So far with 5.3HF1+, I've experienced the following FPS/perf issues:

1. MK's EFHK panning stutter, as noted above and in Orbx forum. Any MK customer seeing this should submit a ticket to them. Even if it's on LM to fix, maybe they can find a workaround.

2. When close to VRAM limit sitting on the ground at the gate, seeing a *massive* FPS drop down to 6-12 FPS. This one eventually resolves itself after 5-10 minutes. Has anyone else seen this? Not sure it's noted anywhere else.

3. In the air, the massive stutter/FPS drop that others are seeing. This one is a game-killer, though I've only had it once. 

Will be curious to see if LM addresses this with another HF or if we're going to have to wait 5 months for another point release. 

 

8 hours ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

Well maybe MS EHFK will give LM a clue or a starting point because as of right now they haven't been successful at recreating the issues you folks have reported.  So far, EHFK is the only place I've been able to generate pauses (more than just stutters).

Cheers, Rob.

Trying reducing your resolution down to 1080p and see if it improves. If it does then your GPU probably can't do what's it's been asked to do.

I never had FPS issues with Prepar3D until I got a 2k monitor and since then my FPS has noticeably suffered. The worst stutters I get are at night, especially with dynamic lighting on where stutters even happen at smaller airports. The biggest killer airport I've seen is Orbx ESNQ but again only at night and it's a tiny airport so it cannot be the scenery itself so I believe it's the dynamic lighting that causes it. I once tried reducing resolution when I was getting stutters and this completely fixed performance.

Obviously running at a lower resolution or with dynamic lighting off isn't an option. The only solution for me has been to reduce AA and to set EA to low which gives something acceptable. Those running much better GPU's compared to my RTX 2070 will likely see far better results.

In my mind, it's the general increase in monitor resolutions over the years that is primarily responsible for poorer performance as opposed to something LM or NVidia have introduced (dynamic lighting excluded). I also have display scaling (125%) enabled because my vision is bad and I haven't really tested if that affects things too.

Edited January 4, 20224 yr by G MIDY

48 minutes ago, G MIDY said:

Trying reducing your resolution down to 1080p and see if it improves. If it does then your GPU probably can't do what's it's been asked to do.

I never had FPS issues with Prepar3D until I got a 2k monitor and since then my FPS has noticeably suffered. The worst stutters I get are at night, especially with dynamic lighting on where stutters even happen at smaller airports. The biggest killer airport I've seen is Orbx ESNQ but again only at night and it's a tiny airport so it cannot be the scenery itself so I believe it's the dynamic lighting that causes it. I once tried reducing resolution when I was getting stutters and this completely fixed performance.

Obviously running at a lower resolution or with dynamic lighting off isn't an option. The only solution for me has been to reduce AA and to set EA to low which gives something acceptable. Those running much better GPU's compared to my RTX 2070 will likely see far better results.

In my mind, it's the general increase in monitor resolutions over the years that is primarily responsible for poorer performance as opposed to something LM or NVidia have introduced (dynamic lighting excluded). I also have display scaling (125%) enabled because my vision is bad and I haven't really tested if that affects things too.

That's why I said this 😉 I can invoke the error at any place on command 😉 with dynamic lights...

Had it for the first time in flight from LEAS to LEBL (it started over LEBB) All ORBX stuff with dynamic lights 😉

Edited January 4, 20224 yr by awf

1 hour ago, G MIDY said:

Trying reducing your resolution down to 1080p and see if it improves. If it does then your GPU probably can't do what's it's been asked to do.

 

19 minutes ago, awf said:

That's why I said this 😉 I can invoke the error at any place on command 😉 with dynamic lights...

Had it for the first time in flight from LEAS to LEBL (it started over LEBB) All ORBX stuff with dynamic lights 😉

To be clear, the issue at EFHK does not have to do with resolution or dynamic light, as far as I can tell. If you have this specific product and can confirm otherwise, feel free to note that. This video demonstrates what we're talking about: a hard stutter when panning and looking towards the terminal yet having good FPS. I have not seen this issue anywhere else in the sim and only since 5.3.

