TZeer

When you say z-axis. Do you mean the function where you can lean forward in cockpit, or the actual zoom function? Cause that's two different settings.

Do you have the possibility to make a mission and place the unit in a remotely location for us to test? Just so we can be sure that the result is not affected by anything else?

I would have loved to give you tips. But looking at your hardware and you are already running at minimum specs, I'm afraid I cant help you.

Your system specs and OS?

There is no hard-limit. DCS can push out 200+ fps if you have the hardware. You can set up a single unit in the editor in a remote location if you wanna test. And to repeat myself, SLI works good as long as other components dont hold you back.

What settings you have is not that important. What is important is that your GPU is working at 100% through all the tests. Then you do a test with the smoke. You now have a reference. Then you start removing effects like smoke etc. Run the test again, and watch for any difference in performance. Do this multiple times so you know you can reproduce the effect if you notice a difference.

I'm running i7 3820 Sandy Bridge-E @ 4,6GHz

If your GPU is working at 100% during your testing with the smoke effects, your cpu is fine. If your GPU is throttling down it's gpu usage to less then 98-100%, there is something else then your GPU that is holding you back.

Did you log the GPU usage?

If you cant monitor you GPU on a secondary screen a log will be good enough. Hopefully your GPU will be working at 99-100% through the tests. If it doesn't you have a bottleneck somewhere in the system.

Depends who you ask. I'm very sensitive to FPS drops. 30 FPS seems like a slideshow for me, specially when looking out to the sides of your plane. Seems ok when looking straight ahead, but as soon as I turn my view to left or right my eyes starts bleeding. So I have tweaked my system to stay at 60 FPS as much as possible. The point isn't to get as high FPS as possible, it's to make the GPU work at it's maximum and see how much performance is lost due to specific scenarios. Take my example in previous post. That drop from 130 to 70 would indicate that there's something wrong with that unit, and it would need optimizing. Would you be able to put it into the game? Sure, but it would use resources that it would not have needed if the unit had been optimized and done properly in the first place. And in the end pulling down the overall performance of the game. But, if someone is already having performance issues due to RAM, CPU or whatever, they might never notice this, as part of their system is already running at maximum. Anyway, looking forward to your tests.

Yes, it allows up to 150 FPS. But it doesn't mean you gonna get it. If you lock your FPS at vsync you will have to monitor your GPU usage on a secondary screen to keep an eye on the load you get. Then as more and more stuff comes into play the load will go up. Until it come to the point where the card is not able to deliver 60 FPS. If you deactivate vsync your GPU will give out as much FPS as it possibly can. And you will easily spot when the FPS is lower then what your expect, or when it starts getting affected by whatever you are throwing at it. When you are trying find out what is affecting the performance you want to get the whole specter. Not just one specific point bellow 60 FPS. Take the smoke/fire/light/whatever thing we have here. To be able to see how it behaves you need to do it from the moment it starts affecting the GPU/using it's resources. Not just when it dips below 60 FPS. Example: Let's say you have a unit, and you place it in an empty place in the editor. With any other unit you would go from maybe 130 and down to 120 FPS, but this specific one reduces your FPS to 70 FPS. With vsync on you would never notice, and you would think, why care, I can still run at 60 FPS. But you should care, as that unit are then stealing resources that could be used to keep your game running in 60 FPS when it suddenly are competing for resources with other visual effects. Horizon: Everywhere you look in the game there are 3d models. Every 3d model consists of objects. Those objects are dealt by the CPU and not the GPU. If you get to many objects within FOV you can see your GPU load will go down while the FPS drops. This is due to the CPU being a bottleneck by the workload produced by the objects, and not able to feed enough data to the GPU. So, if you tilt your view to much and the horizon is visible, this can affect the FPS great deal and give results that have nothing to do with the smoke/fire/light effect. So, instead of arguing about test-method and telling how you feel it is for you. Post your results, with screens, explanation and your system specs so we can hopefully crosstest with other with similar setup and verify. Btw, I'm using Vsync as well when I normally fly as I can't stand tearing :pilotfly:

Could you take screenshots and post your results? For testing you need to take off your Vsync, as it will interfere with your FPS. To see if your flames/glow were removed, change the time of the testmission to night, and see if you have any lightsource from the wrecks. You also need to be very precise to how you angle your camera when looking at the wrecks/smoke. If you get the horizon in the background, you will get performance drop due to number of objects in the scene. Or you can reduce the visibility range to minimum during the test. But yeah, screenshot would help a big deal as it would let us see the performance before/after and at what angles and positions your getting it.

