2.9 | DCS Freezing and Textures not Loading

[Pavlin_33]

Description

Freezing

Since 2.9 DCS is randomly freezing for a second or two. This happens both in cockpit/external view as well as in the map (F10) view. When the freezing occurs, DCS cannot be interacted with, i.e. no buttons or UI can be clicked (loading weapons, configuration panel, ATC, etc.) and of course no cockpit interaction either. The frequency of the freezing seems to be random, that is there is no recognizable pattern.

Important: I am not having issues with the frame rates - between freezes the simulator runs fine, between 80-110 FPS.

In multiplayer environment it seems to happen randomly, since it may or may not happen on the same server with almost identical variables - joining a server and the re-joining after a minute or two. It does not seem to be cloud-dependent as I might have heavy freezing with no clouds, and not so much with clouds present, for example.

It single player, it seems to happen consistently in JF-17: Air to Air Refueling (Day)  instant-action mission.

Interestingly when the freeze occurs, the GPU usage goes down from regular 80% to 0% only to rise back up again once the sim recovers and just before the next occurrence.

Task manager just before the freeze:

Task manager just after the freeze:

Textures not Loading

When joining multiplayer, sometimes the textures fail to load (longer than 20 minutes). I could be sitting on the apron being able to see the sea water where land should be and of course no cockpit textures. It does not depend on the server, for example disconnecting and joining back again does not fix the issue. However, closing DCS and re-staring it again does fix the issue as the textures do load eventually, albeit quite slow (2-5 minutes).

While the textures are missing or failing to be loaded, there seems to be very low disk usage (around 1MB/s). Once the textures start loading the disk usage jumps couple of times. In my case between 8-12MB/s.

Task manages when textures are loading:

When the textures are loading, they do in a very slow manner where very low resolution ones are loaded first (blurry) followed by higher resolution ones.

Hardware/Software

• CPU: i5-4690K @ 4.1GHz (stock 3.5GHz) - water cooled
• GPU: GTX 1660 Super 6GB
• RAM: 32GB DDR - 4 x 8GB Kingston Value Select @ 1600Mhz, C11
• MoBo: Asus Z-97 Gamer Pro
• HDD: Samsung Evo SSD 1TB
• Windows 10 Pro (latest)
• no mods, stock DCS
• trackIR v5

Additional information

DCS Log file

dcs.log

After updating, I have:

• cleared the shaders folder
• cleaned up and did slow repair using the Updater utility
• disabled TacView

There is no AntiVirus interfering with DCS.

Notes:

This is definitely NOT a faulty hardware issue, since the same settings work perfectly on version 2.8.

Same issues happen on both single-threaded and multi-threaded versions.

Edited October 31, 2023 by Pavlin_33
Updated formatting.

[Mateo]

I suffered the same issue, you might check some of tips that I mention this post, and check other.

 

[Pavlin_33]

I just quickly sifted through the log file: there are quite a few errors only from October the 30th. Is this normal?

[Pavlin_33]

It has to do something with the ground units! Either static or moveable, or both.
I deliberately flew of the map on Caucasus and there was almost no freezing of the sim.

[Red_Pilot]

Sadly, the decline in performance in MT continues. In addition, today I got a crash in a small mission on a PG map on which I had no problems at all before 

dcs.log dcs.log.old Export.log

 

P\s And as usual in ST everything is fine

Edited November 12, 2023 by Red_Pilot

[Pavlin_33]

Hi @Flappie,

I am not sure if it helps or not, but I've asked around the forums and it seems that at least 5 people, my self included, have stutter around either ground objects and/or airborne objects. Once away from them, the stutter is gone, mainly over water or at ground map's outter edges.

[Flappie]

Please attach a short track showing your issue. I'll see if I can reproduce it.

[Pavlin_33]

Holly molly, my stutter is gone!
I have changed only:
Textures: medium --> low
Terrain Textures: medium --> low
Shadows: low --> off
Visib Range: high --> medium
Vsync: off --> on

I am not sure which exact settings or a combination of settings fixed it, but no more stutters.
I will try out changing individual ones form the list and see if I can isolate the problem. My bet is the textures, but who knows.

[Prawnler]

No fix here. This is what my FPS is doing every 5-10 seconds.

[Pavlin_33]

Hm... I might have spoken too soon.
Fact is that I get stutter way less often, but they are still there - not nearly as much as before though.
Textures seem to load quicker too in multiplayer.

[KoN]

Did you check your VRAM while running these settings. Running low textures and shadows will free up vram. 

Are you running MT. 

[Pavlin_33]

Ok, so the stutter is gone.
I am not sure if I should feel embarrassed or mad at ED: issue was that the desktop icon was launching multi-threaded version even though the icon's path was explicitly calling single-threaded EXE file. Only after running DCS manually/directly from single-threaded executable (not using DCS-created icon) did it start in ST.

TLDR; In my case it was MT version causing stutter and long texture loads.