intermittent brief pauses?

[flyinfriend]

I doubt there is anything wrong with your system. I have been playing dcs a10 for years and it ran perfectly smooth. Never a stutter. Now with 1.5 and 2.0 many people are experiencing stutters. Even people running it from an ssd are seeing stutters. It seems to be an issue with the handling of textures and clipmaps. Memory usage is way up compared to 1.2. Before you go down the path of looking for issues with your system I would wait to see if the dcs world issues are ironed out.

Edited January 9, 2016 by flyinfriend

[The_Nephilim]

I doubt there is anything wrong with your system. I have been playing dcs a10 for years and it ran perfectly smooth. Never a stutter. Now with 1.5 and 2.0 many people are experiencing stutters. Even people running it from an ssd are seeing stutters. It seems to be an issue with the handling of textures and clipmaps. Memory usage is way up compared to 1.2. Before you go down the path of looking for issues with your system I would wait to see if the dcs world issues are ironed out.

 

Well I been here as well sine LOMAC but I don't remember 1.2 being flawless or running smooth.. I think 1.5 and 2.0 are better and run smoother then 1.2 ever did..

 

But it is a beta so that is what we are doing beta testing on a large scale.. but nothing wrong with Stress testing or checking settings as having it on adaptive is a common occurance fro most people..

 

not saying that is all the issue with everybody but it was not helping with the stutters..

 

It is just weird that on my system it runs fine better then 1.2 ever did..

[Jackdaws]

So..... I still have stutter problems. The reason why I thought it was fixed last night was due to me flying same mission editor setup and using the same plane after doing the changes. Once I change map area and plane it returned. I find though if I fly around in the same area (almost like loading the surrounding graphics) it stops stutter, or at least reduces it to almost nothing and runs smooth. I have shadows on flat, visibility of trees about 50% etc. so in not pushing anything by any means. Msaa is only x4, no depth of field, no civ traffic etc. all with my 980ti. It has to be DCS surely? I'm happy to move on from this and just try to live with it. Now and again I will bring this subject up to see if anyone has more info in the future. But thank you for helping me with all this. I'm still happy to try other options, but also happy to leave it and just move on in the hope DCS fix this if it is their issue? Maybe I should write to a mod explaining my issue just to get a confirmation that it's not me. Anyone know who I should contact. Thanks again!

[The_Nephilim]

Well from what I been reading the z87 chipsets been having issues with the new NVidia drivers there was another chipset maybe the Z97??

 

So do you have a z87 mobo and run the latest drivers?? I sure was hoping the stutters would have been fixed but at least you got your card running max oerformance now so hopefully it will help in other games ;)

[Wolf Rider]

@ juetat2...

 

 

Turn

 

Gamma Correction to OFF

Antialiasing - Transparency to 4x (maximum)

Power Management Mode to Prefer Maximum Performance

Threaded Optimization to OFF

Vertical Sync to Application Controlled and turn to ON ingame

 

You could look at your computer's Power Settings and check for your system throttling down/ Core Parking, etc

Edited January 10, 2016 by Wolf Rider

[BackboneOne]

i got the very same issue with my GTX970 and had it before on hd7950, so it is not manufacturer related. got heavy stuters when zooming in on "fresh" map only, if i exit the mission, reopen it and zoom again at the same direction, there will be no stutters. however, if i will zoom at another direction, i got same stutters. so, if i load up a mission and do a full zoom around 360 degrees i got no stutters at all! this is more like texture swapping problem. im using HDD. it is still flyable, but pretty annoying. no such thing in 2.0 Nevada!

Edited January 10, 2016 by BackboneOne

[Jackdaws]

@ juetat2...

 

 

Turn

 

Gamma Correction to OFF

Antialiasing - Transparency to 4x (maximum)

Power Management Mode to Prefer Maximum Performance

Threaded Optimization to OFF

Vertical Sync to Application Controlled and turn to ON ingame

 

You could look at your computer's Power Settings and check for your system throttling down/ Core Parking, etc

 

Incredible!.. this worked!! Ive been flying around now for the past hour or so.. changed missions, planes etc.. even put everything on ultra and runs smooth as silk. I cant thank you enough!! Im gonna take the day of work now. Ill just tell them it was your fault. Amazing.

