LHP

OK, lunchtime testing done, first up I turned off HAGS through windows settings, no change, I then deleted the Nvidia cache, this made a difference, booted the pc, launched dcs MT no vsync and it was smooth as, then I turned vsync back on, and boom problem returned Next thing I did was to make an exception in malwarebytes for the dcs folder, and both exes, this made no difference at all, tonight I'll add the saved games folder and also the other programs I use to it as well, just incase One thing I have noticed is that the drops seem to be associated with the yellow line in the performance monitor, what does that line represent? I couldn't find any notes on it anywhere

I will check that for sure! I'll also work through your previous suggestions. hopefully, I can find what's causing it, just in case it affects someone else! again I can't thank you enough for taking the time and the work you and your team do deep respect and appreciation

yes, this is my plan for sure The PC is unchanged since the last update, so I wonder if there's been an update to another program that's causing the issue? What's super strange is here I am about 20 minutes later (from the time of the last post that I made) on the server I hosted, with no vsync and the non-MT version of DCS and there are no issues at all, other than the vsync and NON MT DCS I have made no changes, this is just so bizarre!! I really want to get to the bottom of it just to find out what it is. @BIGNEWY you guys are awesome and you do amazing work, ill keep my eyes peeled for that new patch and thank you for taking the time to reply to these messages

ok, so I thought to myself, I'll try it on a server as well, just in case. so.. this was recorded 5 minutes ago, on a server I hosted on my LAN, with the DCS MT.exe used. I am running all programs listed in previous posts. I have uploaded it in full screen this time, and I have zoomed in so you can see exactly what is happening. this is probably the best example of it that I have in this one you can see it happening on the menu, not as often but it still has the same drop, I'm so confused

the issue has now started happening on the non-MT version too, I have no idea whats is going on, I'll grab that software and take a look, I'm lost now went to grab it and I got this Website blocked due to suspicious content Website Blocked: swregistry.softpagehomeware.de v2.6.22 | Heuristics: suspicious content Malwarebytes Browser Guard blocked this page because it may contain malicious activity.

Oooooooooo this looks like a powerful little piece of software for diagnostics, I'll take a look at it and let you know what's going on, going on, may be a few days tho

