FPS Drop mid mission

[Chesster]

Hi guys, 

A newbie to DCS here with the following HW specs:

Asus ROG Strix RTX3090 GPU, I7 7700k CPU, 4x8GB 2500MHz Ram, 500GB Evo 870 SSD, MB: Strix Z270F (Pcie3x16) 

During the initial phase of a mission my FPS runs fairly consistent at 80FPS with 60% GPU load, but after about 20 min into the mission the FPS drops to 5-15 FPS while GPU load drops to single figures. It stays like this for the remainder of the mission. I'm running Dcs liberation for mission generating. 

CPU, Disk and Memory load are low (20%,3%,55%)

Pagefile size is set to 32Gb. 

I've tried altering in game settings and Nvidia settings without success. My CPU and Memory are somewhat old, so a new MB, memory and disks are under way, but this is really destroying my game experience. Next week I will install Asus ROG Strix Z690F MB, i9 12900k CPU and 2xM2 SSD in Raid0 along with 2x16GB 5.2Ghz PCi5 DIMM's. 

I'm going crazy over this, so if anyone have any views on current rig and how to improve it, I'll be very grateful. 

Thank you! 

[FR4GGL3]

Would it be possible to get screenshots from your nvidia control panel (general and DCS profile) and from the graphics settings of DCS?

 

Oh and did you check the temperature of your CPU?

Edited March 13, 2022 by FR4GGL3

[Chesster]

Thank you for your reply. Here are my Nvidia settings and in game settings:
 

[Bossco82]

Try installing MSI Afterburner. In the settings for the on screen display check the CPU, cores/speed/temps. GPU, Cores/speed/temps/voltage, DDR memory usage. 

You will have to go into the main settings and enable voltage monitoring. There are Youtube videos to set this up, JatTwoCents did one recently I think.

Try to almost provoke DCS to do this again and see if the MSI overlays shows up a temp spike or 100% usage etc etc. 

You also have Vsync enabled what fps/hz does your monitor run at??

You could try running 4x MSAA instead of 1.5x SSAA.

Edited March 13, 2022 by Bossco82

[Chesster]

Monitor runs at 144Hz
I've capped fps at 100 in Nvidia as I'm unable to achieve any higher than around 80 at most. 
CPU temperatures could be an issue here. I installed a core monitor and it shows a max temp of 93 on two of the cores. I would assume BIOS will throttle CPU back when this happens, so that could explain why GPU load decreases mid game.

I'll install MSI afterburner and have a look. Thank you!

 

[FR4GGL3]

Why do you use Image scaling and ultra Low Input latency? Both might Hit your Performance in dcs and i guess both might bei useless in dcs. I would also switch vsync Off in DCS as you have Limited your max FPS which i wouldn't do in the global settings. I do this only in the dedicated dcs Profile. Max Performance Mode could also be a Problem If the cooling of your 3090 and the cooling of the Case is Not top notch. If you want to loosen all potential brakes try the high Performance Power Mode in Windows. This could give you something as your CPU might bei a bottleneck. But make Sure that the cooling of your CPU can Take the 100% load all the time. Watch the temps closely!

 

Btw my Smartphone correction Drives me crazy

Edit: your CPU is too hot! You have found your Error. Please have a Look at the correct seat of the Heat sink and have a Look after the Fans. Are they Spinning?

Edited March 13, 2022 by FR4GGL3

[Chesster]

I'm currently down to 10 fps.
GPU load is 16% and 42 deg C.
CPU temps fluctuates between 65-80 degrees. Max 92
CPU load is at most 70% but on average 20%.

HardwareMonitoring.hml

[FR4GGL3]

Do you know hwinfo? This Monitoring Tools can work in the Background and it can Show you If your CPU is getting throttled. But over 90°C is too much for being in a Game and Not in a dedicated stress Test.

Something is wrong. Maybe your heatsink does Not sit right or your voltages are set way above.

 

/edit:

I am now at home and I had a chance to look at your Monitoring Info. I can see that your hottest (peak temperature) cores are CPU#3 and CPU#4. But at the time they hit about 91°C there was not much load. Around 40% on the one and 34% on the other core. The other cores aren't much better. One interesting thing is, that at the all time high, CPU#8 gets about 59% Load and "only" 75°C. So I really guess that your Heatsink doesn't sit plane or maybe your Thermal Paste doesn't do its job. You can check this by pulling the Heatsink. The "stamp picture" of the CPU-Heatspreader on the bottom of your Heatsink will tell you how good the connection between the two of them is.

