DCS Randomly runs bad

[RickJamesBish]

i7-13700k - Rog Strix 4090 - 32gb RAM - 2TB NVME Drive

After loading DCS and selecting a mission, the mission will sometimes load without issue and play great. The next time, same or different mission, I can tell something is not right by the load screen. It takes significantly longer to load each part. Sometimes I can bring up task manager, and as soon as I do, it starts to load normal. This also will happen when opening a mission in the editor, the load is normal and therefore the editing is smooth, but sometime the load is extremely slow, and if I wait for it to complete, the editing is bogged down and slow.

When these things happen and I go view task manager, its shows DCS Power Usage as Very High, although the CPU and GPU usage are low, but not sure if it shows that because I have switched focus to task manager. Also, sometime the mouse movement is slow when back at desktop while checking task manager and switch back to the game the mouse movement remains slow and jumpy.

I have closed down all tasks running to reduce the chance of something interfering with the game. I check HWINFO after these instances and there are no events or signs of high usage. It almost seems to me like a memory leak. When it does start normally I can fly for hours without issue, but I can always tell by the way it loads if the session is going to be playable. Also performance is great when its loads correctly. Extremely smooth and enjoyable.

The main steps I have taken are...

1. Close all unnecessary programs.
2. Moved the game to three different NVME drives in case it was a drive issue.
3. Latest GPU drivers as well as rolling back a few.
 

Any help appreciated. This crap shoot has started to get very annoying.

[silverdevil]

6 minutes ago, RickJamesBish said:

i7-13700k - Rog Strix 4090 - 32gb RAM - 2TB NVME Drive

After loading DCS and selecting a mission, the mission will sometimes load without issue and play great. The next time, same or different mission, I can tell something is not right by the load screen. It takes significantly longer to load each part. Sometimes I can bring up task manager, and as soon as I do, it starts to load normal. This also will happen when opening a mission in the editor, the load is normal and therefore the editing is smooth, but sometime the load is extremely slow, and if I wait for it to complete, the editing is bogged down and slow.

When these things happen and I go view task manager, its shows DCS Power Usage as Very High, although the CPU and GPU usage are low, but not sure if it shows that because I have switched focus to task manager. Also, sometime the mouse movement is slow when back at desktop while checking task manager and switch back to the game the mouse movement remains slow and jumpy.

I have closed down all tasks running to reduce the chance of something interfering with the game. I check HWINFO after these instances and there are no events or signs of high usage. It almost seems to me like a memory leak. When it does start normally I can fly for hours without issue, but I can always tell by the way it loads if the session is going to be playable. Also performance is great when its loads correctly. Extremely smooth and enjoyable.

The main steps I have taken are...

1. Close all unnecessary programs.
2. Moved the game to three different NVME drives in case it was a drive issue.
3. Latest GPU drivers as well as rolling back a few.
 

Any help appreciated. This crap shoot has started to get very annoying.

hello. please post dcs.log found in saved games\dcs\logs. there might be some clues.

[BIGNEWY]

12 minutes ago, RickJamesBish said:

i7-13700k - Rog Strix 4090 - 32gb RAM - 2TB NVME Drive

After loading DCS and selecting a mission, the mission will sometimes load without issue and play great. The next time, same or different mission, I can tell something is not right by the load screen. It takes significantly longer to load each part. Sometimes I can bring up task manager, and as soon as I do, it starts to load normal. This also will happen when opening a mission in the editor, the load is normal and therefore the editing is smooth, but sometime the load is extremely slow, and if I wait for it to complete, the editing is bogged down and slow.

When these things happen and I go view task manager, its shows DCS Power Usage as Very High, although the CPU and GPU usage are low, but not sure if it shows that because I have switched focus to task manager. Also, sometime the mouse movement is slow when back at desktop while checking task manager and switch back to the game the mouse movement remains slow and jumpy.

I have closed down all tasks running to reduce the chance of something interfering with the game. I check HWINFO after these instances and there are no events or signs of high usage. It almost seems to me like a memory leak. When it does start normally I can fly for hours without issue, but I can always tell by the way it loads if the session is going to be playable. Also performance is great when its loads correctly. Extremely smooth and enjoyable.

The main steps I have taken are...

1. Close all unnecessary programs.
2. Moved the game to three different NVME drives in case it was a drive issue.
3. Latest GPU drivers as well as rolling back a few.
 

Any help appreciated. This crap shoot has started to get very annoying.

Hi as silverdevil mentions please attach your dcs log and your dxdiag it will give us some data to look at. 

thank you

[RickJamesBish]

On 1/15/2024 at 1:46 PM, silverdevil said:

hello. please post dcs.log found in saved games\dcs\logs. there might be some clues.

