Marked FPS decrease after 5.3 update

[brucewtb 247]

Since updating to 5.3 HF2 I am experiencing a significant performance downgrade.  In situations where I was previously obtaining 30 plus fps I am now struggling with 25 or so.  Very oddly if I disable volumetric clouds it is even worse like 20 or so. That I find hard to understand, Playing around with settings doesn't seem to change much except for scenery complexity - this seems to be the key setting. In P3D4 and previously with P3D5.2 I could set this at Very Dense but now with P3D5.3 I have to set it at Sparse to get the same performance and I get no improvement with Normal or Dense  over Very Dense. My upgrade path to 5.3 initially was to unistall client, content and scenery then reinstall followed by deleting Prepar3D.cfg and shaders then verifying all my orbx stuff and resynchronising the sim.  Performance in P3D4 is unchanged and now much better than I can get in P3D5 at similar settings.    My system specs include a 9900K cpu (not OC but with turbo boost runs a 4.8-5.0 ghz) 3080ti 36gb ram. So not high end by today's standards but quite capable.  It runs P3D4 and MSFS 2020 very well.  Moving from P3D4.5 to P3D5 gave me a nice performance gain but this seems to have been lost with 5.3.  Grateful for any suggestions.

Bruce

[VHOJT 166]

Setting an Affinity Mask for P3D again seems to be important - it makes a huge difference for me.  I don't know if that's the culprit or not, but something you might try having a look at - check out the P3D 5.3 HF2 released thread, and the Affinity Mask calculator thread (should be on Page 1 or 2 of the P3D forum).

I'll now let someone more exeperienced chime in and hopefully take your pain away.  Hope you get it sorted soon 🙂

Cheers,
Rudy

[blaunarwal 432]

1 hour ago, brucewtb said:

Grateful for any suggestions.

5.3 HF2 should be the same like 5.2. with the same settings at the same place. Certainly your system should handle P3D5 but 30 fps everywhere at high settings is not possible. I think 25 is still good. My system runs fluently everywhere since v5.2 and also with v5.3 HF2

I have a 9700K overclocked to 4.8 with an RTX3090. I did not tweak around with the affinity settings, let the system do its job. I only set the max texture load distance to 32000 and MAX_POINT_LIGHTS and MAX_SPOT_LIGHTS to 1000. My cpu has no hyperthreading, so its like you had it sett to off. Maybe you have it activated. It used to be not good for FSX to P3D4. I saw people were discussing it again with P3D5. I have no choice, that seems good.

Recently I got stutters because ActiveSky was using the CPU more than usual as I could see in the task manager. I had my system running long time only setting it to sleep when I didn't use it. I first thought, it was the scenery I'm constructing. Opening the task manager revealed the reason. I terminated the process from ActiveSky, restarted the program and the stutters were gone. So maybe a simple restart could make your system run fine again.

I limit my fps internaly and although I would enjoy the smoothness of 60 fps, I rather have some cpu power left to avoid stutters. So I cut it down long time to 21 fps. I'm not sure, what I actually use but it is certainly not more than 25 fps. I use the internal limiter since some time now after the external limiter gave problems some time ago.

Dan

Edited February 3, 2022 by blaunarwal

[pads103 37]

affinity mask settings made a huge difference for me.

[newtie 533]

Took some time to find the sweet spot, but an AM definitely helps.

[SteveW 1,792]

Hi Bruce,

9900K is 8 core and will have 16 Logical Processors with HyperThreading enabled.

Unfortunately, with HT enabled the default JobScheduler values in Prepar3D.cfg v5.3 are not so good because they allow scenery threads to share cores with time sensitive threads managing the frame rate so when scenery is gathered the frame rate is destabilised.

So your problems might be related to this conundrum with P3D v5.3 and HT Enabled and their current default JobScheduler values.

Whether that is the source of the problems or not, with HT enabled, I would use:

[JobScheduler]
AffinityMask=65493
P3DCoreAffinityMask=65493
MainThreadScheduler=0
RenderThreadScheduler=1
FrameWorkerThreadScheduler=2
 

If you have HT disabled, the defaults found in Prepar3D.cfg JobScheduler section will be fine.

After making CPU changes, always run P3D and close it first before editing Prepar3D.cfg.

