stuttering on 2.9

[lovethewayoumove]

hace 12 horas, Oilman100 dijo:

Also confirm that this fixes the problem, you only need to turn on 1 core, press OK and then immediately turn them all back on again and press OK, (you don't need to leave the task manager screen) this method ensures DCS won't crash, I just hit escape to pause and ALT TAB into Task Manager, great fix

Not working for me!!

hace 18 horas, Sacarino111 dijo:

Hi.

Yes, but the autopilot is not a thing, it was just t avoid pausing the game, just to be on the safe side.

And yes, I go to Task manager, select DCS.exe, right mouse button and more details on DCS (or something similar) and then I switch from 4 cores to just three (I tested with different number of cores and I saw that switching Off just one core and back to 4 do the trick). This way, I don¡t have DCS to slow down or even stop working. After that, the game goes almost perfect (some little drops on FPS here and there, and smaller than before the switching).

And I am on the last 2.9 version (OpenBeta), and flying MT. Can' tell if the mt.lua is on or not, and can't find it! so I figure that it is not present.

My pc is a low end  i5 just 16 Gb of ram plus 16 GB of pagefile, so not a very powerfull one!

4 cores, and I first did switch off cores 1 and 3 and then "all On", and after some trys, I just switch Off one of them, n. 3 (last one) and does the trick.

Now I have to leave, some work to do, cant replay till tomorrow.

Best luck for you.

Saludos.

Saca111

Thanks anyway for your help, hothing seems to work for me. I'm very frustrated

[Top Jockey]

3 hours ago, Sacarino111 said:

Hi.

Yes.

I suggest you to download the @SkateZilla app to easilly downgrade it to the 28.X.XXXX  you wish. I did it and went ok, but I couldn't make some modules to work ok so I gave a try at 2.9 and with that trick of switching affinity I made i run ok.

Saludos

Saca111

 

Ok, thank you Sacarino !

[Flapjacks]

Not sure if my issue is part of this 2.9 problem or not. I've been getting fps drops for a few seconds down to about 15 fps, then it'll clear up for a few seconds then drop again. Is this the same thing that others have been experiencing? It happens in both SP and MP and on multithread and regular Open Beta. I don't have any mods installed and I've run a slow repair, deleted the fxo and metashaders folders, as well as disabled hotplug. Also, not sure if it matters, but the framerate counter flashes rapidly between GPU and CPU bound sometimes. I would've added a dcs.log file but I don't see it in the log folder (in saved games/dcs.openbeta/logs), just compressed dcs.log folders.

Anyways, I hope someone can tell me if this is part of the 2.9 bug or if I have some hardware issues or something. Thanks.

 

DxDiag.txt

Edited December 22, 2023 by Flapjacks

[Sacarino111]

16 hours ago, Flapjacks said:

Not sure if my issue is part of this 2.9 problem or not. I've been getting fps drops for a few seconds down to about 15 fps, then it'll clear up for a few seconds then drop again. Is this the same thing that others have been experiencing? It happens in both SP and MP and on multithread and regular Open Beta. I don't have any mods installed and I've run a slow repair, deleted the fxo and metashaders folders, as well as disabled hotplug. Also, not sure if it matters, but the framerate counter flashes rapidly between GPU and CPU bound sometimes. I would've added a dcs.log file but I don't see it in the log folder (in saved games/dcs.openbeta/logs), just compressed dcs.log folders.

Anyways, I hope someone can tell me if this is part of the 2.9 bug or if I have some hardware issues or something. Thanks.

 

DxDiag.txt 91.07 kB · 3 downloads

 

To me, it looks like the bug.

Try the affinity trick and check, 

Don't quit the game to do it, just ALT+TAB to the Task manager, right click on DCS.exe, right click again to "details" and then right click again to switch affinity; disable one core, enter, renable all cores, enter and bak to DCS. If it works, it should be almost perfect.

Don't close the task manager, because every time you change plane, even without exiting the mission, you will need to switch affinity. In my experience, the game will be "learning" somehow and the stuttering will be less important, but even though do the switching, it is worth the 5 seconds time loss.

Hope it helps.

Saludos.

Saca111

22 hours ago, lovethewayoumove said:

Not working for me!!

Thanks anyway for your help, hothing seems to work for me. I'm very frustrated

Hi.

I m sorry it does not work, and being a complete ignorant on those matters, I can give any more help.

I've seen you have up to 16 cores, and I have only 4, so try reducing the number of cores (start with 4, as in my case it works ok with "only"4 cores). Also try a number of cores multiple of 2 (2, 4, 8, 16).

