[REPORTED] Performance Issues

[Whisper]

Through my testing, shadows were causing the FPS drop. I stay at 60fps constant under most circumstances. On Supercarrier, I get 38 looking toward the stern. I turned the shadows to Off and FPS was back up to 60 on the deck.

 

Which shadow settings? There are 2

[heroe]

At night, when all the lights of the supercarrier are on when the planes take off, the FPS are low, but when they take off and the SC changes to the landing lights that are much less in the castle, the FPS are good again.

[Strider32]

Which shadow settings? There are 2

 

Good point, should have mentioned haha. The standard shadows settings, not terrain shadows

[Ratcatcher]

I will continue tweaking but currently shadows = Off makes little difference to me. Sat in the Hornet on the template mission, initial load as I'm looking toward the castle is 30-35. If I taxi to the stern, looking to seaward its 40, turning back toward the deck its 25-30.

 

I'm now messing with Occulus tray tools and seeing if supersampling there rather than DCS makes any difference. (ASW mode off)

[Motomouse]

I like my shadows in the cockpit. I dont miss the the shadows outside.

 

For now I fly without shadows because smooth 60FPS are a treat in VR.

 

But I would like an option for cockpit shadows only in the future.

[Whisper]

Good point, should have mentioned haha. The standard shadows settings, not terrain shadows

 

Thank you, I'm going to check that as soon as I can

[Papa Saubär]

Some test carrier start with stennis and supercarrier, this missions are from ED.

 

All with the newest version of DCS and cleared shaders and caches.

 

First Setup

i9 9900kf @5 GHz, RTX 2080Ti, 32 GB DDR4

 

Settings

 

 

 

 

 

STENNIS

 

 

 

 

 

SUPERCARRIER

 

 

 

 

 

 

Second Setup

i7 8700k, GTX 1080, 32 GB DDR4

 

Settings

 

 

 

 

 

STENNIS

 

 

 

 

 

SUPERCARRIER

 

 

 

 

 

I lose a minimum of 60 frames per second for both systems.

 

 

I check my first System without shadows

 

First Setup

i9 9900kf @5 GHz, RTX 2080Ti, 32 GB DDR4

 

SUPERCARRIER

 

 

 

 

 

Looks terrible, but instead of 60 FPS, I now only lose 10...

HWMonitor2 SC no shadows, 1. Setup.txt

[hawk2495]

Is everyone using Vsync? In my case I turned it off and managed to at least get a gradual frame drop. From 70 looking forward on the cold start to about 45 looking aft. Not too bad. With high shadows and 2x MSAA in 4k

[Whisper]

I confirm the HUGE impact of shadows

flat shadow have a slight impact

low and above tank FPS

It's like there's myriads of calculations done for shadows on the islands, for each object (like people, racks, etc...) inside it, or smtg.

I go from 45-40 on Stennis to 20-25 with big stutters and micro-freezes, the renderer has a very hard time keeping up with fast movements of my HMD.

[statrekmike]

I can concur when it comes to shadows. When I turn them off, my framerates shoot straight up. Since turning off shadows isn't a real option (since it makes the sim look outright awful), it might be worth looking into finding ways to simplify the shadows or reduce them wherever possible. If anything, this may allow the Supercarrier to run well on systems that normally fit well inside the recommended requirements for "high settings".

 

I hate to be such a bummer about this. I don't like being this forceful but this is a big deal. While people shouldn't expect great results with a GTX 960 or some other outdated card, they should expect at least reasonably decent results with a better card like a 1070 or similar. A GTX 2080 should not be the minimum requirement to run the supercarrier even remotely as well as one runs the rest of the sim.

[Minsky]

Can confirm.

Shadows on low, med or high = 20-25 fps.

Flat shadows = 50 fps, but the cockpit looks godawful.

 

There is this shaders mod that allows you to keep cockpit shadows, but disables it for other objects. Not sure if it works with the latest OB tho.

 

This might be a good temporary solution while we wait for a proper fix from ED.

"Proper fix" - like excluding some insignificant parts of the island (antennas or ropes 1 pixel wide) from casting shadows on low or medium settings.

[Jafergon]

Can confirm.

Shadows on low, med or high = 20-25 fps.

Flat shadows = 50 fps, but the cockpit looks godawful.

 

There is this shaders mod that allows you to keep cockpit shadows, but disables it for other objects. Not sure if it works with the latest OB tho.

 

This might be a good temporary solution while we wait for a proper fix from ED.

"Proper fix" - like excluding some insignificant parts of the island (antennas or ropes 1 pixel wide) from casting shadows on low or medium settings.

 

 

 

 

Good idea. maybe a lot of small objects should be excluded from casting shadows to help performance.

[VFA41_Lion]

I did some testing. SSAA turned off returned my frames to 80 FPS on the carrier. 1.5x SSAA dumped it to 60 fps, and 2x SSAA returned it to potato frames.

 

 

Boooo SSAA

[statrekmike]

Unfortunately, for anyone still using a 1080p monitor (not a insignificant amount of DCS players I would wager), some kind of anti-aliasing is required because DCS looks pretty rough without it. I am sure this is less of a issue on 2k and 4k monitors but turning off anti-aliasing isn't a solution as much as it is a rather drastic band-aid over a sucking chest wound.

