reported 95%+ framerate loss when looking through missile smoke, rocket smoke, or exhaust smoke (2.8)

[FusRoPotato]

Whenever the view is filled with smoke from rockets, missiles, or plane exhaust (including looking backwards through a targeting pod with FLIR on), framerate drops massively to a point of being unable to control the aircraft.

This does not appear to be the case for ground smoke.

Typically I fly around with minimized graphics settings, netting between 100 and 120 fps on average. When these smoke effects come into view, or show up on the lightning pod in such a way it covers most of the view port, this framerate drops to 3-5 fps. 

8700k, 1080gtx (526.47), 1080p res (min settings), 32 gigs 3600 ram. 

[HansPeter1981]

Yes... possibly this existed before 2.8 but I can totally confirm this. Harrier and Targeting pod with certain shallow angles that bring your own exhaust into the view frame rate goes in my case from 59 down to +- 30... sometimes less 

 

Edited November 6, 2022 by HansPeter1981

[FusRoPotato]

Yeah, after a bit more digging, I found complaints of this problem more than 5 years old.

I'm shocked honestly. I thought overdraw was a globally solved problem back in 2002.

I wonder why it triggers with some smoke effects but not others, like smoke generators, fuel dumps, or ground signal smoke. They don't seem as impactful, if at all.

[durp]

Not sure if this is related to the same issue, but since you mentioned overdraw I might toss it into the bucket (plus it might give this some momentum).
It sounds 'reasonable' that there might be a link between what is drawn in the TGP related to smoke if too many sprites are drawn like with those vapor trails.

 

Vapor trails can sometimes also be very taxing (not sure if it was GPU or CPU, didn't check fpsVR) but it seems only to happen with the thin wingtip trails.

The two screenshots are the same scene, just rotated around, in one screenshot the framerate is 15, in the other it's 40 (40 is my max., capped at 40).
When more of those trails can be seen it tanks the fps, if you see less, its fine. Sounds similar to what the TGP issue is, just too much drawn.

Mind that this is not 'smoke' (but the smoke system is still broken in 2.8). The vapor issue was already present in 2.7.

 

(screenshots are crops from VR screenshots)

[BIGNEWY]

smoke and dust fps issues have been reported to the team 

thank you

[RuskyV]

Was this fixed in the latest beta?

[FusRoPotato]

No, the problem still exists for both vikhr smoke and looking through exhaust via FLIR on the Harrier.

However, I found a temporary fix by installing a mod, V19 MP version by @Taz1004. Personally, I'm not sure I'm in favor of some of the new effects, but the framerate is much better for the Vikhr. In fact, completely fixed.

However, it is unchanged for the Harrier exhaust in FLIR. I suspect he didn't change IR smoke effects at all.

 

[Kallio]

Noticed today a huge impact on fps in VR when looking at blue/red ground smokes (Multithreading, Multiplayer - BlueFlag).