itsjase

It's a combination of luck and angles. Just like most good screenshots are 😉

Capping with RTSS should technically give you 100% free stutter very similar to vsync, and it does in every other game I've tried it with, but...

On further inspection I actually think Sled might be onto something.

It seems that limiting framerate, whether through in-sim limiter, Nvidia Inspector, or RTSS, doesn't reduce CPU usage at all. Which leads me to believe that something is up with P3D.

Uncapped running at 70fps, 100% core0 usage.

Capped at 30fps, whether through RTSS or in-game: Still 100% core0 usage.

In any other application capping the framerate with RTSS also reduces cpu usage.

But doing Sled's trick of disabling and re-enabling the cores causes it to work as intended. This is really quite strange.

For reference, I've used RTSS frame rate limiter in 100s if not 1000s of games, and in every single case they reduced cpu+gpu usage. Prepar3d is the first time I've ever seen this behaviour.

37 minutes ago, lownslo said:

I always run (Prepar3d's pseudo) fullscreen mode.

I just checked NCP and Triple Buffering is off here (as it always is).

Actually, like Noel what I described above is just what I expected. If all it took is locking at any frame rate less than 60 and enabling Vsync, nobody using Prepar3d would be buying 30hz capable monitors. 🍻

Cheers,

Greg

Yeah I didn't realise P3D had no proper fullscreen mode anymore. I've had a gsync monitor since FSX so haven't really kept up with that aspect.

NCP and P3D settings don't matter anymore then, because windows forces triple buffering through its DWM, meaning there's no way to disable triple buffering in P3D.

Which is a shame, because it would make locking to 30fps much easier without the use of external applications, and also give one less frame of input lag.

So the best option for consistent frame pacing would be: Disable both the in-game frame limiter and in-game Vsync, and set the desired framerate limit in RTSS.

Which I'm guessing is what most people already do?

This is strange behaviour, one last question, do you run windowed or fullscreen?

Edit: nevermind I just read LM removed full screen from P3D.

I'm assuming windows is forcing triple buffering, which is why the frames aren't locking.

I'll have a look into it, see if I can figure something out.

Did you reapply your envtex/envshade after you updated?

On 3/25/2019 at 5:59 AM, rstough said:

You do not need to start Sky Force to use Environment Force. You can control what clouds and sky textures you want to install manually or automatically from the Environment Force.  

This is the same for users using Texture Direct.

Let me know if I answered your question.

Does this also include cloud model sync? Or will we have to keep skyforce open if we want that.

40 minutes ago, lownslo said:

No joy here.  Running with no frame rate limiting at all my system will run at 30-50fps during my test flight (the same test I've used since FS9).  If I enable Vsync and lock frame rate to 59 I simply see the same 30-50fps... but with a jerky, lagging scene on my monitor.  Looks like the scene is being held back/dragged ahead based on the varying frame rate.  If I lower the framerate limiter to 40, the frame rate varies between 30-40.  The jerky scene on my monitor isn't quite as bad but still unpleasant.  If I set the sim's FR limiter to 31 the frames vary between 30-31, and the scene flows smoothly across my 60hz monitor.

Cheers,

Greg

 

Did you disable triple buffering?

Or do you have a gsync or freesync monitor by any chance?

17 minutes ago, simba_nl said:

I run recently my 2600K 5.0Ghz rig with the 1060GTX in the "Heaven 4.0" benchmark with Ultra settings in 1080P with 8x AA I collected a score of 89 fps.

For me is Flightsim a better benchmark and as a have stated many, many times here on AVSIM, I collect 30fps in P3DV4 with high settings and all the ORBX candy loaded.

Not sure how that video supports your case. The 8700k destroys the 2600k in almost every test in that video except for gpu bottlenecked games (not flight sims)

1 hour ago, Noel said:

That is the most bizarre piece of information I've heard yet!  Was it tongue in cheek and if not where did it come from?

No not tongue in cheek. Vsync limits your framerate to multiples of your refresh rate, so 60fps. If unable to reach 60fps then it will drop to 30fps.

Triple buffering allows vsync to run framerates other than these multiples because it keeps a 3rd frame in the buffer (as per the name) which it can use to fill the "gap" between 2 vsyncs, though this introduces stutters.

So locking it at any number below 60fps with vsync on and triple buffering off will force it to drop to vsync at 30fps.

Try it if you want

Tomato is also free and looks good with the default presets, very easy to install/uninstall to so no harm in trying it

You can set your iN sim limiter to anything between 33-57fps and triple buffering off. 

This will lock it to 30 vsynced

2 hours ago, SledDriver said:

Thanks for all that guys. I will be doing more tests later today.

Noel/Mace, could you just confirm what method you are using to limit the fps to 30? RTSS? Other?

If you have vsync at 30fps enabled you dont need to limit your framerate, vsync will do that for you.

CPUs aren't all made equal, there's a lot of luck involved. The difference between a good one and not so good one can be quite big.

Ive had a 4690k which ran at 4.6ghz stable with cool temps, I've also had one that wouldn't go higher than 4.1ghz.

30 minutes ago, SledDriver said:

As a new P3D user, I'm currently using EnvDir/EnvShade.

There are a few things I'd like to improve:

 - darker daytime skies at extreme altitude
 - less bright stars
 - remove hard edges on fog in valleys

Those for a start. Anyone know if one of the other shader progs does a better job on these things than my current EnvDir?

Cheers 

Benefits of each:

Envshade: plug and play, looks nice but no options.

PTA: None

Tomatoshade: Free version of PTA with more features such as dynamic reflections. Can also use PTA profiles.

