stampee

I cannot really help you, But I had similar problems on my system the past 2 weeks. All of a sudden I would get a Major lag spike dropping my frame rate into the single digits, and the screen would almost stop then take off again. It was that bad. I tried everything I could figure out as well as you have. I had made no software changes at all. I did install Ultimate traffic, but disabling that made no difference. I had major stutters every 25-45 seconds. I see yours are much shorter time frame. ANYHOW I did a restore point and it fixed my stuttering problem. I realize you cant roll back far enough, and you said you have windows updates turned off. I think in my case, something got updated on my system automatically which caused my stutter, and the restore point cured it. In my topic asking for help, another person said they have a similar stutter issue. You may want to look further into what may have updated on your system without you knowing it. I also by the way had a terrible mouse lag/stutter. Moving the mouse over a click spot caused me to drop into single digits. See if your mouse is doing such a thing also. GOOD LUCK. -Stampee

Bjoern. Are you saying I have to disable Aero to completely eliminate updates? I now have them turned off in the security updates in control panel. -Stampee

Rob: I cannot say which updates I rolled back :( There was a list of about 11 security updates that needed to be done since the restore point. I turned off auto updates to prevent screwing the pooch again, but I went to find them for you, and now the list is gone. I go to updates and it says all of these updates have been done today. So apparently the updates were stored on my harddrive and windows went ahead and re-installed them all for me. So far things are still working, so I just dont know what caused all my grief. I have not installed the latest ATI drivers, and do not intend to until I am sure things are running properly. Thank you for all your advice. -Stampee Forkboy: yes I have been watching the task manager like a hawk and could never see anything causing a problem. I will try fftf and optimize parts and see if I gain any improvement. Thank you -Stampee

Hi all: Before I saw the latest advice I did a restore point. I moved back to catalyst 13.25 and rolled back some windows updates as well. I now am back to running pretty much as I always have. Mainly maxed out settings and 30fps average. I have Mytraffic running, with flight following and see no horrible frame drops. Once in a blue moon, it will drop to 20 fps for a split second on the display. I do not see the drop visually, but the number itself drops. (previously, visually I saw a horrible stutter and the screen would jerk and stop) I do not have UTX reinstalled yet however. I have hardware tessalation turned off now and I see a 20 fps increase in unlimited mode. I guess my older video card cannot handle tessellation as well as a modern one? So I learned something good from this adventure anyhow! The mouse is acting fine once again. Click spots do not affect the mouse at all. I tried various aircraft panels, and clicking on a control does not change the fps counter at all. SO. the bottom line is. I do not know what changed on my system causing this bad problem, but thankfully the restore point pretty fixed it for me. For all I know, it is normal for the counter to drop to a low number occasionally. I could care less as long as the actual visual display does not stutter, or stop as it was doing. I could care less about high numbers, but now I run at 30fps locked instead of 20fps locked as I used to do. At this time I have no affinity mask assigned and am running at 4.7K over clocked. I will leave it for awhile. Things are nice and smooth and I am enjoying the eye candy once again. I believe I will leave UTX uninstalled for awhile until I am sure things are working properly. Thank you so much to everyone who responded. I am a happy camper once again, and even picked up some more FPS, by turning hardware tessellation off. -Stampee

Well: I am about to give up. I thought mytraffic was causing the drops. But with it disabled I still get them. I thought UTX was causing it, but disabling UTX I get the drops also. The period is much longer now, on the order of 2 minutes, not 30 seconds as I was having previously. The mouse still most definitely causes a drop. That is repeatable. I dont know if other people see that or not. As I understand it mouse lag issues were supposedly all but solved and a thing of the past. I sure never noticed them before, but.. So, I do not know where to go from here. My P3d is so mucked up with changed settings and disabled scenery etc, I may have to start a whole new re-install to get things back to a semblance of normal. -stampee

I found out that mytraffic is causing the worst of my frame drops when it is enabled. I THINK it is sound related, but I am not certain. Sometimes when atc speaks I notice the bad frame drop, but not always. I also found another bad problem causing frame drops. If I click on any "click spot" in the cockpit with the mouse I get an immediate drop to 5-7 fps. I do not understand what has changed. I did not have this noticeable frame drop before with my traffic, and never noticed the drop before with the mouse either. I now have a NEW bug that cropped up. I now see huge black patches at times as scenery loads. Sigh... -Stampee