But there is one thing missing in your Monitoring Info: I can't see the Voltage Consumption of the CPU Cores. And I can't exactly tell what "CPU Power" is meant to be in this chart. So I need to use my understanding. My understandig of CPU Power is Wattage. If this is true on your chart, your CPU maxes at ~74W which is nothing. Because the TDP is 91W and I know they would consume up to almost 100W stock - and yours runs at 4,8 GHz which is a bit of an overclock. And whats more is that at this time (Power consumption 74W) the CPU Cores are alle within 78°C to 81°C which is quite a lot compared to the Power consumption. So all of this leads me to be a Cooling issue.

And there is another thing I can see out of your chart: you are still using the maximum performance setting in the nvcp. Because your 3090 never drops below 1700 MHz even at no load. And it starves of data hunger. Because it only wants around 140W of power which is nothing for such a beast if it really tries to do its job ^^

 

Edited March 13, 2022 by FR4GGL3

[Chesster]

 I've overclocked the CPU about 14% in Bios. It's Liquid cooled. 

I'll try to throttle it back to standard. But it was worse before, so I guess the bottleneck is around the CPU. Can't wait to get my new Mobo and CPU next week

[FR4GGL3]

You are on liquid cooling???

I have a 9900k on liquid cooling which gets way hotter than your 7700k and it doesn't see such temperatures even on Prime95 small ffts (the ones that fit completely in the cache and because of this produce insane amounts of heat).*

 

You know what: get back to standard and wait for your new components. And if you install this, have a really close look at the heatsink placement. It needs to sit flush and and needs to have a reasonable amount of thermal compount. I bet then your problems are gone. Also, you really don't need this magic nvcp settings. Just watch out for VSYNC as it can reduce the fps in certain steps if it can't match your monitors 144Hz (but in this case it usually will sit at around 50 fps).

 

*/edit: wait a minute... is this an AIO liquid cooling? Is your heatsink with the pump in it the highest point of the AIO (e.g. your radiator sits on the bottom of the case)? If this is true, don't do this. There will always be a bubble of air in such an AIO. And this bubble will place itself on the highest point of the system. If this highest point is your heatsink, then your AIO does literally nothing. It can't because of the air bubble.

Edited March 13, 2022 by FR4GGL3

[Chesster]

The radiator sits in the front of the cabinet, and yes I believe it's an AIO cooler. Not sure which brand, as I've inherited this system.
I'll have my new system up and running on Wednesday and I'll report back then. It will be liquid cooled as well. 
I would have really liked to figure out what was wrong with the current system though, but it's as you say most likely a CPU heat issue.

Thanks for your help thus far!

[FR4GGL3]

The problem on issues like this is that there is a lot of systematic work to do. Step by step. And to help you in an efficient way, we would need to do this locally (same place) I would need to see certain things by myself.

Just one thing in order to protect your upcoming system:

 

Just to be shure

[Chesster]

I just discovered that my radiator fans weren't rotating. Turns out they were not connected to a power source ??? I connected all fans, and tried to fly another mission. CPU temperatures are now halved between 40-50 deg C.
Still the same thing happened in the game. FPS are high 80's at the start of the mission, with GPU load of about 70%, then it steadily decreases to where it reaches a minimum of about 8-17 fps with a GPU load of 2%???

I noticed that core 8 runs at 60-90% load while the remining cores run at 10-30% or even lower. Now where do I begin ??

[FR4GGL3]

Okay now. One Problem solved.

 

Now you could start in resetting your nVidia Control Panel settings to default and only disable VSync (or put it to "Fast"). And plz disable VSync ingame.

Set your Powersafing Option to "High Performance" to loosen all the Throttles (you can put it back to "balanced" if that didn't help).

 

Next thing to try: go into your UEFI and try to disable Hyper Threading. I have heared that this solved some issues with slowing down - although I never experienced this by myself.

 

Also worth trying: disable the XBox GameBar. No one really needs it, but it can hurt.

And if you have GeForce Experience up and running: deinstall it.

And search for Motherboard hocus pocus tools that promise you overclocking and lightning bling bling. These are also often a source of strange issues.

Edited March 13, 2022 by FR4GGL3

[BitMaster]

Tbh,

before you focus on DCS and Nvidia etc...it is still unclear if his system collapses under load or not. I would run a few loops of realbench, that taxes CPU and GPU and watch temps.

If it can do that for 30min it should run any game load. Then, I would focus on settings in DCS and Nvidia, maybe best to reset both.

 

[FR4GGL3]

True. That won't hurt. And it is always worth it to look after stability issues.

 

The strange thing is that DCS starts with okayish performance and then something falls asleep. That is why I thought about resetting all the messed up settings and give the High Performance Power Mode a try. But yeah... probably you are right - better have a look at the stability.

[Bossco82]

At this point I would maybe download Cinebench R23 and do a couple of runs while monitoring HW monitor. See if that checks out and your CPU is ok.