I turned off vsync, so my card is working at 100% all the time. Did it that way so I can monitor FPS instead of GPU load. I thought I got the biggest hit when aligning the smoke columns... Until I turned off all smoke and fire effects, and realized it gave me no performance gain. What's left to test are those light effects that are around each wreck and burning building. But I don't know which files that controls that.

We don't know what is causing it right now. What you can do is remove all the smoke effects as described in this thread and post your findings with screenshots showing your FPS counter. That way we could see how the effect is at your setup. Even if you don't see it, there is lightning effects around each wreck and building that burns. You can easily see this if you change the time to night. Even if I have a powerful card, I should have seen a difference when removing all smoke and fire effects if they where the big performancekiller. Specially since my card is already working at 100% before I remove the smoke.

It's not. I get the same effect as everyone else regarding this issue. But I agree that people should try with other hardware as well. But they might get performance drop from something that is not related to this issue at all, like lack of VRAM, etc. Or they can hit a CPU bottleneck. I have moved from single 580 to 580 SLI and now a Titan, and what I have noticed is that the more power you have, the easier it is to spot performance "thieves". Earlier I could maybe get 40-50 FPS in a scenario, and maybe 5 FPS drop from something in the game. At that time I would go, ok, that would be normal I guess. But then as the more power you get the less bottleneck you have in the system, and those 5 FPS, suddenly turns into 30-40 FPS.

If someone know the location of the files for lighting effects on burning wrecks it would be great. Thanks

yes, these pictures are with the latest mission with fuel trucks.

Here are pictures to compare. No change in FPS if there is smoke or not. Here is looking towards the wrecks. 42 FPS Here is looking towards the row of new vehicles. 85 FPS During all of this my Titan GTX was working at 100% load on the GPU. I was also careful not to tip the camera to much. Since that would cause the horizon to come into view and the CPU would be bombarded by objects. So there is something else that's causing the FPS loss. Would like to disable the lighting effect from the fire on wrecks. If you change the time of the mission to 0:00 you can clearly see the effect I speak of around all the wrecks.

SLI works fine. Crossfire don't. Crossfire has issues getting both cards to work at 100%. I have used 2x 580 GTX in SLI myself. As long as your CPU is not holding you back your cards will be taxed to 100% on both cards. But you wil most likely run with VSYNC on and you will be able to run the game at 60 FPS. As long as the CPU is not holding you back. Is your GPU working at 100% now? Are you running with VSYNC on? Are you able to get 60 FPS now? If not, what is holding it back? CPU or GPU? If you use a program like nvidia inspector and monitor your GPU usage during FPS drop, you can determine if it's the lack of GPU power or CPU power that's causing the drop. If you loose FPS and the GPU usage is going down, it's your CPU that is the reason. If you loose FPS and the GPU is working at 100%, it's the lack of GPU power.

Will as soon as I get the time :) It doesn't matter if you are flying in day or night. The sim will crunch out as much FPS as possible unless you have vsync on. If you have less visible objects to deal with and less pixels, your FPS will go up as the GPU will have spare resources to use. If vsyn is enabled the FPS will stay at 60 FPS, and load on GPU will decrease instead. This post is was not about if the effect is there or not, or the computer is able to deal with it. It's about the possibility to get this optimized so we don't get this 30+ FPS loss by just switching on a light in the cockpit.

Tested removing all smoke and fire. Gained very little from it. When scene starts I'm at 140 FPS. Explosion starts going off, I drop down to 60-70 FPS. When everything settles I get about 50-60 FPS with everything at default. When I turn off smoke and fire, my lowest FPS was around 60 FPS, while looking down the street from a top down angled view. Only thing left to turn off is this "hue/light" whatever that surrounds a burning wreck. That glowing "hue" that's surrounding burning wrecks and buildings, how do I get rid of that? Want to take that one off and see what happens. Cause when I turn my view and look at the row of new vehicles the FPS goes up to 110+ FPS.

Tested this mission. And I do get some heavy GPU usage when the smoke starts. Noticed one interesting thing. If I look at the smoke from the side, so you can separate what vehicle it comes from, the GPU usage is less. If I align the view with the road so I get the smoking vehicles in one line, the GPU usage maxes out. So even if the amount of smoke is the same, if they overlap each other it brings your GPU to it's knees.

Confirmed. Tested with 3 US fuel trucks. Takes my Titan to 100%. Tested also with 2 parked IL-76 planes, same effect. Big FPS drop due to smoke. Edit: Tested again, and had no such FPS drop. This time with 4 US fuel trucks. Strange

Found something, not big atm but it's something. Enabled Vsync and monitored my GPU usage during the mission. At start my GPU usage was about 50%. After a while as the smoke started filling the screen, the GPU usage went up to almost 100%. Very noticeable when the houses starts going up in smoke. This is on a Titan btw.