I didnt look at the power saving options, just nvidia control panel.

 

So my advice to anyone out there having this stutter/pausing/lag(offline) issue with NVIDIA card, try changing the Nvidia control panel settings to what Wolf Rider and The_Nephilim have suggested. It worked for me.

THANK YOU!!!!

 

EDIT Actually non of the above worked.... i dont know why it did for that brief moment?... back to square one.

Edited February 1, 2016 by Jackdaws

[BackboneOne]

Incredible!.. this worked!! Ive been flying around now for the past hour or so.. changed missions, planes etc.. even put everything on ultra and runs smooth as silk. I cant thank you enough!! Im gonna take the day of work now. Ill just tell them it was your fault. Amazing.

I didnt look at the power saving options, just nvidia control panel.

 

So my advice to anyone out there having this stutter/pausing/lag(offline) issue with NVIDIA card, try changing the Nvidia control panel settings to what Wolf Rider and The_Nephilim have suggested. It worked for me.

THANK YOU!!!!

 

nope, no joy by my side( what is your driver version?

[Wolf Rider]

i7-5930K @ 3.50GHz, 6 Core (HT enabled)

EVGA x99 FTW mobo

EVGA GTX980Ti 6GB vga driver version 361.43

Corsair Vengeance ram 16GB, 2666Hz

Creative Recon3D sound card

Samsung Syncmaster PX2370 monitor

Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit

 

and no modified ingame files/ 3rd party addons or tools - all as original/ except for Controls (A10-C), a virgin install

 

same for my years old X58FTW/ GTX580, and Z77 (with its unstable chipset)/ GTX680 before upgrading to current

 

 

 

 

So what exactly is the problem with user who say; "Yeah, all fine" one minute, then complain/whinge about things the next? yet... others with similar systems indicate no problem/ need to whinge whatsoever? (I'm sorry, I don't mean to be disrespectful - I just don't understand the philosophy)

 

 

 

 

Edited March 16, 2016 by Wolf Rider

[Jackdaws]

i7-5930K @ 3.50GHz, 6 Core (HT enabled)

EVGA x99 FTW mobo

EVGA GTX980Ti 6GB vga driver version 361.43

Corsair Vengeance ram 16GB, 2666Hz

Creative Recon3D sound card

Samsung Syncmaster PX2370 monitor

Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit

 

and no modified ingame files/ 3rd party addons or tools - all as original/ except for Controls (A10-C), a virgin install

 

same for my years old X58FTW/ GTX580, and Z77 (with its unstable chipset)/ GTX680 before upgrading to current

 

 

 

 

So what exactly is the problem with user who say; "Yeah, all fine" one minute, then complain/whinge about things the next? yet... others with similar systems indicate no problem/ need to whinge whatsoever? (I'm sorry, I don't mean to be disrespectful - I just don't understand the philosophy)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sorry to be a "whinge" again! but in fairness its been quite some time now! ..nearly a year in fact! and the problem still exists. Wolf Rider I will try to keep my findings to a minimum and not report so often to what i'm experiencing. I mean that would be a silly thing to do seeing as though that's what this thread is about. Regarding you not understanding the philosophy Ill try to explain..... If someone has a problem and they start a thread to explain the problem, they usually say what they are experiencing if it be good or bad and other forum users usually try to help and share advice in most cases. Then you have people who don't have a problem and generally tend not to start threads explaining they don't have a problem. I don't mean to be disrespectful - I just didn't understand your philosophy.

[Coxy_99]

Yes im getting this to glad its not just me.

[Worrazen]

It's the engine dynamic asset memory manager problem, I tried making a big new thread months ago but kinda put it on hold bc im busy with other stuff and also troubleshooting is weird with no merge yet, however i keep figuring new things out so i rather go slower and prolonged, long story short its about storage operations. Its not about simulation or graphics, people who just say its normal for a simulator to be like this

 

- first of all its the type of dynamic asset management, constant dump-load radius, worst type for HDDs

- secondly the engine seems to have a problem dealing with a lot of storage or input operations, this is visible with mouse movement of camera which produces a separate but similar laggy effect , but not sure really, input replay tracking should never be that taxing, plus it could be moved to another thread no? Anyway i want replay feature to be user adjustable.

