FLIR - FPS killer

[TAW_Impalor]

I have 16 Gb of Ram, but I never saw an issue, even with 1.5.0

 

What's your memory usage with DCS? Mine is 4.1 with 1.5 free, BUT pagefile at 6.7...

 

UPD: Ok, that high pagefile usage was reported by MSI Afterburner. Windows PerfMon shows a mere 5% of 8Gb allocated. Still curious what others see...

 

UPD2: Disabling pagefile did not make a differene to FPS. Afterburner still shows I'm using 6.7Gb of it (LOL), while PerfMon won't even allow to add the measure to the chart. I did order 8 more Gb of memory, will update when it arrives...

Edited November 10, 2015 by impalor

[ody81]

Do all the guys who see improvement from 1.5.1 have 16 Gb of RAM?

 

My system is almost identical to your's except my 760 isn't overclocked and I have 16gb of ram.

And mechanical drives, no SSDs. We both use the same processor and my FLIR is now running fine. Sure I get skips in the sim, but not the slideshow effect I was getting before.

[Punisher74]

What's your memory usage with DCS? Mine is 4.1 with 1.5 free, BUT pagefile at 6.7...

 

UPD: Ok, that high pagefile usage was reported by MSI Afterburner. Windows PerfMon shows a mere 5% of 8Gb allocated. Still curious what others see...

 

UPD2: Disabling pagefile did not make a differene to FPS. Afterburner still shows I'm using 6.7Gb of it (LOL), while PerfMon won't even allow to add the measure to the chart. I did order 8 more Gb of memory, will update when it arrives...

 

I'm not trying to be critical, but you have 8gigs of ram based on your signature specs. Can you elaborate. Unless you're talking about virtual ram from the hard drive. Also as have either 8 or 16 or system ram your GPU VRAM is 2gigs. Lower all the nvidia settings to the lowest settings or application settings and adjust the game settings to the best performance you can get. A single 2gig card will struggle. As I stated a long time ago in this forum, a SLI or x-fire 2gig set up will improve them. As when I had the r9 270x 2gig crossfired fully running(both cards at full MHz)I was getting 60 FPS with vsync but withou the FPS loss was 50%ish. As a 2 gig VRAM will only buffer so much. As the system memory and CPU help with performance DX11 caches renders on the video card. Faster to pull renderings from there then the system memory. Just a thought. And there has been a memory leak reported already.

Edited November 11, 2015 by raptorsim

[shagrat]

Be aware an SLI setup can only use the lower amount of RAM for both cards! So if you put two 2 GB cards in SLI you still have only 2 GB of vRAM for the framebuffer available.

The cards need to synchronize their framebuffer which means you have the same data in BOTH cards memory.

The performance increase is most likely related to more GPU power in general...

If the vRAM is the bottleneck, a second card in SLI or x-Fire does not help.

[Punisher74]

Be aware an SLI setup can only use the lower amount of RAM for both cards! So if you put two 2 GB cards in SLI you still have only 2 GB of vRAM for the framebuffer available.

The cards need to synchronize their framebuffer which means you have the same data in BOTH cards memory.

The performance increase is most likely related to more GPU power in general...

If the vRAM is the bottleneck, a second card in SLI or x-Fire does not help.

 

I know that, I removed all the lower GPU cards and kept the 8Gig alone, a mild performance loss from having only 2 2gig MSI R9 270X's. But the loss was from going from Dual GPU to a single one. What saved it was the extra 6 gigs of VRAM, even thou my VRAM usage is only about 4Gigs. I haven't seen much more then that. I'm ordering another MSI R9 390 and a new 1150 Power supply. The current one is a 850 and well to run 2 R9 390's I need the power boost.

[TAW_Impalor]

@raptorsim:

 

My sig is clear: 8Gb DDR3 Ram, 2Gb vram, no SLI. I tested everything at low and reported earlier in this thread "no improvement". I also reported that looking away from MFDs in FLIR/MAV modes still bears FPS hit and that I see a significant CPU utilization drop when turning these modes on. So my conclusion is that the videocard has nothing to do with that. I have ordered more RAM, to up it to 16Gb and will report... and I don't see any memory leak...

Edited November 11, 2015 by impalor

[TAW_Impalor]

My system is almost identical to your's except my 760 isn't overclocked and I have 16gb of ram.

 

Could you look in the task manager how much RAM does your DCS use?

[Punisher74]

Could you look in the task manager how much RAM does your DCS use?

