Performance problem

[Alkaline]

Hi,

 

I dont get it, i can play Battlefield 4 in ultra/high settings in 1920x1080 with steady 50-70FPS. But in DCS, I have High textures, high visibility range, everything else on the lowest, in 1920x1080. My FPS sinks as low as 10FPS sometimes, e.x at airports and when landing.. What the hell, why? My system is good.

 

AMD FX-8320 @ 4.4GHz

8GB 1600MHz RAM XMP

Windows 8.1 Pro

Sapphire Radeon R9 270x 2GB @ 1070MHz

ASUS Sabertooth 990FX R2.0

AMD CCC 14.4 WHQL

[Pilotasso]

This game is driven by CPU rather than graphics, that is why you see good performance on your shooters but not on DCS. For DCS an Intel CPU is practically mandatory. Also make sure you tune up your terrain detail distance. It'll eat your FPS quickly if you set it too far (where you wont see it anyway).

[gavagai]

My system is better than yours and I use medium visibility distance. That's the biggest fps killer of them all if you set it too high.

[Mojeaux]

This game is driven by CPU rather than graphics, that is why you see good performance on your shooters but not on DCS. For DCS an Intel CPU is practically mandatory. Also make sure you tune up your terrain detail distance. It'll eat your FPS quickly if you set it too far (where you wont see it anyway).

 

We be needing the "EDGE" soon!

[Alkaline]

Well, still.. Shouldnt 4.4GHz per core be enough?

But as you say, it is very CPU demanding, but so is BF4.. I think its rather a bad optimization from ED than my CPU is bad.

 

Would I see any gains if I turn up my OC a little more? I have different profiles all the way up to 4.8GHz all 8 cores enabled. What u think, would bumping the GHz per core do anything?

[Pman]

AMD GPU's generally dont run DCS as well as Nvidia ones.

 

This is due to AMD abandoning Dx9 development some time ago

 

Pman

[AtaliaA1]

Well, still.. Shouldnt 4.4GHz per core be enough?

But as you say, it is very CPU demanding, but so is BF4.. I think its rather a bad optimization from ED than my CPU is bad.

 

Would I see any gains if I turn up my OC a little more? I have different profiles all the way up to 4.8GHz all 8 cores enabled. What u think, would bumping the GHz per core do anything?

 

Battle Field has nothing on DCS. No shooter does. Think about all of the Systems that go online when u start the Jets in DCS. IGI. ILS. MFDs. DSMS. TGP. Maverick targeting system. among others and the myriad number of sub. system involved in them u will soon realize the Shooter Genre only taxation is to the Graphics card as it draws images. The weapon in the hand of the user is the only "System" involved.

 

That R9 would and has done better clocked down not up. do a search many have relegated their DCS gaming to down clocking and waiting for EDGE to receive the benefits of that card.

 

Take a look at another user who had issue that he was able to resolve, it might help U too. http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=131916 h

Edited October 6, 2014 by AtaliaA1

[King_Hrothgar]

I've tried to return to DCS after a long hiatus but it just isn't playable currently. I was here with the initial release of LOMAC, so I've been around a while. And even after all these years, this type of problem still hasn't been solved. In fact it's gotten a whole lot worse since I last poked my head in. I did a test just now to see why my particular system, ancient as it is, is doing so poorly.

 

These are the specs: AMD Athlon II 640 (3.0Ghz quadcore, basically double the listed minimum), Radeon 6850 (double the minimum, nearly the same as the "recommended"), 8GB DDR3. This is an old system, but it was pretty decent in 2010 when I built it. Graphics settings I used for the test were basically low but with medium water and high textures. Resolution was set to 1920x1080 without any anti-aliasing.

 

Using the FMB, I created a mission using the TF-51D and absolutely nothing else. My FPS averaged around 17 from takeoff to landing. It didn't vary much, topping out at 22 fps and bottoming out at 14 fps. At various points I checked what my hardware was actually doing. My GPU was only running at 33% capacity, my CPU was running at 25%. The interesting bit is that my CPU had a single core pegged at 95-100% the whole time while the other 3 remained at under 2% usage.

 

I suspect this is why nearly everyone has so many problems. The game is massively CPU intensive, but will only use a single core. Much of the load appears to be graphics rather than physics as well, as pausing the game has no measurable impact on fps or CPU usage. The modern FX processors aren't any faster than my old Athlon II on a per core per Hz basis. So while an FX8350 obliterates my old Athlon overall, it's only 60% faster as far as DCS is concerned.

