Massive FPS spikes

[LupinYonder]

Hi there.

I recently got a second monitor and am running DSC on both with the ABRIS and Shval camera on the smaller right hand monitor.

 

Now I've been playing around with my ATI CCC settings trying to find a sweet compromise between FPS and GFX. When I'm flying in uncluttered air space with few buildings I run a glorious 55-60fps ( with DCS max affinity and phantom monitor fix ) but I often get massive FPS spikes on some missions, with fps dropping down to 15 or even 5 fps for a few moments or longer, sometimes settling around 25fps.

 

I have been trying to nail down what gfx setting ( AA, AF etc.. ) or game artefact is causing these huge slowdowns, I at first thought it was buildings but no, or possibly other Helis, don’t think so...

 

 

Here is my system and my ATI CCC settings for your expert eyes ;-)

 

and my ATI CCC settings

8X Anti Aliasing

8X Anisotropic Filtering

Standard Catalyist AI

Mipmap Detail lvl = Quality

Wait for vertical refresh On

Adaptive Anti Aliasing off

Triple Buffering On

 

and as is shown in my system specs my card is Over clocked but also heavy cooled, under full load it never gets above 55c

 

My in game DCS Black shark Gfx settings are

Textures = High

Scenes = Medium

Civ Traffic = Yes

Water = Normal

Visb Range = High

Heat Blur = On

Shadows = Full

Resolution = 1920x1080 ( i also have a second monitor running at 1280X1024 )

Res of cockpit displays = 512

 

Any ideas where i might cure this FPS spike issue?

 

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Edited April 27, 2009 by LupinYonder
Forgot to add ingame settings

[EtherealN]

Have you tested disabling the V-sync? I get a slightly higher occurance of stutters when I have that on, but end up pretty much having to use it due to the alternative being to figure out how to get rid of some really really nasty tearing while using TrackIR.

[LupinYonder]

I will try that but i doubt its the problem, thanks anyway.

 

Will report back if this is a solution

 

This did not solve the problem but a helpful fellow DCS player told me he had similar problems when running in windowed mode.

 

Simple question = Can I run dual monitors in full screen mode to improve performance and cure these fps spikes?

Edited April 27, 2009 by LupinYonder

[LupinYonder]

Massive FPS spikes

 

Double post

Edited April 30, 2009 by LupinYonder
Double post

[Mxyzpylk]

I will try that but i doubt its the problem, thanks anyway.

 

Will report back if this is a solution

 

This did not solve the problem but a helpful fellow DCS player told me he had similar problems when running in windowed mode.

 

Simple question = Can I run dual monitors in full screen mode to improve performance and cure these fps spikes?

 

simple answer = No. Not in Vista anyway, not sure about XP.

 

I think the spikes have something to do with ATI CCC. I was running ATITool and don't remember having FPS ups and downs. I can't get ATITool to work anymore so I had to switch to ATI CCC and that's when the problems arose for me. I wish someone had a simple fix to get ATITool working in Vista 64.

Edited April 29, 2009 by Mxyzpylk
added info

[LupinYonder]

Thats an interesting point, i could try DL'ing an ATI tuner program and copying my settings that im using with CCC and see if i get any improvements

 

Ok, it was using multi monitor that was the culprit. I think because my main monitor is 24inch and my second is 17, my radeon 4870 512mb couldn't really handle it :-(.

 

Now whether it was due to running in windowed mode or because of running two monitors I do not know but I will deff experiment again once the patch is out to see if that resolves anything.

Edited April 30, 2009 by LupinYonder
problem solved

[Washer UK]

For the resolutions you are using on the main screen 1920x1080 id guess that the ATI 4870 would want more than 512 meg of ram