resolved Cityscape Honolulu Performance Issues

[downscc]

I'd like advice on disabling options and features to improve the performance of the Honolulu package.

 

My problem appeared first as slight stutters and frequent long frames while in the default M20 doing a first look sightseeing tour.  It looks very good but...

 

My problem became so bad that I had to disable the addon, while in a PMDG B748 at night at a gate of the FSDT PHNL.  The performance was so bad as to make panning the VC Cockpit difficult, with low average frame rates around 2 fps.  After disabling the Orbx addon my lowest average framerate returned to a normal 22 fps with a frame rate lock at 24 fps.

 

I enabled all options when I installed the product, and have done the steps for compatibility with the FSDT PHNL.  The question is which options are going to have the most impact on performance to allow me to use this product?

 

My system is i7-8700K OC 4.8 GHz 3600 MHz 32GB RAM and dual GTX1080Ti SLI video.  I run with medium scenery display settings, but do use the high resolution terrain textures settings.  I use 2xMSAA with frame rate lock 24 fps no VSync.

 

Recommendations appreciated.

[Lee H]

Something is awry somewhere in your PC system or P3D setup, because I have the same PC specs you have and I get very good FPS at Honolulu with FSDT PHNL with FSLabs or PMDG. Go through all your specs again. Do you have dynamic lights on? Maybe switch them off. Try different things. I run 8xMSAA, but I switch off Vsync and Trilinear because they cause my frames to drop. High resolution terrain can be an FPS hog. I have a 4K monitor, so I keep things like terrain and stuff at moderate settings, it still looks good. Level of detail radius is safer at High and Autogen draw distance, anything over medium can eat performance. It's all a balancing act. Why don't you try deleting your P3D CFG and the shaders and start over by rebuilding a new cfg and start with modest settings on your sliders and see where you are performance wise. Then you can slowly raise sliders, checking which ones might be causing you problems. This advice is not fool proof, it's just some ideas to try. 

 

Lee

[downscc]

14 hours ago, Lee H said:

Something is awry somewhere in your PC system or P3D setup, because I have the same PC specs you have and I get very good FPS at Honolulu with FSDT PHNL with FSLabs or PMDG. Go through all your specs again. Do you have dynamic lights on? Maybe switch them off. Try different things. I run 8xMSAA, but I switch off Vsync and Trilinear because they cause my frames to drop. High resolution terrain can be an FPS hog. I have a 4K monitor, so I keep things like terrain and stuff at moderate settings, it still looks good. Level of detail radius is safer at High and Autogen draw distance, anything over medium can eat performance. It's all a balancing act. Why don't you try deleting your P3D CFG and the shaders and start over by rebuilding a new cfg and start with modest settings on your sliders and see where you are performance wise. Then you can slowly raise sliders, checking which ones might be causing you problems. This advice is not fool proof, it's just some ideas to try. 

 

Lee

 

Thanks Lee but I'm sure there's a few things in the long list of options for the scenery that have performance impact.  After all, there was significant difference with it installed and disabled without restarting the session.  Also, I've not found that high resolution textures to be a performance issue; however, this can result in overrunning the 11Gb VRAM limit and that can cause problems so I'll look at that too.  Thanks for throwing ideas my way, appreciated.

[downscc]

1 hour ago, downscc said:

 

Thanks Lee but I'm sure there's a few things in the long list of options for the scenery that have performance impact.  After all, there was significant difference with it installed and disabled without restarting the session.  Also, I've not found that high resolution textures to be a performance issue; however, this can result in overrunning the 11Gb VRAM limit and that can cause problems so I'll look at that too.  Thanks for throwing ideas my way, appreciated.

 

Did some testing and using HWiNFO64 to monitor my system I found that indeed the problem is that I am hitting the 11GB limit of my 1080Ti's.  I can turn off all Honolulu options (excpet dynamic light, which is required for aircraft I fly) and the VRAM use doesn't change significantly.  The high usage is undoubtedly caused by my use of high resolution terrain textures that includes the TEXTURE_SIZE_EXP=10 tweak.

 

It appears I have a choice with P3D... use high resolution textures without Orbx Honolulu or remove the textures size tweak to use the product.  Too bad.  I could drop US$ 2400 on a Titan RTX card but probably not today.

[Lee H]

It's all a balancing act isn't it? You have to give up in some areas to get what you want. I stay away from the texture size tweak as well as dynamic lights. They take too much performance away. You work to find that middle ground where your system cruises along comfortably, and yet things still look good.

[Jack Sawyer]

This is very odd.  I use PMDG's 747, 777, & NGX in this area and have my FPS locked to 30 and it never dips below 30.  It's very smooth and works fine.  I wonder why mine works and your's doesn't?

[downscc]

1 hour ago, Jack Sawyer said:

This is very odd.  I use PMDG's 747, 777, & NGX in this area and have my FPS locked to 30 and it never dips below 30.  It's very smooth and works fine.  I wonder why mine works and your's doesn't?

Are you using the high resolution terrain texture tweaks?  I'm also using TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD=4096.

My frame rates are excellent until the VRAM requirements hit the wall.  As recognized by Lee, I can improve performance by backing off display quality..., not something I'm in a hurry to do.

[Frank Schnibben]

Out of curiosity I just did 2 quick stress test runs with a PMDG 777 loaded at PHNL and flown around CS Honolulu for a few minutes with the TEXTURE_SIZE_EXP=10 tweak applied / settings: for testing purposes except for the traffic sliders everything set to maximum (also texture settings) / AS weather.

 

As you can see from my specs listed below, my windows "system" (= laptop) is weaker than yours, especially regarding graphics.