Sorry for the delay. I think notification went to spam. Here is the log file. It happens every time I play. Today it happened early on but then I played a nice training session with no issue. Not sure how the log file works so if this does not seem to contain the info needed, I can delete this log file and run the game again. I am confident it will happen again.

Another thing I noticed that seems to happen when this issue is going to occur is that during loading, a terrain ini 0 appears, then terrain ini 1,  something I never notice when the game loads normally, but then again it may just happen so fast when it loads normally that I don't see it.

dcs.log.old

dcs.log

Edited January 18, 2024 by RickJamesBish

[silverdevil]

hello. try to up your pagefile

from the log

2024-01-18 16:34:45.020 INFO    APP (Main): CPU cores: 16, threads: 24, System RAM: 32476 MB, Pagefile: 7424 MB

 

 

[RickJamesBish]

12 hours ago, silverdevil said:

hello. try to up your pagefile

from the log

2024-01-18 16:34:45.020 INFO    APP (Main): CPU cores: 16, threads: 24, System RAM: 32476 MB, Pagefile: 7424 MB

 

 

Thanks, I will give it try. Video says to choose the fastest drive and disable the others. All of my drives are NVME and are identical so not sure which one to adjust, the windows OS drive, drive the game is installed on, or one of the other drives that is mainly for storage?

[silverdevil]

7 hours ago, RickJamesBish said:

Thanks, I will give it try. Video says to choose the fastest drive and disable the others. All of my drives are NVME and are identical so not sure which one to adjust, the windows OS drive, drive the game is installed on, or one of the other drives that is mainly for storage?

Hello. You can put on any drive if they are the same. There may be some merits to put it on the drive other than where DCS resides.

[RickJamesBish]

2 hours ago, silverdevil said:

Hello. You can put on any drive if they are the same. There may be some merits to put it on the drive other than where DCS resides.

 

On 1/15/2024 at 1:50 PM, BIGNEWY said:

Hi as silverdevil mentions please attach your dcs log and your dxdiag it will give us some data to look at. 

thank you

So after increasing page file the issue still persists. I just played a small training mission consisting of one aircraft (myself), a radar, two SAMs, a group of tanks and bmps. I played that same mission this morning all the way through without a hiccup but did not want to report back that the issue was fixed since I knew from experience I can play fine once and then it be total crap the next time.

Sure enough after I took off, I got a freeze. Alt+Tab and bring up task manger. The same Very High power usage, which I am not sure if that is normal or not. The game unfreezes as it normally does when I pull up task manager. Alt tab back to game and I continue to fly and another freeze. Repeat alt tab to task manager. Unfreezes, fly, repeat.  The amount of time the game unfreezes gets shorter and shorter each time until the system is actually running behind... meaning my mouse movement and clicks visually fall behind. I can watch what I was doing 20 seconds ago.

This time I rode it out until I could finally ESC to menu. The sluggish mouse movement continues until I finally choose to exit the game, which in itself takes about 20 seconds to close after clicking exit. The system instantly runs like nothing is wrong. I open a different high GPU CPU usage game immediately and it runs like a top. 

I have attached the log files again since I exited during the anomaly in hopes that something shows up there.

 

dcs.log dcs.log.old debrief.log

Edited January 19, 2024 by RickJamesBish

[silverdevil]

7 minutes ago, RickJamesBish said:

So after increasing page file the issue still persists. I just played a small training mission consisting of one aircraft (myself), a radar, two SAMs, a group of tanks and bmps. I played that same mission this morning all the way through without a hiccup but did not want to report back that the issue was fixed since I knew from experience I can play fine once and then it be total crap the next time.

Sure enough after I took off, I got a freeze. Alt+Tab and bring up task manger. The same Very High power usage, which I am not sure if that is normal or not. The game unfreezes as it normally does when I pull up task manager. Alt tab back to game and I continue to fly and another freeze. Repeat alt tab to task manager. Unfreezes, fly, repeat.  The amount of time the game unfreezes gets shorter and shorter each time until the system is actually running behind... meaning my mouse movement and clicks visually fall behind. I can watch what I was doing 20 seconds ago.

This time I rode it out until I could finally ESC to menu. The sluggish mouse movement continues until I finally choose to exit the game, which in itself takes about 20 seconds to close after clicking exit. The system instantly runs like nothing is wrong. I open a different high GPU CPU usage game immediately and it runs like a top. 

I have attached the log files again since I exited during the anomaly in hopes that something shows up there.

i am seeing in the latest dcs.log that your pagefile is still set low. 