Ok after 8 hours straight of testing, I have some answers... TLDR: It is a DCS Multi-Threading issue/bug, 5-7FPS drops at regular and semi-random moments. I have updated the title to reflect this ---------------------- before I go into this, the second video (one in the second post) shows what these drops look like, it happens at high altitude, at low altitude and even when just sitting at the fly screen, also it happens in MT regardless BUT is made worse when running any of the following programs it does its glitch using, Track ir Helios sim shaker. it glitches when any one of them is active, and it does not glitch any more or less with some or all of them running. so this was my starting point, oh also, OBS does not cause any issues even with replay buffer on and actively filming somthing my testing was done on the F16 Free Flight instant action mission on the caucuses, my method was to start the control print screen displays as soon as I entered DCS, kick off the mission, wait for the load then wait 5min to let everything stabilize before clicking the fly button then I would fly in a straight line for a bit before beginning pylon turns, after a few reversals I would again fly wings level, the glitches happened regardless of what I was doing for the flight but seemed to be the least when 3 or 4 turns deep. I also cleared fxo and metashaders regularly just to make sure it wasn’t them. I also deleted everything from my dcs folders and did a full repair the night before starting these tests and things remained unchanged, so I cracked into it I believe the glitch is related to loading things back to testing. first up all testing was done with all the listed programs running, and none of them skipped a beat, the only program glitching was DCS. so I changed the priority of all of the programs, to below normal then low, with no effect, HOWEVER when I spun DCS up on HIGH priority the glitches were atrocious, fast, and often and bad next I dropped DCS down to normal, and kept the other programs at low. I then manually forced the extra programs onto the E Cores, I left DCS on all cores and stopped the extra programs using cores 1-16, leaving them on the remaining 17-32 cores No improvements Let me stress at this point that I’ve been running these programs for years and have never had an issue with them with DCS, and running them only makes the glitches worse, it does not cause them. and up until these issues started i never had a single problem with VSync or big frame drops I also changed the local host ports they ran on just in case there was something there. Next, I moved on to GPU settings, I tried, all the VSync settings in the Nvidia Control Panel, I tied limiting the fps of DCS, I tried limiting the FPS of the background programs, tried triple buffering etc, but no luck with any of them. There were natural improvements in frame rates, but not the glitch. I also tried to brute force my way through, setting preferred max power in both Nvidia CP and in the Windows gaming graphics, I also tried game mode on and off. Nope still nothing And with that, I returned to DCS, I made more adjustments, clouds from ultra to high, trees, scenery, and other settings on the right-hand side of the setting page (can't remember their names now haha) and dropped them all as low as 50%, no improvement, the frames were buttery smooth by this point however the glitch was still happening. I tried shadows from default to flat and turned off SSS, but still nothing. Turning VSync in game still yielded the same bad frame rates as it did when I posted this thread, BUT turning off the full screen mode did seem to make some difference to the VSync issue, not the glitch how ever. It seemed at this point that if I held a tight pylon turn the glitch would stop happening but the second I rolled the other way it would come back hard. The smoothest settings seem to be vsync off but limiting the frames to 60, which is absolutely fine, however, the glitch still happens. I spent about another hour messing around with variations but nothing would resolve the glitch. Until I decided to see if anything happened on the non-MT I booted up non-MT DCS (with the last settings I had made and the extra programs running), and it was stable, it had a very minor frame wobble of 1fps, it would go between 59-61 fps in a normal way, but there were NO 5-7+ FPS drops at all. For 20 minutes, when I closed down and started writing this. also, its of note that neither my 13900k nor my 3090 got anywhere near to being pushed at any point in the testing, temps were 40-50 for the CPU and 60-70 for the GPU, with the readout saying I was using less than half my GPU VRAM, theoretical frames were in the 300s by the end of testing So there you have it, I don’t know what more I can find out about it but this seems to be an issue somewhere in the MT version of DCS @BIGNEWY Not sure what else you may need of me but let me know, I’m happy to provide it! For now ill stick with standard no MT DCS good to have some resolution haha EDIT: Couldn't stop testing, but can now confirm that running dcs in NON-MT mode also let me go back up to the settings I was using before testing, and in fact even higher settings including VSync and it was running buttery smooth, with all programs running as well. locked at 60, no glitches, so its definitely an MT thing

I'll take a look at that and give it a go, looks promising! What even are those other 2 what do they do, I can't seem to find a plain human answer, or i could just be an idiot, that's actually more likely haha, I'll give those a go and report back

