SledDriver

No flashing here on 441.20 or 441.08 previously. (Maybe try running DISM? 😉 )

Don't be stupid. You could have asked questions if you really wanted to be productive. Throwing out random global fix-all solutions is not helpful. But that's the problem with forums. People sometimes pop up trying to look clever without taking the time to ascertain either the full nature of the problem or the risk of the solution they are proposing. If I had obliviously followed the suggestion to run DISM on my machine, it would not of helped at all. The problem seems to have been with Environment Force.

I think it's irresponsible to suggest to someone who's technical ability you have no idea about that they should enter into running low level system commands like DISM, and that even before you have any idea what the actual problem is For an inexperienced user that is more like to cause problems than solve them. I'm not hostile at all. But I am protective of the inexperienced. It wasn't my intention to offend anyone, and I apologise if that happened inadvertently, but I think if you look back, my opening two questions were very light and simple, has anyone had a crash since updating to 1909 or the latest GeForce, and the response I got was to start overhauling my entire operating system without caution.

Thanks to those who answered the original 2 questions asked and didn't give a dissertation on how to maintain a PC, which I have over 35 years experience of professionally.

Ta. It looks like Environment Force was crashing in the background.

These forums are weird. I asked two simple questions, and some people go off on one...

Hmm. Also updated nVidia GeForce drivers from 441.08 to 441.20. Anyone else using 441.20 succesfully?

Both happened after long flights on final decent. Sim paused for maybe 30 seconds with blue circle cursor and Not Responding, then crashed to desktop. Notable and only change in system recently was update of Windows to 1909 from 1903. On 1903 P3D was rock solid for months. Anyone else?

I haven't tested this in P3D yet, but the general rule of photo and video processing is that if you already have image quality problems, sharpening will only make it worse. For sharpening to work you need two things: 1) a good source 2) not to overdo the sharpening. Sharpening isn't magic. It doesn't make detail which isn't already there. What it does is pamper to the eye's optical acuity, providing crisper edges, but leaving the area between edges mostly untouched (as controlled by the film grain setting), thereby satisfying the eye's desire to see crispness. But if you overdo it, you will have running zaggies along edges and other qualities which will rapidly deteriorate the image. There is no correct setting. You have to set it to please yourself. Again the general rule of sharpening is that if you are continually aware of it, you have overdone it.

Well that did work, but it's very strange, and suggests some dodgy programming practices. Cheers

Hmm. I did update last night and did a few short flights between airports and all was good. I also did a full system backup before I updated, so I have a way back easily if problems do turn up.

Running HF2 now. All good. 🙂

This is frying my head. Just spent an hour trying to update RTSS from 7.2.2 to 7.2.3. Should take more than a few seconds huh? We the update fails with RTSS in use - install process aborted. So I tried an uninstall. Same problem. So I renamed all the exe's in the RTSS prog folder to .old and rebooted the machine and tried again. Same problem. So I googled for a while and found many others with the same problem, but none of the suggested fixes worked. I even tried renaming the entire RTSS program folder and rebooting. Same problem. I killed all of it's apparent tasks and processes. - EncoderServer.exe - RTSS.exe - RTSSHooksLoader.exe The are definitely NOT running in task manager, but I still cannot uninstall or update it. What on earth is going on with this stubborn program which refuses to be uninstalled or updated? How can it still be running when I've tried to undermine it? And how do I update this program. I'm going off RTSS in a hurry if it is so deeply embedded in my system that I cannot update or uninstall it. Any ideas which I haven't already listed above? Any WHAT is the installed doing placing 64bit files in the x86 Programs folder, and running them?????????????????

Heh. Yeah - end up waiting forever...

Cheers.

I'm still on HF1. Could you expand on the HF2 benefits as you see them?

I fly P3D HF1 with ASP4, SF3D, EnvDir/Shade/Tex, EnvForce. FFTF Dynamic, RTSS. I use almost exclusively RealAir/VertX planes and UK photo scenery with UK2000 airports. Rig is 8700K delidded clocked to 5Ghz at all times with AVX offsets at 0, 32GB ram, and a clocked GTX980Ti. This is all running very nicely. Smooth 30fps Should I upgrade to HF2? What benefit is there? Are there any drawbacks? Do my addons work well with HF2? Is the frame rate still dropping in HF2 as I see reported here? If I go for HF2, which parts of P3D do I need to update? Cheers

I assume for cache reasons, they are better using two LP's on the same core? Yet that then limits the number of cores available to assign in this way to addons which are not being assigned to P3D.