Also check the motherboard BIOS, in case there is a limitation on number of cores or similar.

Saludos

Saca111

[Sacarino111]

On 12/22/2023 at 11:15 AM, lovethewayoumove said:

Not working for me!!

Thanks anyway for your help, hothing seems to work for me. I'm very frustrated

Hi.

One thing I noticed is that you bettter do the switching AFTER all the textures have been loaded, when, some how, the game is "stabilized". I also found oput that sometimes I have to do it twice, as one apparently is not "waiking up" Windows ( or DCS) so it uses all the cores set.

Saludos. Saca111

[Flapjacks]

I tried the affinity core thing with no luck, thanks though.

[Top Jockey]

6 hours ago, Sacarino111 said:

To me, it looks like the bug.

Try the affinity trick and check, 

Don't quit the game to do it, just ALT+TAB to the Task manager, right click on DCS.exe, right click again to "details" and then right click again to switch affinity; disable one core, enter, renable all cores, enter and bak to DCS. If it works, it should be almost perfect.

Don't close the task manager, because every time you change plane, even without exiting the mission, you will need to switch affinity. In my experience, the game will be "learning" somehow and the stuttering will be less important, but even though do the switching, it is worth the 5 seconds time loss.

...

 

Hello again,

When you say "plane", you mean everytime one changes the view ?

Like for instance, changing between F1 and F2 views ?

[Sacarino111]

1 hour ago, Top Jockey said:

 

Hello again,

When you say "plane", you mean everytime one changes the view ?

Like for instance, changing between F1 and F2 views ?

No, I mean changing from A 10 to F16, for example, or exiting the mission and entering in again or in a new one.

At least for me

Saludos.

Saca111

 

[Hiob]

Ok, so this is kind of embarrassing: I violated rule numero uno, „never touch a running system“.

I was in the mood to do some new testing on 5800X3D vs. 5900X, so I changed the cpu. Nothing else was changed mind you! Bios-Settings are „stable defaults“ + XMP activated. Apart from the Trusted Plattform nagging and the need to set a new pin, nothing was changed in windows either.

Same DCS, same GPU-drivers same services and apps running (or not running).

And wouldn’t you have guessed it? The stutter-fest is back. Where I had previously 1% lows around 115 and 0.1% lows around 95-100, they dropped now close to single digit. Same frame time spikes as often seen here.

And now the (even more) frustrating part: Nothing of the „placebos“ that were discussed around the issue seem to solve the issue (I had the same problem for a short period with the other CPU, but after some tinkering it went and stayed away). I changed the core affinity, I used process lasso, I deactivated power services….

The only thing so far that seem to have a positive affect is to limit the max fps in game to 120 (from 180), but that wasn’t necessary beforehand isn’t exactly what I want to do. 

Kind of self inflicted problems - but annoying nevertheless. I‘m really curious if the problems persist when I change back again. (but that won’t happen today)

@BIGNEWY That may be the only new(?) hint that this while endeavor brought: IIRC with 2.9 was the max fps-slider in the setting introduced (which you can change on the fly within the game). I know that it was possible to set the max fps beforehand by editing autoexec/luas. Maybe there is an issue with the realtime implementation of this feature. Perhaps you can forward this idea to the team - just to rule it out.

Have a nice x-mas everybody!

Edited December 23, 2023 by Hiob

[AKULA_OPTIMUS]

On 12/21/2023 at 3:39 PM, noisy_lightning said:

You don't need to go back into the game. Just change the affinity to cpu0 press OK. Then change it back to all cores. Has the same effect.

I went an hour last night with no problems then out of nowhere the stuttering came back (Self built Strike eagle training mission) but changing the affinity again solved it a further time.

Clearly something in the games code just doesn't play nice. Couldn't pin point last night what thr cause was sadly but the game continued to run lag free for another 45min till I chose to quit out.

Didn´t solve the problem entirely, but it definetly helped, thank you!!!!

[BIGNEWY]

49 minutes ago, Hiob said:

@BIGNEWY That may be the only new(?) hint that this while endeavor brought: IIRC with 2.9 was the max fps-slider in the setting introduced (which you can change on the fly within the game). I know that it was possible to set the max fps beforehand by editing autoexec/luas. Maybe there is an issue with the realtime implementation of this feature. Perhaps you can forward this idea to the team - just to rule it out.

Have a nice x-mas everybody!

Hi, the team are reading here, and I have highlighted some other suggestions from users also. 

thank you

[Top Jockey]

On my PC with specs as on signature ... my 2 cents.

