active NA Southern California Frame Rates

[THCaptain]

Hi guys. I find myself here after purchasing NA SoCal back in July, and admittedly I did little research other than reviews, ofcourse pre purchase I didn't see a bad review, so I wen't ahead, and shelled out the 50 something dollars gladly thinking it was money well spent, as I mainly fly the region. I like to fly commercial heavies usually, PMDG 47/77.. I run pretty modest settings on my rig, and before hand never had any addon scenery with the exception of LatinVFR KSAN. Normally getting upwards of 40-50 frames with a PMDG product, depending on if I'm on approach, sitting at a gate or what have you. Upon installing SoCal, and running a few flight trying to see what I may need to do with settings, I was getting very stuttery frames, jumping between 15-20 (a very un smooth 20 when it would hit it). I tried turning off my vehicle traffic to 0 from 9%, turning my autogens down from normal to sparse. I tried turning my level of detail radius down from ultra to high, my scenery complexity down from dense to normal. Autogen draw distance down from very high to high.. Settings I already had pretty low; water detail set to low, reflections only set to user vehicle only, special effects both on medium dynamic 3D autogen vegetation was off, no HDR lighting, shadows medium,  cloud draw at 60miles detailed clouds, volumetric fog. No other traffic besides cars (which I had turned off as mentioned). Display setting FXAA off,, 4xMSAA,, 2048X2048,, Aniso. 16x. Tried locking frames around 30, 25, 20, all with same result of a slide show upon approach, really badly approaching LA. I emailed ORBX with all kinds of info screen shots, video, and was told the product was working fine. OK fair enough,, so I gave up for months and wrote off the money as a loss... Got a tick to try to give it another go, started out with some more searching, and what do you know, the bad reviews, and people with same issues make an appearance. I read an older thread from 2015-2016 where people we're basically saying how you have to turn everything down as much as possible, not fly commercial addon type of aircraft ETC. & I'm thinking to myself, WHY, why should we have to basically turn everything down so much and tip toe the sim around a product that we paid good money for. Not be able to fly the aircraft of our choice ETC. without having to worry about a a choppy slide show. I didn't read anything about minimum or even recommended specs on the purchase page? Unless I'm just blind and missed it completely. So excuse my little rant, it's just a little frustrating to spend money on something I don't even use, when I hardly ever get to put money towards hobby as it is. This is my last ditch effort for some help, without having to turn everything down to the point of not even being able to fully enjoy the scenery as it should be.  I'm even considering getting Global base, and adding on vectors, and OpenLc as  I go (but I'm a bit scared). As I've read global seems to get much better performance, obviously I understand there will be some hit, but I don't think it should be so bad I can't even run it.

[Doug Sawatzky]

Hi Aron

 

Sorry I may not be much help, but I can report that with my system (P3Dv4), and the PMDG 747, along with higher settings than what you are using, I am getting very smooth performance with good fps at KSAN and around the region.

 

I am assuming you are also using P3Dv4 in your above reference? If so, your GPU is probably what is holding you back the most.

 

Cheers

 

Doug 

[Holger Sandmann]

Hi Arron,

 

generally speaking, I'd first test whether a specific component gives you the most grief. That is, experiment with setting autogen sliders to full left, then scenery density (i.e., custom objects), specific display settings like shading, AI traffic, etc. Only change one slider/checkbox at a time. Perhaps one of these stands out the most and then you could focus on reducing its impact.

 

If you strictly fly large airliners out of major airports then you can also experiment with removing the object placement files for the smaller airports included with SCA. Individually, those files wouldn't have much impact but there are a ton of these in the LA basin and thus, collectively, they could eat up quite a few fps. Make a new folder within \ORBX\FTX_NA\FTX_NA_SCA05_SCENERY named "airport_objects" or similar, then navigate to \ORBX\FTX_NA\FTX_NA_SCA05_SCENERY\scenery, sort by name, select the 300+ files starting with "FTX_SCA_objects_", and move them into the new folder. Do the same with the 20+ files that contain "_GP" in their names and leave all other files as they are. Then check in the new folder for files with the ICAOs of the airports you're likely to fly into and move them back into the \scenery subfolder.

