Terrain textures high DESTROYS framerates

[Nealius]

With the 2.8 updates of the last couple of months, my system has been increasingly unable to deal with high terrain textures.

In attached mission, sitting in an F-15E at Nellis, with terrain textures low and textures medium, I get a solid 40fps looking towards Las Vegas. For some reason I get a dip in the 30s and some stutters when looking north/northeast, but still playable. 

However, change the terrain textures to high and I get 26fps looking towards Las Vegas, and down in the teens when looking at Sunrise Mountain.

I don't really understand what's going on.

Specs: i5-9600k at 4.7Ghz, RTX3060 12GB, 32GB DDR4, SSDs, 32GB pagefile, Quest 2 at 72hz 1.2x resolution. DCS settings when issue is experienced

Is it a hardware issue, something with DCS, or something with NTTR/Nellis?  

02-Nellis Ranges Sunset.miz DxDiag.txt

Edited July 24, 2023 by Nealius

[Raven (Elysian Angel)]

You're not alone. Given by the amount of threads popping up complaining about the very same thing (massive increase in RAM/VRAM demands these past few months), I'd blame DCS.
Whether it's a memory leak or something else I don't know, but something changed.

For example, this is my frame time graph after flying a long mission in the Mi-24 (the longer the mission lasts the worse it gets).
Needless to say this is not exactly a pleasant experience (and these very same settings worked just fine not too long ago):

Edited July 25, 2023 by Raven (Elysian Angel)
fixed the "null null"

[Nealius]

Would an upgrade to 64GB of RAM, or even a 16GB+ VRAM card, mitigate the issue any?

[diego999]

23 minutes ago, Nealius said:

Would an upgrade to 64GB of RAM, or even a 16GB+ VRAM card, mitigate the issue any?

 

Yes, but if this trend continues you'll find the same problem again 6 months down the road.

This is some kind of memory leak/bug ED has to fix on their own.

 

 

[Raven (Elysian Angel)]

1 minute ago, diego999 said:

Yes, but if this trend continues you'll find the same problem again 6 months down the road.

This is some kind of memory leak/bug ED has to fix on their own.

Exactly that… 

[nikoel]

In theory, GPU scaling is not a bug

For instance if DCS has settings that can utilise 8gb all the way to 24GB of ram I would argue that this is a good thing

A 3060 is a low end graphics card and is not suited for high settings in VR. The issues you're experiencing are appropriate to the settings that you're running

Some issues which disguise themselves as VRAM can also be BUS Width (or both), which for your card is 192Bit. In comparison a 4090 with 24GB which currently is the best card money can buy is 384 Bit wide. So not only the memory size is double but also the throughput (not to mention a much faster architecture)

Whilst indeed there are reports of memory leaks for some players; ignoring those, DCS is a power hungry game if run at high enough setting can even max out a 4090

Edited July 26, 2023 by nikoel

[Nealius]

12 hours ago, nikoel said:

A 3060 is a low end graphics card and is not suited for high settings in VR.

It was suited just fine for high texture settings in VR up until three months ago. Let's not turn what is clearly poor optimization and performance bloat into useless hardware comparisons. Throwing money and chipsets at the problem doesn't fix the problem.

Edited July 27, 2023 by Nealius

[LucShep]

I haven't tried latest OB update in MP yet, but with previous one (2.8.6.41363) yes it seems something is broken.
With it, I was getting over 16GB of VRAM (used, not allocated) in PG map with simple quick missions online (that I hosted for a friend), whereas before It'd never go above ~11GB.
And on 4YA Caucasus MP servers at some point it maxxed out the 24GB(!) of my RTX3090.
If it's memory leak or something else I don't know, but it is unacceptable. 

For now, and in my recent experience, the quickest solution was:
1) go instead to latest Stable release and avoid the OB version of DCS.
2) install Taz's Optimized Textures (this one is a must have) and also Shadows Reduced Impact.

The thing is, it's something that even on Stable release is very far from ideal (problem exhists, just less pronounced), and involves the textures of everything, not just terrain. 
ED and 3rd parties really need to rethink the textures sizing and formats, for the VRAM budget. It has been completely out of control for too long.

Before someone jumps in defending ED, saying that it's not a big deal and that there are Textures settings, let me tell you that it doesn't solve this long standing problem. 