Thanks Bert. Really tricky to detect what it is. System is very clean. I don't install word not allowed on it - I have another machine for all the stuff not specifically related to my major apps. Consider that this machine is used professionally as a music production workstation - like sims, this is also timing and latency critical. I use the machine for sometimes 14 hours a day producing music, and never does that very complex system experience any hangs in all that continuous use. I'll just keep an eye on the task manager while using P3D and see if I can eventually spot which process goes busy when these very rare long pauses happen. Ta

I've not had (or mentioned) a single CTD. It's just a 10ish second hang, and then it continues fine.

Can you expand on these points. Are you suggesting that some addons benefit from being assigned to more than one LP? Possibly using both threads on the same physical core? Re the hang. There was no traffic loaded when the big hang happened. I'm kinda suspecting ASP4 at this point from which I use the weather engine. Clouds are provided by SkyForce3D. Like I say, the problem with faultfinding this hang is it happens so rarely. Once yesterday in about 2-3 hours of flying.

Thanks Steve for your thoughts again. You spurred me on to spend some time today testing my system out to see if I could eliminate my remaining small stutters, in search of the glassy smooth sim. The system is a delidded 8700K (6 core +HT, HT on) overclocked to run at 5GHz permanently, all cores, including when running AVX2 instructions (ie AVX offset of 0). System is rock stable at this clock, used daily as a music production workstation where critical timing an low latency is a must. 32GB ram, GTX 980Ti overclocked. NVMe M.2 boot drive and 5xSSD SATA data drives. All rock steady and 100% reliable. All folders involved with P3D and it's addons are excluded from AV and Malware scans. I'm running P3D 4.5+HF1. All addons are up to date. The time to load P3D from the desktop to the initial load screen was a consistent 11 seconds +/- 0.5 seconds. The times listed below are for loading P3D from the initial screen to in-sim, ready to fly, using the same scenario each time. I'm using full Great Britain photo scenery so load times are longer than they would perhaps be with non-photo scenery. For these tests, no background tasks were loaded, such as SkyForce3D, or weather engines etc. Just plain P3D. So here is a list of the Affinity masks I used and the timings, sorted from slowest to fastest. AM Binary Load time (seconds) 4 00 00 00 00 01 00 120 20 00 00 00 01 01 00 115 84 00 00 01 01 01 00 90 340 00 01 01 01 01 00 90 1364 01 01 01 01 01 00 70 4083 11 11 11 11 00 11 58 1365 01 01 01 01 01 01 54 4085 11 11 11 11 01 01 48 4081 11 11 11 11 00 01 48 4095 11 11 11 11 11 11 44 Now you'd think from that list that AM 4095 would be the way to go, but it isn't. The sim runs smoothest with AM of 1364. I don't use core 0 at all, leaving that for operating system stuff and any other random background processes. And all my P3D addons are assigned to the other 5 core threads not used by P3D through use of a batch file. With all that in place, the sim is maintaining 30fps at all times and is very smooth. Except for one thing. I'm getting the most horrendous occasional sim hang, for maybe 10 seconds. All activity ceases, to the point that I'm expecting a BSOD, then after about 10 seconds, everything continues perfect. This is rare - it happened just once this evening in a two hour flight, and at the time I was in the middle of the Scottish Highlands, so far from any large airport scenery that might of been loading at the time. https://photos.app.goo.gl/n6UbJnqtcKGMrTAx6 Has anyone had the same and found a cure for this. It's not a stutter. Looking at the screen grab on the link above, it's much worse and shows the CPU and GPU taking a dive in performance (red arrows). Core 0 Thread 1 (green arrow) got busy just before this pause, and Core 6 Thread 2 (purple arrow) also ramps up just before the pause. Core 0 is not assigned to the sim or any addons. Core 6 Thread 2 is assigned to FFTF Dynamic, and ASP4 (Active Sky). Anyone got any thoughts on what is happening here or found a fix? Is there a known issue with FFTF Dynamic or ASP4? I've had quite a few of these long pauses, and it would be great to get rid of them.

Maybe all his efforts have been refocused on MS Fright Stimulator 2020. Just saying. Hope he hasn't abandoned P3D.

Interesting. I have the same setup, but without Tomatoshade, and I am still seeing the hard edges, so I will be interested to here your findings.

Looking at the screenshots above, has this update fixed the horrible hard edges of clouds and fog in valleys which I have seen up to now? Like this: https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipO5WkS0swDiekAIPs2S9t-LHPyXvC10ySOVsryEAiEf1p4XDvFR1QIq650b45Y-Og?key=X1lCOGpkX0c4R2lvVFFNVFdNZUpXSFZlQk5QWXpB