answered Really low frames when flying into True Earth England

[Locarno1]

Hi Guys,

 

Recently I have noticed my frames being exceptionally low whenever I am flying into and around True Earth. I believe this happens mostly when X-Plane is loading the scenery in. Now I know that True Earth is very intensive and there's quite a bit of scenery to load in but I notice when the scenery is loaded in, my frames are fine, averaging around 25-30fps, if not more sometimes. This only happens when it's loading in the scenery in-sim and when flying online (which I always do) it keeps disconnecting me due to frames.

 

Sometimes I've had the frames reduce down to 3-4 FPS and then it'll jump back up to 20-25 FPS.. I'm running an Intel i7 6700K CPU @ 4.0GHz and Nvidia 1080 GPU. I've got XPlane on an SSD where True Earth is as well which should help the load time but obviously not.

 

I'm also running 3jFPS Wizard to improve my general frames and Vulkan too. Is there anything else I can do, apart from uninstall True Earth altogether which I do not want to do.

 

Hope some suggestions can be posted.

 

Thanks,

 

Tristan

[Jon Clarke]

Please send me a pic of your XP Graphics settings so I can check that.

Also attach a copy of your scenery_packs.ini

When the fps drops I am assuming you are in a high demand area like a city, is that correct?

[Locarno1]

5 hours ago, Jon Clarke said:

Please send me a pic of your XP Graphics settings so I can check that.

Also attach a copy of your scenery_packs.ini

When the fps drops I am assuming you are in a high demand area like a city, is that correct?

Hi Jon,

 

Thanks for getting back to me. Please find attached the requested files. I can't be fully certain in regards to where happens as I feel it's generally as every 'Tile' is being loaded in perhaps, but yes I would imagine city areas wouldn't help either.. For example, I was FL380 or something flying into Manchester at night and over Bristol going northbound, the frames dropped from 25 down to like 5-6 for a good 5-10 seconds and then went back up to 20-25.. This happened again later as I moved more northbound. Also happens going in any direction too.

 

Kind Regards,

scenery_packs.ini

[Jon Clarke]

Is there any improvement if you untick the Draw Shadows on Scenery ans also reduce the Antialiasing down a notch. Also what is your screen resolution?

It sounds like a PC issue where the scenery loading is using almost all the resources for a time that then introduces the fps loss.

You also have addons like x-europe sitting above the True Earth addons which 9s incorrect and will cause issues. I will take a look at editing it for you and post it later

For some reason you have given Global Airports a zz prefix and this will also cause issues as it is supposed to sit just below al your 3rd party airport addons and just above all your True Earth addons.

Please remove the zz from Global Airports in your Custom Scenery folder and then run XP and send me the scenery_packs again. It should not have the zz prefix if you have removed that prefix from the actual Global Airports folder in Custom Scenery.

[Locarno1]

6 hours ago, Jon Clarke said:

Is there any improvement if you untick the Draw Shadows on Scenery ans also reduce the Antialiasing down a notch. Also what is your screen resolution?

It sounds like a PC issue where the scenery loading is using almost all the resources for a time that then introduces the fps loss.

You also have addons like x-europe sitting above the True Earth addons which 9s incorrect and will cause issues. I will take a look at editing it for you and post it later

For some reason you have given Global Airports a zz prefix and this will also cause issues as it is supposed to sit just below al your 3rd party airport addons and just above all your True Earth addons.

Please remove the zz from Global Airports in your Custom Scenery folder and then run XP and send me the scenery_packs again. It should not have the zz prefix if you have removed that prefix from the actual Global Airports folder in Custom Scenery.

Hi Jon,

 

Thanks. My screen resolution is 1920 x 1200. I've removed the zz from Global Airports and moved the position for you to just about my True Earth now. Have noticed a small performance increase but haven't tried out a proper flight out of and then back into True Earth england yet which I'll try and do later tomorrow.

 

Find attached my scenery_packs as requested.

scenery_packs.ini

[Jon Clarke]

I will go through your scenery_packs and optimise it. I will attach it when I have finisg=hed OK.

[Jon Clarke]

I have revised your scenery_packs for you. You had too many incorrect layering placements that would be affecting or masking TEGB addons, like SFD Global, X-Europe and GB Lights (TEGB has lights)

 

scenery_packs.ini

[Locarno1]

4 hours ago, Jon Clarke said:

I have revised your scenery_packs for you. You had too many incorrect layering placements that would be affecting or masking TEGB addons, like SFD Global, X-Europe and GB Lights (TEGB has lights)

 

scenery_packs.ini 22.59 kB · 0 downloads

Thanks Jon. I suspect the order has somewhat changed as I use xOrganizer for things.. Is this a good tool to use?

[Jon Clarke]

I am reluctant to comment other than X-Organiser is/was not necessarily compatible with True Earth addons as it will place them incorrectly when disabled and then reenabled by that tool.

