darnoc Posted October 12, 2020 Share Posted October 12, 2020 I'm having an issue with massive framerate drops (40-50 down to 4-6) caused by power line towers which appear in large numbers (like small forests) in specific places. Even a row of power line towers causes a small loss of framerate. It took me a while to track down the issue but by removing "all" custom scenery then re-installing it file by file I traced it to Orbx GB South (haven't tested Central or North yet). The worst I've found so far is just north of Bournemouth airport but there are others. Has anyone else founds this very irritating issue. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jon Clarke Posted October 13, 2020 Share Posted October 13, 2020 Welcome to the forums. Would you post a screenshot of a particular area that the power lines appear as a "small forest". Thee have been no other reports over the time that TEGB has been released of the issue you are describing Do you also have some other addon(s) that add trees or forests in your Custom Scenery folder. There are several "forest" addons and also addons like X-Europe have a forest folder as does SFD Global. Attach a copy of your scenery_packs.ini please so I can check the layering sequence you have. Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
darnoc Posted October 13, 2020 Author Share Posted October 13, 2020 Hi Jon, Thanks for the welcome. Here's a shot of my "small forest" of power line towers attached. The shot was taken from about 800ft above the western end of Runway 08 at Bournemouth looking almost due north. The forest is in the Woolsbridge area near Three Legged Cross. There's also a line of power line towers stretching southwest from the forest to Ferndown Industrial Estate which also causes a substantial frame rate drop but nowhere near as much as the "forest". I've also attached my scenery_packs.ini file although it's very sparse as the only scenery I have installed currently is Orbx GB South. I have plenty of other sceneries but they are currently residing in my Custom Scenery (Disabled) folder whilst I investigate this issue. Note that the towers disappear entirely when I remove Orbx GB South. In this current configuration with the issue manifesting I've also removed the folder Orbx_OrbxlibsXP. It literally is just the Orbx GB South folders in my custom scenery folder. I did find a screenshot of something similar in an Xplane forum but they had no massive loss of frame rate and no Orbx scenery. The supposed explanation was that it was a depiction of an electricity substation. Thanks for your interest. C scenery_packs.ini Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jon Clarke Posted October 14, 2020 Share Posted October 14, 2020 Would it be possible to resubmit the same pic but without the fog/mist as i am finding it difficult to the forest. Clear skies and a bright sunny day would be best if possible please. Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
darnoc Posted October 14, 2020 Author Share Posted October 14, 2020 Apologies Jon, CAVOC and zoomed in further. Cluster of towers in the centre of the screen. You can clearly see the damage to the frame rate in the top left corner. I only have to pan off the towers for the frame rate to shoot back up. Cheers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
darnoc Posted October 14, 2020 Author Share Posted October 14, 2020 Hi Jon, Here's another example. Not quite so extreme as the power line towers are correctly located but there are a number of them and they make a heavy impact on the frame rate. The shot is just north of Southampton facing Northeast with the M27 junction 3 on the right of the picture. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jon Clarke Posted October 14, 2020 Share Posted October 14, 2020 2nd pic highlights the issue. I will have to ask the dev @Tony Wroblewski to see if there is aw ay to reduce the impact you are having. Please note though that this issue is not one I have had reported as being a such an impact as you appear to be having. What are your PC specs and XP settings please Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
darnoc Posted October 16, 2020 Author Share Posted October 16, 2020 Hi Jon, thanks for taking an interest. I'm running an iMac Retina 5K 27 inch late 2014 with 4Ghz Quad-core i7, 32 Gb DDR3, AMD Radeon R9 M295X, 1TB of Flash Storage. XP settings: I normally run in windowed simulator mode with 85 degree field of view. Visual effects: Max Texture Quality: Max Antialiasing: None Anisotropic Filtering: Currently set at 1x (having experimented with it any higher yet) World objects: Medium to Max depending on which aircraft I'm flying Reflection Detail: Minimal Draw parked Aircraft and Draw Shadows: unticked Medal driver: unticked (I've found with Metal on it goes all stuttered, the opposite of what it's supposed to do. Don't think it likes my graphics card although I can't see why. Metal should run quite happily on it by all accounts) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jon Clarke Posted October 16, 2020 Share Posted October 16, 2020 Thanks for the details. As Tony is really busy he may not be available on the forum so i will contact him privately to see if he can assist. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tony Wroblewski Posted October 17, 2020 Share Posted October 17, 2020 I'm not convinced that the problem is the powerline farm, but rather I think your problem is that you're trying to run this scenery on max texture settings on a system that isn't powerful enough. Zooming in on areas as you are doing is what is causing your FPS drop as I believe your card only has 4GB of VRAM? You'll likely maxing this out very easily causing sudden framerate drops, and using Metal won't help in this case, but rather it will likely make everything blurry. Other tell-tale signs you're running out of memory are frequent pauses and sudden drops and rises in FPS for what appears to be no reason. Try dropping the texture setting down to "high" or lower (and restart X-Plane) and monitor how much memory it is using. Once you have it staying below 4GB of VRAM, you can likely enabled Metal again that will help with performance further. If the cause really is the powerlines, then there is no simple toggle to remove them. Only way would be to mask them, but essentially they'd still be there and taking up resources. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
