fixed Huge SP performance degradation with 2.9.7.58923 and 2.9.6.58056 compared to DCS 2.9.5.55918

[NoJoy]

I do have huge performance drops but it only affects Syria and the Persian Gulf map. Caucasus and NTTR runs smooth as they're used to.
Since the last update DCS 2.9.7.59263 Syria & the Gulf I have 5 - 15 FPS where I did have some 60 - 70.

Seems like the Chinook and Apache have at least something to do with. When I delete them from the missions from these maps frames recover to 15 to 30ish.
Though - unflyable frames.

I know trk files are a must and I wouldn't mind to upload some but right now I don't have time as there would be 2 for each map and with and without the helos to see the difference.
Maybe some later... sorry.

[A Hamburgler]

32 minutes ago, tmz said:

The problem is the performance degradation between 2.9.5 and 2.9.6/2.9.7. What used to work does not anymore, and that is a big problem for those of use that run missions with large unit counts. How can you simulate a war with 20 planes and 50 ground units?

Thats the point of this thread. In 2.9.5 I could easily run a mission with over 600 units in total and now in 2.9.7 Im lucky if I can get 50 units.

[BIGNEWY]

59 minutes ago, A Hamburgler said:

Thats the point of this thread. In 2.9.5 I could easily run a mission with over 600 units in total and now in 2.9.7 Im lucky if I can get 50 units.

We understand that and are looking into the issues people are seeing, but sometimes its not always DCS, windows updates, driver updates, scripts or custom mods can all play a part in performance issues. 

Renaming your DCS folder in saved games is a good place to start when looking for issues, it backs it up, so can be reverted to if needs be, or for moving input folder to the new DCS folder which is created when you start DCS again. 

If you notice a performance improvement after creating a new DCS folder in saved games, something in there will be adding to the performance impact being seen. 

As mentioned we continue to look at FPS issues in DCS and are working on optimisations also.

thank you  

[Esac_mirmidon]

I was having FPS spikes every six seconds in several own created missions with a lot of units, triggers, scripts loaded, radio commands, etc. 

Reading about renaming users fólder will help i opted for trying first renaming the scripts fólder inside users and......

Fixed!!!!

No more spikes on any mission. Then i recovered my usual scripts for simple radio and a pair more like The Way, and everything works like a charm.

 

Worth trying renaming scripts fólder and trying after or even the whole users folder, but you must know what to recover like control input, missions, script files, etc

[Darcaem]

Of course it is not always DCS, we are mixing several problems not related with the sim itself: caused by mods (OH6H gunner script, for example), the mouse high polling rate bug, "unoptimized settings" (we are doomed to have to study regularly all the lattest posts and updates about our graphic's card drivers in order to play), and sometimes bad designed missions (we all make mistakes while programming lua code in order to make our missions a little bit spicy).

But it is obvious there are also issues caused by DCS itself such as the huge filesize of textures (the CH47F for example, but there might be more? https://forum.dcs.world/topic/356550-normal-maps-roughmet-and-flir-texture-sizes/#comment-5508632), some sort of memory miss-management (why do you have to restart the sim in order to change maps? If you launch a mission in Sinai and then another one on Kola there are stutter, if you close DCS and open it again, and launch the same Kola mission, it is smooth), and obviously something related to pathfinding, or detection, or God-knows-what related to units making the very same mission that works flawlesly in 2.9.5 does not from 2.9.6 up (having removed the already known bugged mods and scripts)

I at least, being a software engineer myself, appreciate all the effort and know how hard it is to properly test software taking into account the huge diversity of hardware and how stupid we users are creating problems ourselves (even more with the freedom DCS gives us being able to use custom code to build missions and allowing custom mods) in manners a developer would have never though. But please, do not overlook the core problems just because they can be overcome with "horse power" throwing more money into people's setups (unless the business model is focused only on whales who can spend it).

PS: ok, having cried a little bit with this post, I shall return to that thing called "the outside world". At least being unable to fly is making me spend less time on the computer

[Rolling]

Maybe consider getting Open Beta back, to get more customer feedback for experimental updates.....

[BIGNEWY]

28 minutes ago, Rolling said:

Maybe consider getting Open Beta back, to get more customer feedback for experimental updates.....

No plans to sorry. And lets not derail this thread with the discussion, keep it for the performance issues. 

thanks

[Red.01]

I suffered with framerate and crash's so decided to rename my saved games.

Now I get very slow bootup speed of dcs,hangs on the module manager and also a strange "waiting for another copy of dcs to close" before restarting after changing the gui scale.

[BIGNEWY]

4 minutes ago, Red.01 said:

I suffered with framerate and crash's so decided to rename my saved games.

Now I get very slow bootup speed of dcs,hangs on the module manager and also a strange "waiting for another copy of dcs to close" before restarting after changing the gui scale.

Can you attach your dcs log? 

Also bear in mind the first load will take longer as it is creating shaders

Regarding another copy, when the launcher starts take your time and make sure the login has finished, sometimes being to quick with clicking creates this scenario 

 

[Glide]

I experienced a massive batch of those stutters today on Syria over Palmyra.  One of my F4's had parked under the hardened shelter at sunset.  This was in VR as I turned my viewport toward it.  This is a very heavy Apache mission that is otherwise smooth. 