Regards

Steve

[VHOJT 166]

15 minutes ago, SteveW said:

Hi Bruce,

9900K is 8 core and will have 16 Logical Processors with HyperThreading enabled.

Unfortunately, with HT enabled the default JobScheduler values in Prepar3D.cfg v5.3 are not so good because they allow scenery threads to share cores with time sensitive threads managing the frame rate so when scenery is gathered the frame rate is destabilised.

So your problems might be related to this conundrum with P3D v5.3 and HT Enabled and their current default JobScheduler values.

Whether that is the source of the problems or not, with HT enabled, I would use:

[JobScheduler]
AffinityMask=65493
P3DCoreAffinityMask=65493
MainThreadScheduler=0
RenderThreadScheduler=1
FrameWorkerThreadScheduler=2
 

If you have HT disabled, the defaults found in Prepar3D.cfg JobScheduler section will be fine.

After making CPU changes, always run P3D and close it first before editing Prepar3D.cfg.

Regards

Steve

There are some suggestions that having each process on a different physical core may be beneficial - for me, that makes it worse and I have mine like you have suggested to someone else in another thread:

[JobScheduler]
AffinityMask=255
P3DCoreAffinityMask=252
MainThreadScheduler=0
RenderThreadScheduler=1
FrameWorkerThreadScheduler=2

My question is - how come you don't suggest the different physical cores for P3D processes - AND - this is probably asking about black magic - why does it work smoother this way for me?

I don't want to hijack the thread here about Bruce's FPS issues with stuff all about AMs though.

[SteveW 1,792]

52 minutes ago, VHOJT said:

There are some suggestions that having each process on a different physical core may be beneficial - for me, that makes it worse and I have mine like you have suggested to someone else in another thread:

[JobScheduler]
AffinityMask=255
P3DCoreAffinityMask=252
MainThreadScheduler=0
RenderThreadScheduler=1
FrameWorkerThreadScheduler=2

My question is - how come you don't suggest the different physical cores for P3D processes - AND - this is probably asking about black magic - why does it work smoother this way for me?

I don't want to hijack the thread here about Bruce's FPS issues with stuff all about AMs though.

I did suggest to use different physical cores for P3D processes and do all the time.

[SteveW 1,792]

57 minutes ago, VHOJT said:

[JobScheduler]
AffinityMask=255
P3DCoreAffinityMask=252
MainThreadScheduler=0
RenderThreadScheduler=1
FrameWorkerThreadScheduler=2

255,252,0,1,2 would work on 8 core HT disabled, but 255,255,0,1,2 would be slightly better in scenery fill-in.

However that would not be so good with four core HT Enabled (8 Logical Processors), in that case I would use 253,253,0,1,2

[VHOJT 166]

6 hours ago, SteveW said:

255,252,0,1,2 would work on 8 core HT disabled, but 255,255,0,1,2 would be slightly better in scenery fill-in.

However that would not be so good with four core HT Enabled (8 Logical Processors), in that case I would use 253,253,0,1,2

I was such a berk and forgot to mention that I have a 6700K (so four cores and 8 LPs with HT on).  I shall give this a try and report back.

Edited February 3, 2022 by VHOJT

[brucewtb 247]

13 hours ago, SteveW said:

Hi Bruce,

9900K is 8 core and will have 16 Logical Processors with HyperThreading enabled.

Unfortunately, with HT enabled the default JobScheduler values in Prepar3D.cfg v5.3 are not so good because they allow scenery threads to share cores with time sensitive threads managing the frame rate so when scenery is gathered the frame rate is destabilised.

So your problems might be related to this conundrum with P3D v5.3 and HT Enabled and their current default JobScheduler values.

Whether that is the source of the problems or not, with HT enabled, I would use:

[JobScheduler]
AffinityMask=65493
P3DCoreAffinityMask=65493
MainThreadScheduler=0
RenderThreadScheduler=1
FrameWorkerThreadScheduler=2
 

If you have HT disabled, the defaults found in Prepar3D.cfg JobScheduler section will be fine.

After making CPU changes, always run P3D and close it first before editing Prepar3D.cfg.