2024-01-19 20:10:19.176 INFO    APP (Main): CPU cores: 16, threads: 24, System RAM: 32476 MB, Pagefile: 16384 MB

change you power scheme to "ultimate"

 https://www.howtogeek.com/368781/how-to-enable-ultimate-performance-power-plan-in-windows-10/

[RickJamesBish]

I did try with both set to 32768 and had the same issues as well. I read in the thread you originally linked that someone had issues with 32 and changed it to 16 so I configured it that way this last time hoping it was the happy place, but no.

Edited January 19, 2024 by RickJamesBish

[silverdevil]

14 minutes ago, RickJamesBish said:

I did try with both set to 32768 and had the same issues as well. I read in the thread you originally linked that someone had issues with 32 and changed it to 16 so I configured it that way this last time hoping it was the happy place, but no.

 

i am not convinced your issue is related to resources or is it something else. but it is recommended to have at least 50 GB of memory needed for MP. so it does not hurt having 32 GB pagefile.

did you setup the power profile?

Edited January 19, 2024 by silverdevil

[RickJamesBish]

12 hours ago, silverdevil said:

i am not convinced your issue is related to resources or is it something else. but it is recommended to have at least 50 GB of memory needed for MP. so it does not hurt having 32 GB pagefile.

did you setup the power profile?

 

Yes my power profile is set. I turned down pagefile to allow windows to manage and it set it to 7168MB. Just played for an hour no issue, but I have done that before with it set to auto. Other than the issue occurring daily, it is not consistent enough to track it down. 

[RickJamesBish]

Is there anything unusual about the terrain_ini 0 that appears when the game is taking an usually long time to load?  It seems that when it loads normally, I only see terrain_ini 1. 

[silverdevil]

2 hours ago, RickJamesBish said:

Is there anything unusual about the terrain_ini 0 that appears when the game is taking an usually long time to load?  It seems that when it loads normally, I only see terrain_ini 1. 

i do not believe so. 

have you emptied shader folders? have you tried a different mission?

this is only my opinion and please do not take it as a lecture, but it seems to me in my experience with helping others in the forum, that the most common problem with performance is the amount of memory. you have great hardware. good gfx. good processor. good nvme drive. and then only 32 GB of RAM. it may be placebo in my case. i have 128 GB of RAM and all else less than you and my system runs without any hitches.

there could be other things on your system, like windows and gfx drivers settings, that need to be massaged too.

[hawa0835]

I agree that it is a random problem. Sometimes the game works flawlessly, and sometimes it doesn't.

[RickJamesBish]

On 1/21/2024 at 7:27 AM, silverdevil said:

i do not believe so. 

have you emptied shader folders? have you tried a different mission?

this is only my opinion and please do not take it as a lecture, but it seems to me in my experience with helping others in the forum, that the most common problem with performance is the amount of memory. you have great hardware. good gfx. good processor. good nvme drive. and then only 32 GB of RAM. it may be placebo in my case. i have 128 GB of RAM and all else less than you and my system runs without any hitches.

there could be other things on your system, like windows and gfx drivers settings, that need to be massaged too.

Yes I have tried that all. I do not think RAM is the issue. HWINFO shows min / max / avg system RAM usage. After playing I always check this and the results are typically the same, whether the game ran smoothly or has started acting up. For the whole system, average usage during the sim is around 16gb usage and max is 21gb. I also have friends that we fly together on our dedicated server. They have lower end systems overall and less ram (16gb). They will continue to fly while I'm frozen.

I have run memtest and it came back clean. Did a completely fresh install of the game on my 4 NVME drives and closed down all background apps that were not necessary. Statistically, I have titles that push my GPU and CPU and Ram usage more than what I am throwing at it with DCS and they run with zero issues. 

Appreciate your help and suggestions. I will just hold off on any future mod purchases until I figure this out.

[RickJamesBish]

This is still unsolved for the most part. I had two 16GB (32GB. I added two more since it was suggested RAM amount may be the issue. That was a disaster and also when I figured out that my motherboard only supports 2 DIMMS. Adding the second kit actually caused all of my games to lock up within seconds of launching. Still wanting to eliminate RAM amount as the issue, I removed all 4 DIMMS and installed two new 32GB Dimms for a total of 64GB. Confident that ram amount is not the issue as the system is back to all games running great with the exception of DCS having its random performance issues.

In case I did not mention it, I also eliminated all hardware. I replaced the MB, CPU, RAM, GPU, M.2 (only installed one). Fresh install of windows and all drivers, bios, etc. I get the same occurrence of DCS random performance issues. I have not tried every module but do know that it happens with the F16 and SU25.