 

So with that in mind, does anyone know what all Edge is going to offer on the tech front? How many cores will it use? Will it put the graphics load on the GPU instead of the CPU? I really want that shiny new MiG-21 module, but the game simply is not playable. The devs violated the first rule of computer programming: "it has to work."

[Godzila]

I am no expert, but I explored these FPS problems because of mine low spec system. Those following the forum frequently know that EDGE is coming with DX11 which will help a lot. With current DX9 CPU is overloaded with 3d models which are made by today standards. Systems modeling is spit in a bucket for CPU. ED could correct their 3d models for smooth play in DX9, or make new engine. They choose later which is better in my opinion. I just hope it will really be released this year.

 

And as Pman said, AMD is not supporting DX9 which is not ED's fault.

[Art-J]

Maj. Death, as far as we can conclude from all posts re. EDGE so far, this strictly GFX renderer update will affect GPU performance (duh!), shifting some of the load from CPU to GPU, but multicore support, being something completely different and requiring rewrite of the code, will sadly not make it to the release. Thus, can we expect some general performance improvement? Possibly yes, at least that's what we've been told. Will it be massive? In my opinion, rather unlikely.

[BitMaster]

Battle Field has nothing on DCS. No shooter does. Think about all of the Systems that go online when u start the Jets in DCS. IGI. ILS. MFDs. DSMS. TGP. Maverick targeting system. among others and the myriad number of sub. system involved in them u will soon realize the Shooter Genre only taxation is to the Graphics card as it draws images. The weapon in the hand of the user is the only "System" involved.

 

That R9 would and has done better clocked down not up. do a search many have relegated their DCS gaming to down clocking and waiting for EDGE to receive the benefits of that card.

 

Take a look at another user who had issue that he was able to resolve, it might help U too. http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=131916 h

 

 

When looking at the pure CPU usage of both codes ( BFx and DCS ) one can see how much more CPU cycles BF3 and BF4 use. With the BF titles my CPU is utilizing all cores with 40-60% load.

With DCS, I have 2 cores, 1 fully loaded and one around half.

 

This clearly tells me, whatever BF calculates, it calculates like 4 times as much as DCS does.

I am not sure what it does, but it does a lot more and it can not only be for more FPS.

 

 

ED, bite the apple and make DCS 3.0 a true multicore application so we can use the coming 8, 12 and 16 core models.

 

 

Bit

[AtaliaA1]

 

This clearly tells me, whatever BF calculates, it calculates like 4 times as much as DCS does.

I am not sure what it does, but it does a lot more and it can not only be for more FPS.

 

ED, bite the apple and make DCS 3.0 a true multicore application so we can use the coming 8, 12 and 16 core models.

 

 

Bit

 

Hmmmm? Confused much? (Rhetorical of course)

 

U Do know that there are 4cylinder engines 6cylinder up to 12cylinders. I drive 1 mile each on those different vehicles and will not the result be equal to ur enology? and yet they are in fact doing the same amount of work.

[BitMaster]

Hmmmm? Confused much? (Rhetorical of course)

 

U Do know that there are 4cylinder engines 6cylinder up to 12cylinders. I drive 1 mile each on those different vehicles and will not the result be equal to ur enology? and yet they are in fact doing the same amount of work.

 

ehhh ???

 

comparing about 12-15% CPU overall usage to 60-80% overall CPU usage doesn't say anything about the road aka what has been calculated, it plainly and only says that BF is capable of using that many cores and distribute that much workload roughly equally among those. Nothing more and nothing less. DCS can only run on 2 cores where the cores are dedicated to 1 for sound and one for anything else.

 

The overall work being done is by definition not the same if you call for physic laws. The BF code draws much more ampere on the CPU and does cause more energy transition aka work being done. That much to physics and your cylinder comparison and how much work has been done.

There is no way you can compare what you mentioned to the way those two codes try to offload there workload to what there is and make the best use of what there is. That is the original idea of my post.

 

Bottom line and said in other words, BFx could not get that much work done if it would only consider 2 cores. That leads to a conclusion that DCS can only add "that much" until the engines collapses if it can't get rid off of some workload ( EDGE 2.0 ) or in later stages spread among more cores.

 

I can see the limit in CA in the limitation to 1 core for DCS main calculations. It can only calculate that much and bringing a whole world of ground warfare into DCS will just not work this way I guess.

 

my 2 cents

[EtherealN]

There are more details to these things: the "utilization" isn't like filling up an RPM meter on an automobile.

