 hz

I have BTW also discovered that if I activate the P3D framerate limiter to below unlimited, eg 100, then sometimes it will make the frames drop even though it has not reached the limit? 

That's all very well stated and I believe all that is about the norm for anyone running Prepar3D V4 or V5. I've seen all of the issues you've outlined and I believe these are the issues there are no known end user solutions for. The pauses have been put down to scenery loading, Antivirus, windows randomly accessing drives. I have had the experience of low fps at destination airport where it is normal when the same airport is the departure airport. I've also seen it be both normal or low at the same destination airport on different occasions. I also still see autogen loading in block on decent and final into destination airport and during the flight. I've seen perfect sharp tiles right next to blurred tiles. I have a 2080ti and 8086K running at 5.3ghz with 16gb of 4400mhz CL18. The only advantage anyone else could really have over me is 2 extra physical cores.

My solution to it is accept it the way it is. There is always going to be some immersion killers with Prepar3D no matter what. I used to spend a lot of money on addons but I don't anymore. Probably less than $300 a year at this point. So I don't feel like I am throwing good money after bad.

Edited May 27, 2020 by Quasimodo

[SteveW 1,792]

I would run a test with no traffic. If I still get pauses the same it's not that. If smoother without traffic, I would investigate the models by elimination. Sometimes traffic starting up somewhere can create pauses or short freezes.

[Noel 4,492]

Hi SorensenDK,

If you have road traffic enabled start by turning that off.

Next, how about trying what often works very well for fluid stutter-free video, for many others?  If you could perhaps do a test by eliminating the 3 projectors and just use one or a regular PC LCD to see if you can get rid of stutters, then set up this way:

P3D:  unlimited/vsync on/triple buffering enabled.

If your projector's 30Hz refresh is the same as a regular PC LCD monitor then you should have a frame rate of 30 easily maintained w/ the settings you posted--it should be a total breeze to get rid of stutters on your hardware.  I say this because I have had fluid, stutter-free performance even on 7 y/o hardware far inferior to yours.  On my new system it's just the same except I can set sliders up accordingly.  With this approach you MUST be able to maintain 30 fps else you will experience stutters, so you adjust sliders accordingly and perhaps can exploit FFTF Dynamic in fine tuning.  It is also critical to never let your GPU hit 100% load w/ this approach else you will see frame rate dip below 30 and that is the death nell to fluid video.

If you have an LCD monitor to try that doesn't offer 30Hz refresh and alternative method works as well or better, and that is using Riva Tuner's scan line of 60Hz/2 which will then effectively sync to 1/2 of your 60Hz screen to also achieve 30fps.  

Using the internal frame limiter in P3D is a lost cause--never use it!  This was true in FSX as well.

 

[GSalden 4,656]

Try AA with 8x MSAA or 2x SSAA
AF at 8x 

LOD radius at High and if no stutters at Ultra ( so not maxed out )

Clouds resolution at 256 or 512

If you are running 3 projectors from 1 pc it is always heavy on the system.

But P3Dv4.5 can run very smooth with little to no small stutters..

 

[Ianrivaldosmith 5,317]

1 hour ago, Quasimodo said:

That's all very well stated and I believe all that is about the norm for anyone running Prepar3D V4 or V5. I've seen all of the issues you've outlined and I believe these are the issues there are no known end user solutions for. The pauses have been put down to scenery loading, Antivirus, windows randomly accessing drives. I have had the experience of low fps at destination airport where it is normal when the same airport is the departure airport. I've also seen it be both normal or low at the same destination airport on different occasions. I also still see autogen loading in block on decent and final into destination airport and during the flight. I've seen perfect sharp tiles right next to blurred tiles. I have a 2080ti and 8086K running at 5.3ghz with 16gb of 4400mhz CL18. The only advantage anyone else could really have over me is 2 extra physical cores.

