active TE GB South P3D v4 Stuttering/slowing performance issue

[GSalden]

While using sparse for SC ( and Low for AG distance ) will help the  framerate, if you are flying to another country there are little objects ( eg airports )... 

 

For TU NL I suggested making the option to choose ( FTX Central ) between max objects and 50% to start with. And then using the SC and AG sliders can tune it extra....

 

 

[Delly]

2 hours ago, Chris.D said:

I see you have all tried just about everything other than checking your hardware.

..

Just my 2 cents worth.

Chris.

 

 

 

Thanks and nice story but not relevant here.

 

3 hours ago, Benny said:

 

You guys tell me what should I do

 

Ben

 

Post a youtube video of real flight from EGLL to EGLC attach hardware specs and prepage3d.cfg

 

[pmb]

7 hours ago, Delly said:

Both of you @flying_fish @pmb can you try Scenery Complexity = SPARSE and Level Of Detail Radius MEDIUM

 

 

Thanks Delly, I'll certainly try this tonight.

 

However, this begs the question: Why make a superb scenery with all bells and whistles - to finally switch them off? I already thought this w.r.t. the shadows, while it's no too much disturbing over big cities. However, Scenery Complexity = SPARSE (with the only switch between all and nothing, if I properly understand you) is something I have difficulty to accept.

 

Kind regards, Michael

[Nick Cooper]

Hello Michael,

 

To prevent blurred scenery,

please try this:

 

Quote

 

1. Delete Prepar3D.cfg (...\AppData\Roaming\Lockheed Martin\Prepar3D v4\)

2. Delete all files in ... \ProgramData\Lockheed Martin\Prepar3D v4\SceneryIndexes_x64\

3. Delete all files in ...\AppData\Local\Lockheed Martin\Prepar3D v4\Shaders\

If NVIDIA Inspector is installed - remove all tweaks.

 

Start P3D. Perform parameter settings.

 



 

 

 

[BrianV]

I found, as Nick, that reducing world texture resolution to 15 cm helps a lot (I normally have it at 7 cm in landclass scenery). Not sure whether this would be the same as with LOD14 rather than LOD15 in the texture that was discussed in relation to a possible seasons package. In any case, it looks fab with the setting above even using real weather.

[pmb]

6 minutes ago, Nick Cooper said:

Hello Michael,

 

To prevent blurred scenery,

please try this:

 

Thanks Nick, will test and report later. The automatically generated prepar3d.cfg hat 1024 which I modified to 2048 afterwards to only detect it doesn't change fps. However, I didn't keep an eye on clarity/blurryness at this stage, thus I may well have overlooked this. 1024 wouldn't be too hard to accept either.

 

Kind regards, Michael

[Delly]

9 minutes ago, pmb said:

Thanks Delly, I'll certainly try this tonight.

 

However, this begs the question: Why make a superb scenery with all bells and whistles - to finally switch them off? I already thought this w.r.t. the shadows, while it's no too much disturbing over big cities. However, Scenery Complexity = SPARSE (with the only switch between all and nothing, if I properly understand you) is something I have difficulty to accept.

 

Kind regards, Michael

 

I agree its ridiculous, and I don't accept it, because there are only 2 Scenery Complexities. Shadows (which make a huge visual improvement in certain lighting conditions) cannot be used! Frankly ORBX should address this and add more levels, but given the kind of responses on here it looks unlikely.

 

Try it yourself fly over London using Normal Complexity. Screenshot. Change to EXTREMELY DENSE. No differences. This is a real shame because its the best scenery I have ever seen. Perhaps there are differences somewhere but London where it all falls down has no graduation.

 

On AVSIM MatthiasKNU was suggesting removing certain files to reduce complexity manually

https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/550009-orbx-trueearth-great-britain-south-released-for-prepar3d-v4/?do=findComment&comment=3971028

 

Perhaps if this is completely ignored by ORBX someone will create a tool to manually lower complexity so we can actually run this beast and enjoy it like XP users can.

[Nick Cooper]

Hello Delly,

the comments of all customers are noted and will be acted upon where appropriate.

 

[flying_fish]

8 hours ago, Delly said:

Both of you @flying_fish @pmb can you try Scenery Complexity = SPARSE and Level Of Detail Radius MEDIUM

Thanks Delly, I did try this yesterday, and also the settings suggested by Nick just now.