 

CPU's have different resources dedicated to different things, the most clear distinction is Integer and Floating Point. (The latter used to not be in CPU's at all some time ago, but would rather sit off-chip in what was called a "math co-processor" if present at all.) Depending on the workload type, different resources are useful. Simulators rely heavily on floating point. I cannot say for sure, but there are a few potential explanations to the discrepancy in utilization you are seeing:

 

1) the other games you mention do a lot of integer (perhaps lots and lots of AI/LoS etc, would make sense)

2) the other games you mention might 'emulate' floating point stuff using integer cores (quite inefficient, so would raise "utilization", but would also make the game less vendor-dependent since chips like current AMD's that have less FPU resources but craptonnes of integer resources can still operate the game)

 

Don't know if either of those is the case, just wanted to highlight the fact that looking strictly at core utilization numbers can be extremely misleading if you do not also know what the process(es) in question are actually doing.

[Godzila]

I think that we don't need 8 cores 5GHz implementation to calculate graphic stuff on ancient graphic engine. Upgrade from DX9 to 11 will reduce CPU usage and offload the work to graphic card. I think it will significantly improve performance on older/weaker CPUs and demand more powerfull graphic cards.

 

You can setup very intense ground battle with lots of units on old computer and when looking in the sky FPS will be good.

[nervousenergy]

I've tried to return to DCS after a long hiatus but it just isn't playable currently. I was here with the initial release of LOMAC, so I've been around a while. And even after all these years, this type of problem still hasn't been solved. In fact it's gotten a whole lot worse since I last poked my head in. I did a test just now to see why my particular system, ancient as it is, is doing so poorly.

 

These are the specs: AMD Athlon II 640 (3.0Ghz quadcore, basically double the listed minimum), Radeon 6850 (double the minimum, nearly the same as the "recommended"), 8GB DDR3. This is an old system, but it was pretty decent in 2010 when I built it. Graphics settings I used for the test were basically low but with medium water and high textures. Resolution was set to 1920x1080 without any anti-aliasing.

 

Using the FMB, I created a mission using the TF-51D and absolutely nothing else. My FPS averaged around 17 from takeoff to landing. It didn't vary much, topping out at 22 fps and bottoming out at 14 fps. At various points I checked what my hardware was actually doing. My GPU was only running at 33% capacity, my CPU was running at 25%. The interesting bit is that my CPU had a single core pegged at 95-100% the whole time while the other 3 remained at under 2% usage.

 

I suspect this is why nearly everyone has so many problems. The game is massively CPU intensive, but will only use a single core. Much of the load appears to be graphics rather than physics as well, as pausing the game has no measurable impact on fps or CPU usage. The modern FX processors aren't any faster than my old Athlon II on a per core per Hz basis. So while an FX8350 obliterates my old Athlon overall, it's only 60% faster as far as DCS is concerned.

 

So with that in mind, does anyone know what all Edge is going to offer on the tech front? How many cores will it use? Will it put the graphics load on the GPU instead of the CPU? I really want that shiny new MiG-21 module, but the game simply is not playable. The devs violated the first rule of computer programming: "it has to work."

I just don't see how this is a reasonable position to take. Your system is 4 years old... this is an insurmountable problem when trying to play a modern flight sim. Yes, they should update the minimum and recommended specs, as even though the base engine is still the now ancient, poorly optimized first release it's had a lot of modern, demanding stuff added to it. But expecting a game that played well 4 years ago to play just as well after 4 years of enhancement isn't reasonable.

 

EDGE might help some, but your CPU is simply too old and slow to do much with DCS. If you can get it over 4Ghz you'd probably see a significant improvement given how single-threaded everything is, but I'm not sure how far you can stretch that old chip.

 

On a similar note, one thing that just mystifies me is how little of the engine has been multi-threaded, particularly AI. Almost 20 years ago (when I had more time and my reflexes were way better) I played in the upper levels of the Q2 DM and CTF competitive scene. A huge problem we had to deal with was players cheating with Bots. If you never played the old Id FPS games, these were hacked together game clients that could play the game for you, completely emulating a real person to the game server. It was a constant arms race between the bot writers and the developer / server admins. Why hasn't the AI for DCS been written as it's own routine? This shouldn't be hard, and would allow AIs to run on extra cores or even completely separate boxes / VMs. If I understand correctly, AI is a major resources hog in the current engine, and it's not possible to have AIs use the PFM. Yes, you'd also bring back the potential cheating angle, but I'm having a hard time seeing that as a problem with the flight sim community.

