resolved ridiculous FPS drop with London City scenery pack

[flyinion]

Hi guys, picked up EGLC and the City scenery pack over the holidays and have noticed a big problem.  The sim is almost unflyable with the city landmark pack.  Sitting at gate 24 at EGLC if I pan the camera off towards O2 center I hit low 20's.  If I remove just the scenery pack and leave EGLC I can look off in the same direction and see 40+ FPS in heavy overcast with light rain (real conditions right now).  Is this a known issue with the scenery pack?

[Nick Cooper]

Hello,

it is not and in fact it is widely reported to be "frame rate friendly".

Of course, in the same direction you also have most of Docklands

and Central London.

[wolfko]

1 hour ago, flyinion said:

Hi guys, picked up EGLC and the City scenery pack over the holidays and have noticed a big problem.  The sim is almost unflyable with the city landmark pack.  Sitting at gate 24 at EGLC if I pan the camera off towards O2 center I hit low 20's.  If I remove just the scenery pack and leave EGLC I can look off in the same direction and see 40+ FPS in heavy overcast with light rain (real conditions right now).  Is this a known issue with the scenery pack?

 

For me FPS in the low 20s are flyable. The more MSFS is more about smothness than FPS. I admit that the situation you have dedcribed is causing some stutters and not smooth performance. In situations like this I am running the sim in a window not in focus. This improves overall performance ( incl. FPS) a lot.

 

[Senchay]

would be maybe worh tp try to disable fullscreen-optimizations. I didnt try it yet because i usually have over 30 fps but if its true that the sim runs better in a window its worth to try out.

 

Or the Windows Game mode does something it shoudnt. Is this a known thing for various ppl (the thing with window)?

[flyinion]

It's just weird because without the city pack but with EGLC still installed I was 40+ fps, with the landmark pack I was like 20-22 in that direction, 35-38 the opposite.  Maybe I should ask if there are any known FPS issues with EGLC instead and maybe they're clashing somehow even though listed as compatible?

[wolfko]

2 hours ago, Senchay said:

would be maybe worh tp try to disable fullscreen-optimizations. I didnt try it yet because i usually have over 30 fps but if its true that the sim runs better in a window its worth to try out.

 

Or the Windows Game mode does something it shoudnt. Is this a known thing for various ppl (the thing with window)?

 

Full screen optimization and playing around with game mode settings have no effect on my rig. But having MSFS on an unfocussed window  has a dramatic effect. Just to clariyfy, I am using MSFS in full screen mode, but just not in the focussed window. What exactly I do I have explained lengthily in this linked thread:

 

 

 

[Craig Riach]

@wolfko What size ram do you have and have you checked how much is being used whilst over London or other very built up area's?

[flyinion]

Not sure about wolfko but in my case I have 32GB and have seen the FPS window report up to almost 18GB in use sitting at EGLC in the scenario I described and usually with about 7100 of 7300 avaible VRAM (card has 8, but MSFS usually reports less overall available since other things use it as well).  VRAM has not been an issue in other area though (similar usage).

[Nick Cooper]

Hello,

I am not sure that the large usage of RAM and VRAM actually matters,

in fact I think that it is a good sign that the program is making full use

of the available resources.

 

My unscientific opinion is that rather than it needing 7+ GB of VRAM and

around 18 GB of system RAM, it is instead using a sensible percentage of what

is available to it, which could be expected to reduce in absolute numbers

if there is less hardware available.

[Richard1000]

One of the most difficult things about msfs is how varied performance is, even when folk appear to have similar equipment.

I have both city airport and city scenery and find it pefectly playable.

I have also tried the unfocussed window described above and it doesn't make the slightest difference!

Richard

[flyinion]

Well I gave up for now and removed the city scenery pack.  Maybe when I upgrade my 3700X and 2080 Super to my planned 5950X and 3080 it will bring the low FPS end up enough to let me run both.  Worst case I lost like $5 or something like that since it was bought on the holiday sale.

[John Dow]

One trick if you're running close to your system's peak resolution is to drop the Render Scaling to 80 or even 60, it might help and while there will be some loss of detail mostly I find, at 80, that it is hardly noticeable from a normal flight's perspective.  And set many of the other settings to medium etc, sometimes that helps, sometimes it doesn't.  The two level of detail sliders still provide good scenery at 80 to 100 as well.

 

 

[Senchay]

London airport + city works for me a lot better than any of the photogrammetry ones. 

 

I have the RTX 2080 and a 7700K and if i dont fly in the a320 or 747 (cant do that on the airport anyway) i always get over 30 fps and its a lot more fluid, with less microstutters than the pg cities. I didnt do that test though, looking to the mentioned place. Probably it will be lower as well. But isnt that the nature of 3D applications? If its a game, or any other sim or addon, if its detaild and complex it will reduce the fps when looking at it. 

 

I doubt you get better fps in other places tbh. Hows the fps over Munich, if you look straight to where the most buildings are? Probably also in the low 20ties. If i compare london pack with photogrammetry cities in regards to fps the london pack will always win.

 

I mean, i dont doubt one can increase the fps by removing it but imo that shouldnt be the question. The real question would be if other places, cities with photogrammetry in comparable size run better than the city pack.

 

 

[flyinion]

Soooo, I revisited this just now after having an aha moment just now while thinking about a problem I fixed yesterday.  I was having crazy FPS issues with trying to run OBS studio and the popular freeware EGKK addon.  I fixed that after realizing I was using all my VRAM due to having texture resolution on Ultra and causing my 2080 Super to choke on itself.  Part of the symptoms there were randomly the FPS just dropping like a rock out of nowhere which was similar to this problem where FPS might be ok then it would drop and that was it.  Sooo, now that my texture resolution is still reduced to "High" I reinstalled the city pack and umm, I'm currently getting 45fps looking at the O2 POI marker from the gate in the EGLC addon, while loaded up in the A32NX.  I'm a bit embarrassed now, but hopefully this find will help someone else.  Looks like I need to get a GPU with more than 8GB of VRAM.

[Jon Clarke]

Glad you have sorted it out. Many times the issues regarding performance are due to settings and the addons content. They are tested and many of the testers do not have super duper hardware setups. Addons by nature become more "demanding" as both the sim and addon technology evolve so there is always going to be differences in performance based on the users hardware.

In MSFS and in my experience the other fligthsims the VRAM is becoming much more important in achieving good fps and allowing higher settings in the sim to be achieved.

My default setting with a 1080ti is deemed to be Ultra, but I always then run through each setting and lower those settings which are unimportant based on my type of flying which is never above 10000ft. Do I need Ultra ground shadows, waves. light bloom etc...no. A big hit on fps is the Render Scaling and I have mine at 60 and still see exceptional quality, but I am also running at 4K so I can afford to compromise on many of the settings, lowering them from all being set at Ultra with no discernible difference in visual quality. I then keep the more important visual effects settings at Ultra