I will delete the files Nick has helpfully suggested, and restore Nvidia defaults for P3D and retest later and post. I really don't think its hardware related Chis.D as my PC is very much out of the box, I'm not confident enough to fiddle with bios or other optimizations, but thanks for the contribution.

[John Dow]

Just to recap for those who are following this thread and may have missed it elsewhere, it seems that selecting High Performance in the NVidia settings, either in the desktop app or via NVidia inspector, is having good results.  I didn't realise I had it selected since testing started, and it's all I can think of as to wh6y my mid range system runs this scenery quite well every except London.

 

Unfortunately London is subject to the FSX/P3D coding that allocates most of the hard work to a single core (such as the sheer number of buildings in London) and I don't expect to get smooth performance there until I upgrade to an 8700K or better.

 

And I stand by me finding that reducing the P3D texture resolution to 256 x 256 helped with the blurries and didn't seem to degrade the look of the scenery from VFR visual cruising height, between 2-3,000 ft..

 

[Dreamsofwings1]

Some really useful information being gathered here.  Thanks to everyone for getting involved.

[Delly]

15 minutes ago, John Dow said:

Unfortunately London is subject to the FSX/P3D coding that allocates most of the hard work to a single core (such as the sheer number of buildings in London) and I don't expect to get smooth performance there until I upgrade to an 8700K or better.

 

 

8700k? No chance and not true about the cores, I have 16 cores at 100% on my 9900K around London. Technically it can render it smoothly (runs at 30FPS no shadows) but stutters as you move or turn when new batches of buildings get loaded/textured in and flushed out. There are way too many buildings for the pipeline even at Normal complexity so we will never get good performance over London until 2030 or the complexity levels are sorted out.

[Nick Cooper]

Hello,

if the topic can be kept on the subject of support suggestions, it will be of more help to everyone.

[Delly]

1 minute ago, Nick Cooper said:

Hello,

if the topic can be kept on the subject of support suggestions, it will be of more help to everyone.

 

Fair enough Nick, just don't want people to go out and spend their hard earned money on a new CPU thinking they will be able to use Normal Scenery complexity near London at the moment. I think that is important support information.

[bruce e]

Thank you Nick & John for your active help 

Nick     Trying your suggestion in post #164

Fingers & everything else crossed 

[flying_fish]

I've tried to pull together everything we've discussed in this test. I have rebuilt P3D config and restored Nvidia defaults as suggested by Nick, and have set:

Texture Resolutions Medium-1024x1024
LOD High
Tess factor High
Mesh Res 2m
Texture Res 15cm
Unchecked high-resolution terrain textures
Scenery complexity Dense
Autogen and Scenery draw distance High
Autogen Vegetation density High
Autogen Building density High

All shadows off

Flying at 2000' 

It's about as good as I managed to get it yesterday, and enough to really get a promise of just how good this product is. over open countryside the periods of sharp textures last a few minutes, then textures slowly blur as CPU gets overwhelmed as in the foreground here:

and the resource monitor shows:

This resolves after maybe 30secs and then the cycle repeats.

Heading towards London, the blurred ground textures become constant even though frames are steady at about 20fps.

I'll add in the nVidia performance tweak and try P3D texture resolution to 256 x 256 as per John's suggestion later.

 

[Eugene Krikunov]

1 hour ago, flying_fish said:

 

 

 

Please uncheck Dynamic 3D Autogen Vegetation

[flying_fish]

3 minutes ago, Eugene Krikunov said:

Please uncheck Dynamic 3D Autogen Vegetation

Thanks Eugene, missed that after deleting P3D config this morning - so I'll recheck again later. I definitely didn't have them enabled yesterday, though.

[JamieBrooks]

Good help on these topics, I have managed to get Birmingham area performing better, removing FTX England seemed to massively help and even got the Robinson chopper flying over London at a stable FPS of 20 and locking it at 20fps seems to give me smoother performance, I do get some blurries over Birmingham on all my tests in the same area to the south of the airfield as I circle around to land at Runway 33 (seems to be the same area each time) which is over fairly rural landscape.

