Clouds killing FPS

[quacks 0]

Hello All, recently in my sim (P3dv5.2,) I have been getting major performance hits when rendering clouds with an RTX2070 and a ryzen 7 2700x at 4.3GHz.

I'm using REX clouds with an EA sky, and the draw distance is at 90 with maximum coverage, 3 cloud layers in ASP3D, and auto resolution in REX. My FPS w/o clouds is around 45-55 but when clouds come in the FPS drops to 20-25.

I have tried deleting shaders, ShadersHLSL, reinstalling client/content, using DDU to revert to old drivers, and changing REX settings to no avail. In V4 or 5.1 this was never an issue, clouds had little to no impact on my fps. Shadows are on but rendering distance is only at medium.

Any help is appreciated

[Flyinggok 55]

What is your draw distance set in ASP3D?

The draw distance from P3D setting will be overwritten with it what I know.

Everything above 110 kills my 1080 too but you have much recent GPU.

I recognized also an unusal higher impact on fps if clouds are present which I have never been seen before but I have not find out what is causing this.

[newtie 533]

What is auto resolution in REX and what is the resolution it's drawing at?

[blaunarwal 432]

Reducing resolution of the clouds can improve your framerates. When I used the 1080 and later 2080 I had to do this to have acceptable performance in P3D4.5. I used 512 clouds. It looked the same like with higher resolutions.

Now with 5.2 I have a RTX 3090 which has no problem regarding resolution of the clouds. So I can't talk about v5 really but I guess, it is the same as with 4.5. Maybe with EA on, you should go for 1024 then or switch EA off. At least I am not convinced of EA yet.

[quacks 0]

10 hours ago, Flyinggok said:

What is your draw distance set in ASP3D?

The draw distance from P3D setting will be overwritten with it what I know.

Everything above 110 kills my 1080 too but you have much recent GPU.

I recognized also an unusal higher impact on fps if clouds are present which I have never been seen before but I have not find out what is causing this.

Min 60/Max 90. It seems that when i just have cirrus clouds my FPS is fine but all of a sudden when i have overcast, my fps dips a lot and stutters are highly noticeable.

[quacks 0]

9 hours ago, newtie said:

What is auto resolution in REX and what is the resolution it's drawing at?

1024x1024 i changed it manually to this resolution and it overcast still destroys my FPS

[quacks 0]

4 hours ago, blaunarwal said:

Reducing resolution of the clouds can improve your framerates. When I used the 1080 and later 2080 I had to do this to have acceptable performance in P3D4.5. I used 512 clouds. It looked the same like with higher resolutions.

Now with 5.2 I have a RTX 3090 which has no problem regarding resolution of the clouds. So I can't talk about v5 really but I guess, it is the same as with 4.5. Maybe with EA on, you should go for 1024 then or switch EA off. At least I am not convinced of EA yet.

Tried to reduce from HD to 1024 to 512 and there was no major difference in performance, overcast still killed my fps. 

Edited July 16, 2021 by quacks

[quacks 0]

Yeah this is really weird, I can spawn in at KLAS facing the strip (RW26R) and get 45ish FPS at an already taxing scenery, but put in overcast clouds and my fps dips to 25-30. I don't think clouds should be having this big of an impact.

[quacks 0]

To add on as well, when I think I should have more GPU usage during heavy overcast, it remains around the same (as well as my CPU) as it would be with light clouds or no clouds at all, but the FPS is significantly worse. Is this just the game's engine being bad, or is my installation borked? I've tried reinstalling to no avail many times.

[Flyinggok 55]

I would say, yes there is something wrong with your installation.

Just tried basic theme with full overcast and still got 60fps stable 😞 (with an "old" 1080 card)

[SN737 132]

I'm with AE on, Vol clouds to medium and loosing almost 10 fps when clouds are present with and without AS. So it's not only your 2d REX clouds issue nor installation.

[KL Oo 695]

The thing that I find kills my FPS in cloud (usually overcast) is AA. My 3090 will struggle with 8xSSAA  - at 4xSSAA its a lot better - but the AA at a lot of airports becomes worse on my 55" monitor

 

[SN737 132]

I use 8xMSAA and it hits too much fps still. (GTX 1080 Ti)

[Shomron 251]

My performance in v5 is worst then in v4 (fps fluctuating causing stutters) not sure what the issue is... I'm with a 1080Ti using the same settings as in v4 aside from having EA turned on with volumetric clouds set to high...

Frames locked to 30 fps in NCP and set to unlimited in the sim.

4K monitor, 2048 textures with 4xMSAA

Edited July 18, 2021 by Shomron

[sho69607 29]

Anytime I have clouds my fps generally takes a hit. I pay the price and use 8xSSAA because some of the addon aircraft do not have high res instruments and its hard to read. Fortunately I can get away with this with a 2080ti, but this adds a lot of heat and usage by using such high levels of anti aliasing. Even the FSLabs A320 instruments look blurry unless I use some sort of image sharpening and high anti aliasing.