Decreasing HIGH to LOW settings on Textures, can only partially work on "TERRAIN TEXTURES" (because there are separate Lower resolution textures for the Maps).
The problem is on the other "TEXTURES" setting (the one that affects everything which isn't terrain), as it does not work to solve the problem.
This one merely adjusts Mip level (basically downscaling information, and a blurry mess in image quality). Be it at "Medium" or "Low", the full texture files will still be loaded into VRAM and, if not enough, will be stored in swap files and RAM. And the problem will still remain.

Meaning, the current solution in DCS for the textures does not work, and needs to be rethinked and changed entirely.
This is not something new. As said in other threads, ED should take this and this into account, test, re-test, and realize it themselves.
It's as urgent as MT and any other performance solution.

Edited November 22, 2023 by LucShep

[VirusAM]

It was suited just fine for high texture settings in VR up until three months ago. Let's not turn what is clearly poor optimization and performance bloat into useless hardware comparisons. Throwing money and chipsets at the problem doesn't fix the problem.

That is simply not possible, last year I had a 2080ti and "only" 11gb of vram, and I absolutely had to use low terrain textures and medium textures.
Only when I upgraded to the 24gb 3090 I could change the settings to both high

[Nealius]

5 hours ago, VirusAM said:

That is simply not possible, last year I had a 2080ti and "only" 11gb of vram, and I absolutely had to use low terrain textures and medium textures.
Only when I upgraded to the 24gb 3090 I could change the settings to both high

Your singular experience means that it's impossible for everyone? 

And to be clear, last year I ran both settings on high and had zero issues unless I was flying the Tomcat on Syria. In absence of that specific pairing it was not "impossible." Texture performance issues for me on every map and every module didn't start occuring until the update that released Sinai.

A lot of people noticing an increase in VRAM usage despite such "impossibility" per your anecodotal evidence. 

 

Edited July 27, 2023 by Nealius

[Raven (Elysian Angel)]

10 hours ago, LucShep said:

It has been completely out of control for too long.

 

At some point technology progresses though, so it's completely normal for hardware demands to increase with newer maps. You can't expect 8GB cards to run properly with maximum texture quality in 2023 (especially in VR), that's just unrealistic and holding back game development.

That being said, 16GB worked just fine on existing maps a few months ago and now it doesn't. That is a problem: you shouldn't need 24GB of VRAM just yet since too few people have cards like that. Sure, in say 5-6 years that may be the norm but we're not quite there yet.
On my system, textures on High/High used 11GB of VRAM in the Caucasus map and 14GB in Syria. In the latest Open Beta those same maps use 18.6GB. So something is not working correctly.

[wheelie]

A year ago i ran a 3090 with 24gb VRAM.

Syria missions (multiplayer) and liberation missions would take up 21/23gb of the VRAM, i was a tad shocked to say the least and always wondered how other users would handle this with the plethora of cards out there. I've since switched to a 4090 and again i see high utilisation of VRAM which is kind of what i would expect.

So a year later i still see the same VRAM behaviour i had seen before MT was a thing. Maybe we're seeing more caching in VRAM for the new eye candy, night lights, shadows, pre-rendered content, 4k textures? I don't know but the VRAM usage for me is the same as it's always been however for cards with 8, 12 and 16gb ram i suspect this may have caused some unexpected issues that could result in shared memory being used which would obviously be far, far slower than the GDDR6 on a lot of GPU's.
Perhaps the additional shadow options have added to this? I don't know but i see the VRAM as high as it's always been on my system.

A good troubleshooting exercise would be to have the same mission replay and enable each shadow/texture option to see what, if any increase this causes and and what point it goes above the threshold of a GPU's available VRAM.

Edited July 27, 2023 by wheelie

[Raven (Elysian Angel)]

16 minutes ago, wheelie said:

A good troubleshooting exercise would be to...

I think the point is that people (including myself) get sick and tired of spending hours tweaking their system for optimal 'performance-vs-eyecandy' balance only to see their framerates go down the drain a few patches later - on existing maps I might add and with the very same settings.
 

