Severe Frame Lag for the last week

[Jakes]

Hi everyone.

Hoping someone can help, I am completely at a loss.

DCS MT version was working flawlessly up to about the 8th of February when it just started glitching like crazy in MP. Switched over to ST and that helped for a few days. Since about the 15th I have been have massive lag spikes freezing the game for up 30 seconds in some cases...so for the last 5 days I have been down the rabbit hole.

To start, I had no mods installed during this testing... I have removed everything, and it made no difference. The tests today were done using the Raven 1 Campaign - Mission 1, which was working flawlessly up to a few days ago when I found out Viacom causes issues. Removed it and DCS performance got worse.
I have made no changes to my setup, no new or strange mods, everything I have worked flawlessly at MAX settings. I was flying almost daily with no issues. Also, no other games on my pc have any issues, only DCS.
So here is what I have tried:

- Capped FPS at 120  -  No change
- Capped fps at 90  -  No change
- Core Park thing(can't remember the name)  -  All cores unparked and ready to go  -  No change
- Hotplug Off  -  No Change (Last test, I switched it back on during the test and no change)
- Power services disabled  -  No Change
- Affinity trick for the processor  -  No change in ST but a tiny improvement in MT (Could fly a few more minutes before it went to lag-hell)
- Page File  -  As massive as I could make it, as well as standard  -  No changes
- Root Enumerator trick  -  No change (Also mention in another thread)
- DCS in Full Screen vs Windowed  -  No Change at all
- Anisotropic Filtering set to 8/4/2  -  No Change
- Textures to Med  -  No Change
- Deep repair  -  No difference
- renaming saved games folder and letting it generate a new version  -  No change
- Process Lasso installed  -  changes had No effect

I am all out of ideas here...Please can anyone help?

Windows and all drivers are up to date. All peripherals are the same as they have been for months, even in the same ports.
Ryzen 9 5950X 16 Core - NVidia Geforce RTX 3090  -  64Gb Ram

EDITs:
I have also done the Spudknocker fix excluding DCS and all related programs from Defender.
Tacview was disabled too (Usually the cause of this issue so the first thing I do).
After running MT, my whole pc lags after exiting DCS, needing a restart to get it functional again. Only program to cause this issue,

Post Lasso MT Test - dcs.log MT Post many changes - dcs.log Affinity Changes - No effect - dcs.log ST Post Deep Repair - dcs.log MT Post Deep Repair - dcs.log DxDiag.txt MT Pre Deep Repair - dcs.log

Edited February 20, 2024 by Jakes
Additional info

[silverdevil]

1 hour ago, Jakes said:

Hi everyone.

Hoping someone can help, I am completely at a loss.

DCS MT version was working flawlessly up to about the 8th of February when it just started glitching like crazy in MP. Switched over to ST and that helped for a few days. Since about the 15th I have been have massive lag spikes freezing the game for up 30 seconds in some cases...so for the last 5 days I have been down the rabbit hole.

To start, I had no mods installed during this testing... I have removed everything, and it made no difference. The tests today were done using the Raven 1 Campaign - Mission 1, which was working flawlessly up to a few days ago when I found out Viacom causes issues. Removed it and DCS performance got worse.
I have made no changes to my setup, no new or strange mods, everything I have worked flawlessly at MAX settings. I was flying almost daily with no issues. Also, no other games on my pc have any issues, only DCS.
So here is what I have tried:

- Capped FPS at 120  -  No change
- Capped fps at 90  -  No change
- Core Park thing(can't remember the name)  -  All cores unparked and ready to go  -  No change
- Hotplug Off  -  No Change (Last test, I switched it back on during the test and no change)
- Power services disabled  -  No Change
- Affinity trick for the processor  -  No change in ST but a tiny improvement in MT (Could fly a few more minutes before it went to lag-hell)
- Page File  -  As massive as I could make it, as well as standard  -  No changes
- Root Enumerator trick  -  No change (Also mention in another thread)
- DCS in Full Screen vs Windowed  -  No Change at all
- Anisotropic Filtering set to 8/4/2  -  No Change
- Textures to Med  -  No Change
- Deep repair  -  No difference
- renaming saved games folder and letting it generate a new version  -  No change
- Process Lasso installed  -  changes had No effect

I am all out of ideas here...Please can anyone help?

Windows and all drivers are up to date. All peripherals are the same as they have been for months, even in the same ports.
Ryzen 9 5950X 16 Core - NVidia Geforce RTX 3090  -  64Gb Ram

EDITs:
I have also done the Spudknocker fix excluding DCS and all related programs from Defender.
Tacview was disabled too (Usually the cause of this issue so the first thing I do).
After running MT, my whole pc lags after exiting DCS, needing a restart to get it functional again. Only program to cause this issue,

yikes a lot to digest here. i think it is best to go slow. i looked at your log and see you have no AA. change to DLAA. beware of ghosting. also post screenshots of your Nvidia settings.

here are mine

Edited February 20, 2024 by silverdevil

[Jakes]

1 hour ago, silverdevil said:

yikes a lot to digest here. i think it is best to go slow. i looked at your log and see you have no AA. change to DLAA. beware of ghosting. also post screenshots of your Nvidia settings.

here are mine

 

DLAA is one of the things I switched off while testing. The DCS settings screen is how it was with the last test, which is the best performance I have had since the issue started.
Normally everything is at it's highest with no issues.

