answered Rohnerville Volumetric Grass HIGH setting causing massive frame drops

[captainwarez]

HI, does anyone have this airport yet? I'm experiencing frame drops of fluctuations from late 50 odd frames to 25-30 (which causes stutters) frames when looking at the volumetric grass (track ir) and flying around this airport with the airport  grass setting of 'High density'. But as soon as I set the grass to default setting of low density I get good frames in the 55-58.

I'm on P3D V3 I have i5 overclocked to 4.4GHZ, with 8 GB system memory and MSI Nvidia 980 ti which has 6GB of memory. All running on windows 10.

Pretty much everything is maxed out on P3D including airport settings, just seems strange that the High grass setting causes massive frame drops? Would it have anything to do with the fact that the grass is volumetric?

 

I have also made sure I updated with latest orbxlibs

-Lee

 

[John Venema]

That's precisely the reason the control panel has a 'high' setting for grass, because during testing we found certain testers' PC suffered low FPS with max grass, so it was decided to make it optional. If you don't tick that check box you should be fine.

[captainwarez]

do you have any ideas why this only affects certain users? 

Just trying to understand why this volumetric grass is affecting my system is this way. I have a very strong graphics card which should be more than enough for the high grass. 

[Russell Linn]

When it comes to performance, there are a lot of variables that can affect framerate. As you have everything maxed out in P3Dv3, it _might_ not specifically be the grass causing the issue. Disabling/lowering other features in P3Dv3 or in the airport may also improve your average framerate. I know that doesn't sound like a great answer, as you have good hardware, but bear with me.

Sometimes performance will also vary depending on the area you're flying in. For example, some airports/areas may have a higher amount of vegetation, buildings or even aerial coverage compared to others. Because of this, every user may have a different result depending on their P3D setup, PC hardware and the area they're flying in. Disabling or lowering things such as grass can be the fastest way of boosting performance.

[captainwarez]

Hi Russell I agree with what you are saying, but I wonder if the issue is elsewhere?

Take the airport San Carlos at San Francisco Bay for example, prob the most cpu/gpu taxed area ever, the area is chocked full of detail. I am able to get an average 30-35 frames flying around there, all autogen maxed including the airport. I just wonder if it's to do with how the volumetric grass affects the scenery.......

Rohnerville in comparison is quite empty, small town but hilly, lots of trees but the trees don't really stress my setup.

Going back to the airport volumetric grass, the grass around Rohnerville airport is quite sparse, the setting only adjusts the height of the grass? 

[Russell Linn]

Try disabling the specular maps on the buildings via the control panel. That can be quite intensive as the textures are high resolution, so we made it optional.

 

I'll see if I can take a look at the grass. It shouldn't make a big impact so there's no harm in double triple checking.

[Triplane]

I see the same thing Lee. My average framerates with all the sliders full-right are no grass = 60 FPS, low grass = 55 FPS, and high grass = 28FPS. The framerates don't change when I turn off specular maps. Cutting the FPS in half just with the tall grass seems strange but it is what it is. (4790K at 4.4GHz, 16GBG RAM, GTX970, Windows 7 Ultimate)

 

Doug

[JimmiG]

Same here, the High grass setting causes a weird kind of stuttering/lurching. The area itself doesn't seem very frame-rate heavy, and simply changing grass to the default setting doubles the frame rate and removes the stutters/lurches. So it's definitely something with the grass itself that causes it.

[Chunk]

That setting alone causes a 50% dip is FPS. So it stays off for me. Like John said, it's there for a reason.