If that is a success. Reset Nvidia control panel, try running the maxfps at 60fps not 100fps and use MSAA instead of SSAA. I have a 3090 and I run MSAAx4 using 1440p 60fps and I am happy with that. 100fps is asking a lot from a 7700k keeping up with a 3090.

I had something similar to you recently, suddenly my gaming performance was all over the place. Working one moment then not the next. I couldn't pin it down. Eventually the problem got worse and showed itself. My AIO had developed a blockage.

[Chesster]

Thank you all for your feedback so far.

As I have upgraded the system the following specs are now in place:

Mobo: Asus ROG Strix Z690F Wifi
Processor: Intel i9 12900k, no overclocking, Liquid cooling
Memory: 2x16Gb DDR5 CL40 Corsair 4800MHz
GPU: Asus ROG Strix RTX 3090
Storage: 2x2Tb Corsair M.2 SSD, OS on one, and game directories on the other.

I would imagine the system specs should be sufficient to run DCS World, however I still get these annoying stuttering during game play. In Free Flight there's not much of it, but it is there, but during DCS Liberation missions there's many and severe ones.
I've turned off virtually all complexity settings in Liberation like: -Infantry - Carcasses ........... etc
Still no improvement.

I've run several benchmark tests, and the system scores high/as expected in all of them.
Disk test, CPU test, Memory test, GPU test etc.

MSI afterburner shows two cores running high between 60-90%, and a voltage limit of 1.

The stuttering sounds consistent with the sound from the GPU. Sounds kind of like an old HDD reading/writing.
 GPU load is about 50%
CPU load  5 %
Temperatures are GPU/CPU: 56/41 Deg C
 

[Chesster]

I've sort of ruled out the GPU as the culprit, as I've tried the old GTX 1070 with more or less the same stuttering (lower frame rate obviously). I'll have a look at some of your suggestions tomorrow. 

Thank you all so much! 

[Chesster]

I have reset almost all settings in Nvidia Control Panel, and I have set all settings in DCS to absolute max.
I've turned off Game Bar, and set power plan to "Max Performance". (Not really sure if the game bar made a difference though)
I also increased the Voltage to the GPU by about 50mV. (About half of what is max allowable in ASUS GPU Twerk)

STUTTERING IS GONE!

I notice in MSI Afterburner that there are no limits reached anymore. The purring from the GPU is even and the stuttering is gone.
With all AA settings set to highest levels, I get an even 50fps.
Turning off SSAA doubles the frame rates to 100-120 fps

On the ground in DCS Liberation missions I get around 80fps, which increases to around 120fps during flight.
Man it's now an absolute delight flying again!!!!

Thank you all for your helpful inputs. I really appreciated it!
FLY SAFE!

Edited March 19, 2022 by Chesster

[FR4GGL3]

Plz try "Balanced performance" as a comparison. Because if there isn't much differnce, you will safe a lot of heat, noise and a bit on your electricity bill on balanced performance. Not in demanding games but in situations when you simply don't need all of the power.

 

As I read somewhere fly pretty, anybody can fly safe ;)

[Chesster]

Balanced power plan drops about 40% framefrate.
I'll stick to performance!

Fly Pretty

[FR4GGL3]

I am surprised about that, but numbers don't lie. Thanks for trying.

[BitMaster]

It does indeed pay to change the GPU PowerPlan on the fly as needed and not look at it as a one time set&forget thing. You can do that, I did it too for years and always asked myself why in the world my PC needs over 165w in idle on the desktop. OK...the Pump and myriad of fans take their toll but their was a large unkown part I never figured out what consumed the rest in idle. Well, actually it's pretty easy and I tell this everybody while not doing it myself, TRACK IT DOWN with HWinfo. When you set it to HighPerformance Mode and open HWinfo you should check your GPU wattage in idle, then watch a YT or light work...then switch the GPU to Balanced Mode and watch again... on my 1080ti its around 50w difference, that's MORE than my 5900X needs for daily desktop usage.

MSI Afterburner has nice TaskBar icons that also show GPU wattage on Desktop, it's 15w now...used to be 67w 24/7/365   That does pay back.

In game, if I forget to switch, it depends, DCS doesnt like it and I suffer severe fps issues, other games mostly dont care.

[FR4GGL3]

I use a quick Windows Powerplan Switch via the Desktop Context Menue (right Mouse Button). So I can really quick switch between "I have the Power" and "Sleep you all must now". It came as a .reg file - anybody can find it via google.

It helps you to keep your Hardware cool and quiet when you do stuff that also a Tablet could do. Which is like 90% of the time. And when you want to play, all of the power is just a click away.