Worrazen

Wait so it's meant inhouse, the third party Corsair wasn't it?

I have seen similar behavior ... using F6 key to view the selected missile in F10 AWACS view doesn't seem to work, it goes to some other missile, I'm busy and not sure yet so I just mention now, but I'll open appropriate new thread when I get to this and test it again.

I don't know, that seems really weird that would help anything ... About my theory (and evidence) for the terrain stuttering ... I got caught up in the Black Smoke saga so it got delayed.

Did I mention that I botched my build in 2013 with the low profile CPU cooler (didn't knew), blocking my 2 DRAM slots, and then when I upgraded I put 4GB sticks in instead of 2x8GB like the initial set. Well, I just pulled the trigger on a pair of 8GB more to get me to 32GB because I ain't having it no more, I'll modify the CPU cooler if I have to FFS or get another one for this socket ... but it's late, I can't run some of the analysis tools because it just craps out when commit reaches 24GB, I should have done this way earlier, but still the PC is gonna go for 2 years relatively before I upgrade the core and to DDR4.

Update: I have got access to another machine temporairly which I installed DCS World on previously (free), older than mine but with what seems to be a better GPU, a weaker CPU tho, but since these tests are isolating everything possible except the smoke it's doesn't matter much it seems, the FPS is quite high there. That machine more free space so I put the latest OB alongside an older 2.5.5.xxxxx Stable from somewhere in fall of 2019 (I didn't update to latest stable for this test) so I can test both there. Initial quick analysis (without advanced tools, just the basic overlay) and the FPS drop appears to be there as well, but since it's around 150FPS when viewing sea and sky and it goes over 200 when viewing only the sky (and the aircraft model) it seems it kinda doesn't matter in practice because it's not noticable to the eye if you'd be playing for entertainment, withouth actively looking for issues. The FPS drop is like from 170 FPS to 120 FPS in F/A-18C the standard Black Smoke test with the camera some 30-50 and 100-200 meters behind. That is why potentially affects more people but they were not aware of it due to a beefy GPU, not being in F2 View much in the precise conditions and other thing. especially I guess many of those on 1080p which is still the gaming standard AFAIK or at least many who haven't upgraded yet. That's why you need a overlay with histogram or a profiler/monitor to log the performance statistics to be able to notice this better, looking just at the SYSINFO FPS counter can be unreliable because the FPS fluctuates significantly depending on the portions of terrain-ocean-sky on the screen. Offline is also hard, there's so many dips and ups and you won't find the point in time accurately, unless you take the effort to time things to the second. The MSI/RSST overlay you see on the right side in many of my videos is manually configured and not something out of the box, I could say it's not that hard and it's not, but fiddling simple things can take more time than it looks, to get things just right can turns into hours, it puts most people away from beta testing as it can take you whole afternoon and more, and the next day, and so on. I will recreate the settings that were on that machine's stable version, use identical missions/scenarios, and the 1080p resolution for a 1080p monitor, so I just put mine to 1080p as well and see how it goes. I'll be digging more tomorrow, because now I can compare totally different hardware, that machine GPU is a Nvidia, and the smoke looks less dark on the Nvidia machine (but that could just be the HW difference in how coloring looks which we know for a long time), but if it's a HW configuration bug affecting only me and certain machines, perhaps on the unaffected machines the smoke is less dense? We'll see.

Ohhh, the same type of smoke is present in many aircraft for this type of effect, including Su-25T so any could test this, and it doesn't matter if your PC is crappy, if there's a FPS drop or not that's the thing we're looking for. I'm not asking anything special, same thing the devs would ask in such a thread.

Okay, but you guys gonna confirm/test if you also have this bug or what? I need at least one case that doesn't have it at all, and should be on video too for proof. Thanks

I started using offline mode for my beta testing, seems to work fine like that.

Beware of fakes people, there's so many of them, it exploded ever since youtube started paying users ad revenue for uploads.

Well the new lighting is suppose to take more of a hit because it looks better, but I guess not that much.

