bandit648

Actually, I think whatever sticks in memory and reduces stuttering with this, survives restarting the game. If you restart your PC it will be gone of course. I did forget to mention, I tested preload radius and I see little to no difference between the lowest setting of 100 and highest setting of 150000. The manual states this setting is supposed to preload objects into system RAM so you should see increase in RAM usage with a higher preload radius. This does NOT happen. I'm currently running preload radius set to 100 and have my pagefile off in Windows. With 32GB system / 11 GB GPU this is getting the best results for me currently. If you force preload radius to zero in options.lua, then it uses all available memory. In my case it would go up to 32 GB of system RAM and 11 GB of GPU memory. If it was empty mission it would run fine like that but with a lot of AI units the game would crash unless I enable the page file. Maybe I just need 128 GB of system RAM and 32 GB of GPU memory and the game will run great!? :lol::lol::megalol:

We need as many replies to this thread as possible to get attention. Otherwise I suspect this won't be fixed anytime soon by ED. If you have this issue, please reply to the thread with details! Thanks

A nice thing I discovered to use the F11 trick and not muck up your static weather- Create an empty mission where you cycle through the F11 views on the desired map. Then save a replay track of that mission. The next time you start DCS you can just run the replay track prior to loading your real mission. Then you get the affect of having things loaded into memory to reduce stuttering but you don't lose your static weather clouds immediately. I also found that setting preloadRadius = 0 in the options.lua will allow DCS to use all of your system RAM and GPU memory.. this is interesting for testing. It eliminates stuttering on an empty mission. As soon as you load a mission with lots of AI units it maxes out and will crash if you have your pagefile disabled. With pagefile enabled, it will continue to run but doesn't work as well as F11 cycling + pagefile disabled in my experience.

I'm seeing water flickering when using dynamic weather under heavy cloud cover. The issue doesn't occur with static weather clouds. The flicker usually starts a few minutes after starting a flight and is only visible from inside the cockpit. If you flip to external view there is no flickering. I've tested this with a variety of aircraft and they all do it. The issue is present in both open beta and stable release. Is anyone else seeing this? I want to use dynamic weather but I can't stand it with this flickering. I'm running 1440p resolution with G-Sync, no VR. I've tested it with a variety of DCS settings and system config and nothing seems to get rid of it. Reducing water detail level down to medium or low helps but it still flickers where the water is reflecting the sun. Here's a video I made of it... https://youtu.be/Xgye29k3IFU

It loads objects and textures into physical memory. I'm going to post a new thread shortly with testing results on this. I found some new tricks to avoid the disappearing clouds after cycling F11.

Even if you have 32 GB DCS doesn't use it efficiently. If I fire up a mission and don't do anything my RAM usage sits at around 12 GB. Try cycling through all of the airbases on whatever map you're on with the F11 view. That will load tons of stuff into memory and your RAM usage will go up significantly. This reduces stuttering. See my thread in this sub-forum "Static weather causes stuttering". I proved it with testing. F11 actually works. Why the game doesn't do this automatically I don't know. Preload radius doesn't appear to do anything with physical memory. I believe it loads into virtual memory (pagefile) ?? Either way you still get stuttering with it. Cycling F11 view actually works though.

:doh: One thing I had forgot to try apparently. Honestly I kinda thought of it as another DCS performance myth but this one turns out to actually work. If anyone doesn't believe it proof is here. I think this really highlights the continued issues with DCS memory management.

After days of testing and developing a mild obsession I finally found a workaround for this issue. It turns out the problem is related to the dreaded DCS memory management and seems to get worse with heavy cloud levels set in static weather settings. In my testing I tried everything from changing DCS settings (shadows, view distance, MSAA level, etc.) to 9 different Nvidia drivers going back to Nov. 2017 to page file vs no page file. Nothing seemed to make a difference in the stuttering. Then I remember reading on the DCS forums once that hitting F11 a bunch of times helps with stuttering... With preload radius set to max, I cycled through F11 views for all 27 air bases and then watched the RAM perf counter in RTTS go up to nearly 19 GB. Then I started my test which is just a camera view floating above the PG map, 400 knots @ 20,000 ft. for 7 minutes with cloud level 8. Here are the results.. nearly a perfect 60 fps all the way though. Without doing the F11 cycle I get dips of fps into the 30's as noted in my previous graphs. Now here's the interesting part. After restarting DCS I still get good results in my test scenario even without doing the F11 cycle. Notice the RAM usage is half of what it is in the first test. Whatever the F11 cycling does sticks through a restart of the game. I suspect it goes away after restarting your PC though.

Yes, I totally understand and agree with this. All you have to do read through some of the posts in this thread and see that the majority of them are user created issues. However, when someone raises an issue that is reproducible under certain circumstances and provides evidence of the issue then I think that support should take the time to look into that or at least acknowledge it. In my case I found that static weather clouds set to level 5 - 8 causes stuttering. This is easily reproducible and I've described exactly how I reproduced and provided fps logging showing the dips. I would think this would be classified different than the usual "I'm getting low fps" threads we normally see on here. I hope so! It would nice if they were a little more transparent in regard to updates and fixes for performance.

It's on the map and visible in the satellite textures, but it's just outside the detailed area.