- i thought it was textures but texture streaming seems to be existing but hard to catch it in action, so its other things like models that have to be fully loaded in RAM before engine can continue

- while the sheer size of the whole dataset is big, the data requested in the moment isnt big at all and doesnt max out a good 145 MB/s HDD.

- people with SSDs only minimize the effect, not eliminate it.

- Extra Amount of RAM and VRAM above target visibility range to try to preload more, is useless. ("Preload radius option ingame is a bit different than it seems)

- almost everytime the game hitches its about storage i/o, crashes, ejections, etc, some important assets are not preloaded, and theres a chance these will get dumped but windows memody caching saves the day for some time, but i can see some common things have to constantly be reloaded.

 

The OS memory caching feature is actually annoying in troubleshooting since it cannot be disabled for testing purposes, x64 bit versions of windows dont support the registery key to disable this.

 

 

More assets need to be streamable if not already, regardless the engine has to be able to continue rendering while assets are queued for load, but better yet another asset allocation type to be introduced that works better with HDDs, custom fixed area and switching, this would actually make all that extra RAM useful, meeting specs smoothness would be assured, you would just adjust the size of fixed preloaded area according tohow muc RAM you have.

 

Critical optimizations have to be done even if its small in SSD case, miliseconds of delay still being added hiddeny ontop of frametime. Sometimes i can see the aircraft moving backward.

Edited May 20, 2017 by Worrazen

[Coxy_99]

Im getting it while viewing around and moving my head in TrackIR most of the time seems to settle after awhile, Not as smooth as the last patch thats for sure last patch was good.

[Worrazen]

But terms and labels also have to be explained which i will also do, for myself if not anything else, The way DAAM works with rendering settings, and the labels in options dont exactly make sense, but partly thats just my opinion of how I would do it

[BitMaster]

its not dcs, its not TiR5 software as many/most dont have issues.

 

Take a deep look into your I/O subsystem !

[Coxy_99]

its not dcs, its not TiR5 software as many/most dont have issues.

 

Take a deep look into your I/O subsystem !

 

What is this :)

[Pikey]

My observational findings support your technical analysis. +1

It's the engine dynamic asset memory manager problem, I tried making a big new thread months ago but kinda put it on hold bc im busy with other stuff and also troubleshooting is weird with no merge yet, however i keep figuring new things out so i rather go slower and prolonged, long story short its about storage operations. Its not about simulation or graphics, people who just say its normal for a simulator to be like this

 

- first of all its the type of dynamic asset management, constant dump-load radius, worst type for HDDs

- secondly the engine seems to have a problem dealing with a lot of storage or input operations, this is visible with mouse movement of camera which produces a separate but similar laggy effect , but not sure really, input replay tracking should never be that taxing, plus it could be moved to another thread no? Anyway i want replay feature to be user adjustable.

- i thought it was textures but texture streaming seems to be existing but hard to catch it in action, so its other things like models that have to be fully loaded in RAM before engine can continue

- while the sheer size of the whole dataset is big, the data requested in the moment isnt big at all and doesnt max out a good 145 MB/s HDD.

- people with SSDs only minimize the effect, not eliminate it.

- Extra Amount of RAM and VRAM above target visibility range to try to preload more, is useless. ("Preload radius option ingame is a bit different than it seems)

- almost everytime the game hitches its about storage i/o, crashes, ejections, etc, some important assets are not preloaded, and theres a chance these will get dumped but windows memody caching saves the day for some time, but i can see some common things have to constantly be reloaded.

 

The OS memory caching feature is actually annoying in troubleshooting since it cannot be disabled for testing purposes, x64 bit versions of windows dont support the registery key to disable this.

 

 

More assets need to be streamable if not already, regardless the engine has to be able to continue rendering while assets are queued for load, but better yet another asset allocation type to be introduced that works better with HDDs, custom fixed area and switching, this would actually make all that extra RAM useful, meeting specs smoothness would be assured, you would just adjust the size of fixed preloaded area according tohow muc RAM you have.

 

Critical optimizations have to be done even if its small in SSD case, miliseconds of delay still being added hiddeny ontop of frametime. Sometimes i can see the aircraft moving backward.

[Coxy_99]

What does it mean in basic science for simple minded people like me?

[mkiii]

Don't you mean many/most are not reporting issues... It's not quite the same. I imagine that most DCS users don't even frequent the forum, especially if they are newly inducted Steam users..