Updated the OP accordingly. ------------------------------- A cheesy list of smoke types: (unofficial) Black Engine Exhaust Smoke (BEES) - Double draw calls. Super laggy. Gray Wing-Destroyed Smoke (GWDS) - Single draw call (so 1 for each wing/streak) High Altitude White Contrail Smoke (HAWCS) - Double draw calls. Very fast. This is initial profiling me using this utility, hence just a peek, not really fair to call it analysis or diagnosis, I didn't do any of this prior ever, so this is the real deal walkthrough, but I cut up the noninteresting pieces out good, neither I did any advanced comparisons or hunting down the details, but on the surface it's quickly evidence by the BEES is the most costliest of smokes by far, so much, that it raises the question whether it's a bug or not optimized, or just design flaw or something. Note that it's the "GPUTime" that matters for FPS AFAIK, other times I think are aggregated/summed as they work in parallel but don't hold me for my word, that's why PSTime can be so high and that's why other times could be higher than GPUTime, apparently, but I'm only beginning with this utility. Double draw calls, which can both get very coslty with BEES was a bit of a side thing I wondered, but thought it's probably just the positioning and sue of different color channel for the pixels to get the pattern and the final effect right, and I still do, but the the big oops might have been if it's, get a load of that, rendering in stereo when not in VR Mode, potentially wasting 50% of the GPU, because I never ever had VR on this machine nor any VR utility or SDK or anything. But that didn't look like the case as I haven't found good clues on other draw calls where it deals with models, pretty much the whole frame should have things doubled and I didn't detect that, but if these double draw call on certain smokes including BEES really are for VR then it makes BEES that much laggier. It does affect HAWCS too but that's a totally cheap smoke on it's own. The clue is left vs right shift in these pink draw call affected area markers, you can't see the smoke in this case, these line outline a square area of the smoke object effect internally, and you can see the density of how bazillion a lot of these boxes coming out of the exhaust in a cone shape toward the camera. Usually performance suffers due to CPU bottleneck with draw calls, in this dase so much of this is in one draw call, and since the rest of the scene is pretty (sky/model), there's no other draw calls to slow the CPU, which makes this an entirely GPU bottleneck. Forgot to note: That's the F-18C poofing that BEES, since this is getting a bit more sophisticated and I'll be looking at other smokes too for my perf diag practice and learning the other tools I just found, perhaps I find something more or not, hopefully it helps to get to solution faster :) ... but excuse me if some of these abbreviations step on something else, GWDS sounds awfully familiar, I might change it around if that's the case.

Omg ... what I just possibly discovered, I need to make sure I'm seeing that right ... but it's, holy smokes and that's quite fitting term as it also has to do with the now (in)famous Black Smoke, I need to write the post, make screenshots, edit and upload the videos ... but I need a break while the weather, later. EDIT: and that may be a dud, a false alarm, thankfully, I'll keep an eye on it tho, it's very similar but something else may be going on.

Everyone of you reporting perf should be posting what you're actually doing in the game, what mission, it's heavily relevant. Are you actually logging the FPS, or just peeking on the FPS counter here and there?

I've been quite critical of the pagefile way back, the truth is, we simply have to little RAM and VRAM, DCS needs more, some of it is probably non-optimized usage that perhaps could be lowered but if you look at all the map data and assets it's not unusual. Hopefully there aren't too many copies and garbage being left in the RAM while you play. Now, the question is how much is normal? Do we need the whole map in RAM really? The answer probably has to do with visibility, enough that you don't lag when you turn around 360 degrees and look at the horizon, this is already true, but not for the Targeting Pods (and that's my next thread I'll be posting I'm trying to for a couple of days) Not quite, specialists from SysInternals and others don't really agree with MS's defaults, pagefile isn't really managed the way the GUI makes you think, it's a dumb calculation of how much RAM you have ... There is some validity to the pagefile as it does page out some of the background stuff that does make more space in the RAM and will not create trashing. But the pagefile idea should have been improved and more transparent(stats) over the years, but it's not. He's right, this is what I was going to mention as well, virtual memory is actually the memory that applications see, it's a virtual page table, and it can be huge, but it's virtual, it's just imaginary memory, but then some of those pages get commited to RAM where actually things happen, this is what Windows manages, where actual physical memory is behind it, apparently applications usually reserve and take more virtual memory than they really need, hence it's virtual, it's not going to take RAM, if you would map it directly to RAM then it would take RAM despite not using many of the bits, that's my basic idea but it gets more complicated, there's probably other reasons why virtual memory architecture exists. This is an old thread that you brought up so I'm referring to some of the old posts on here to try to clear stuff out, because I've seen digged deeper into the Windows Memory stuff as part of my learning of the performance diagnostic tools (WPA, PerfStudio etc) and it did made my opinion with pagefile less hostile now. So yeah to all the posts says DCS uses pagefile, no it's not DCS fault, and if it is, it's due to us who want to load all that much so we have a better experience, that's all Windows Memory Management that can, but I think it's also DCS that can reserve chunks of memory and do stuff to override the Windows memory management behavior, the point is again, we don't have enough RAM for DCS, because DCS has to keep throwing things out when it loads up other things. The answer is, there is no pagefile fiddling that will save you, you're not going to be able to change any functions of what Windows Memory Management does, it's only the amount. You should get more RAM instead, don't waste time with pagefile settings, if you have 32GB RAM then set it to 8GB or something, you still want some pagefile because it does actually help get thing out of the way like browser data that's just sitting there doing nothing in various tabs, but that would only happen when you have like over 25 GB of RAM usage if not more, however DCS Multiplayer is more hungry than SP people say.