My solution to it is accept it the way it is. There is always going to be some immersion killers with Prepar3D no matter what. I used to spend a lot of money on addons but I don't anymore. Probably less than $300 a year at this point. So I don't feel like I am throwing good money after bad.

Spot on, the problem is the software. The mirage of endless ‘solutions’ in here comical. 

[F737MAX 5,579]

Are you running Acronis True Image or similar backup software? Have you excluded your antivirus from actively checking all of the various P3D folders?

Have you tried a lower AA than 8xSSAA?

Checked that only one view window per projector and no pop-out panels (PFD or ND) of a payware airliner are being used?


All the talk of a horror show regarding long pauses seems to be confined to Intel CPU users.
On my current Ryzen 3700X and even my previous 1700X, I only experienced short pauses when my AI traffic was set too high and I flew into a new traffic bubble.
 

[GSalden 4,656]

1 hour ago, Ianrivaldosmith said:

Spot on, the problem is the software. The mirage of endless ‘solutions’ in here comical. 

So why do I not suffer from these issues

If the software is the problem then everyone would experience it.

A few months ago I helped a good friend of mine setting up P3Dv4 as he also claimed to have pauses and stutters. I did nothing special just set everything up as my did for 2 pc’s.

And he is a happy Fs pilot without any issues up to today...

Bottomline :

How you setup your hardware and how you configure all your software is what matters here...

 

Edited May 27, 2020 by GSalden

[Noel 4,492]

30 minutes ago, F737NG said:

Have you tried a lower AA than 8xSSAA?

Definitely should monitor GPU load because even w/ that GPU it would be very easy to overburden it I can imagine w/ 3 projectors depending on their resolution and that should definitely play a role in stutters of that type, recurrent shorter but significant stutters.   Back it way down to 2xMSAA just as an acid test and go from there.

[SorensenDK 1]

Hi All.

Thank you very much for all your contributions. 

Funny thing is that I remember FSX never had stutters - only maybe bad FPS - so if you have 24 FPS, it would run fluid without stutters, but with P3D you can have 50+ FPS and still experience stutters!? 

But some run it better than others, so ther emust be a solution - although, again a complete stutterfree P3D probably is non existing 😉 But I think sometimes you need to dig deeper in the computer systems. For example, if I use RTSS and try Scanline SYn - nothing happends! Som there must be some kind of PC 3D hardware setting that is wrong. When I use MSI afterburner, there are not any consistancy between the FPS recorded in P3D as to MSI Afterburner. Trying to set 30 FPS limit in RTSS I had to use something like 124 FPS, to have 30 FPS in P3D - Wierd! 

@GSalden That looks stunning!! Do you have three monitors using viewgroups, or are all monitors connected by widevew on 3 PC? 3 PC could be the solution, but heard it gives problems with clouds and AI aircrafts etc.?

But anyone have a clue on as to how you can setup faster loading of textures? I only use one SSD m2 HDD, so tranferspeed should be no problem! 

/Bjarne

 

[GSalden 4,656]

2 pc’s :

server 2x 4K ( = 8x 2K...)

left view client 1x 4K ( = 4x 2K... )

No CTD’s no OOMs..

V5 :

Another thing you can try :

- 30 hertz / Unlimited ( I use 25 hertz ! )

- FTFF Dynamic (payware) :

AGL mode : 0-5000

0.01 - 0.33

Edited May 27, 2020 by GSalden

[Ianrivaldosmith 5,317]

2 hours ago, GSalden said:

So why do I not suffer from these issues

If the software is the problem then everyone would experience it.

A few months ago I helped a good friend of mine setting up P3Dv4 as he also claimed to have pauses and stutters. I did nothing special just set everything up as my did for 2 pc’s.

And he is a happy Fs pilot without any issues up to today...

Bottomline :

How you setup your hardware and how you configure all your software is what matters here...

 

A quick google search will show you a decade worth of posts relating to stutters and hitches and whatever else you want to call them. They exist, and they are prevalent. 

Edited May 27, 2020 by Ianrivaldosmith