 

I find that the problem seems to come and go, depending on what the latest update has done. No changes to my system inbetween. The biggest thing that has upped my overall performance is a: swap file on SSD only, B: Make the CPU O/C as fast but stable as I can, while using minimal GFX O/C. Using 16GB RAM, which DCS is certainly not using up, and 4GB GFX which it may be - Inbetween those is 8GB of shared memory.

 

I rarely get anything too problematic in 1.5, but 2.0 is a stutterfest at times, usually at Nellis/Las Vegas of course.

[BitMaster]

I have no stutter and EXPLICITLY do not allow any SWAP file on my SSD but diverted them to my 2 2TB HDD's.

[BitMaster]

What is this :)

 

 

Well, that is a very complicated matter.

 

As every PC is almost unique, you have to start simplyfying things.

 

Disconnect ALL USB you have but mouse and keyboard, ALL OF THEM, A L L !!

 

Then fly a test mission with Kb/Mouse only and check if the problem has gone.

 

If yes, then you know at least one of your USB devices is causing it. It could be anything, from the USB chip/driver itself, a USB Hub, your printer, scanner, cam, etc.. most have tons of USB connected and some are troublesome.

 

Check your Bios, disable or enable "Plug&Pray OS"Settings, both can harm or help.

 

Update all your drivers and Firmwares. Bios, USB Chipset driver ( go to vendor or win-raid.com, which is even betetr than motherboard vendor ), Audiodriver ( MB vendor or chip vendor, take the NEWEST one you can find ). Intel Chipset driver ( Intel DL only ), GPU, SSD Firmware, IRST if applicable ( Intel only ), Network driver ( vendor ).-..etc etc etc.

 

Disable all functions in Bios that you dont actually use, free up some ressources.

Disconnect EVERYTHING you dont need for BARE TESTING and see if it goes away, if it does, add them 1 by 1 and test EACH TIME what brings the error back into play.

 

Standard procedure for any gamer that seeks I/O misfiring.

[Worrazen]

People who say it's not DCS fault either don't have the technical skill to detect this problem, or are purposelly avoiding to look deeper in order to enjoy the entertainment content, or simply don't notice the minimized effect because they use faster storage device, still any storage device is slower than VRAM or RAM and it will add latency no matter what they think.

 

What I'm doing is purposeful critical analysis, it's basically hunting for bugs and implementation behavior, etc, its an interesting job to me and I'm not in a hurry to play the content, I rather do that later when I'm more familiar and feel comfortable. People don't need to believe this, but if they were not part of the research from the beginning at least they could avoid jumping to conclusions and casting doubt.

 

I can't go deeper or explain more now, because I'm typing on phone, I'm doing home improvement, air conditioner, electricity, coax and ethernet cabling, storage maintenance, 50 boxes an many items to sort etc, could take 2 weeks before resume testing again, I installed 2.0 alpha a week ago and will stay with it, I hope the merge happens because Its complex already and I have to pick one edition.

 

Also everything I'm saying right now, past week and following 1-2 weeks is all quick answers, not full ones.

 

Also about camera lag, that is not a mouse or driver fault either, 1000 hz mouse speed is an official feature and nothing new, if the gamereplay feature can't deal with it its the games fault.

Edited May 21, 2017 by Worrazen

[Pikey]

Part of my observational findings were my own reduction of the symptoms when I upgraded to SSD, then after split OS and DCS onto different SSD's, whilst also upgrading gfx cards along the way and having zero effect on stutters with those, but more effect with clock speed and storage. I ran regular events in Multiplayer on my own server and could see results over the years, as well as listen in depth to other peoples performance issues and T/S them. I can recreate this by simply going to VR and sit at Kutaisi and look sharply to the North and south, then look down at the pit and then the sky and your FPS flips around in magnitudes far greater than should be for what is actually displayed. A simple turn of the head and everything pauses whilst "something" happens. It's small but it's annoying and obvious.

 

To answer Coxy since he's a long time pal, in a nutshell, DCS isn't great at a deep level as an application, it doesn't handle loading stuff well and relies on a lot of processing each "frame" which the engine will chug thorugh and slow down your FPS on, but not through Graphics changes, but by number crunching, the code and reading texture changes. There's some other activities on frame and it's not just as simple as that. A little off topic but if for exampe you take a single player flight with nothing else happening, it tends to run much better from your own point of view than if you ran a complex mission with other players. This is because the engine processing is tied to the graphics and it must complete some calculations before it will render the next frame.