Update, added some findings, check out the second post. But this is the barebone sky test, so the ratio between smoke and no smoke is huge, we'll see the diff with terrain and other activity tomorrow, I'm out for today. It won't look so dramatic against other stuff but if it cuts your fps at low level terrain from 45 to 20 FPS that's a big deal IMO.

So did you actually try it out, you got to be sure, it may be just certain PC configs/drivers issue, it could only be an AMD issue, you need to get camera inside the cone of the smoke that travels out of the engines but also where the smoke flows but that would be due to manouvering or wind, so try to stay level. It's important that we get people who may not have this issue at all, then it's not the game's fault so much. I'd be surprised if your GPU eats through all that without a hitch, unless the bug doesn't affect you. I've seen F/A-18C and Su-27 to get into pretty jaw dropping cases there, 14 FPS down from 80 :)

Hint: It's not amount of draw calls ... update soon. I would have posted it by now but I got something in the way, got a bit out of memory, had to reboot, then another tool crashed due to it's own bug and have to wait for crash report upload, then I have to update 5 other utilities, but this is the life of beta testing :) But it's nothing we can use, I don't have a solution to fix now or anything, it's for the devs if it helps, they should figure it out anyway. I'll be updating drivers after this.

According to my findings, it's not he track file, but I'm not saying I have found the only thing, there's many things going on.

Hey, I got the same message after I suspended my DCS.exe process for quite a few hours, and resumed more than 4 or 5 hours later I think. I did not use servers or multiplayer for a few weeks. Actually I never ran a server or a dedicated one ever on this machine or on my account at all, and I never even used my account on any other machine. But ... I did swap out the audio card and went back to the onboard audio, and did the drivers and stuff, if that counts toward HWID (i'll go check out the FAQ on that), but I know for a fact I had no problems starting up DCS after the change, except, audio wasn't working on first boot, had to start it up twice, it probably reconfigured then. So it may be a standard error message when the session is invalid. If it cannot be determined in software why that session is invalid or whatever then the standard error message has to be kept for an error message at all, but it should not say that with 100% certainity of what has happened, part of the solution is also rewriting that error message to be more explanatory and give a number of reasons why the session may be invalid or why it won't login. Thanks for consideration.

I'm kind of a programmer my self, modder, although not yet around DCS much, even tho I would love to, stuff like this is a nice cup of tea: Delay/start time doesn't work reliably in embedds so standard link: That was pretty funny, it may not be to some, but I like nuggets like that, even tho it's not such an unusual thing, I've seen this happen over the years with quite a few other games, I can't remember which now, but at least 4 to 5, that's usually one of the sign when devs really care or enjoy working to have the interest/time for that.