 

Cheers, Holger

[THCaptain]

Thanks for the replies, guys! To Mr. Sawatzky's point I can agree that my GPU isn't ideal, I just imagined that turning things down quite a bit would compensate that. I'm curious as to what GPU you are using, or maybe just a 1060 with a little more ram would do the trick? (& Yes the most recent update to V4)

 

& To Mr. Sandmann's point I did try un checking all boxes in the Control panel, which did seem to help some.

However I tried something else the other night, was turning my autogens UP, and added Fiber Frame Time Fraction of .05 to the CFG (I try to stay away from CFG tweaks over here in P3D now).. & It seemed to work really well, went from my 15-20 stutter frames on approach to LAX, to a smooth running 30ish frames. I did try one at a time, the autogen first, did get more smooth, and frames were better. But when I Threw in the FIber Frame it really seemed to do the trick. Though I didn't get much test flights in as I was exhausted. Going to fire up now, and see if I was just dreaming. I'm curious what your thoughts are on both turning autogen up and seeing improvements, the fiber frame, and thoughts on if it would be a good idea for me to purchase Global Base, and just use that until I can upgrade GPU. I've read that it's not as demanding, and beautiful at the same time. Will still get back with full results of what I tried, and will also try Mr. Sandmann's suggestions.

 

MUCH THANKS FOR YOUR TIME!

 

-Aron

 

[Doug Sawatzky]

Aron

 

I am using a GTX 1080Ti....my system specs are in the "Reveal Hidden Contents" bar below my name.

[CaptKornDog]

On 11/2/2018 at 7:16 PM, THCaptain said:

Thanks for the replies, guys! To Mr. Sawatzky's point I can agree that my GPU isn't ideal, I just imagined that turning things down quite a bit would compensate that. I'm curious as to what GPU you are using, or maybe just a 1060 with a little more ram would do the trick? (& Yes the most recent update to V4)

 

& To Mr. Sandmann's point I did try un checking all boxes in the Control panel, which did seem to help some.

However I tried something else the other night, was turning my autogens UP, and added Fiber Frame Time Fraction of .05 to the CFG (I try to stay away from CFG tweaks over here in P3D now).. & It seemed to work really well, went from my 15-20 stutter frames on approach to LAX, to a smooth running 30ish frames. I did try one at a time, the autogen first, did get more smooth, and frames were better. But when I Threw in the FIber Frame it really seemed to do the trick. Though I didn't get much test flights in as I was exhausted. Going to fire up now, and see if I was just dreaming. I'm curious what your thoughts are on both turning autogen up and seeing improvements, the fiber frame, and thoughts on if it would be a good idea for me to purchase Global Base, and just use that until I can upgrade GPU. I've read that it's not as demanding, and beautiful at the same time. Will still get back with full results of what I tried, and will also try Mr. Sandmann's suggestions.

 

MUCH THANKS FOR YOUR TIME!

 

-Aron

 

 

Any updates with your full results?

 

I'm on an i7 7700K myself (at 4.8 GHz) with 1080, and I simply wound up uninstalling SoCal...unfortunately my only region from Orbx.  Sticking with Global and individual airports for now.  Removing individual airport objects didn't seem to have too, too much of an impact for me.

[Gabe777]

I fly with no Autogen in FTX regions. 50% increase in my FPS.... YMMV

 

And yes, sometimes better to just use OpenLC and Vectors.

 

At least with Vectors, you can dial stuff up and down... unlike with the full regions, where everything is just turned up to ELEVEN !

 

And, this is what's wrong with full regions - no ability to modify anything and tweak performance.

 

And I'm guessing "True Earth" will be like Full Regions .... 'on steroids'. .......Low n slow GAs only.

 

And for that reason.... I'm out.