3 minutes ago, Chapstick said:

 

To be clear, the issue at EFHK does not have to do with resolution or dynamic light, as far as I can tell. If you have this specific product and can confirm otherwise, feel free to note that. This video demonstrates what we're talking about: a hard stutter when panning and looking towards the terminal yet having good FPS. I have not seen this issue anywhere else in the sim and only since 5.3.

I do have EFHK so can try but does this only happen at night or in the day (ensure the season is set to summer to test)? If it's only happening at night then it sounds like it must be the dynamic lighting? It seems that this will happen a lot with EFHK specifically because it's more or less always night in Finland at the moment.

Dynamic lighting performance is very affected by resolution as the lighting PBR calculation result must be rendered at this resolution by the GPU. Add in aircraft lights too and things get very heavy on the GPU.

27 minutes ago, Chapstick said:

 

To be clear, the issue at EFHK does not have to do with resolution or dynamic light, as far as I can tell. If you have this specific product and can confirm otherwise, feel free to note that. This video demonstrates what we're talking about: a hard stutter when panning and looking towards the terminal yet having good FPS. I have not seen this issue anywhere else in the sim and only since 5.3.

I'm not talking about EFHK I'm talking about the issue from the OP and many of us...
This isn't about EFHK (that's a side step) the issue we are discussing here is at many places 😉

From the video that looks like a dynamic light issue and 5.3HF 1.1 😉 Did you tested with dynamic lights turned of in P3D and repeat the same test?

Edited January 4, 20224 yr by awf

Not sure if this info helps anyone or even myself however my sim has been running smooth up until yesterday when I added some entries in the scenery addons the legacy way of manually adding...Once I did that the performance went to sh#$! I am going to try disabling the sceneries I added manually and see what happens.  The scenery in question for me is TropicalSim Antigua 2017. Not sure if this is coincidence or not but thought I would throw this out there and maybe someone else is finding the same issue and can also check on their system if this is also an issue.

2 hours ago, awf said:

That's why I said this 😉 I can invoke the error at any place on command 😉 with dynamic lights...

Had it for the first time in flight from LEAS to LEBL (it started over LEBB) All ORBX stuff with dynamic lights 😉

I don't even think that the dynamic lighting is bugged or anything like that as the lights themselves behave no differently to standard effects. The problem is a complex airport scenery can have hundreds of these lights placed in locations designed to direct light onto PBR surfaces and this is the problem.

There are two settings in the P3D configuration file which control the maximum number of these lights in a scene (normally it's 250). If you set these maximums lower then performance will improve but lights can be suppressed and even the lights in your aircraft VC can be suppressed if there are too many in that particular airport.

Rendering performance has increased massively over the last 5 years (mostly thanks to the move to DX12) which has meant the sim generally works well despite these changes. However, those on older hardware will of course suffer and scenery developers want their sceneries to look the best which means more lights and more PBR textured objects etc so less performance. Volumetric clouds are the latest thing from LM which are no longer just fake textures but are GPU calculated/generated and so will further hit your GPU.

We're already on DX12 so unless LM work on more friendly calculations and shaders then the only way around all of this is to reduce the impact on the GPU which means a lower resolution or to reduce the amount of post-processing by lowering AA. Everyone has said for a long time that P3D is a CPU bound platform but on modern hardware I really don't think that this is true anymore.

Edited January 4, 20224 yr by G MIDY

2 hours ago, G MIDY said:

I do have EFHK so can try but does this only happen at night or in the day (ensure the season is set to summer to test)? If it's only happening at night then it sounds like it must be the dynamic lighting? It seems that this will happen a lot with EFHK specifically because it's more or less always night in Finland at the moment.

Dynamic lighting performance is very affected by resolution as the lighting PBR calculation result must be rendered at this resolution by the GPU. Add in aircraft lights too and things get very heavy on the GPU.

I just tested it with DL turned off in display settings. Same issue. 