 

What I do get which I could do with figuring out is the odd fps dip, where for a second or so it drops to 12-13fps and back to 20, like a stutter almost. Done most testing with PMDG 737-800 and that seems fairly acceptable, I guess the key thing is that Airliners won't have too much issue with it as they are high above it apart from take off and landing when at a slower speed anyway. 

 

Its a product I've been waiting eagerly for, so hoping I can get it running just that bit better, I am assuming the Density setting which i lowered by this thread is irrelevant then if the autogen doesn't downgrade unless you go to sparse?

 

 

[John Venema]

Here are my settings for silky smooth, stutter free, blurry free flights over London at 4K resolution, with a 2 minute loading time:

 

 

 

[andy1252]

At the risk of making an *rse of myself (as I see JV has just posted his settings as I was putting my post together <grin>), I've just put a post in the screenshots forum with the results of my struggles with all this

 

I shall now go and read JV's post to see what else I might have tried <grin>

[flying_fish]

Thanks John, I now have about fifteen sets of  graphics settings saved!

Using the 'JV special' set I get a much higher frame rate, in the 40's, which is great and at VFR altitudes the LOD is not a problem.

Active sky off, clear skies set in sim, no weather at all.

After a few glorious minutes, they're back....

 

and my CPU is maxed out.

Even with all autogen sliders  at minimum, shadows off, dynamic lighting off, every bxxxxy thing off,  Kent slowly blurs into this...

 

I'm beginning to think this must be an anomaly with my PC... and that I'm wasting a lot of time for others who are probably getting bored with all this!

[Nick Cooper]

Hello,

the next time your scenery looks like that, can you take a look at the

Task Manager performance page and see what's going on please.

Ideally, take a picture and post it?

[flying_fish]

Will do -in fact it's on my list to check out Navigraph simlink which appears to be a bit of a hog on my system.

[John Venema]

I’d say the issue is local. Let Nick do some diagnostic work with you and see what processes are running. What you are seeing is the result of CPU overload.

[he11dude04]

1 hour ago, flying_fish said:

Thanks John, I now have about fifteen sets of  graphics settings saved!

Using the 'JV special' set I get a much higher frame rate, in the 40's, which is great and at VFR altitudes the LOD is not a problem.

Active sky off, clear skies set in sim, no weather at all.

After a few glorious minutes, they're back....

 

and my CPU is maxed out.

Even with all autogen sliders  at minimum, shadows off, dynamic lighting off, every bxxxxy thing off,  Kent slowly blurs into this...

 

I'm beginning to think this must be an anomaly with my PC... and that I'm wasting a lot of time for others who are probably getting bored with all this!

I get the same thing 

[flying_fish]

46 minutes ago, Nick Cooper said:

can you take a look at the

Task Manager performance page

Here's the point at which the ground textures start blurring; notice core 1 overloads, and the load is not spread over the other three, and the GPU is almost 100%

[Benny]

Ok guys, I uploaded this one from home so it's in 720P, this is a test a did this morning with John (above) setting.. SAME exact setting.

You will see a little bit of micro stutters when flying very low, between 2000-4000 feet all is better.

REMEMBER that I loose some power wile recording, about -10-15%, Time to load at London Airport was 2:35 sec.

 

I am now uploading the big 1.7 GB in 2K video....

Ben

 

 

[The Merowinger]

Indeed the CPU could be overload. I just made a little turn over London (about half an hour, now my wife calls me). Frames and Variances are okay, even in the EGLC aeria. It is important for me for landing with something like a small airbus there. And for that I want to use TEGB too.

 

Kai

 

If wanted I can show my settings later.

 

 

[Nick Cooper]

3 minutes ago, flying_fish said:

Here's the point at which the ground textures start blurring; notice core 1 overloads, and the load is not spread over the other three, and the GPU is almost 100%

 

Thanks, can you select the GPU and show its reading please?

[flying_fish]

2 minutes ago, Nick Cooper said:

select the GPU and show its reading please?

Yer 'tis

[flying_fish]

..and like KiaUweWeiss, my wife awaits a taxi.... back in 30

[pmb]

7 hours ago, Nick Cooper said:

Hello Michael,

 

To prevent blurred scenery,

please try this:

 

 

(That was on the 1024 texture resolution.)