darnoc Posted October 21, 2020 Author Share Posted October 21, 2020 Hi Tony, I've done further research including your suggestion of dropping the texture quality. Currently set on Medium and it's making no discernible difference. Please note that the only reason I was zoomed in on that area was to show you what is causing the frame rate drops. This also occurs when zoomed out. In fact it's much more of a problem when zoomed out because any power line towers in the field of view will cause the frame rate to drop. The more there are the greater the drop. I've now also discovered that several more areas where I've experienced frame rate drops in the past are actually being caused by the same issue. For instance, I always thought that the frame drops around Heathrow were caused by heavy scenery demand but on closer inspection I've found Powerline towers there as well which, by panning around I can prove are the cause. The only way I can remove them is to lower the World Objects to absolute minimum which, for VFR flying defeats the object. I can also, of course, remove the Orbx scenery which also fixes the problem but that also defeats the object. Is it possible to set the power line towers to a lower priority so they stop being displayed at higher World Object settings? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jon Clarke Posted October 21, 2020 Share Posted October 21, 2020 @Tony Wroblewski for comment please. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tony Wroblewski Posted October 22, 2020 Share Posted October 22, 2020 Thanks for testing. Sadly, there is no setting available just to remove the powerlines. The only way to do this will be to mask out all powerlines with blank objects, but as I mentioned above, I'm not sure this will actually solve your problem as technically they'll still be there and just transparent. I'll see if I can find a way to do this easily and post back here. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jon Clarke Posted October 22, 2020 Share Posted October 22, 2020 Thanks Tony for your response. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sentry11 Posted October 22, 2020 Share Posted October 22, 2020 @Jon Clarke @darnoc Anything that may affect FPS perks my curiosity, so I decided to check it out for myself. FWIW I'm getting around 30 - 35 FPS in the attached screenshots just above the RWY at Bournemouth, and approaching the nest of power lines. The only thing I can suggest is the old trash your "X-Plane" file that is inside your "Output" / "preference" folders and the shader cache folder inside your "Output" folder, then restart PC and XP. But before doing this keep a screenshot of your XP settings as you will have to reset them again after the restarts. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Dow Posted October 23, 2020 Share Posted October 23, 2020 3 hours ago, Sentry11 said: @Jon Clarke @darnoc The only thing I can suggest is the old trash your "X-Plane" file that is inside your "Output" / "preference" folders and the shader cache folder inside your "Output" folder, then restart PC and XP. But before doing this keep a screenshot of your XP settings as you will have to reset them again after the restarts. There are topics around that explain what to keep and what not to keep from these folders, so you don't lose your control settings etc. Has definitely worked for me in the past. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jon Clarke Posted October 23, 2020 Share Posted October 23, 2020 I tend to delete the Shader cache and then I delete only the X-Plane PICS Rules file, leaving all the others alone. You will still need to reset your XP settings as XP will start in the default settings which are pretty low. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
darnoc Posted October 23, 2020 Author Share Posted October 23, 2020 Hi Guys, thanks for all your suggestions and I will have a play later. Meanwhile, having already had a further play with settings. I did as Tony suggested and reduced my texture settings a notch. This appeared to make no difference at all until I re-enabled Metal. Previously Metal caused a very jerky screen but now it's working OK and I've gained a few fps. But get this, the power line towers are no longer causing frame rate drops! I've tried setting Metal on and off and sure enough the power line frame rate drops change with it. Therefore, it looks like a potential issue with Xplane 11.5 / Metal incompatibility on my machine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jon Clarke Posted October 23, 2020 Share Posted October 23, 2020 Glad it is fixed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tony Wroblewski Posted October 24, 2020 Share Posted October 24, 2020 roads.net.zip You can try this hack to remove all powerlines. Download the attached file, unzip and place it into "Custom Scenery/Orbx_B_GB_Central_TrueEarth_Overlay/roads/" overwriting the file that is there. Let me know if you see any difference Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
darnoc Posted October 24, 2020 Author Share Posted October 24, 2020 Hi Tony, Power lines are still there but it all seems to be running much better now that Metal is working. Thanks for advice and assistance. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jon Clarke Posted October 24, 2020 Share Posted October 24, 2020 5 hours ago, Tony Wroblewski said: roads.net.zip 322.67 kB · 2 downloads You can try this hack to remove all powerlines. Download the attached file, unzip and place it into "Custom Scenery/Orbx_B_GB_Central_TrueEarth_Overlay/roads/" overwriting the file that is there. Let me know if you see any difference Tony. The problem being reported is in TEGB South. Should darnoc not be placing the unzipped hack into the Custom Scenery/Orbx_B_GB_South_TrueEarth_Overlay/roads/ folder? @Sentry11 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tony Wroblewski Posted October 24, 2020 Share Posted October 24, 2020 Sorry, yes it should be copied in to Custom Scenery/Orbx_B_GB_South_TrueEarth_Overlay/roads/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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