[Aquorys]

On 7/26/2023 at 12:00 AM, Raven (Elysian Angel) said:

You're not alone. Given by the amount of threads popping up complaining about the very same thing (massive increase in RAM/VRAM demands these past few months), I'd blame DCS.
Whether it's a memory leak or something else I don't know, but something changed.

I am sure there are certainly some things very wrong with the VR code in DCS, or possibly the graphics engine in general, but it is also worth noting that it is by far not the only culprit.

The worst problem of all is that modern general purpose computer architecture, like the one that a normal PC uses, and also general purpose operating systems suck phenomenally at providing predictable and consistent performance.

You might ask, why?

Well, for starters, there is an enormous gap between the peak performance and the base performance of the hardware. Depending on whether data is currently in one of the caches - and there are multiple caches with different performance characteristics - or just the memory, and depending on how the data is accessed, the processors can get the data very quickly or very slowly. And by "very slowly" I mean that it is not uncommon for the access to be 100 times slower than if it happened "very quickly".

On top of that, add in that none of the general purpose operating systems are hard realtime capable, meaning that there is no guaranteed way to make them run your performance-critical 60 fps graphics thread exactly every 16-17 milliseconds and execute a guaranteed number of instructions to make sure that it is able to perform all calculations that it needs to do to finish a frame. All you can do is hope that things will be fast enough pretty much by coincidence.

The result of that is that if you design anything for using more than roughly 1/100th of a PC's performance, you will almost certainly have latency problems every now and then, resulting in all kinds of things, from fps drops to input latency, jittery mouse movement, etc., just because the system happens to be slow right now for unpredictable and unknown reasons.

And this whole story is the exact reason why it is an extremely bad idea to use those normal general purpose computers and programs to fly real aircraft, and in turn, also the reason why real world avionics systems are extremely expensive. They need predictable performance and memory consumption and hard realtime capable software. There are ways to do that, but the effort required to develop such systems is orders of magnitude beyond what's possible and affordable for a home PC running computer games.

 

[VirusAM]

Your singular experience means that it's impossible for everyone? 
And to be clear, last year I ran both settings on high and had zero issues unless I was flying the Tomcat on Syria. In absence of that specific pairing it was not "impossible." Texture performance issues for me on every map and every module didn't start occuring until the update that released Sinai.
A lot of people noticing an increase in VRAM usage despite such "impossibility" per your anecodotal evidence. 
 

Well..it's math, not my personal experience. Simply less than 16gb vram is not suitable for a good VR experience with high texture settings.
When low of vram you will have plenty of stutters caused by swapping to system ram and from system ram to disk.
You also have to consider what is a good experience for different people. Personally I cannot use VR if my fps are below the ASW (oculus reprojection tech) threshold.
So maybe you could stand some dips of frame rate without noticing and now something is different for you

[Raven (Elysian Angel)]

2 hours ago, Aquorys said:

but it is also worth noting that it is by far not the only culprit

Yes, the points you make are all very valid, but we also don't have a dodgy Windows KB to blame this time around, and the difference in performance is massive.
It's also one of the main reasons I use a Professional Edition of Windows instead of Home edition, and have so for years: so I can enforce Group Policies (even though I am the only user of my PC) that defer Windows Updates for example, and do other things you simply can't with a Home Edition.

 

  

46 minutes ago, VirusAM said:

Well..it's math, not my personal experience. Simply less than 16gb vram is not suitable for a good VR experience with high texture settings.

Yes indeed: when Syria first came out I tried running that with Terrain Textures on High on a 2070Super. Needless to say I couldn't do it without facing a stutterfest, even on a headset with a low resolution such as my Rift CV1 that I was using at the time.
On a Reverb G2 with 100% render scale and 2x MSAA... good luck

That being said, OP talked about NTTR which is probably the map that runs best for me: with my normal settings in the latest OB I have 35 ish fps on the ground (which is fine to me for an airport), 50-60fps in the cockpit once in the air and at high altitude I can hit 90fps in external view. But even there, on longer flights there is micro-stuttering that I blame entirely on MT not being mature enough yet.

Edited July 27, 2023 by Raven (Elysian Angel)

[diego999]

I've played for months in VR with a 2060 during 2.7 era. Low details and simple missions, yes, but it was playable.

With the first 2.8 patch the loss of performance was so big that card wasn't good anymore. Mind you, that was less than a year ago. And now with 2.8.7 it looks like the 3060 is not enough either.