[silverdevil]

10 hours ago, RickJamesBish said:

This is still unsolved for the most part. I had two 16GB (32GB. I added two more since it was suggested RAM amount may be the issue. That was a disaster and also when I figured out that my motherboard only supports 2 DIMMS. Adding the second kit actually caused all of my games to lock up within seconds of launching. Still wanting to eliminate RAM amount as the issue, I removed all 4 DIMMS and installed two new 32GB Dimms for a total of 64GB. Confident that ram amount is not the issue as the system is back to all games running great with the exception of DCS having its random performance issues.

In case I did not mention it, I also eliminated all hardware. I replaced the MB, CPU, RAM, GPU, M.2 (only installed one). Fresh install of windows and all drivers, bios, etc. I get the same occurrence of DCS random performance issues. I have not tried every module but do know that it happens with the F16 and SU25.

something i did not notice in all these posts. what AV software do you use? if nothing else, it is likely defender. either way i suggest you add your game install folder to exceptions. i went from 2 minutes to 30 seconds to load. can you post another dcs.log?

[RickJamesBish]

For those looking, and since it apparently is not important enough to put a sticky in the performance bug section, the issue was the Intel P-Core E-Core. My issue was resolved by disabling Core #8. 

I see this was hit upon a year ago and now it is pretty well know that the issue is the Intel Cores, so not really understanding why a sticky has not been made.

Edited April 12, 2024 by RickJamesBish

[RickJamesBish]

Apparently Intel has released a driver to address this. It does not come right out and say it addressed this issue but it does distribute work load between P and E cores. It was initially only available for the GEN 14.  I found a link that announced support had been extended to gen 12 and 12 so I checked the Asus Website for my Maximus Z790 and the new driver was there. Since installing and enabling in my bios, I have not had the performance issue yet. I am going to continue to test throughout the evening.

Edited April 15, 2024 by RickJamesBish

[Flappie]

Thanks for your feedback. I'll relay your post on other threads.

[slughead]

7 hours ago, RickJamesBish said:

Apparently Intel has released a driver to address this. It does not come right out and say it addressed this issue but it does distribute work load between P and E cores. It was initially only available for the GEN 14.  I found a link that announced support had been extended to gen 12 and 12 so  I checked the Asus Website for my Maximus Z790 and the new driver was there. Since installing and enabling in my bios, I have not had the performance issue yet. I am going to continue to test throughout the evening.

 

Could you share some details please? A screenshot of the driver and release notes or a link to it. Also what did you change on the bios. A screenshot or photo would be of great help.

[AdrianL]

8 hours ago, RickJamesBish said:

Intel has released a driver to address this

Are you referring to Intel Dynamic Tuning Technology? https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000058479/graphics.html
 

[QuiGon]

1 hour ago, AdrianL said:

Are you referring to Intel Dynamic Tuning Technology? https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000058479/graphics.html

Or maybe he is referring to Intel Application Optimization, which uses DTT https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000095419/processors.html

[RickJamesBish]

1 hour ago, QuiGon said:

Or maybe he is referring to Intel Application Optimization, which uses DTT https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000095419/processors.html

Yes, both of these, although it is unclear if the Intel Application Optimization is needed or not. In the Reddit Intel group, the person that appears to be from Intel is vague with responses. The App has a list of tested / supported games that you can enable or disable as individually or as a whole, but also has an Advanced tic box, which by description makes it sound like it is for testing on games not listed.  When asked about that, he states on multiple occasions that the advanced option is to try out the games in the list, which made absolutely no sense. He dances around that aspect quite well.

 

3 hours ago, slughead said:

Could you share some details please? A screenshot of the driver and release notes or a link to it. Also what did you change on the bios. A screenshot or photo would be of great help.

The DDT driver is something Intel provides to the MB Manufacturers so I can't really link to it since there are so many but is referred to as DDT

Intel® Application Optimization with Advanced Mode  (as far as I know only available from Microsoft Store)

Intel to roll out 14th Gen's game optimization software to older 12/13th Gen hybrid CPUs after all | PC Gamer

Here is a link to MSI and you can see here they only mention the Gen 14, which in a video about the core issues, the person stated they reached out to Intel and was told they had no immediate plans to support 12 and 13 Gen.. but that obviously changed. (see link above).

How to Enable Intel Application Optimization on MSI Motherboards

For my Z790 ASUS MB, you enable it in BIOS under Advanced > Thermal Configuration > Intel Dynamic Tuning Technology Configuration.

 

It would be nice if someone at ED reached out to Intel about this to get some details...   And followed up with what they find, if anything.

Edited April 15, 2024 by RickJamesBish