While on mission (single player edited F-14 Case 1 Carrier Landing) on Open Beta 2.8.6.xxxxx MultiThread :

> call Task Manager
> select 'details' separator
> right click on dcs.exe
> define afinity
> un-select one given core - click OK
> right click on dcs.exe (again)
> define afinity
> select 'all processors' - click OK

... don't know if it is placebo or not.

The 'afinity' tweak seems to help decreasing the stutter frequency ... and I'm not yet sure it lasts the entire time of gameplay.

I'm also using a pagefile of 32768 MB, modest options in-game, and the Task Manager 'high priority' tweak for DCS ...

[Hiob]

1 hour ago, Top Jockey said:

On my PC with specs as on signature ... my 2 cents.

While on mission (single player edited F-14 Case 1 Carrier Landing) on Open Beta 2.8.6.xxxxx MultiThread :

> call Task Manager
> select 'details' separator
> right click on dcs.exe
> define afinity
> un-select one given core - click OK
> right click on dcs.exe (again)
> define afinity
> select 'all processors' - click OK

... don't know if it is placebo or not.

The 'afinity' tweak seems to help decreasing the stutter frequency ... and I'm not yet sure it lasts the entire time of gameplay.

I'm also using a pagefile of 32768 MB, modest options in-game, and the Task Manager 'high priority' tweak for DCS ...

I choose the term „placebo“ because none of the methods seem to reliable cure the symptoms for everybody. (Including the ones, I was sure did the trick last time) As far as my overview of the posts go, all the different suggestions seem to work „sometimes“ for „some“ people. Alt-tab-ing and messing with the cores has some effect for me as well, but before I changed cpus, I had flatlines always everytime - so there has to be a solution that sticks. Unfortunately with the current cpu, nothing seem to work. I may get some short-term improvement sometimes, but nothing that lasts……

Tomorrow I will revert back to the 5900X. I‘m curious if that solves the problem again, which would be a result on its own, but unfortunately I doubt it. I seem to have been very lucky last time.

Some observations I made through the last hours of messing around

- the only time I had smooth fps again without any frametime spikes was after I spent 30 minutes adjusting the OSD of Afterburner with DCS running, frequently switching between applications without closing either one. After that I could run my benchmark scene a couple of times without issues. Unfortunately after a restart of DCS I was back to square one.

- the core usage of all cores jumps to 100 when a spike occurs. Can’t say if cause or effect of the problem.

- Due to the frequent tabbing between applications seemingly solving the issue, I had the suspicion that the fullscreen and or v-sync option could be a culprit or part of the problem. But altering those settings made no difference either way.

Edited December 24, 2023 by Hiob

[Sacarino111]

11 hours ago, Hiob said:

I choose the term „placebo“ because none of the methods seem to reliable cure the symptoms for everybody. (Including the ones, I was sure did the trick last time) As far as my overview of the posts go, all the different suggestions seem to work „sometimes“ for „some“ people. Alt-tab-ing and messing with the cores has some effect for me as well, but before I changed cpus, I had flatlines always everytime - so there has to be a solution that sticks. Unfortunately with the current cpu, nothing seem to work. I may get some short-term improvement sometimes, but nothing that lasts……

Tomorrow I will revert back to the 5900X. I‘m curious if that solves the problem again, which would be a result on its own, but unfortunately I doubt it. I seem to have been very lucky last time.

Some observations I made through the last hours of messing around

- the only time I had smooth fps again without any frametime spikes was after I spent 30 minutes adjusting the OSD of Afterburner with DCS running, frequently switching between applications without closing either one. After that I could run my benchmark scene a couple of times without issues. Unfortunately after a restart of DCS I was back to square one.

- the core usage of all cores jumps to 100 when a spike occurs. Can’t say if cause or effect of the problem.

- Due to the frequent tabbing between applications seemingly solving the issue, I had the suspicion that the fullscreen and or v-sync option could be a culprit or part of the problem. But altering those settings made no difference either way.

 

Hi man.

Sad thing you are telling us. We all will be praying for you  to have it back again and working with old CPU! 

Keep us informed...

Saludos.

Saca111

And yes: if it is not broken, don't fix it!

[Hiob]

Good morning folks, 

unfortunately I have to declare defeat. I wasn’t able to get the 5800X3D to run smoothly.