 

26% System Memory usage of 16gigs DDR3 RAM, and 3gigs DDR5 Vram out of 8Gigs. Now as for what it was when I had 2gigs of VRam I cannot say because those cards are going into a streaming and Media PC. Also please understand it wasn't until this patch did I see a improvement in this issue. Whatever ED updated in the Map Images and code worked. I had the new card as of the 3rd of November.

Edited November 11, 2015 by raptorsim

[TAW_Impalor]

My system is almost identical to your's except my 760 isn't overclocked and I have 16gb of ram.

And mechanical drives, no SSDs. We both use the same processor and my FLIR is now running fine. Sure I get skips in the sim, but not the slideshow effect I was getting before.

 

Could you post a screen of your settings page, please?

[TAW_Impalor]

OK. Now I am completely baffled, but I got somewhere!

 

* The "FLIR Bug" symptoms are: sharp drop in FPS and CPU utilization when turning TGP in WHOT/BHOT mode and/or IR MAV on MFD. Then done on both MFDs, the effect is cumulative. It does not matter if the MFDs are in the field of view(!)

 

** For all testing I used Instant Action "Easy - Russian Foothills - Fall" and put the mission in active pause right after the start. So, except for the wingman flying around, the conditions are always the same. I wiped DCS.openbeta folder, removed all mods and repaired the DCS before the tests.

 

1) Installed 8 Gigs of new memory to bring RAM to 16. NO DIFFERENCE at all!

2) Reduced all settings to NO/LOW (see attach). The bug disappeared!!! I.e. instead of FPS drop 100->44, it is now 130->110. On my old 8 Gigs this test earned no results (although, I only tried it once).

3) Now, one by one moving the settings back to High/Ultra as before (screen attached - I will call this setup "High", but it is not the High preset). Starting from the bottom, and restarting the quick mission after each change, I was trying to find the culprit.

4) After returning everything to High, I STILL SEE NO BUG. Base FPS is now at 120 (was 100) and dropping with FLIR+MAV to a decent 100. Double checked that all settings are back ah high, try again the mission. No bug!!!

5) Reboot - restart DCS to see if the bug is gone for good. All settings still at high. The bug is back!!!! Base FPS 120 - still higher than before the experiment (100), and drops not to 44 but to 50. I can't believe my eyes.

6) Now, instead of lowering all settings at once, going one by one from the top. Base FPS goes higher and higher, but there is still a sharp drop with FLIR+MAV. And only when I lowered the last parameter - Anisotropic Filtering from 16x to No, the bug disappered!

7) Is it the AF causing the bug? Upped everyting else to High/Ultra, except the AF - the bug is back! 128->48...

8) Again reducing other settings, one by one, trying to find at least one eye-candy I can use.

9) With only Terrain Textures at High and everything else at Low/Off, the bug is now extreme 136->36!! Never before it was 36. always 44 minimum.

10) ALL at Low/Off again and I ended up with the most severe version of the bug: 143->37 ((((

11) Restart DCS again, NO BUG at all Low (143->120)!

12) Moved all to High - again NO BUG (105->100)!!!

13) Restarted the mission - a little bit bigger drop (108->91), let's say no bug.

14) Restarted the mission again: 114->99.

15) Restarted the mission again: 114->99. Everything seems stable.

16) Now, re-launching the DCS. As you have guessed, the bug returned: 107->47.

17) Re-launching the DCS again. The bug is here: 115->49.

18) Re-launching the DCS for the third time. The bug is here: 106->47.

19) Now, reducing all to Low, OK, then back to High, launch. The bug is here: 105->47

20) Again all to Low, 140->66

21) Restart DCS, same Low settings - No bug now.

22) Restart DCS, and before launching the mission, I change all settings from low to high. Launched the mission: 100->87, NO BUG appeared!!

23) I ran a few more tries and reproduced the results over and over.

 

I came to the conclusion:

 

The only way to run A-10C on my machine is to set all settings to Low, re-launch DCS, return everything to where I want it to be and then play. It seems important with what settings the DCS launches - it must be allocating some resources one way or another. I don't know if 16Gb of RAM was important, but it is still nice to have them.

 

I spent five hours today on these tests(!!!), but at least there was a result. (And I paid good money for all the modules I have.) I hope the Devs will get to the bottom of this bug. Please confirm you are reading and taking action!

 

Thank you!!!

Edited November 12, 2015 by impalor

[L0op8ack]

OK. Now I am completely baffled, but I got somewhere!

......

Thank you!!!

 

oh man, I found the 'IR render unknown terrain' problem days ago.

http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=152060

 

it means IR is running 'pic in/on pic' mode, it will cause fps loss, definitely.

I guess TV has the same problem.