Regards

Steve

Thanks Steve but these settings made no difference.  I have tried a number of Job Scheduler settings with HT on and off and there is little difference.  My test scenario has been the PMDG 787-800 ay rwy 16R FlyTampa YSSY fair weather.  Previously with 5.2 and 4.5 my fps has been 31-33 with Scenery Complexity at Very Dense but now any setting other than Sparse reduces frames to 21-24 (I am able to have other settings at high values without markedly affecting FPS  - scenery complexity seems to be the key setting).  I get a comparable performance downgrade with another test scenario which is a circuit around Orbx's YSCB in the PMDG 737 NGX.   Moving around the world I get the same performance drop off so it is not specific to particular locations.  Now I should add this is all at 4K but I have been using 4K for more than 5 years mostly with a 1080ti (the 3080ti is a recent acquisition} and getting significantly better performance in 4.5 and 5.2 than I can get now with 5.3HF2.  I normally run P3D with vsync on and unlimited frames which pegs FPS to my Monitor refresh rate of 30 so I am aiming to not have FPS drop below 30 and I have been able to mostly do that with mid to high settings - until now.

Bruce

[Avi8tor 30]

Hi Bruce,

since I have comparable system specs, I'd like to make following suggestion: Once your flight has loaded within the sim, go to windows task manager and open then close p3d.exe core settings (don't know the exact english wording). For me this somewhat snake oil smelling process works wonders. That means my 8 cores (HT off) are much more evenly used with no more 100% peaks.

It's simpel and may be worth trying.

Cheers Martin

Edited February 4, 2022 by Avi8tor

[SteveW 1,792]

4 hours ago, brucewtb said:

Thanks Steve but these settings made no difference.  I have tried a number of Job Scheduler settings with HT on and off and there is little difference.  My test scenario has been the PMDG 787-800 ay rwy 16R FlyTampa YSSY fair weather.  Previously with 5.2 and 4.5 my fps has been 31-33 with Scenery Complexity at Very Dense but now any setting other than Sparse reduces frames to 21-24 (I am able to have other settings at high values without markedly affecting FPS  - scenery complexity seems to be the key setting).  I get a comparable performance downgrade with another test scenario which is a circuit around Orbx's YSCB in the PMDG 737 NGX.   Moving around the world I get the same performance drop off so it is not specific to particular locations.  Now I should add this is all at 4K but I have been using 4K for more than 5 years mostly with a 1080ti (the 3080ti is a recent acquisition} and getting significantly better performance in 4.5 and 5.2 than I can get now with 5.3HF2.  I normally run P3D with vsync on and unlimited frames which pegs FPS to my Monitor refresh rate of 30 so I am aiming to not have FPS drop below 30 and I have been able to mostly do that with mid to high settings - until now.

Bruce

With HT enabled you can only lose fps with a scenery loader on the same core as the MainThreadScheduler (one on each LP). With HT enabled you gain fill-in performance with more Scenery loaders active on HT cores. With HT disabled you should see the same fps and slightly less fill-in performance.

So if you see equivalent fps with HT enabled and HT disabled (and you are sure about the affinity settings) then there must be something in your add-ons that does not work well with the latest version. I would start an elimination process.

Edited February 4, 2022 by SteveW

[brucewtb 247]

Well I will have a look at my addons but whatever it is my performance in P3D 5.3 HF2 is quite terrible compared to what I had with P3D 5.2 just prior to the update debacle.  I mean FPS dropping into the low teens whereas before it was 40 plus (unless I set Scenery Complexity to sparse!)  Getting a bit sick of messing around with P3D maybe the time has come to fully move over to MS2020.  One very odd thing that I have not previously noticed is that FPS gets much worse if you disable volumetric clouds which is quite counter intuitive.  Has it always been like this?

Bruce

[Ray Proudfoot 8,930]

Hi Bruce, this has me scratching my head. I also run in 4K with a 30Hz monitor but with a slightly less powerful CPU and GPU. You’ve done everything correctly regarding uninstall and reinstall as far as I can see.

I think the only option left to you is to uninstall again but this time also uninstall the remaining P3D Academic entry in Control Panel / Programs.

It may just be a glitch with the new install. There’s no logical reason for worse performance. I did find the 3D ground people at Orbx YSSY do hit the frame rate quite hard so turn them off. But as you have poor results elsewhere that’s why I’m suggesting a reinstall given you appear to be alone with these problems.

Maybe download the main installer again just to be on the safe side.