I came across one last promising idea. There is (was) a known issue with Ryzen CPUs/Mainboards causing stutters in games, related to the onboard fTPM (Trusted Platform Module). This should be fixed by up to date BIOS versions. The Mainboard I use has a double BIOS, whenever there is a problem it switches to the other BIOS (you can’t switch them deliberately). I didn’t notice at first that changing the CPU has switched the BIOS and that the second one wasn’t up to date - so that gave me hope that updating it would cure the problem.

Long story short, it didn’t. Nothing of the methods discussed did. No core switching, MT.lua on/off, power service, … only the maxfps to 120 brought some relieve (but only in scenarios with overall high fps, cross testing in other environments was jaggy again).

So I switched back to my trusty 5900X (btw. none of the other benchmarks I did - Heaven, Superposition, Cyberpunk - showed any advantage for the X3D anyway), and luckily - at first glance - it seem to work as flawless as before. 

Now I‘m sitting here, confused and somewhat disappointed. Tinkering with hard and software is part of the fun for me, so I don‘t mind the hours spent with this endeavor - and I was aware from the beginning that there was probably no gain with the the cpu change. Usually though, I end up with some result. Either finding some kind of solution or at least learning some new things. This time around…..

 

[AKULA_OPTIMUS]

Well, definetly the affinity thing worked for me, or at least, it improved the situation. What I did is to once you spawn in a plane, alt+tab to go to the windows task manager, turn off the cpu affinity of the last cpu core (I have 4), wait a couple of seconds, and turn the affinity of all cores on again. Then go back to DCS.

Here I show the graphs so you can see, hoping someone find it useful somehow.

 

[mosqui]

AKULS

Your method works but in mt the freezing continues. For ST everything is ok.thanks

[Sacarino111]

On 12/25/2023 at 11:00 AM, Hiob said:

and luckily - at first glance - it seem to work as flawless as before. 

Ufffff! That's a relief!

I the other hand, I was decided to change the CPU and the motherboard and RAM (in deed, renewing my stuff), but after your journey, I am less prone to do it. I will wait a bit to see if there is some real solution to it.

Nice to now you are back in gear and hve luck.

Saludos.

Saca111

22 hours ago, mosqui said:

AKULS

Your method works but in mt the freezing continues. For ST everything is ok.thanks

Well, I do use mt and for me it works (kind off); in heavy missions, in the Siria map, the play is not that smooth. Some times I have to switch to 3 cores a few times before it will go fluent. I also noticed that it work better if I wait until the mission/map is fully loaded before doing the switching.

My two cents...

Saludos

Saca111

[Hiob]

2 hours ago, Sacarino111 said:

Ufffff! That's a relief!

I the other hand, I was decided to change the CPU and the motherboard and RAM (in deed, renewing my stuff), but after your journey, I am less prone to do it. I will wait a bit to see if there is some real solution to it.

Nice to now you are back in gear and hve luck.

Saludos.

Saca111

Well, I do use mt and for me it works (kind off); in heavy missions, in the Siria map, the play is not that smooth. Some times I have to switch to 3 cores a few times before it will go fluent. I also noticed that it work better if I wait until the mission/map is fully loaded before doing the switching.

My two cents...

Saludos

Saca111

Yeah it works fine again. I‘m still a bit puzzled though. I have no idea, why the the 2x6 core cpu does better in my system than the 1x8 core. Intuitively I would have bet the other way round. I still think, it is the windows scheduler - but I have no idea currently why and how.

[MAXsenna]

Yeah it works fine again. I‘m still a bit puzzled though. I have no idea, why the the 2x6 core cpu does better in my system than the 1x8 core. Intuitively I would have bet the other way round. I still think, it is the windows scheduler - but I have no idea currently why and how.

May be somehow "it likes" devided by three and not two/four?
I have no stutters and my CPU is 10+ years old. Pretty much max out everything, and it's even smooth on the Marianas, though it slows down sometimes, but not a big issue. Six cores.

Sent from my SM-A536B using Tapatalk

[Hiob]

Just now, MAXsenna said:

May be somehow "it likes" devided by three and not two/four?
I have no stutters and my CPU is 10+ years old. Pretty much max out everything, and it's even smooth on the Marianas, though it slows down sometimes, but not a big issue. Six cores.

Sent from my SM-A536B using Tapatalk
 

When DCS is running, it loads cores on both ccds. Pretty random. Personally I don’t think that it matters, which cores exactly are used (unless it confuses P-cores and E-cores - which would be a windows flaw in my opinion, but Ryzen 5000 doesn’t have E-cores so that‘s not an issue here).