 

but it seems that I put it to wrong section,

only 8 checked the track file I attached.

[wolle]

Great work, impalor. Hopefully this will help the devs get to the bottom of this!

[Esac_mirmidon]

Every time you change a graphic option you must restart DCS to a full effect. Every time and for every single change.

[wolle]

Every time you change a graphic option you must restart DCS to a full effect. Every time and for every single change.

 

Really? Is this new? I never noticed that this was necessary in prior versions of DCS...

[TAW_Impalor]

Every time you change a graphic option you must restart DCS to a full effect. Every time and for every single change.

 

this is not what I see! setting low, restarting, setting high, launching the mission gives me hiqh settings with no bug!

[Esac_mirmidon]

I've experienced variable results when i change a graphic option with or without restarting DCS so for me the only way to be sure is restarting every time for every change i've made.

 

This way produce in my rig a solid predictable result every time at the same settings.

[TAW_Impalor]

I've experienced variable results when i change a graphic option with or without restarting DCS so for me the only way to be sure is restarting every time for every change i've made.

 

This way produce in my rig a solid predictable result every time at the same settings.

 

If you read through my post, restarting after setting High brings about the FLIR bug. Only restarting with Low settings and than changing to High without restart gives a solid predictable bug-free result!

[Esac_mirmidon]

Strange. In my signature you can se my rig. I have the exact same result every time at the same setting so i can help you. Sorry.

[Punisher74]

In theory in 1.5 the connection to the options.lua in the saved games config folder is already made on launch. Where as in DCS 1.2.16x there were 2 executables and on mission loading the connection is reset. Hence changes in the settings did not need a restart of the whole game. 1.5 needs a restart to change the changes in settings. Anyway the most promising lead could be within this bug. Loop8ack might be onto something. But I did test the multi pass =true in the code for the TGP and even setting it to false. When I had the issue with the bug my test resulted there was no change period the bug was still there. So I reset the code back to true.

 

http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=152060

[Frenetique]

I experienced the same bug with the A10C, with TGP or MAV. I'm going from solid 60fps to 30 and below.

 

On the hardware side, I have no really big weak points (8Gb of RAM, GeForce 970 GTX, Intel i7-2600k, Windows 7 64bits, 1920x1024).

 

On the settings, everything on high except the loading radius which is a bit lower. The MCD display are set to 1024 and not every frame for the refresh.

[Shughart]

Exactly the same as Frenetique. I'm going from 60ps to 20-30. It's been almost 6 month and no dev seem to have found the solution to that problem, or looked into it maybe? :mad: That's annoying. It prevents me to use the A10C when it's been working like a charm with 1.2. What a drawback!

 

My specs are:

My system specs are:

Windows 10

Nvidia GeForce 770M

Intel I7 4700HQ @ 2.40Ghz

12 Go DDR3

[Veritech]

The same happens to me, and I noticed something else: during night missions it gets even worse. Sith argument that VRAM could be the cause does not apply to me with my current rig:

 

iMac 27" running Bootcamp with Windows 10 64bit Pro, GeForce GTX780M 4GB , Intel Core i7-4771 @ 3.50Ghz, 32Gb DDR3 on a Fusion Drive 3TB.

 

As most of you guys said before, everything goes just fine until the TGP's FLIR is switched on. I should mention as well that frame rates are better in the DCS 2 Open Alpha, it still has the issue of FPS dropping 50% when the FLIR is used. Said that, DCS 2 gives me way 70% more fps with better settings than 1.5... maybe it could be a programming bug?

 

If you need better info, let me know.

 

Regards,

[Erich Alfred Hartmann]

To me it also happens with the A10c, when I activate both screens or just the IR camera of the maverick the fps fall crashingly, if I deactivate it back to work at 60 fps without problem

[shagrat]

To me it also happens with the A10c, when I activate both screens or just the IR camera of the maverick the fps fall crashingly, if I deactivate it back to work at 60 fps without problem

That particular issue was fixed two years ago... if you have this issue, you either run a pre 2.x Version of DCS World, or you may need to check your shaders (recompile), or try a DCS repair.

[Duster]

I have the same problem, the FLIR is an FPS killer.

My specs are in signature and it is absolutely not possible that from 80/90 fps you switch to 60 fps with the FLIR pointed on the horizon.

Without even opening the mirrors! Otherwise it goes under 50 fps!

I tried to do the repair, lower the settings of the diplays to 512, but nothing ... always low fps and only with airplane that have mfd in TV mode.

What should I do, reinstall DCS ?!

Software perpetually unstable and think that I only use 2x msaa ... Total Disappointment!