[Rmnsvn]

for anyone still using a 1080p monitor (not a insignificant amount of DCS players I would wager)

 

I play on 1080p monitor and there're lots of us outdated guys. I get perfect results with MSAA x2 + MFAA set via NVCP. It gives you at least MSAA x4 quality with negligible performance impact.

 

Shadows with SC just put my rig on the knees. I have 45-60 FPS flying around DXB on heavy MP mission and 22-23 FPS looking at the Island on supercarrier with low setting for shadows. Switching them off gives me consistent 60 FPS on my Nvidia 1060.

Edited May 21, 2020 by Rmnsvn

[statrekmike]

So I just spent some time messing with settings again. As said before, it runs okay when you turn shadows off or run only flat shadows. The moment you turn on low shadows or above, the framerate (specifically when you look at the superstructure) goes down quite massively. I have a theory about this. When looking at the carrier model in detail, there are a lot of railings, cables, and even some of the antenna that really stack up the shadow rendering count. Perhaps some of these shadows could be removed and perhaps the antenna shadow casting ability could be simplified. I know that might bother some but it is a VERY small price to pay for reasonable performance on even rather decent systems.

 

At the risk of sounding like I am pestering. Was this something that came up during the extensive testing? I can't imagine that everyone doing testing is running a bleeding edge gaming rig with at least a 2080 under the hood. This issue isn't exactly subtle and makes itself VERY visible even on systems that can otherwise run DCS like a champ.

 

To put it bluntly. There is clearly something wrong. It is one thing if performance were to take a big hit with a VERY busy deck with lots of Tomcats or something but even on a empty deck, the performance takes a MASSIVE hit when you look at the general superstructure area of the ship. This can't be by design, it is far too drastic.

[wilbur81]

Was this something that came up during the extensive testing? I can't imagine that everyone doing testing is running a bleeding edge gaming rig with at least a 2080 under the hood. This issue isn't exactly subtle and makes itself VERY visible even on systems that can otherwise run DCS like a champ.

 

My thoughts EXACTLY! I sometimes wonder if the testing team ever tries the game at full 4K as well.

[lj0076]

I have the same experience, a massive drop in fps when using Supercarier. Tested on a blank map. Understand, on my i5, GTX1060 6GB, 32Gb RAM, I'm usually around 70-80 fps, out of range of airports many times higher. When using nVidia 3D Vision2, the fps drops to about 50, otherwise it still holds a high value.

Supercarier seems to be a really complex module and older graphics cards have a problem. As someone wrote here, yes, I belong to the absolutely insignificant minority for ED who are affected by this and which probably does not deserve attention. That is, except for all my money, purchases, all the modules.

I agree that DCS was fine two days ago and everything was running smoothly on my lineup and suddenly I could throw out my computer as unsatisfactory?

I know it's a demanding module, but dropping fps by -50 is a mistake.

[Minsky]

Seeing that this topic was marked as "investigating" in mere hours after I created it, ED is at least looking into it, and nobody is being ignored.

 

The latest patch and the Supercarrier have other issues, so we might need to wait for our turn.

[Minsky]

A quick summary of the first 10 pages of this topic:

 

1. There are people with much better hardware than mine, also affected by this issue.

 

2. If your performance with the Supercarrier is smooth, it doesn't mean you are not affected: drops from 70-80 fps to 50-40 aren't always noticeable without using a FPS monitor.

 

3. This issue has nothing to do with the amount of AI units, location or complexity of the mission.

 

4. It is quite possible that this issue is caused by shadows from the highly detailed Supercarrier model. Please set in-game shadows to "Flat Only" or "Off" and see if it has any effect.

[Crimson_Ghost138]

Another thing to mention:

Performance drops are big when its getting dark and the lights come on at the carrier!

[ThorBrasil]

A quick summary of the first 10 pages of this topic:

 

1. There are people with much better hardware than mine, also affected by this issue.

 

2. If your performance with the Supercarrier is smooth, it doesn't mean you are not affected: drops from 70-80 fps to 50-40 aren't always noticeable without using a FPS monitor.

 

3. This issue has nothing to do with the amount of AI units, location or complexity of the mission.

 

4. It is quite possible that this issue is caused by shadows from the highly detailed Supercarrier model. Please set in-game shadows to "Flat Only" or "Off" and see if it has any effect.

 

I did what you say in part 4. I put the shadows on Flat Only and the FPS gain was very big.

[statrekmike]

I really hope the solution doesn't just become "if you are experiencing massive FPS loss, turn off shadows" because DCS looks pretty bad without shadows (and flat shadows for that matter).

 

I don't really get how I could be a member of a minority here. My computer is not exactly a unusual build. I have a hard time believing that this is not a issue that effects everyone but perhaps having a very high-end computer helps brute force through the problem without much notice.

 

That being said, I have put a lot of money into upgrades as DCS has come along over the years but I am not plunking down $800+ on a high-end GPU just so that the Supercarrier and ONLY the Supercarrier can run as well as the rest of the sim. My GTX 1070 should be enough to not see such a drastic drop in performance.

[ouky1991]

I had a bit of stutter. So I changed arleigh burke spawned next to my carrier to oliver hazard perry class, and my fps improved. Anybody can confirm it has performance impact?

[statrekmike]

I had a bit of stutter. So I changed arleigh burke spawned next to my carrier to oliver hazard perry class, and my fps improved. Anybody can confirm it has performance impact?

 

 

I just tried that, it didn't seem to do anything to overall performance.