Thank you: I only had fsforce in the dll files. I copied them, and then deleted both files. I searched around some and did not see any other dll files that may have been duplicates. I still get the strange fps drops. I will disable all addons and see if some bgl file is corrupt causing this. -Stampee

Thanks slayer. I tried 252 and 254 affinity tweaks. I dont want to update to 3.1 until I get this resolved first. P3d was running fine and something changed either in p3d or on my system and I cannot understand what happened. The only software I installed in weeks has been Utx a few days ago, I disabled that to no avail. -Stampee

By the way, I just turned off hardware tesselation because it is giving me 10 fps better in flight. Maybe because I have an older video card? it did not help the frame drops however. I still drop to as low as 5 fps at times. I check task manager and process lasoo and do not see any background process's taking up a lot of cpu time. For what that is worth. -Stampee no tweaks at all to the CFG file, other than the line to give me average frame rate. and I let prepar3d build a new one also to no avail. I will turn bloom off now and set to 30 and test. Thank you. -Stampee I set bloom to zero and set frame lock to 30. As you can see in the photo, it did not help. it dropped to 6.9 fps. Actually it dropped to numerous values while I was trying to get a good screen capture. 11.4, 7.8, 5.6 etc. all around 20-45 seconds at a time. Thanks much for the help however. -Stampee

OOPS sorry on the resolution, it is 1920x1280 native I am running. I have not done any tweaks to the CFG file other then set it to show average frame rates. Here are the screen shots requested. Thank you so much for the help. -Stampee

Hi all: I have searched google and on avsim and everyplace I can think of, until I am blind from reading, and so far no solution to my problem. I am seeing a massive lockup/stutter while flying which I cannot seem to find a cause for. I will show 50-75 FPS on unlimited (depending on terrain) and then I will get a jerk(screen stop) and show a minimum frame of 5FPS. This happens around every 30-45 seconds. Sometimes it will drop to 11 fps or 15fps or usually into single digits. Straight and level flying it happens, and view panning, or turns or loading of scenery seems to make no difference. I recently built a new system, about 3 weeks ago. I swear I did not have this problem initially immediately after the new install. I added Utx recently, but disabled it and saw no changes. I am running an i74790K overclocked to 4.8GHZ. 1600 mhz Gskill raptor memory 16 gig. (a little slow maybe, but...) Sapphire 7950 3 gig video card. ( older yes, but I can average 70fps and then drop to 5 so doubt this is the problem either. 1280x1024 display on my LG tv. Samsung ssd850 pro for P3d and a 2nd for the operating system. Windows 7 64 bit bothSSD show over 550 gps so I doubt that is the problem either. Radeon Settings Version 2015.1223.1060.19763 Direct3D® Version 9.14.10.1171 Asus Z97 pro gamer motherboard. I ran windows msconfig and shut off all services to no avail. I killed my comodo antivirus also without it helping. Various affinity masks did not help. I tried with and without any traffic. I THINK it is a little better with zero traffic settings but I am not positive. I tried shutting off water, and setting water to ultra to no avail. I also do not think it is sound related, as some other people have had. I have let P3d rebuild its cfg file to no avail. I cleared the shader cache. I have the minimal settings P3d picked for me, and I even lowered them further to no avail. I have these stutters over photogen scenery as well as over default scenery. Different aircraft make no difference. I have very minimal crap on my system,as this is a new build, and I have no other windows or programs open while P3d is running anyhow. I am guessing something may be running in the background causing these disruptions, but what and how can I find it? I am thinking of doing an older restore point and see if it solves anything. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. -Stampee

thank you, but I wanted it for any saved flights as well. Also any new flights I create from an airport I also have to manually reset the weather visibility. -Stampee

I am running Catalyst 13.12 with no problems at all. I am on windows 7. I had problems with later catalyst versions on prepar3d 2.5 and rolled back to this version. good luck to you. -Stampee

Hello everyone: I like to set my weather visibility to around 20 NM. I have a lower end CPU and this helps with FPS. Right now, every time I fly I have to go into the world/weather settings page, then customize and select the 20 nm distance I want. Is there a cfg file setting I can adjust so this always will be set when I run p3d? THANKS -Stampee