 

a) Without FSDT PHNL    20-21 fps VC, no stutters / 22-24 outside, no stutters
b) FSDT PHNL active    18-19 fps VC, slight stutters / 20-22 outside, no stutters

 

I didn't monitor VRAM in these quick tests but given the complexity of the plane and the insane settings fps are not too bad IMO.

 

I can only assume that something else (apart from CS Honolulu and FSDT) requires a lot of your 11GB VRAM.

[Jack Sawyer]

1 hour ago, downscc said:

Are you using the high resolution terrain texture tweaks?  I'm also using TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD=4096.

My frame rates are excellent until the VRAM requirements hit the wall.  As recognized by Lee, I can improve performance by backing off display quality..., not something I'm in a hurry to do.

Hi Dan, I don’t use any tweaks.

[downscc]

40 minutes ago, Jack Sawyer said:

Hi Dan, I don’t use any tweaks.

Which is my point, you cannot compare your performance with default settings.  I've pushed the terrain resolution and have seen impressive results on a 4K screen, allowing me to actually enjoy watching the scenery from flight levels.  Not everyone has the same criteria for satisfactory results.

[downscc]

1 hour ago, Frank Schnibben said:

I can only assume that something else (apart from CS Honolulu and FSDT) requires a lot of your 11GB VRAM.

Is that a valid assumption given that you didn't check your VRAM use?  When I turn off the Honolulu the VRAM drops from 11GB to 8GB, no other changes.  You have a theory?

 

I've been playing around with it.  Unfortunately I cannot manipulate pre-rendered frames because I am using a SLI configuration. 

 

I found that I can save 1GB of VRAM by reducing texture resolution (not terrain) from 4096 to 2048, and another 1GB further lowering it to 1024.  I'll keep it at 2048 for now as a compromise since many new products are now using 4096 texture sheets, but I'm more interested in terrain than I am buildings.

 

VRAM loading only affects frame rate when you hit about 10.5GB on a 11GB card, and then the impact begins as occasional stutter and worsens to constant long frames as the video memory is paged to slower RAM.  I am maintaining a frame rate lock of 24 and at 2048 my avg lowest value is 14.5.... much better than the 2 I originally reported.

 

 

[Jack Sawyer]

46 minutes ago, downscc said:

Which is my point, you cannot compare your performance with default settings.  I've pushed the terrain resolution and have seen impressive results on a 4K screen, allowing me to actually enjoy watching the scenery from flight levels.  Not everyone has the same criteria for satisfactory results.

Well, I was wrong, I do indeed have TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD=4096.  I just made a flight in the PMDG 747-8 from PHLI to PHNL and got 25-30 in the new CityScape.

[Nick Cooper]

Hello Jack

TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD=4096 is a setting and not a tweak, it is what is written to the prepar3D.cfg file when you move the slider to 4096.

TEXTURE_SIZE_EXP=10  is a tweak, to be used it has to be manually added to the prepar3D.cfg file.

It is best used with care, as this topic illustrates.

 

 

 

[Jack Sawyer]

4 hours ago, Nick Cooper said:

Hello Jack

TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD=4096 is a setting and not a tweak, it is what is written to the prepar3D.cfg file when you move the slider to 4096.

TEXTURE_SIZE_EXP=10  is a tweak, to be used it has to be manually added to the prepar3D.cfg file.

It is best used with care, as this topic illustrates.

 

 

 

Thanks Nick, now I’m going to have to look for that one too.  I’m not up on this stuff like a lot of others but I’m learning.

[Jack Sawyer]

5 hours ago, Nick Cooper said:

Hello Jack

TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD=4096 is a setting and not a tweak, it is what is written to the prepar3D.cfg file when you move the slider to 4096.

TEXTURE_SIZE_EXP=10  is a tweak, to be used it has to be manually added to the prepar3D.cfg file.

It is best used with care, as this topic illustrates.

 

 

 

Just now checked, I have TEXTURE_SIZE_EXP=9.

 

So I must have added that a while ago.

[Nick Cooper]

Hello Jack,

I think that line is redundant, as it just sets the default

"Use high resolution terrain textures" which is a setting with its own tick box.

[Jack Sawyer]

6 minutes ago, Nick Cooper said:

Hello Jack,

I think that line is redundant, as it just sets the default

"Use high resolution terrain textures" which is a setting with its own tick box.

Thanks Nick, so what should I do then?

[Nick Cooper]

Nothing, or remove it, your choice Jack.

It's not doing anything.

[Jack Sawyer]

3 minutes ago, Nick Cooper said:

Nothing, or remove it, your choice Jack.

It's not doing anything.

Thanks again Nick, you’re always so helpful and knowledgeable, I appreciate it.

[downscc]

16 hours ago, Jack Sawyer said:

Well, I was wrong, I do indeed have TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD=4096.  I just made a flight in the PMDG 747-8 from PHLI to PHNL and got 25-30 in the new CityScape.

I wasn't talking about TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD; rather, I am referring specifically to TextureMaxLoad, a different parameter, which is set by the Texture Resolution Slider.  I found it interesting that I have a system that performs well under almost all conditions was brought to it's knees by high VRAM use, an issue discussed at length in a recent AVSIM post by Rob Ainscough.  I found it equally interesting than lowering the texture resolution (not terrain textures) by one step decreased VRAM load by 1GB using the Honolulu City Scape product.

 

This simple change has a minor impact on quality and can make the difference between being able to take advantage of the Orbx Honolulu City Scape or not.

 

Sorry you got confused Jack, there are multiple different texture resolution parameters and each one does something different.  It can be very confusing.