I set a manual cache to 50GB to cache my home area where I do my practice stuff.  It is 600 square miles all photogrammetry (Pinellis County, FL) and it took 49 of 50GB allocated. It took about 2 hours to build the area.  I also have the LOD tweak in my user config set to 5 from 2.  This causes the the sim to take about 30 seconds longer to load up the scenery but when it's done it is great.  No streaming, no seeing the scenery load in,  no scenery cut off or melting photogrammetry high-rises in the distance.  I lock my frames to 30 with MSI Afterburner and I get a smooth 30 FPS.  Great from doing my touch and goes and my hundred dollar hamburgers.    It's the only area I intend to cache because I tend to bounce around quite a bit but it's great to have it there as it's the home area.  I do not use rolling cache.

System Specs:
asrock z390 phantom gaming mobo
I7-9700k @ 5.0 GHz
32 GB Ram
Geforce RTX 2070 running 1440p Acer monitor
FS is on dedicated 500gb M.2
Internet download speed average 450 Mbps

What do these settings actually do? Do they prevent occasional pauses or stutters?

I've heard setting both to 0 helps eliminate stutters for some users...

I am now thinking that I will only cache large cities I am about to go to, like LAX, NYC  and delete them after if I don't intend on returning soon ... a manual management style

Edited September 6, 20205 yr by peppy197

8 hours ago, abrams_tank said:

Most Canadian cities are missing photogrammetry.  For Vancouver, the only photogrammetry is downtown Vancouver and a little outside of downtown.  Otherwise, for most of metro Vancouver, there isn't any photogrammetry.  One way to check is just go to Bing Maps and you can see which areas of the city have photogrammetry.

So that's why if you try to cache parts of the Vancouver metro area, it's 4 MB.  Conversely, much of metro Seattle is covered by photogrammetry.  So that is why caching metro Seattle may give you 6 GB.

You can just do a visual check.  Fly a slow plane like the Cessna 152 close to the ground.  Metro Seattle looks way, way better than metro Vancouver (only downtown Vancouver looks good because it has photogrammetry).

i did find VAN a bit more extended than what i remember (mostly real sailing, no planes)

Edited September 6, 20205 yr by peppy197

11 hours ago, peppy197 said:

I am now thinking that I will only cache large cities I am about to go to, like LAX, NYC  and delete them after if I don't intend on returning soon ... a manual management style

My approach of having multiple manual cache files will allow you to keep those airports while adding new airports as well. After taking all day to download 20GB of photogrammetry, the last thing I want to do is delete that data if I ever plan to visit that place again.

I have strong evidence that the rolling cache acts as an L1 cache, and the manual cache acts as an L2 cache, meaning that FS first checks the rolling cache, and if it can't find scenery, it then goes to the manual cache (and this is the important part - COPYING the data into the rolling cache), and if it still can't find the scenery, then it downloads it.

This means that as long as the manual cache editor is broken, the best configuration is to have a huge rolling cache and a smaller manual cache big enough to download a single city / region (or as I suggested earlier, multiple manual caches for multiple cities). Once you fly over that city, data will be copied from the manual cache into the rolling cache, so you can use the manual cache to load the next city you are going to without losing the previous city from the rolling cache, assuming rolling cache is big enough.

So, I can't just select the region as big as I want and choose high quality? Why is that?

People. The entire cache system is bugged out. Just ignore it for now.

Set both to zero. The amount of data streamed in real time is tiny anyway.

I find it much smoother to have both set at Zero.

21 minutes ago, Gabe777 said:

People. The entire cache system is bugged out. Just ignore it for now.

Set both to zero. The amount of data streamed in real time is tiny anyway.

I find it much smoother to have both set at Zero.

This has been my observation as well (see my "Trees are grass!" thread), though I do use the rolling cache because my bandwidth struggles with photogrammetry, so the rolling cache helps in my case.

One thing I noticed when I used the manual cache for everything and then later turning it off, is that FS seems to be very smart in how it streams data. If I cache a city like Boston, it downloads a crazy amount of data. If I fly over the same city relying on streaming, I do get the warnings about bandwidth, but the city still looks good from my perspective. I know for fact that I'm not streaming anywhere near as much data as I did precaching the city using the manual cache, which means FS is really doing a good job at focusing on what I can see (buildings and scenery right outside my window, for example) rather than everything. So with this in mind, using the manual cache now feels "wasteful" both of my own bandwidth and time (plus time to "paint" the areas to download) and the server's bandwidth as well. After all, who flies directly over every single building in a city in a grid pattern?

But I am curious now, what are the known bugs with the rolling cache?

 

ps - I wish I could edit my previous post about manual caching (see above). While I believe the assumptions are still correct, I can no longer recommend using manual cache because of the bugs (trees are grass).

Edited September 8, 20205 yr by Keto Ketchup
added info

2 hours ago, Keto Ketchup said:

 

But I am curious now, what are the known bugs with the rolling cache?

 

 

Manual cache interface becomes slow, clunky and basically unusable after creating 1 or 2 areas.

So I realize this is a year-old thread.... but as a new FSer & first-time installer - I have to ask.... are things better for manual and rolling?  I ask this as I am in the middle of waiting for a manual cached region to finish downloading (one of at least 5 I had planned - with relatively high detail and each about the size of greater chicagoland) - and after reading this thread - I am now worried if this is going to be self-defeating.  Has there been any improvement or advancement in the manual cache management and how effective it is, etc?  Is Keto Ketchup's process still the best way to go when caching multiple cities?

Thanks all... this was a really good read - it just has me worried.  Crossing fingers that the past year has been good to the sim in this regard. 

 

On 9/8/2020 at 3:40 AM, Gabe777 said:

People. The entire cache system is bugged out. Just ignore it for now.

Set both to zero. The amount of data streamed in real time is tiny anyway.

I find it much smoother to have both set at Zero.

Before  upgrading to new SSD, my old SSD was nearly full so I deleted rolling cache. I could not find any difference in quality or stutters when I had no cache at all.

I think the local cache system was designed by Asobo for slow internet connection areas.

I wonder if loading times are slower when you hit the FLY button if you have no local cache (neither rolling nor manual)?  I do know that when you warp to a new far away location using developer mode, it takes awhile for the scenery to load, about 20 seconds

1 hour ago, srobak said:

Crossing fingers that the past year has been good to the sim in this regard. 

I am not sure that Asobo has gotten around to looking at this.. If you have a good internet connection, the Caches do not appear to help and may possibly affect smooth performance.. try it, and see!