At the rate DCS is burning through generations, by mid 2024 you're going to need a 6090 to play at decent fps.

[VirusAM]

Yes indeed: when Syria first came out I tried running that with Terrain Textures on High on a 2070Super. Needless to say I couldn't do it without facing a stutterfest, even on a headset with a low resolution such as my Rift CV1 that I was using at the time.
On a Reverb G2 with 100% render scale and 2x MSAA... good luck

That being said, OP talked about NTTR which is probably the map that runs best for me: with my normal settings in the latest OB I have 35 ish fps on the ground (which is fine to me for an airport), 50-60fps in the cockpit once in the air and at high altitude I can hit 90fps in external view. But even there, on longer flights there is micro-stuttering that I blame entirely on MT not being mature enough yet.

Surely the nttr is the easiest map on the hardware Vr or not

[Mr_sukebe]

I’ve got to ask, for those with VRAM concerns, have you set your terrain textures to low?  I did and that helped a lot.

[Raven (Elysian Angel)]

2 hours ago, Mr_sukebe said:

I’ve got to ask, for those with VRAM concerns, have you set your terrain textures to low?  I did and that helped a lot.

Please read the thread (and others like this if you feel like it), thanks.

[Nephris]

I just want to share my observation, as I changed last week from stable to openbeta to utilizise the MT feature.

This change to openbeta turned out to be a good idea as my frames rised by around 35fps.

Settings at stable: high textures , MSAA 2x >> fps were ok ,around 35 > 60.

Setting at openbeta: hight texture ,SSAO enable , MSAA off >> fps were good at around 50 > 80

Settings after openbeta Update past days >high texture ,SSAO enable , MSAA off >> fps acutally worse ,around 25 > 40

 

I am using a fairly old cpu 4930k @4 ghz , 32GB DDR3 , rx 5700 xt. So rather old tech with DDR and socket. However I didnt expected to end even worse after I change from stable to openbeta. I take the risk for early features - fair enough, but following the thread, it looks like the fps win by MT is butchered by fps loss due ... something

Is that correct?

 

My gpu ram is completely utilized at 98% ... just F-16 singleplayer mission (standard)...I didnt observed that before, but tbh I didnt bother to check b4.

 

edit: changed settings again to:

Setting at openbeta: low texture ,SSAO disable , MSAA 2x >> fps are good at around 50 > 80

 

Edited July 27, 2023 by Nephris

[Mr_sukebe]

51 minutes ago, Raven (Elysian Angel) said:

Please read the thread (and others like this if you feel like it), thanks.

 

Yep, read that.  My comment wasn't just aimed at the OP.

[Raven (Elysian Angel)]

57 minutes ago, Nephris said:

changed settings again to

The strange thing is that often we get better frame rates by increasing the graphical fidelity, as if GPUs like to be pushed a bit.

After MT released I increased my settings a bit as well with no negative effect on frame rates. Now, after a few patches I still get the same frame rate as before, but what changed for me - and many others it seems - is memory demands, both VRAM and system RAM. 

[Nealius]

13 hours ago, Raven (Elysian Angel) said:

You can't expect 8GB cards to run properly with maximum texture quality in 2023 (especially in VR), that's just unrealistic and holding back game development.

Runnng a 12GB card, as per opening post.

11 hours ago, VirusAM said:

Well..it's math, not my personal experience. Simply less than 16gb vram is not suitable for a good VR experience with high texture settings.

Then show me the math explaining how my 12GB card ran perfectly fine last year. Or the math showing why it shouldn't have.

Edited July 28, 2023 by Nealius

[Nedum]

On 7/26/2023 at 12:00 AM, Raven (Elysian Angel) said:

You're not alone. Given by the amount of threads popping up complaining about the very same thing (massive increase in RAM/VRAM demands these past few months), I'd blame DCS.
Whether it's a memory leak or something else I don't know, but something changed.

For example, this is my frame time graph after flying a long mission in the Mi-24 (the longer the mission lasts the worse it gets).
Needless to say this is not exactly a pleasant experience (and these very same settings worked just fine not too long ago):

 

It looks like, you are CPU bound. I can't see an issue with the VRAM.

Did you all the stuff with the slow repair, no mods and so on?