Edited October 12, 2014 by nervousenergy

[cichlidfan]

These are the specs: AMD Athlon II 640 (3.0Ghz quadcore, basically double the listed minimum)

 

You should have stopped right here. Having 4 cores does not make it double anything, unless you are counting the two cores that don't get used in the first place. :doh:

[tintifaxl]

My guess (and it's not even an educated one) is, EDGE looks much better - but all in all we'll have even less fps than we get with the current engine. So no performance help from the new renderer. A major upgrade will be in order, but better wait until EDGE is released.

[cichlidfan]

My guess (and it's not even an educated one) is, EDGE looks much better - but all in all we'll have even less fps than we get with the current engine.

 

If that were going to be the case then there would be no point in Rift integration.

[Corrigan]

Well, EDGE probably will run smoother; the current engine is outdated and inefficient as I understand it.

 

How the new maps run, however, is anybody's guess I suppose. Note that those are two different things.

[Mustang]

AMD GPU's generally dont run DCS as well as Nvidia ones.

 

This is due to AMD abandoning Dx9 development some time ago

 

Pman

 

This was true months ago, but DX9 performance for 7000 series cards and above has improved ALOT since the 14.4 Catalyst (the 14.41 package that was recently released has even better performance, i expect improvement this to migrate to the WHQL drivers soon)

[TordinVarglund]

Its amazing how people still spin the same tale of how DCS is so much more demanding than anything else around.

 

Its not. Its the current engine being 10 years old and unable to utilize the truly massive gains in processing power modern PCs have. Its the same story with stuff like the ArmA series etc, engines made in ancient times on low budgets being shoehorned into games that they can never keep up with.

 

Give a talented dev team a proper budget and tell them to build a specialized engine with todays know-how and technology, and you would see performance, utilization and detail levels very different than whats in use in DCS and ArmA etc these days.

 

Not like thats going to happen though. BI already proved they cant put money to use with A3, and flight sims dont have the audience to attract the investment needed.

 

Thats not to say EDGE cant be good, but its still a relatively small dev with a limited budget, and their record isnt exactly great if you ask me.

[Nedum]

My guess (and it's not even an educated one) is, EDGE looks much better - but all in all we'll have even less fps than we get with the current engine. So no performance help from the new renderer. A major upgrade will be in order, but better wait until EDGE is released.

 

That souldn't happend!

If ED is right and all the AMD GPU problems comming from a lack of AMD DX9 support, my System must more than double the FPS.

 

I switched from a 480 GTX with average 60 FPS to a R9 290X with a average of 35 FPS. Same gamesettings. Nothing else changed.

The R2 290X is more than 2.5 times faster as the old 480GTX in every game, even in old DX9 games.

The ONLY game that get no benefit from my new Card is DCS.

The ONLY game I get less FPS is DCS.

I had e-mailed with AMD support and they clearly said: ALL AMD Cards are FULL DX9 compatible. IF there is NO "external GPU" Code (like some nVidia optimations like in the past was made from nV), even DCS should get a big FPS raise with a new AMD card.

The Problem is NOT the lack of DX9 support from AMD (there is no lack), there is something strang stuff in DCS engine coding (perhaps some help from nV? were not the first game with this "optimation")!

But that's not the point!

If ED is right and all this is based of the lack of DX9 Support from AMD, so with EDGE/DX11 ALL NEW AMD Cards MUST get an EXTREM boost, or ED has something strange to explain!

We will see this next year, if DCS 2.0 (aka EDGE) will find the way on our PCs.

My old 480 GTX lays here and I will test the new build with both cards.

Edited October 12, 2014 by Nedum

[Nedum]

we should hopefully see a beta build of edge very shortly.

 

some OT!

All new builds that should coming with EDGE are shifted to the end of November or Winter 2014 (end December 2014 - end March 2015)

So I wouldn't bet a cent on a release from EDGE this year.

In Decmeber the vecations in the USA are starting and from Januar the "party" in russia is starting.

So if EDGE is not at the end of November on our PCs, I think we will get EDGE not until March 2015, more later.

[AtaliaA1]

 

Bottom line and said in other words, BFx could not get that much work done if it would only consider 2 cores. That leads to a conclusion that DCS can only add "that much" until the engines collapses if it can't get rid off of some workload ( EDGE 2.0 ) or in later stages spread among more cores.

 

I can see the limit in CA in the limitation to 1 core for DCS main calculations. It can only calculate that much and bringing a whole world of ground warfare into DCS will just not work this way I guess.

 

my 2 cents

 

I understand U, I think. Language barrier thing for sure.

 

U are right. The only way to get those numbers is to re-program using modern technology More Cores and Better Instruction set used by the newer programming software. But the cost is prohibitive for such a small Development team. I would gift $1000 if I thought this would end in getting us to the GPU FPS. we all want.