 

I tried all the values from 4096 down to 256, you always have to fly a bit until things stabilize. According to my impression, scenery gets clearer indeed with lower values, but I have yet to make screenshots to confirm this, sometimes our eyes get tricked. I think this setting has an impact on airport buildings (among others) as well. With most of them being 1024, this value might be a good trade-off. Anyway, it's still far from the crisp ground I see under XP. Perhaps I should have never bought this one .

 

Now there's plenty of food to try in this thread when I find time.

 

Kind regards, Michael

[bruce e]

Hi Nick

One for you to ponder over LOL

Took off from Lands End  in a NE direction towards EGDJ Upavon mostly rural with the odd town

The odd short period of slight blurring of scenery started about 20 min into the flight but resolved itself within a minute or two. Frames 21 (locked at 22) with no stutters.

 

Forty minutes into the flight and persistent blurred scenery with no recovery after 15 minutes

 

Mindful that frames are ok & with no pauses/juddering to speak of & just the out of focus blurred image problem after a period of time (although this has greatly improved following yours & JV's advice) I am wondering whether the issue lies with my six year old CPU i7 3770K  3.5GHz? I would value your opinion on this as I am a bit green on the mysteries of CPU's (amongst other things LOL) but maybe it is getting a bit long in the tooth

[JamieBrooks]

Doing Johns settings in the other thread but locked at 30fps im getting a relatively smooth experience bar the odd big stutter, done a flight BHX to EMA in the Malibu and that worked fairly well, just some patches of blurries which could do with finding a solution too, if they loaded quicker it would be spot on.

 

Also did Cardiff to BHX in the 737 PMDG and it was flyable, again just a few blurry spells.

 

Taken a screenshot on my phone, when it works it looks bloody excellent, iron out these teething issues and it will be incredible.

 

What is LM actually meant to bringing with v4.5 is that likely to cure the blurries or just the loading time of the scenery?

[flying_fish]

1 hour ago, JamieBrooks said:

Also did Cardiff to BHX in the 737 PMDG and it was flyable, again just a few blurry spells.

Hi welcome to the party.

TEGB has been designed to be appreciated low n slow, and it's not surprising that flying over it in a 737 will cause some problems. What some of us are experiencing is problems at 2000' or so doing 90kts.

Framerate is not as issue; it's texture loading causing CPU overloading that we are investigating. Nick is on the case!

 

[flying_fish]

3 hours ago, bruce e said:

issue lies with my six year old CPU i7 3770K 

Guess it doesn't help - but don't invest yet! Out of curiosity (and to follow a lead I'm looking at) is your 1060 driver up to date? It should be v 418.81 which came out a few days ago.

4 hours ago, he11dude04 said:

I get the same thing 

How about you? Driver up to date?

[bruce e]

Driver: No still running  398.11  

Throw back to FSX days - if its working dont change it

But I'll investigate further tomorrow

[GSalden]

Nick, as London is a large city and has several large airports in it’s surrounding, perhaps there could be made a feature for choosing less objects for the inner city.

 

For TE NL I made a batchfile that takes out all large inner city blocks from Amsterdam and The Hague and replaces them with AG buildings / trees that are way smaller in bgl size.

 

When flying a jet and towards Schiphol several runway fligtpaths are over the innercities of Amsterdam and The Hague and with my 3 view setup that really helps with fps and I do not have to compromise with my settings..

Just my 2 cents 

[flying_fish]

Update on testing with minimal settings...

Actions taken...

Nvidia drivers updated to v418.81 released last week. 

REX textures removed &, P3D default restored.

EU England & Wales set to Off

All non European Orbx scenery Off

Checked that no texture issues occur in areas outside of TEGB

3rd-party shaders off

 

Settings:

Texture Resolutions Low 512x512

LOD Medium

Tess factor High

Mesh Res 5m

Texture Res 15cm

Unchecked high-resolution terrain textures

Scenery complexity Sparse

Autogen and Scenery draw distance Medium

Autogen Vegetation density None

Autogen Building density None

Shadows -None

Dynamic lighting Off

 

Addons installed

Chaseplane and TrackIR on

JF C152

 

Result:

Load time 4.5 mins

Textures load in 3 - 4 miles in front of aircraft doing 90kts.

CPU still phases to peak every few minutes causing textures to load in closer to plane for a period.