Why am I getting such low FPS, and how to improve that?

[CO2Neutral 278]

On 2/22/2023 at 12:10 PM, Christopher Low said:

Is Dynamic 3D Vegetation in P3Dv5 any better than that in P3Dv4? If not, then I would switch that one off.

Dynamic 3D Vegetation looks better and responds to wind/light sources better (PBR based), however, I agree to disabling.  Sadly the 3D Vegetation isn't blended well and is too spread out.  In addition, no one has attempted to use the SpeedTree SDK to improve 3D vegetation ... it's yet another P3D technology made available that was never fully utilized by the community (most likely due to the cost of the SpeedTree SDK license).  SpeedTrees are visually the most impressive of any platform I've experienced, but yet again, poor implementation, performance, and adoption.

[Luke 782]

19 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

 Not in this case. The AM setting is the problem. Reinstalling won’t fix that.

Read his post again, right above my quoted part. He seems to have gotten significant improvements after a reinstall. I'm merely pointing out that the reinstall did it. SSDs will improve your load times, but not your frame rates.

Cheers!

[Ray Proudfoot 8,950]

9 minutes ago, Luke said:

Read his post again, right above my quoted part. He seems to have gotten significant improvements after a reinstall. I'm merely pointing out that the reinstall did it. SSDs will improve your load times, but not your frame rates.

Cheers!

I went back and found this… “It does have the M2 interface for all three drives. C is a 500GB SSD, and D and E are 500GB HDD. I seem to have suffered a major brain fart in that I instinctively avoid when possible installing large programs on the main drive (and quadruply so in the Program directories) and had thought I'd installed the main program on its own subdirectory on C while installing the other information on D. However, it seems that when I updated P3D from v4 to v5 I did a clean install and now everything is on D.”

I missed the fact he had installed to a HDD so yes, I agree installing to an SSD will improve loading times significantly.

[Masterius 15]

Observations:

HT off improves FPS stability and rate by an observable difference. With World settings at rather high settings, and sitting at KBWI (which is my high-traffic "standard" for testing) at external view and rotating, HT on occasionally stutters, and cyclically drops to below 10FPS; HT off produces no stutters, and FPS usually remains above 20. 

Playing with affinity mask settings with HT either on or off made no detectable difference that I could observe.

 

[Ray Proudfoot 8,950]

9 minutes ago, Masterius said:

Playing with affinity mask settings with HT either on or off made no detectable difference that I could observe.

The AM settings will be different of course. Did the ones I suggested yesterday help?

Look at Task Manager / Performance / CPU for the VPs. A screenshot of both scenarios would be informative.

[MammyJammy 124]

On 2/26/2023 at 2:10 AM, Masterius said:

There seems to be six options available for each core:

1 - Assign a P3D Affinity Processor (AffinityMask=)
2 - Assign a P3D Core Process Affinity Processor (P3DCoreAffinityMask=)
3 - Set the P3D Main Thread Scheduler, likely 100% Core/LP Usage MainThreadScheduler=)
4 - Set the P3D Render Thread Scheduler (RenderThreadScheduler=)
5 - Set the P3D Frame Worker Scheduler (FrameWorkerThreadScheduler=)
(6) - CPU Core (Not used for P3D)

So how do I do that? Actually--and more accurately--how do I decide what cores I want to be assigned for specific functions?

I would encourage you to read the section at the bottom of the calculator that explains what each of these things are, particularly the Thread Schedulers.  Each of those can be assigned to a single core only, and depending on your CPU, cooling, and overclocking, you can go deep down the rabbit hole to find the fastest single core you have.  Unless you have a crazy single-core overclock, the gains in doing so will be minimal.  The better thing is to spread them out a bit so you don't have a "hotspot" on your CPU (this depends heavily on the CPU die layout, but that's a whole 'nother level of nerd).

Using the calculator is pretty easy:  Click the radio button next to those options, then simply click on the cell you want to assign to that affinity mask/core assignment.

For your CPU, I'd encourage you to try giving it as many cores as you can and mask off the HT cores for the Thread Schedulers.  Try this:
https://izn-flightsim.s3.amazonaws.com/affinity.html?cores=8&threads=16&affinity=63447&coreAffinity=63444&mainThread=0&renderThread=6&frameThread=1#presetAnchor

Of course, if turning HT off works fine, then do that.  But this may give you the same FPS results with slightly improved scenery loading.

 

On 2/26/2023 at 9:59 AM, CO2Neutral said:

Disable HT (hyperthreading which will give you some additional OC headroom), P3D will not benefit from more than 8 real cores.

Not exactly.  P3D 5.3 will consume as many cores as you give it for all its supplemental threads within the P3DCoreAffinityMask.  There's another long thread here (link escapes me) where many of us tested this repeatedly.  On P3D 5.3, give it as many cores as you can and leverage the far more granular affinity mask to keep the virtual cores adjacent to the Thread Schedulers off.  This will most visibly improve scenery loading versus HT off with similar-if-not-identical FPS results.  Earlier versions of P3D that did not have this granular affinity masking ran great with HT off, but the experience of I and others is that 5.3 makes effective improvements in multi core performance.  Your mileage may vary though and every system is different....Test and use what works for you!

 

On 2/26/2023 at 9:59 AM, CO2Neutral said:

• Use RTSS to lock frames to 30 if you're monitor is unable to work at 30Hz or introduces too much latency, set unlimited target (as suggested)

With the most recent 500.x+ Nvidia drivers and P3D 5.3, you don't need RTSS to lock the frame rates externally.  Again, see the optimization guide at the bottom of the affinity tool for multiple ways to externally lock to 30 FPS from the Nvidia Control Panel with Vsync on in P3D and frame rate set to unlimited.