Seems like you should try tomatoshade, will let you tweak those things you're after to your liking

I don't think it's any special phenomenon. Probably something simple in his setup.

My guess is the cpu is parking cores or throttling due to OS settings, and disabling and enabling of a core might temporarily disable/confuse the performance management so it stays at max frequency.

Do you know your cpu frequencies sled? And monitored them before and after the disable/enable?

open task manager and click on performance then CPU, it should show each core's usage and also the current speed it's running at.

56 minutes ago, Shomron said:

With turbo boost functionality is it correct to assume my CPU (I have the same as yours) is running at 4.4 Ghz when running P3D?

In other words I want to make sure I am achieving the maximum performance with this CPU w/o overclocking otherwise I will be motivated to overclock it as it will be considered going over the base frequency of 4.0 Ghz.

Unless something has changed recently, turbo boost activates for less cores.

If I recall correctly for the 4790k its 2 cores at 4.2ghz or 1 core at 4.4ghz.

If all 4 cores are being stressed it won't boost over the base 4ghz

Overclocking to 4.4ghz will give you all 4 cores at 4.4ghz

17 minutes ago, Nemo said:

So true. When I started with AIG-OCI, I had to add about 50 airlines/schedules by UTL. Among them were very important ones like Air Canada, China Airines, Avianca and so on. Meanwhile, after some weeks most of the larger airlines are now available via AIG-OCI. Only 15 airlines from UTL remained in my set-up. I guess that I will abandon UTL very soon. Sorry for UTL, but their development of updates (adding new airlines/liveries and flight plans)  was much to slow. The same is true for Traffic Global which I purchased too, unfortunately.

What I'm still missing on the AIG web site is the DONATE BUTTON. I'm more than willing to give at least the same amount of money what I paid for UTL and TG, respectively..

Have you noticed any difference in loading times? FPS? with AIG models vs UTL? 

Put the flightplan in C:/Users/Public/Documents/FSLabs Data/Routes/

Then enter your flight number or from/to in the mcdu and you should get an uplink.

20 minutes ago, stesma54 said:

That's the recipe for making money, with FSX once you bought an airport it was for life but now users need to buy the same addon anytime a new sim version is out.😉

Isn't that how it's always been from FS2000, Fs2002/fs2004 and fsx? If Microsoft had made an FS11 I'm sure you wouldve had to rebuy a lot of addons.

Sorry if I came accross as agressive, I'm just trying to point out you are trivialising a lot of things that LM has done/and continues to do, to improve the sim.

I'm confused though, you say you're locked at 30fps through RTSS but your system can do 45-60fps. So from my understanding before you touch the cores you have a locked 30fps with 60% cpu usage? But then after you disable/enable the core you get the same locked 30fps but with a higher cpu usage?

1 hour ago, Noel said:

I'm thinking Sled, if anything, is seeing lower total performance.  Just a hunch, but as I say if he truly is seeing the main WORK of P3D being spread equally over 6 cores or what have you he would be seeing performance others have not yet seen.

Yeah I think you're correct, what he's probably seeing is overall less performance, but maybe a more stable framerate as the frame drops usually occur when a core gets hammered to 100%

Having 20fps constant might look smoother to him than 30fps with intermittent drops to 20fps.

On 4/13/2019 at 4:55 AM, SledDriver said:

By who? The actual guys who wrote it?

Did you ever actually look at the thread count on your modern PC with anything running. It's not uncommon to have no 'apps' open and the CPU still be handling 20,000 threads, and you're trying to tell me that P3D main routines are in one thread.

That just doesn't make sense.

P3D main processing will be thousands of threads, all perfectly capable of being distributed across many cores.

That's just how CPU's work.

The fact that it loads up Core0 unless you stop it, is almost certainly legacy programming which has not yet been rewritten by LM.

To be making statements like this it's clear you haven't done any threaded programming before.

Those thousands of threads you see are mostly background tasks by windows. Many windows processes have lots of threads so they can easily be scheduled and spread over multiple cores.

Yes the P3D main routines are in one thread. It is only possible to multi thread so much, which LM have already done with scenery loading, etc. You'll also get some addons on different threads like AS, Chaseplane, GSX, and UTL, but any code execution that interacts with the flight model/physics through SimConnect/FSUIPC has to be done on the main thread as they are not thread-safe (Unless something has changed recently that I'm not aware of).

One of the biggest issues with threading is keeping things in sync, if you put different parts of the code on different threads, it becomes much harder to keep them in sync. This is why scenery and autogen is easy to offload, because loading scenery can be done independently of aircraft systems.

A good analogy would be thinking of threads as crew members on a flight. Adding more pilots into the cockpit wouldn't be very helpful, you never want more than one pilot handling the controls at once. But adding a co-pilot, first officer, or flight attendants in the cabin is fine, as they are doing their own thing that doesn't interfere with the flying. But again this gets to a point where there aren't enough jobs for the crew to do. I mean you could technically have 1 flight attendant per passenger if you wanted, but then they'd constantly be blocking each other and causing traffic jams in the aisles.

It's hard to have multiple people (threads) doing the same thing, whether in life or in programming.

I'm assuming your cpu has also been de-lidded?

2 hours ago, SteveW said:

Sorry, perhaps you got the wrong end of the stick.

Poppet is a problem solver that works a lot on this stuff and is very helpful. The solution evolved is to simply remove the lot as Bert said.

I'm not saying you guys don't understand shaders, What I'm saying is that overall even the expert shader god isn't sure what's happened to them after messing with shader mods. So remove them. That is also the gist of what I was saying. I remove the entire thing in effect by renaming the proper set of folders.

 

Sorry if my response sounded like I was annoyed, bad choice of words.

In the end we are all just trying to help each other.