Hello sir: What do you mean by setting the pixel size? I see no option in the camera.cfg file for this. -stampee

I fly the maul probably 90% of the time. I have seen odd things like this happen as well. I will be flying along level then suddenly it will start losing power and fall off to the left. I have not proven what causes it. But I think it is joystick related. I have the forcefeed back 2 stick. Did you try calibrating the stick and also turn off forces and then back on with forces? I am sorry I cannot be more help, its been quite awhile since this BUG happened to me. but the maul is the only aircraft I have ever seen this occur on. -Stampee

Rich: I run two screens over and under in eyefinity mode which are stretched. the 3rd screen is undocked for switches,flightplan,gps things like that. the 2nd lower screen is not a 3d capable monitor, only the upper one. When I run FSX and p3d 1.4 in tridef 3d the upper LG (3D) screen would be in 3d and the lower would be in 2d. Surprisingly it was no problem and looked fine because normally the instruments are always showing on the lower screen, and the upper was mainly out of the cockpit view. Depending on the aircraft some things like a compass or window pillars may show, but it was never a problem for me. I am pretty easy to please. -Stampee

I am very interested in this software. I have missed 3d mode since 1.4 or whenever they went to the half windowed full screen mode. I have given up on tridef and they are now out of business anyhow. I run an LG 3d tv which works fine in fsx still. If you are looking for testers. I volunteer to put my head in the noose. I always run 1280x1024 which is the maximum resolution my tv will support. Something else to consider. Way down the road I imagine. Running the old Tridef on FSX and on p3d 1.4 I could run 3d on the LG tv and have 2d mode still on my 2nd and third monitors. Dont ask me what the video card was doing, but it figured it all out by itself for me. By the way, I run amd video, so dont know if your drivers work on amd or not? I have not seen any mention of it. -Stampee

Thank you both, for so much kind assistance. I finally found the problem. Mytraffic 2013 was causing all the long load time. if I remove the entry from the prepar3d.cfg file my load times are now 13 seconds. Disabling the package in the library did not make any difference. I guess when I installed mytraffic last November I did not initially notice the longer load time. I have now lost all my hair, but at least now I know what is happening. -Stampee

well, I have scenery editor installed finally. I ran process monitor and this time it installed properly. HeckIfIKnowWhy? anyhow, I see no scenery errors, and I have now disabled most of the photo scenery I have, yet still have the horrible load times. I always keep a log of what I have installed, and I sure dont see any notes saying load times changed after the installs. from 30-75 second start menu time, certainly something has changed. -stampee

spirit: Thanks, it wont install for me. it says it has installed. I go to the install directory and nothing is there. I then do a 2nd install and it says I already have a copy installed and do I want to delete it first. I tried changing directories, installing as administrator and made sure I have hidden files turned on. I also do not see it in the control panels program list. very very odd. -Stampee

Thanks for the help. -Stampee

Jim: Is there a version of scenery config editor for prepar3d? I guess I am dense, I cannot find the fsx/p3d guide. I never knew there was one. Thanks -Stampee

Jim: Thank you very much. I ran process monitor, but could not get it to show the process from the very start. I will disable some scenery areas and look for the scenery config editor you mentioned. I see that I did add a lot of photo scenery the last few times i flew but did not recall the long load times then. it is so hard to keep track of everything that changes. Thank you for your response. -Stampee

Hi All: I have not flown my p3d in about 2 months. I just installed a new SSD drive and moved all p3d files to it, then changed my drive letters. p3d runs well, but It takes a long time to load the initial start up screen, where you can create and load saved flights. I see the cpu at around 12%. it takes around 75 seconds to finally start, when in the past it was around 30 seconds. I do not think it has anything to do with the SSD but something that may have changed on my system in the past 2 months ( I cant imagine what, but I did install the latest AMD video drivers), or heaven forbid something is corrupted in p3d. Maybe the video drivers are causing some weird issue? I have amd 14.12 drivers now installed. I deleted the shaders cache also. Oddly I did not see any message that it was rebuilding the cache before the start menu. Any advice would be appreciated. -Stampee -UPDATE I rolled back to 13.12 video drivers and still it takes 75-90 seconds for the menu to load. I cannot imagine now what has changed in the past 2 months causing this.