Default clouds killing FPS? Active Sky XP

[Alpha Floor 237]

8 minutes ago, Bjoern said:

Because OpenGL is kind of slow.

So esentially the game is broken?

 

[Pastaiolo 1,688]

On 6/4/2020 at 1:47 AM, Alpha Floor said:

Gentlemen,

I usually get somewhere around 45-60+ FPS on my machine. 60+ during cruise: i9 9900k OC 5.1 GHz, RTX 2080 Super, DDR4 32GB 3200MHz.

However, whenever there is a thick cloud layer around as provided by Active Sky XP the frame rate seems to suffer disproportionately. Here is an image when I was cruising at around 30-35 FPS surrounded by cloud.

I understand clouds are difficult to render but these are the default XP-11.41 clouds, I did not touch them or applied any weird shader or anything. Also note it's my CPU that's bottlenecking here, not the GPU. any idea as to why?

I am not using the Active Sky cloud textures. Do these perform any better or worse than the default ones?

Thanks for your help in advance,

Jaime

Sadly it is something mostly related to how default clouds are an its weather engine. LR didn't update their clouds or weather engine in years and it shows, then resources were shifted to Vulkan. We'll see afterwards if they will get back to it, or, as i like to joke about it, Austin will start measuring how the speed of a fart is going to affect the general airflow of his plane at 200 knots on a clean day instead of focusing on more pressing engine related XP matters.

Edited June 6, 2020 by Pastaiolo

[Bjoern 1,157]

On 6/6/2020 at 12:32 AM, Alpha Floor said:

So esentially the game is broken?

Yes, "slow" naturally means "broken". I'd immediately ask Laminar and the devs of all your add-ons for a refund and then write scathing zero star reviews on all major retail outlets for XP11.

Sass aside, OpenGL is essentially an old API that no video card manufacturer cares about anymore. Therefor, driver-level support for it in proprietary drivers is minimal, which in turn makes it very slow. With properly written drivers, OpenGL still be can be quite fast though. Some numbers to drive the point home, for XP benchmark 55 on an AMD 5700XT at QHD resolution:

Windows (standard AMD driver): OpenGL - 30 FPS (Vulkan - 52 FPS)
Linux (open-source driver): OpenGL - 50 FPS (Vulkan - 60 FPS)

[Alpha Floor 237]

1 hour ago, Bjoern said:

Yes, "slow" naturally means "broken". I'd immediately ask Laminar and the devs of all your add-ons for a refund and then write scathing zero star reviews on all major retail outlets for XP11.

😂

X-Plane is one of those "love-hate" kind of relations. I want to love it, but it drives me crazy sometimes. It seems performance hasn't been a main concern for them historically. (and no, I get your sass but no zero star reviews from me. Overall I am happier in my life having X-Plane over not having it, even with all its flaws...)

What I don't get is their ideal FPS range of 25 to 35. I mean, who are they kidding? 35 is "usable" but hardly "ideal". Ideal is 45-60. The difference in smoothness is very noticeable.

[soaring_penguin 428]

12 minutes ago, Alpha Floor said:

😂

X-Plane is one of those "love-hate" kind of relations. I want to love it, but it drives me crazy sometimes. It seems performance hasn't been a main concern for them historically. (and no, I get your sass but no zero star reviews from me. Overall I am happier in my life having X-Plane over not having it, even with all its flaws...)

What I don't get is their ideal FPS range of 25 to 35. I mean, who are they kidding? 35 is "usable" but hardly "ideal". Ideal is 45-60. The difference in smoothness is very noticeable.

Actually, Austin himself would like everybody to hit 60fps everywhere ... . 25 to 35 is what you get if you add enough to the mix.

[mattdebrugha 0]

I’ve downloaded the 3jFPS script and seems to help quite a bit. When I had active sky weather active my FPS kept “chugging” from 60 down to 20” every second which was pretty annoying

[mSparks 2,086]

On 6/7/2020 at 4:18 PM, Alpha Floor said:

What I don't get is their ideal FPS range of 25 to 35.

source please.

[mattdebrugha 0]

I still happened to get these chugging fps drops where the frame render times jumped from 150 to 300 every second... I just removed Geoforce Experience and it seems to be steady for now! 

 

Edit: Never mind... its back 😧

Edited June 29, 2020 by mattdebrugha

[Alpha Floor 237]

On 6/29/2020 at 4:36 PM, mSparks said:

source please.

https://www.x-plane.com/kb/setting-the-rendering-options-for-best-performance/

[mSparks 2,086]

3 hours ago, Alpha Floor said:

https://www.x-plane.com/kb/setting-the-rendering-options-for-best-performance/

Note: This article is for X-Plane 10 only.

... things have changed a bit since then.

But at least now I know where it comes from. Thank you.

11 is targetting "VR native" aka 90fps - not quite there yet tho.

Edited July 5, 2020 by mSparks