 

That's a little offtopic for this because the intermittent jerks you used to get before you had a decent PC are more related to the graphics and texture loading as described, but you can influence on frame slowness with mission complexity too. And a number of other things that aren't gfx related, like having an MLRS fire in a MP mission.

 

Of course none of that is new, it's been established for years that Clockspeed is king for DCS, and for good reason. But not derailing on general performance, the load stutter is an interesting one here.

 

People who say it's not DCS fault either don't have the technical skill to detect this problem, or are purposelly avoiding to look deeper in order to enjoy the entertainment content, or simply don't notice the minimized effect because they use faster storage device, still any storage device is slower than VRAM or RAM and it will add latency no matter what they think.

 

What I'm doing is purposeful critical analysis, it's basically hunting for bugs and implementation behavior, etc, its an interesting job to me and I'm not in a hurry to play the content, I rather do that later when I'm more familiar and feel comfortable. People don't need to believe this, but if they were not part of the research from the beginning at least they could avoid jumping to conclusions and casting doubt.

[Jackdaws]

Part of my observational findings were my own reduction of the symptoms when I upgraded to SSD, then after split OS and DCS onto different SSD's, whilst also upgrading gfx cards along the way and having zero effect on stutters with those, but more effect with clock speed and storage. I ran regular events in Multiplayer on my own server and could see results over the years, as well as listen in depth to other peoples performance issues and T/S them. I can recreate this by simply going to VR and sit at Kutaisi and look sharply to the North and south, then look down at the pit and then the sky and your FPS flips around in magnitudes far greater than should be for what is actually displayed. A simple turn of the head and everything pauses whilst "something" happens. It's small but it's annoying and obvious.

 

To answer Coxy since he's a long time pal, in a nutshell, DCS isn't great at a deep level as an application, it doesn't handle loading stuff well and relies on a lot of processing each "frame" which the engine will chug thorugh and slow down your FPS on, but not through Graphics changes, but by number crunching, the code and reading texture changes. There's some other activities on frame and it's not just as simple as that. A little off topic but if for exampe you take a single player flight with nothing else happening, it tends to run much better from your own point of view than if you ran a complex mission with other players. This is because the engine processing is tied to the graphics and it must complete some calculations before it will render the next frame.

 

That's a little offtopic for this because the intermittent jerks you used to get before you had a decent PC are more related to the graphics and texture loading as described, but you can influence on frame slowness with mission complexity too. And a number of other things that aren't gfx related, like having an MLRS fire in a MP mission.

 

Of course none of that is new, it's been established for years that Clockspeed is king for DCS, and for good reason. But not derailing on general performance, the load stutter is an interesting one here.

 

Pikey can i ask.. when you upgraded to ssd did you originally have ssd for OS and sata for games/storage? but then you upgraded your games/storage to ssd from sata? so you still have 2 seperate hdds correct? only i have ssd for os and sata for storage. today i tried something by installing dcs onto my ssd os drive and the pausing seems to have gone. What im thinking is if i upgrade my sata (storage/games) to ssd even though its a seperate drive do you think i will see the same good results as having the os and dcs installed on the one ssd drive?.. that sounds confusing but what im saying should make sense!.. sorry!!

[Worrazen]

Pikey can i ask.. when you upgraded to ssd did you originally have ssd for OS and sata for games/storage? but then you upgraded your games/storage to ssd from sata? so you still have 2 seperate hdds correct? only i have ssd for os and sata for storage. today i tried something by installing dcs onto my ssd os drive and the pausing seems to have gone. What im thinking is if i upgrade my sata (storage/games) to ssd even though its a seperate drive do you think i will see the same good results as having the os and dcs installed on the one ssd drive?.. that sounds confusing but what im saying should make sense!.. sorry!!

 

Your use of terminology is confusing. I use SSD for OS and high-end HDDs for games/storage. Both/All are SATA AHCI-mode devices. I have enough space on SSD to use it temporairly for testing purpose, something I already did in past and do plan to do with DCS later.