I also tested it at 1024x768. Same issue. 

yes rob iam seeing the same , the GPU is idling 

that stutter is horrible.

28 minutes ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

It's not a resolution issue ... the GPU is actually dropping it's power draw and frequency to idle state which means it's waiting for the CPU to provide.

Data logs are here (.csv file):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SQ-M6NEZ3XEhD9DZsxn5ExpsJGkrTZDi/view?usp=sharing

You can see when FPS hits 0 or 0.6 the GPU frequency drops to 705 (from 2025) as does the GPU temps ... some sort of process contention that isn't GPU related, just waiting for the CPU to deliver.

My prepar3d.cfg is here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AC3PfRCflBwYeCZdHuj86ntnzEInThQ7/view?usp=sharing

Cheers, Rob.

Rob, 

Thank you for testing and sharing your results, very helpful!

I see that your FPS was alternating between 0, 0.6 and 40+
 

When the sudden/permanent FPS drop/freeze occurs on my system I noticed that P3D FPS counter alternates between as much as 0 FPS and 100+ FPS. The normal 30 FPS via VSYNC (30Hz Monitor) are completely ignored.

GPU usage also drops significantly. 
 

Whatever is causing this issue at MK EHFK may also be the cause at other airports or during cruise as scenery is paged. What I still don’t understand is why it only occurs occasionally for some of us and at random locations or stages of flight. 

55 minutes ago, Chapstick said:

I just tested it with DL turned off in display settings. Same issue. 

I also tested it at 1024x768. Same issue. 

+1

I can’t believe there are some trying to deflect to monitor resolution as a culprit here. 

I used 4K resolution beginning in P3D v4 with a 1080Ti and my system NEVER encountered the bug being discussed here.

Still using 4K with a 3080Ti since July 2021 and NEVER encountered this bug until V5.3 

Edited January 4, 20224 yr by Ray Proudfoot
Embedded video in quote removed

3 hours ago, awf said:

That's why I said this 😉 I can invoke the error at any place on command 😉 with dynamic lights...

Had it for the first time in flight from LEAS to LEBL (it started over LEBB) All ORBX stuff with dynamic lights 😉

Did the exact same flight, however not with chaseplane but EZDOK...

First flight with chaseplane fps dropped to 2 and going up to 50 and everything between and stutters like h...

Second flight exact the same only with EZDOK all went smooth and stayed locked at 45...

Running an 3080 at 2K

More testing to do...
 

Edited January 4, 20224 yr by awf

42 minutes ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

It's not a resolution issue ... the GPU is actually dropping it's power draw and frequency to idle state which means it's waiting for the CPU to provide.

 

Data logs are here (.csv file):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SQ-M6NEZ3XEhD9DZsxn5ExpsJGkrTZDi/view?usp=sharing

You can see when FPS hits 0 or 0.6 the GPU frequency drops to 705 (from 2025) as does the GPU temps ... some sort of process contention that isn't GPU related, just waiting for the CPU to deliver.

My prepar3d.cfg is here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AC3PfRCflBwYeCZdHuj86ntnzEInThQ7/view?usp=sharing

Cheers, Rob.

Rob have the same in the air, but also when playing with the time forward and backward at the gate EHAM V2 I can invoke the stutter every time...

Edited January 4, 20224 yr by awf

Just now, Rob_Ainscough said:

Yes, this is what I reported to LM.  I'm hoping they can get a copy of this airport from Orbx or MK Studios and run in their dev environment in conjunction with nVidia developer tools to obtain some performance metrics and pin point the issue.

I don't know if this is related or not to those reporting the horrible FPS issue, but it's all I've been able to find and replicate so far.

Cheers, Rob.  

Appreciate the efforts Rob!  I got everything back up and running with 5.3 and 3 out of 4 flights encountered this exact issue.  Never had 5.2 so back on 4.5HF3 right now doing KEWR-LLBG in the 777 but would love to have this kind of stability in 5.3 so hoping your efforts point them in the right direction.