The Dev of X-Organiser had a chat a few months ago with our True Earth Dev and I was led to believe that a newer version of the tool was released which dealt with the issues.

You may want to contact the X-Organiser Dev and/or check that you have the latest version. I cannot confirm however that the newer version has rectified the issue as I do not use it.

[Locarno1]

8 hours ago, Jon Clarke said:

I am reluctant to comment other than X-Organiser is/was not necessarily compatible with True Earth addons as it will place them incorrectly when disabled and then reenabled by that tool.

The Dev of X-Organiser had a chat a few months ago with our True Earth Dev and I was led to believe that a newer version of the tool was released which dealt with the issues.

You may want to contact the X-Organiser Dev and/or check that you have the latest version. I cannot confirm however that the newer version has rectified the issue as I do not use it.

Hi Jon,

 

I've done a test flight in it today flying from Stansted - Krakow - Stansted and the frames when coming back in True Earth were still pretty bad, between the 10-20FPS mark. I use 3jFPS Wizard to optimise and use the 'Max FPS' option but it was still very low. I'm a bit unsure what is really causing this, I would imagine my CPU is bottlenecking somehow..

 

Can you suggest anything else at all? Apart from a system upgrade? Mine's about 4-5 years old now.

 

Many thanks,

 

Tristan

[Jon Clarke]

I cannot think of anything to offer you as further advice  that would not involve an upgrade of at east a part of your PC.

Do you use any other plugins other than 3jfps? AI Traffic programme?

[Adriaan19]

Weirdly enough I have the exact same hardware and problem (Intel i7 6700K CPU @ 4.0GHz and Nvidia 1080 GPU). I'm using xOrganizer and also suffer from immense fps losses over the UK. Perhaps I'll try rebuilding my .ini file. I feel like a couple x-plane updates ago this wasn't the case and remember seeing 50-70fps with True earth UK on. So something has changed and I'll investigate. Here's my scenery.ini in case anyone wants to take a look: 

scenery_packs.ini

[Jon Clarke]

I will get back to you but I don't see Global Airports in your scenery_packs. Is it in Custom Scenery folder?

 

[Jon Clarke]

Apologies. I just found it.

[Jon Clarke]

I have rearranged the scenery_packs.ini to optimise it.

Regarding FPS I cannot comment as the fps rate will vary considerably dependent on hardware, and location within TEGB. London fps will be hugely different to flying over the Highlands of Scotland for example as you well know. so to quote seeing 50-70 fps previously would only have been in a fairly sparse autogen/ buildings area I would guess. I have a 1080Ti and will get 28-32 fps around EGLC heading into central London and Heathrow.

Again it also depends heavily on your XP settings which you have not mentioned nor whether you use Vulkan or Metal (are you on Windows or Mac?)

Hope this helps:

scenery_packs.ini

[Adriaan19]

Hello @Jon Clarke. Appreciate you taking a look at the scenery_packs.ini order, thanks! 

By optimizing I assume you mean there were no problems (that would result in bad rendering/loading) but it could be structured better?
That could be useful feedback for the xOrganizer dev(s).

 

I will try it out though and run some tests.

 

Rig:

I'm running on a 6700K 4.4GHz, SSD, 48GB RAM, GTX1080.

Settings:

Have been running Vulkan for a while, seems I have higher FPS on OpenGL though, to my surprise.

Visual Effects: High (HDR)

Tex Quality: High

Antialiasing: 2x SSA+FXAA

Anisotropic Filtering: 8X
World objects: Medium

Reflection Detail: Minimal
Draw shadows on scenery: Off.

I generally average 40 on complex airports and 50-100 in the skies.
EGPH has me down to 5-8 fps however facing east on stand 3, so that's not quite workable. If I look North or West however it goes back to 50 so that's would suggest something in the scenery there.
Had a similar issue at EGNT, but I've found a workaround and posted about it here: https://forum.orbxdirect.com/topic/202539-xplane11-egnt-poor-performance-and-runway-contours/

Before I know for sure what's going on I just have to run more tests with vulkan/openGL and having certain scenery enabled/disabled. For now I don't want to hijack @Locarno1's topic and you can just regard this as a "weird, I had the same thing happen". If I'm able to pinpoint it, I'll report back. 

Maybe it's time to just reinstall x-plane after couple years of tinkering with it as well :p

[Jon Clarke]

A while back the Dev of X-Organiser was in discussion with our True Earth dev regarding the way that X-Organiser misplaced TE addon scenery in the scenery_packs especially after being disabled and then enabled again. TE addons should always be directly under Global Airports and the 3 files of Custom, Overlay and orthos should not be separated. My understanding was that after the talks there was a newer version of the Organiser issued that assisted in resolving the issue. You may wish to check that out.