Reserved for updates. Basic Example Track: https://forums.eagle.ru/attachment.php?attachmentid=229195&stc=1&d=1583278297 ------------------------ Update 1: F/A-18C Terrain Tree Test, Maximum tree radius. -------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------- Update2: This is NOT limited to 2.5.6 OB AFAIK, I have used the current build to do this, but this one was on my head for some time, I just never got to the bottom of it and kept forgetting. Updated the OP accordingly. -------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------- Update 3: Seems like a truckload of pixels ... NO SMOKE SMOKE SIDE SMOKE INSIDE Update 4: A cheesy list of smoke types: (unofficial) Black Engine Exhaust Smoke (BEES) - Double draw calls. Super laggy. Gray Wing-Destroyed Smoke (GWDS) - Single draw call (so 1 for each wing/streak) High Altitude White Contrail Smoke (HAWCS) - Double draw calls. Very fast. This is initial profiling me using this utility, hence just a peek, not really fair to call it analysis or diagnosis, I didn't do any of this prior ever, so this is the real deal walkthrough, but I cut up the noninteresting pieces out good, neither I did any advanced comparisons or hunting down the details, but on the surface it's quickly evidence by the BEES is the most costliest of smokes by far, so much, that it raises the question whether it's a bug or not optimized, or just design flaw or something. Note that it's the "GPUTime" that matters for FPS AFAIK, other times I think are aggregated/summed as they work in parallel but don't hold me for my word, that's why PSTime can be so high and that's why other times could be higher than GPUTime, apparently, but I'm only beginning with this utility. Double draw calls, which can both get very coslty with BEES was a bit of a side thing I wondered, but thought it's probably just the positioning and sue of different color channel for the pixels to get the pattern and the final effect right, and I still do, but the the big oops might have been if it's, get a load of that, rendering in stereo when not in VR Mode, potentially wasting 50% of the GPU, because I never ever had VR on this machine nor any VR utility or SDK or anything. But that didn't look like the case as I haven't found good clues on other draw calls where it deals with models, pretty much the whole frame should have things doubled and I didn't detect that, but if these double draw call on certain smokes including BEES really are for VR then it makes BEES that much laggier. It does affect HAWCS too but that's a totally cheap smoke on it's own. The clue is left vs right shift in these pink draw call affected area markers, you can't see the smoke in this case, these line outline a square area of the smoke object effect internally, and you can see the density of how bazillion a lot of these boxes coming out of the exhaust in a cone shape toward the camera. Usually performance suffers due to CPU bottleneck with draw calls, in this dase so much of this is in one draw call, and since the rest of the scene is pretty (sky/model), there's no other draw calls to slow the CPU, which makes this an entirely GPU bottleneck. ----------------------------------- Update 5: I have got access to another machine temporairly which I installed DCS World on previously (free), older than mine but with what seems to be a better GPU, a weaker CPU tho, but since these tests are isolating everything possible except the smoke it's doesn't matter much it seems, the FPS is quite high there. That machine more free space so I put the latest OB alongside an older 2.5.5.xxxxx Stable from somewhere in fall of 2019 (I didn't update to latest stable for this test) so I can test both there. Initial quick analysis (without advanced tools, just the basic overlay) and the FPS drop appears to be there as well, but since it's around 150FPS when viewing sea and sky and it goes over 200 when viewing only the sky (and the aircraft model) it seems it kinda doesn't matter in practice because it's not noticable to the eye if you'd be playing for entertainment, withouth actively looking for issues. The FPS drop is like from 170 FPS to 120 FPS in F/A-18C the standard Black Smoke test with the camera some 30-50 and 100-200 meters behind. That is why potentially affects more people but they were not aware of it due to a beefy GPU, not being in F2 View much in the precise conditions and other thing. especially I guess many of those on 1080p which is still the gaming standard AFAIK or at least many who haven't upgraded yet. That's why you need a overlay with histogram or a profiler/monitor to log the performance statistics to be able to notice this better, looking just at the SYSINFO FPS counter can be unreliable because the FPS fluctuates significantly depending on the portions of terrain-ocean-sky on the screen. Offline is also hard, there's so many dips and ups and you won't find the point in time accurately, unless you take the effort to time things to the second. The MSI/RSST overlay you see on the right side in many of my videos is manually configured and not something out of the box, I could say it's not that hard and it's not, but fiddling simple things can take more time than it looks, to get things just right can turns into hours, it puts most people away from beta testing as it can take you whole afternoon and more, and the next day, and so on. I will recreate the settings that were on that machine's stable version, use identical missions/scenarios, and the 1080p resolution for a 1080p monitor, so I just put mine to 1080p as well and see how it goes. I'll be digging more tomorrow, because now I can compare totally different hardware, that machine GPU is a Nvidia, and the smoke looks less dark on the Nvidia machine (but that could just be the HW difference in how coloring looks which we know for a long time), but if it's a HW configuration bug affecting only me and certain machines, perhaps on the unaffected machines the smoke is less dense? We'll see. ----------------------------------- Update 5: 1. Grim Reapers on youtube also mentioned they noticed this (the head guy's PC at least) 2. Okay, it's not stereo rendering lol, it's double draw call becuase it's one smoke effect for each engine. I just didn't happen to only try it with one engine, or had the chance to test a single engine'd one. 3. The difference in smoke color that I noticed on another borrowed machine is probably due to Monitor type, it's TN, and my is IPS, that would have a huge effect on it self, so nothing to worry about there. Reminder: Those pink lines don't mean necessairly anything's wrong or too much, it's an outline of the objects in that draw call, the area being drawn, you can see the white smoke has a lot of them too the same way black smoke does, but white smoke is around 20 times less demanding if I eye ball it, if not more. You can see the right engine contrail smoke draws being highlighted (whole area, not wireframe like in other pictures), while the left one is not, so they're to separate effects for each engine, makes sense ofcourse, but it kinda adds to a lot of smoke saturation that overlaps/shrouded that hopefully isn't being rendered, not a problem with white smoke as it never takes too much, perhaps that's what is happening with the Black Smoke, that all of the smoke objects are rendering completely, even if obstructed? But Black Smoke is more transparent seeming and perhaps that's how it is designed to make the desired effect look right depending on various conditions and amount of smoke. The Black Engine Exhaust Smoke looks totally different in design versus the White Contrail Smoke and Smoke Generator Smoke anyway, it's not just a color change at all. However the smoke generator on F/A-18C only sprays from the left engine, I do not know if that's by design or not. --------------------------------- --------------------------------- Allright if you say so, ... just you know it can be tricky as eyeballing it doesn't really work to good if FPS is above 100 at all times because without screenshots I can't be sure what you guys are doing. There is a suspicious case I've got captured where the effect would not have a FPS drop, I don't know what I did different, but I was using 1080p windowed here, but I was using it before as well, and the game was in mission-start-pause for quite some time, only when I did the active pause black hole it started dropping the FPS. Maybe some kind of a clue that it is a bug and perhaps only happens in certain conditions, perhaps the smoke is affected by environmental conditions, or that the FPS was CPU bound and GPU had enough headroom? I'll see later but I'm gonna need a break sometime soon. Now I'm finally going to update the drivers and see what happens, I didn't want to on purpose in the middle of testing to do as much here to have enough to compare. ----------------------------------- Update 6: Reinstalled AMD/ATI Drivers with Factory Reset (deletes all other versions, settings, device driver history) to 20.1.3 WHQL (from 19.5.2 I think) and kept at default settings as per usual, I don't play with GPU settings much in terms of gaming tuning, as I usually don't get bothered by aliasing that much, but I was using 4x MSAA in DCS. Well there's no difference, did a quick test (now I need a break, perhaps a day or two) same Black Smoke behavior, 4xMSAA or not. The only thing there's different is just the FPS min and max bounds shift higher up, but the big drop is still there.