  

On 2/27/2023 at 5:18 AM, Ray Proudfoot said:

I agree installing to an SSD will improve loading times significantly.

100%.  Over multiple systems I have built and tested running P3D, the single most important factor I have found in disk speed is random read/write IOPS.  P3D reads thousands of files, most of which are pretty small.  on random read/write performance, M.2 PCIE (!important) drives are an order of magnitude faster than SATA SSDs, which themselves are an order of magnitude faster than any mechanical drive.  Careful looking at sustained read/write speeds (typically Gbps) as they don't have much meaning in P3D...That's more applicable to reading and writing very large files.

This however, is with a caveat:  If you still run your system with file compression, file indexing, and virus scanning on (all Windows defaults BTW...), your performance will still suffer.  That's a lot of software layers on every single file read into P3D.  Turn that stuff off selectively and you'll see better scenery loading, as well as a shortened wait for the P3D scenario screen to fire up.

Again, all in the guide at the bottom of the affinity calculator.

[Ray Proudfoot 8,950]

33 minutes ago, MammyJammy said:

If you still run your system with file compression, file indexing, and virus scanning on (all Windows defaults BTW...), your performance will still suffer.  That's a lot of software layers on every single file read into P3D.  Turn that stuff off selectively and you'll see better scenery loading, as well as a shortened wait for the P3D scenario screen to fire up.

I’ve never had file indexing turned on since I went to SSDs. File compression likewise. Using Defender I’ve excluded my P3D folders. I can’t recall whether that extended to Windows. I’ll check tomorrow.

[MammyJammy 124]

1 hour ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

I’ve never had file indexing turned on since I went to SSDs. File compression likewise. Using Defender I’ve excluded my P3D folders. I can’t recall whether that extended to Windows. I’ll check tomorrow.

Right-click on the drive itself from Windows Explorer and choose Properties.  Check the bottom two boxes from the dialog screen.  It should look something like this:

On a fresh Windows install using NTFS, I'm pretty sure (but not 100% certain) that it will default both compression and file indexing to on (checked).

Edited February 28, 2023 by MammyJammy

[Ray Proudfoot 8,950]

@MammyJammy, somewhat frustratingly the indexing option was checked on my P3D PC. I've turned it off and a few files cannot have their property changed as they're in use. Let's see if it has any noticeable effect.

[Kalnon 160]

If you're using P3Dv5 I really recommend uninstalling Buildings HD as it is not officially compatible with P3Dv5 and for me it caused stuttering and frame rate drops.  Once I uninstalled it, everything ran much better.

[Juliett Alfa Romeo 530]

Really? what about the rest of OrbX catalog (like FTX Global)?

@Kalnon

Edit: Here says "compatible with v5"

Edited March 2, 2023 by Juliet Alpha

[Kalnon 160]

2 minutes ago, Juliet Alpha said:

Really? what about the rest of OrbX catalog (like FTX Global)?

@Kalnon

I have all Orbx Global range scenery installed including Base, Vectors and all the openLC's, I have multiple of their Regions sceneries installed and I also have Terra Flora v2 and Trees HD installed as well as a few free seaports and they all seem to work fine with P3Dv5.3.  As for their other stuff I am not sure though I've read they do have some things not yet compatible.  When looking on their website or using Orbx Central, make sure to always check the description on an items store page to be sure.

[Kalnon 160]

Oh and don't forget to check out the partners section where you can get nice, free airplanes that work in P3Dv5.3 by Aeroplane Heaven 😀

[Masterius 15]

I had intended to reply sooner, but I came down with--and still am recovering from--acute bronchitis.

So I felt well enough today to try playing with the settings and see what results I got. Upon starting up the pc it shut down within seconds before doing an auto-restart. Instead of booting up I got some sort of error message stating that I needed to select the boot media and retry again. I tried three cold starts and got the same error message. I then booted up into BIOS and checked the boot sequence and, lo and behold, the only media it was recognizing was the new F: 1TB SSD. It wasn't even seeing the bootup C drive SSD at all. I couldn't even select it, as it wasn't even detected.

So I disabled the F: drive, saved BIOS, and tried restarting again. Much to my surprise, the pc booted up like nothing had been wrong. I restarted and loaded BIOS again and, again, much to my surprise, now my boot C drive and F: drive were visible. However, now my fans were acting funky, audibly spinning up and down instead of not audible at all. So back to BIOS and...

This time I got a message saying BIOS was successfully reset.

And it was. All the settings were back to defaults. 

I'm a bit too weak and ill to delve back into this mess right now, but I'll try all the suggestions once I'm feeling better.

[CO2Neutral 278]

On 2/28/2023 at 9:34 AM, MammyJammy said:

you don't need RTSS to lock the frame rates externally.  Again, see the optimization guide at the bottom of the affinity tool for multiple ways to externally lock to 30 FPS from the Nvidia Control Panel with Vsync on in P3D and frame rate set to unlimited.

Yes, I'm aware, but NCP setting doesn't always work as well, I find RTSS to always work and it also provides addition limiting methods.

Not using any external limiter is the best option, but for those that don't have VRR and the monitor at 60Hz only, I would still recommend RTSS over NCP.  RTSS can also provide for a wealth of other good information and system metrics.