The Nvidia settings are unchanged for the last 6+ months.

I will try your settings profile and see how that goes.

 nullnullnull null

[Jakes]

@silverdevil Your settings made it much much worse on my system unfortunately

[Jakes]

@silverdevil I FOUND THE FIX!
Watching a video from @Reflected and he recommends trying Quick CPU to unpark the cores.
Tried it and I am back to running max everything and smoother than ever before!

Looks like the previous parking app I used has vanished off my machine and the last windows update decided my pc is a parking lot.
Disable CPU Core Parking Utility (coderbag.com)
 

 

[Jakes]

Looks like all the fixes were just temporary. All the issues reported are WORSE now after the update.
EVERYTHING, even my BIOS is up to date and still having major issues with frame drops and stutters making flying damn near impossible.
Here is my latest log file from a test now...but issue is just as bad in MT and ST.
1 screen or extended screen...DCS as admin or not... No mods...Mods... Cores unparked... Affinity untick re-tick.... Change saved games folder and generate new one... along with redoing all the steps previously mentioned... NOTHING helps and it is only DCS having any issues.
I have tried everything and all I get is worse and worse performance. Posting this here and hoping @BIGNEWY and team find some sort of help from this.
Next step is a format and try again from scratch....

dcs.log

dcs.log.old

Edited March 2, 2024 by Jakes
Additional info

[BIGNEWY]

Hi 

some advice 

Your RAM 65456 MB
Your Pagefile 128000 MB

set the pagefile to managed by windows, you have plenty of RAM already, and it will free up some drive space. 

Check your scripts 

Error
attempt to index a nil value
Line
359
Script
C:\Users\mulle\Saved Games\DCS.openbeta\Scripts\DCS-BIOS\lib\modules\aircraft_modules\FC3.lua

Process Lasso detected - Process Lasso can cause issues with DCS MT. Consider disabling it to test.

 

Check your windows settings for HAGs and resave your NVIDIA ( change a value and resave it ) I've seen issues after windows updates. 

if that does not help redo your gpu driver. 

 

 

 

[Jakes]

1 hour ago, BIGNEWY said:

Hi 

some advice 

Your RAM 65456 MB

Hi there.

Thanks for your response!

I set my pagefile to be managed by windows.
Re-Installed the latest version of DCS-BIOS.
Uninstalled Process Lasso.

Tested but still had some nasty dips....but it was better.

Then I checked my HAG settings and both HAG Scheduling and Optimizations for windowed games were off.
Switched ON HAG Scheduling and saw a massive improvement.
Spent some time on a busy Syria MP server that usually has the most and worst spikes....had one barely noticeable spike in 35min.
Will keep testing and see what happens on different servers and campaign missions.

[Jakes]

Sorry @BIGNEWY, seems I was a little too happy and replied too soon...and sadly it's back to what it was/worse with no changes.
I did several tests and will attach the logs for each but here is a breakdown of them:

1) Post HAG Scheduling 4YA SYR B - dcs:  This is the log after all the changes you recommended. Busy 4YA Syria server and it was damn near flawless.

2) POST Post Hag Scheduling test 4YA PG M - dcs:  This was after I closed the game and went back in. Medium busy 4YA PG server, glitched and stuttered badly.

3) POST POST post HAG Scheduling ZA PG Server Q - dcs:  This was again after restarting DCS, local server with only me on it. glitched and stuttered worse than ever.

Here is re-installed the GPU drivers:
4) Post GPU Driver Re-Install ZA PG q - dcs:  Stutter was better for a few seconds and then went brutally bad again.

Any more ideas?

Post GPU Driver Re-Install ZA PG q - dcs.log Post HAG Scheduling 4YA SYR B - dcs.log POST Post Hag Scheduling test 4YA PG M - dcs.log POST POST post HAG Scheduling ZA PG Server Q - dcs.log

[Pendragon]

The fix mentioned below has worked pretty well for me, somewhat similar specs as you:

 

 

[Jakes]

2 hours ago, Pendragon said:

The fix mentioned below has worked pretty well for me, somewhat similar specs as you:

 

 

Thanks for this but I ran a full pc format. Re-installed all mt DCS items and it is working better than before. Maxed out settings looking amazing with 100+ frames in most cases. Just Syria still hurt the FPS but not badly enough to cause stutters.