The 10th tactical airbase at Konarak/Chahbahar would make a nice addition to this map. Mirage F1's and F-4D's are based there and would likely be the first Iranian aircraft a US Carrier group would encounter upon approaching the SOH. https://www.scramble.nl/orbats/iran/airforce Hope this is being considered!

Something I noticed, ED seems to be much more responsive to issues regarding modules and other aspects of the game but when it comes to performance issues they are mostly ignored. If you look at this sub-forum there are little to no issues acknowledged as being a bug. Even in the case of static weather clouds causing stuttering, which is easily reproducible in both open beta and stable release. I opened a ticket on that issue as well and it has no response. So, should we expect that ED will not look into any reported performance issues and not report them? I do understand that performance issues can have many different causes but sometimes it's the game engine itself that needs to be corrected.

I wish it was as simple as editing the dynamic weather lua file. If you configure dynamic weather you'll notice the cloud base altitude is the same every time. It's set to a default level of a rather high 8000 ft. There must be a static/default value for this located somewhere in the config files but I've been unable to find it. Cirrus cloud levels are set in the cirrus.fx file but I can't find a similar value for the dynamic weather clouds. Unfortunately it doesn't appear there is any way to set the cloud level or thickness the way you can for static weather clouds.

It appears with dynamic weather systems that the clouds base altitude is set to some static value of around 8000 ft. Does anyone know if there's any way to change this through the config files (.lua, .fx etc.). I've looked everywhere for where this value is set and can't seem to find anything.

I suspected no issue with overcast so thanks for confirming. For now I'll be using dynamic weather. I just learned that CombatFlite can also generate dynamic weather conditions and it's super easy to use.. great work-around until ED fixes this. https://www.combatflite.com/ Does anyone know if there's a way to control the cloud base level with dynamic weather? The default seems to be around 8000 ft and I haven't found any way of changing that yet.

Adding some more test results. The issue is reproducible in the "Stable Release" version 2.5.3.24984 also so I suspect this has existed for some time. Here is my test flight in F/A-18C over SOH map. Static weather clouds set to level 8. Flight time is 7 minutes.

I tested this as well and didn't get any stuttering until I added static weather clouds at level 5 to 8. I didn't test full overcast. So, the problem appears to be with the clouds. For some reason the same clouds added through dynamic weather run perfectly fine.

This guy did a fantastic tutorial on how to create custom dynamic weather profiles. It's a pain but it's worth it for the performance difference.

It's kind of shocking the difference dynamic weather makes. The problem is that configuring it is not as easy as it should be. I recommend people setup a few different dynamic weather profiles and save them for use in place of static weather. The other thing that annoys me is how the cirrus clouds are programmed to fade in and out every few minutes. There are some simple things like that could easily be fixed. The addition of some hi-res cirrus cloud textures would improve the look of the sim at the same time.

When it comes to stuttering in DCS there can be a million different causes but one thing is for certain - static weather causes stuttering and dynamic weather does not. I know this has been mentioned on the forums before by others so I decided to test it for myself. Here are the results- I setup a simple mission on the SOH map with 41 units present. I'm cruising in the F/A-18C at 25000 ft for approximately 7 minutes over heavy cloud cover. I turned on FPS logging in MSI Afterburner and observed the results. In the first test, I had static weather settings with clouds set to 8 with rain on and winds at 10 knots. Many stutters were recorded with the worst dip was from 60 down to 40 fps. These are major stutters. In the second test I used a dynamic weather profile I setup that has heavy clouds, winds and rain. The results speak for themselves. I'd like the dev's to recognize this as an offical bug and hopefully fix it. I bet a lot of the complaints about suttering are because of this.

Yes exactly.. this used to be not so much of an issue since everyone was gaming on 1080p @ 60fps with v-sync on. Now many more people own high refresh-rate displays with VRR in the mix as well.

Glad it works for you! I'm thinking we should ask the ED dev's to fix the in-game limiter so we can all just use that. Technically the in-game limiter should offer the best performance but the DCS one is broken.

I'm not sure why some insist on acting like this issue doesn't exit. I've tested TrackIR on two different systems and in four different sims and they all do the same micro-stuttering unless locked at 60 fps. I know that you and Goa tried to find a solution for this as well. There may not be one but I've opened another case with NaturalPoint to see what they say.

Maybe we should take the discussion over to guru3d forum and see what the folks over there say. I'm saying that capping my game at 60 fps while running at 144hz does not disengage G-Sync as you are claiming. You are absolutely right that capping at 58 fps on a 60hz panel is ideal for G-Sync.. No argument there. Is 58 fps ideal for TrackIR? Not in my experience. Most people who have G-Sync have 100hz or higher monitors so advice that 58 fps is one size fits all setting is not good advice.

So this thread is really to discuss the best method of fps locking. In my tests, NVInspector "Limiter V2 - All Off" gets the best results and maintains the best lock on 60 fps. RTSS fluctuates a lot, especially under load in heavy missions. RTSS supposedly has lower input lag but no one has tested Limiter V2 so we don't know. And really, who cares? This isn't CS:GO we're playing here. 30mikemike, I think you mean NVInspector as NVCP doesn't have those options. I'll try the v-sync @ 1/2 refresh rate and report back. Thanks.