oooooh K, update time, sorry it's been a while but I've been doing some testing, first up I updated to the latest NVidia drivers, I was on the latest but a day or so ago they updated again, I updated because this one specifically mentioned bad vsync performance, specifically micro stutters, anyway, no improvement, vsync in DCS is still bad however I did manage to get my framerates back, all I had to do was change some settings, I dropped the view distance from high to medium and then all of the detail sliders down by 1/4 that seemed to do the trick. I also used the frame limiter to limit the frames (duh) to 60 fps, this performs waaaaaaaay better than vsync ever had. now that I think about it the issue seems to happen when new things need to load in at range, maybe I need to adjust the LOD stuff?? something to try I did try the DLAA, man it looked good and ran smooth, however, the shadow trail things were awful and I couldn't handle them so I've gone back to MSAA for the time being, at my new settings there is no appreciable performance hit, even at 4x, however, 2x will do while I'm sorting the issues out. I still don't understand why the issue has even come around, I don't get why I've had to adjust my settings down to stop these frame glitches, it's very weird. I'm sure with our collective brain power (yours not mine haha) we can figure it out. For reference my system specs are CPU: i9 13900k GPU: EVGA 3090 FTW 3 RAM: 64 GB DDR5 6000mts MOBO:690 Series ROG and the game and OS are stored on 980Pro M.2 drives here are my current settings from the dcs log ['AA'] = 'MSAA'; ['forestDetailsFactor'] = 0.85; ['rainDroplets'] = true; ['LensEffects'] = 0; ['box_mouse_cursor'] = true; ['anisotropy'] = 4; ['water'] = 1; ['motionBlurAmount'] = 1; ['BlurFlatShadows'] = 1; ['outputGamma'] = 2.2; ['aspect'] = 0.88888888888889; ['lights'] = 2; ['LODmult'] = 1; ['MSAA'] = 1; ['messagesFontScale'] = 1.25; ['width'] = 2560; ['visibRange'] = 'Medium'; ['DLSS_PerfQuality'] = 2; ['useDeferredShading'] = 1; ['clutterMaxDistance'] = 0; ['textures'] = 2; ['cockpitGI'] = 1; ['terrainTextures'] = 'max'; ['height'] = 2880; ['multiMonitorSetup'] = 'main setup - pilot 2k tall'; ['shadows'] = 3; ['defaultFOV'] = 78; ['shadowTree'] = false; ['chimneySmokeDensity'] = 2; ['secondaryShadows'] = 1; ['SSS'] = 1; ['fullScreen'] = true; ['preloadRadius'] = 150000; ['scaleGui'] = 1; ['Scaling'] = 0.66; ['DOF'] = 0; ['clouds'] = 3; ['sceneryDetailsFactor'] = 0.85; ['Upscaling'] = 'OFF'; ['Sharpening'] = 1; ['motionBlur'] = 0; ['ColorGradingLUT'] = 14; ['SSLR'] = 1; ['effects'] = 3; ['SSAO'] = 1; ['maxFPS'] = 60; ['sync'] = false; ['heatBlr'] = 2; ['forestDistanceFactor'] = 0.7; ['flatTerrainShadows'] = 0; ['civTraffic'] = 'low'; ['ScreenshotExt'] = 'png';

Awesome I'll give that a go tonight!! I'll try anything at this stage, haha, I'll report back if it's a success or failure and we can take the next step

Sure Thing, what dxdiag info do you want? all of it or just one specific bit? I have attached the dcs.log this is the most up-to-date one. also, after many hours of tweaking I have been unable to dial the issue out, I'm open to ideas but am very confused as to what the issue is. I also grabbed this video that shows the drops that are causing this, in this video I have the Vsync on through the Nvidia control panel, it doesn't cause as bad of the the same frame drops as the one inside DCS does but they still happen. through testing I have found that these drops happen regardless of fps settings, they are just less noticeable at the higher framerates, as my monitor is 60 fps they are very noticeable around that fps setting. but still, it happens at the higher setting. I have also spent a lot of time testing other games, DCS is the only one affected, all other games are smooth as butter, all drivers are fully up to date. not sure what's causing these dips but I'm interested to find out. this mission is just the default tomcat free flight instant action I hope some of the information has been helpful, very intrigued to see what the results are! dcs.log

So a week or 2 ago, maybe after the last update, I can't remember, but anyway, I started getting these really bad frame glitches, I had not changed anything, not a single setting, not anything, they happened regardless what I flew and regardless of what map I was on. I nothing I did fixed it, here's what it looked like then i turned off Vsync. Instantly the problem went away, back to smooth flying and frames I don't know what happened to vsync, ive been using it for years, and I would like to use it again, but for now it's really bad. I'm not quite sure what's wrong with it but it, but yea, it was causing the glitches, weirdly if I kept Vsync off and used the frame limiter we now have I do not get any issues, so it's definitely Vsync

Damn, that seems like a bit of an oversite. I'll just have to squint haha

Might be worth a look, I'll try it and report back

I want to set up a mission with some close formation flying at night, but I can't for the life of me get the aircraft to turn its lights on, none of the AWACS or transport aircraft, even CAM ones won't turn their lights on, making it real hard to find them in the cloud or after going blind is it possible to force them on? I couldn't find the option in the unit options menu in the ME

does anyone know of a way to turn down the volume of the voice you have when using the default radio stuff? I would like to be able to turn it down so it's not blaring in my ears when I request takeoff, landing, rejoin, pre-contact etc is this possible?