Come to think about it. The cores DCS uses seem random, but it uses always the same (I believe, from memory, need to check this). I wonder why that is and if this information is remembered by Windows or by DCS…..

[Top Jockey]

@Hiob, @Sacarino111 and everyone ...


Although my hardware is long outdated, and I'm using Open Beta 2.8.6.xxxx, yesterday I've stumbled in one option which considerably decreased my stutters :

- changing the 'define priority' to: "real time" at the Task Manager
 

I can confirm it helped my stutter situation because evertyme the stutters do appear :

- the FPS gray line (at the up left corner counter) used to have more pronounced drops, more durable and more frequent

- after selecting "real time" priority at the Task Manager the stutters decreased considerably

- that is perceived as the FPS line drops got fewer, less pronounced and less durable - as I highlight in red at the image below

Anyone of you already tried this ?

 

 

Edited December 27, 2023 by Top Jockey

[Sacarino111]

52 minutes ago, Top Jockey said:

@Hiob, @Sacarino111 and everyone ...


Although my hardware is long outdated, and I'm using Open Beta 2.8.6.xxxx, yesterday I've stumbled in one option which considerably decreased my stutters :

- changing the 'define priority' to: "real time" at the Task Manager
 

I can confirm it helped my stutter situation because evertyme the stutters do appear :

- the FPS gray line (at the up left corner counter) used to have more pronounced drops, more durable and more frequent

- after selecting "real time" priority at the Task Manager the stutters decreased considerably

- that is perceived as the FPS line drops got fewer, less pronounced and less durable - as I highlight in red at the image below

Anyone of you already tried this ?

 

 

 

HI.

Nope, but will do as soon as I can.

Thanks and happy new year!

[Hiob]

1 hour ago, Top Jockey said:

@Hiob, @Sacarino111 and everyone ...


Although my hardware is long outdated, and I'm using Open Beta 2.8.6.xxxx, yesterday I've stumbled in one option which considerably decreased my stutters :

- changing the 'define priority' to: "real time" at the Task Manager
 

I can confirm it helped my stutter situation because evertyme the stutters do appear :

- the FPS gray line (at the up left corner counter) used to have more pronounced drops, more durable and more frequent

- after selecting "real time" priority at the Task Manager the stutters decreased considerably

- that is perceived as the FPS line drops got fewer, less pronounced and less durable - as I highlight in red at the image below

Anyone of you already tried this ?

 

Unfortunately, yes. I did. Among all the other task and scheduler related stuff. Didn’t make any difference during my experiment with the 5800X3D.

Funny thing is, now as I‘m back to my default CPU, I don’t even need to do this to have it run smoothly. No core switching or disabling and no change in priority settings. (DCS runs at „normal“)

Currently I‘m trying (sporadically) to find a setting that creates the stutters……since I had them at a point in time with this CPU, too. 

So far every single cause or cure that I read of, seem to be just anecdotal (incl. my own). Meaning it only works sometimes for some people (or maybe for a specific hardware or software combination). I haven’t seen, tried, or found something that works reliably for everyone (or everytime for me).

Edit:

I have to say though, I‘m pretty OCD about a lean running system, meaning when I run DCS there is almost nothing else running apart from TrackIR (not even that when I‘m just Benchmarking). Maybe the task priority has a bigger effect when there is more running at the same time (on fewer cores). (for reference, the system on idle has ~80 processes running)

Edited December 27, 2023 by Hiob

[Sacarino111]

21 minutes ago, Hiob said:

Unfortunately, yes. I did. Among all the other task and scheduler related stuff. Didn’t make any difference during my experiment with the 5800X3D.

Funny thing is, now as I‘m back to my default CPU, I don’t even need to do this to have it run smoothly. No core switching or disabling and no change in priority settings. (DCS runs at „normal“)

Currently I‘m trying (sporadically) to find a setting that creates the stutters……since I had them at a point in time with this CPU, too. 

So far every single cause or cure that I read of, seem to be just anecdotal (incl. my own). Meaning it only works sometimes for some people (or maybe for a specific hardware or software combination). I haven’t seen, tried, or found something that works reliably for everyone (or everytime for me).

Edit:

I have to say though, I‘m pretty OCD about a lean running system, meaning when I run DCS there is almost nothing else running apart from TrackIR (not even that when I‘m just Benchmarking). Maybe the task priority has a bigger effect when there is more running at the same time (on fewer cores). (for reference, the system on idle has ~80 processes running)

 

Hi.

This start to point out to the motherboard and the BIOS version. I should try to update my BIOS first...

Saludos.

Saca111