What is causing stuttering for me for quite some time now, this is NOT limited to 2.5.6, it's the engine exhaust from F-18 that would cause FPS dips whenever and it took me a long time to kinda pinpoint it and actually realize it. But it only happens randomly when playing usually, because you're actively rotating the camera in F2 and your airplane, the camera and the engine's of the airplane(x axis) have to come in almost perfect alignment and distance for this to have the maximum effect, not counting the speed and angle of all the physics of the smoke that blows it out of that alignment, so yeah you don't need that alignment, if the smoke blows into your camera you're going to get hit hard. It may also be a configuration bug, along with the A-10C noisedive thing, perhaps smokes are that costly only for me, because I didn't heard anyone talk about it in terms of FPS, but yeah it took me long to figure it out too. So I'll be updating GPU drivers shortly as I was planning to do so for some time around other issues too, I wanted to test things out like this first, then again after that. White Contrail Smoke, at high altitude, does not kill FPS at all, there is some slight dip if you do get a lot of them on screen like with a 4 engines of a AI tanker, but a fraction of what the relatively newer type Black Smoke does. I haven't tested with others than F-18C yet, but I will, but I'm sure it happens else where too, it seems like the black smokestacks may be using the same type of smoke which lags a lot. Which was somehting I noticed way back last week, but didn't report it as I was working on it determining whether the ocean fidelity and waves have something to do with it because when you do come to a certain zoom level the oceal LOD coupled with the amounts (draw calls) causes a similar dip in FPS. So I set the sea quality to lowest, and here's what I got with the Admiral Kuznetsov Smoke Stack. I went on and did the other aircraft I own. these are water tests, to get most other factors out of the way. Water quality was set to LOW. --------------------- --------------------- --------------------- --------------------- --------------------- Same for Su-25T and Mig-29S There definitely is variation due to amount of engines and size how much smoke is produced but it does have a similar effect across the board. In some aircraft it's barely seen and it still makes a big difference. A-10C, A-10A, do not have the Black Engine Exhaust Smoke.

Not all FC3 planes use Shkval, so I guess that one may not work across all. A new inconsistency found: Su-33 has "Electro-Optical System" without the "On/Off" suffix. I don't care how unusual this seems or feels, I'm sure there's a valid point in here somewhere.

Interesting idea :) Don't get me started on civilian aviation safety and emergency features and the problems and solutions ... I would a bit but I'm busy with OB256 bug hunting season now.

There's several dimensions of zoom levels for the ME/F10 view, for various things, right, now in this case, railways use two dimensions, looking from no zoom to full zoom, the first dimension doesn't work correctly as it still shows after the Railways in the Map Options are disabled, but it does work fine for the second dimension and all of it's zoom levels. The transition between dimensions (lack of a better term for dimensions) is where there is a transition between showing smaller town names, so these transitions are grouped together with where many things so that many things change at the same time.