active Massive FPS drops in NCA

[Tom Schroeder]

As I have purchased almost every ORBX scenery you can see that I'm a very satisfied customer. But now I'm facing a severe problem with NCA:

I installed the freshly bought NCA scenery, the NCA airports (as far as available for P3Dv3)  and actual libraries, switched FTX Central to North America and fired up P3Dv3.
I set the plane to KSFO (Default, not Add on) and the FPS, limited in P3D to 20, immediately dropped to 7-8. Trying to take off became a kind of slideshow with drops to 3-4 FPS. Being airborne the frames altered between 7 and12.  I also got lots of 1-3 seconds long stutters every 8-12 seconds when the photoreal bay surface was loading.

So I tested ORBX KSTS but got almost similar results with FPS at about 9-12. ORBX KSEZ, with good and stable FPS before NCA installation, also dropped to about 10-12 FPS. Flying NCA cross country the frames are at about 12-16.  

So I switched off windfarms, marinas, Oakland harbor objects, but the FPS kept as slow as before. Then I also switched off all traffic and set the P3D autogen sliders to medium values. But there was no change in FPS, even a P3D restart with the low settings didn't change anything.

Shock!

So I cross checked this with my PNW/PFJ/SAK/England/Wales/Norway etc. and all was well: Stable FPS at 19.9 (when set to unlimited up to 35-40), good old W52, OG39, PAEN etc. worked like a charm. Back to NCA: Same heavy loss of FPS again.

But my system is high potential, with two 1TB SSDs for system and P3D, 4GHz Quadcore, ZOTAC GeForce GTX 980TI AMP Extreme 6GB etc. etc. Ok, the P3D sliders are unually set to high values and my res is set to 5760x1080, but in fact the problems ONLY occur with NCA...

Any help is highly appreciated :-)
 

[pmb]

I have a rather mediocre system i7-2600 3.4 GHz (not overclocked) + GTX760/4GB, but I get 18-20 fps (fluid) with FB KFSO HD + NCA. Drops a little when flying towards San Francisco City, but never close to 1-digit. And this with pretty high settings, nearly all scenery sliders fully right, some shadows, shadow quality next to right. Framerate set to 20. No NI used.

 

I have road traffic = 12 % (I think) and use UT2 with around 45% both.

 

I would't say 20 being great, but as long as it's fluid I can live with it. I didn't switch off any features like marinas (...yet).

 

Given your system, there might be something wrong with your installation, even more as you say England performs well (and London City is the same class as the Bay Area, I would say).

 

I am often flying in the Bay Area, so this is not a one-time impression but my general experience.

 

Two remarks though: (1) I use a hardware panel, no panel on display, only scenery, (2) only GA planes (C172).

 

Kind regards.

[porsche]

I have the same problem there. Used to be fine then one day......have no idea if it was something I did. KSFO for example is not fly able with low single didget fps.

[John Venema]

If you grab KSQL the control panel that comes with that airport has options to disable certain NCA scenery elements like dock cranes and wind farms which give you an increase in performance in the Bay Area.

 

if you don't want to spend the money on KSQL search these forums on previous discussions about NCA performance and how to manually disable certain scenery elements to bring FPS up again.

[Tom Schroeder]

Thanks John, off course I own KSQL and I already disabled all these NCA Options before. But this didn't help that much, as I already wrote in the thread start 

Last night I did a complete reinstall of P3Dv3 and all suitable P3Dv3 compatible ORBX licenses, as I thought there might have been something wrong with the entire installation.
Unfortunately I'm facing the same problem again and some more: As just tested with KSQL now the scenery seems to load to a specific point, I can seen ground surface, buildings and other scenery stuff, the AI traffic hangs in the air, but there is no weather, CPU load goes down to almost zero and P3D seems to stop.

@pmb: I used to fly just the English landscapes but after the reinstall I tried the London area. Unfortunately I now found the same problems like above with my ORBX England scenery, where P3D now seems to stop working when I set the plane to an airport in London (EGLC) or the larger London area (EGTF, EGTO, EGSX etc.)

Wales works well, also Scotland and the other major NA sceneries. I just didn't test Norway, NZ and AU but I hope they are fine.

So now I have trouble not only with NCA but also with England...

[merlinux]

Your PC sounds like a beast...My CPU is a i5  4440 (3ghz) and my graphic card is an entry level 750ti, and im running p3d almost maxed up and i still get some acceptable fps in SF (15-20) If you are sure that you've tried reducing your AI levels in P3D and you are still getting <10fps, it could be due to some other process sharing CPU time.

Even if you dont notice any fps loss on other region, you might still have them but because they are less demanding you just do not feel them as in NCA in the bay.

 

Are you running any other sort of programs in the background which would use your cpu? like an AV

[VonClout]

1 hour ago, merlinux said:

Your PC sounds like a beast...My CPU is a i5  4440 (3ghz) and my graphic card is an entry level 750ti, and im running p3d almost maxed up and i still get some acceptable fps in SF (15-20) If you are sure that you've tried reducing your AI levels in P3D and you are still getting <10fps, it could be due to some other process sharing CPU time.

Even if you dont notice any fps loss on other region, you might still have them but because they are less demanding you just do not feel them as in NCA in the bay.

 

Are you running any other sort of programs in the background which would use your cpu? like an AV

 

You have a similar system to me merlinux. In fact I get far better performance in NCA using v3 than I ever did with v2, hence I dumped v2!

 

As you've pointed out there must be something else running in the background that is causing the lowered fps,

 

Simon