Edited August 23, 2024 by Glide

[BIGNEWY]

4 minutes ago, Glide said:

I experienced a massive batch of those stutters today on Syria over Palmyra.  One of my F4's had parked under the hardened shelter at sunset.  This was in VR as I turned my viewport toward it.  This is a very heavy Apache mission that is otherwise smooth. 

 

We are working on some improved LOD's for AH-64's that should help a little here. 

thanks

[Glide]

I noticed that I could get the FPS graph to oscillate by nodding my head up and down in the first shot.  It did not do that with side to side motion (facing ocean with terrain below my feet on eject).  That made me think about off screen cache for terrain.  I cranked up Preload Radius to the max, and a lot of that spikey behaviour went away.  I hope this helps.

Edit.  I can get the tick tick to occur on demand.  I turn my head toward the sun on the last shot, and the tick tick starts.

Edited August 23, 2024 by Glide

[A Hamburgler]

11 hours ago, BIGNEWY said:

We understand that and are looking into the issues people are seeing, but sometimes its not always DCS, windows updates, driver updates, scripts or custom mods can all play a part in performance issues. 

Renaming your DCS folder in saved games is a good place to start when looking for issues, it backs it up, so can be reverted to if needs be, or for moving input folder to the new DCS folder which is created when you start DCS again. 

If you notice a performance improvement after creating a new DCS folder in saved games, something in there will be adding to the performance impact being seen. 

As mentioned we continue to look at FPS issues in DCS and are working on optimisations also.

thank you  

I think I tried almost every DCS option from a fresh install, removed old saved games fold, no tactview, no mods, no mission scripts, no mission triggers, and so on. I have both 2.9.5 and 2.9.7 installed on different drives so i can test back and forth. This is why I dont think its a driver or windows issue because 2.9.5 still runs the missions fine. Regardless I appreciate you guys taking the time to look into the issue. Thanks for the feedback and updates about it. 

[Glide]

12 minutes ago, A Hamburgler said:

I dont think its a driver or windows issue because 2.9.5 still runs the missions fine

Yep, I'm thinking the lighting change now.  I don't have any shadows turned on in the last test, so I'm thinking lighting and terrain streaming together is making this one a tough bug to find.

Edited August 23, 2024 by Glide

[Pande4360]

vor 37 Minuten schrieb Glide:

Yep, I'm thinking the lighting change now.  I don't have any shadows turned on in the last test, so I'm thinking lighting and terrain streaming together is making this one a tough bug to find.

 

It should be purely AI calculation based. THis issue also happens on dedicated servers. Running a dedicated server with the latest version will lag the whole server on heavy missions. It´s not a graphics issue

Edited August 23, 2024 by Pande4360

[Glide]

Then you get this with the MB339 on Caucasus.  This is perfect.  I do believe, as BN said, it's module related.

Edited August 23, 2024 by Glide

[Pande4360]

vor 26 Minuten schrieb Glide:

Then you get this with the MB339 on Caucasus.  This is perfect.  I do believe, as BN said, it's module related.

 

It´s 100 percent not aircraft type related, if anything it´s maps issues too. but the essential issue is apparaent with just any aircraft. I tested it with just F16s and SA10s and the older builds could handle 50% more active units.

The issue you have might be ofc real but is not really related to the core of this thread which is purely about unit count. Again the issue is also prevailent with just hosting a server with no graphical computing.

Edited August 23, 2024 by Pande4360

[SignorMagnifico]

On 8/21/2024 at 8:01 PM, SignorMagnifico said:

Attaching my DCS.log, dxdiag, some screenshots, and a track file. FPS went from 80 down to 45/46 just by looking from right to left in the Chinook on the ground. 

DCS Performance.rar 49.49 MB · 5 downloads

Any insight from the devs on this? Should I attach more track files?

[Glide]

5 hours ago, Pande4360 said:

but is not really related to the core of this thread which is purely about unit count

I believe you are incorrect.  This is a performance issue thread, and members are seeing the issue even in the menu.  I personally don't have any issues; I'm just trying to help.  The sim is very playable and getting better each patch.  I'm loving it!

[Dangerzone]

I think you’re both correct. There’s not just one single cause here. 

Unit count is definitely a factor. I’ve gone from 3,000 that used to work,  down to 1500 then 1000 and now 300 to try and keep missions acceptable so there is definitely an issue with units, AI, pathing, etc. 

I have also experienced high cpu demand just in the menu with no mission running.

One does not negate the other also being an issue.  DCS currently has numerous performance issues contributors, not just one. 

I’m suspecting some of these have been known, but partly neglected because old tech and the hope may have been that Vulcan would be ready in time and address these before it became too much of an issue, instead of having to divert resources to focus on the problems on the older current platform and doing more work than necessary on soon to be obsolete functions? If so, it seems the issues have caught up with DCS prior too then and now it’s biting us in the butt. 

Hopefully there’s a few things the devs can find in there to recover a bit of performance in a short amount of time, but we’ve also seen 2 patches since 2.9.6 with no performance gain yet so it might be a while. 

I’m tossing up options at the moment, between options such as banning chinook on servers, reducing unit count (again), dropping back to previous DCS version, or just suggesting our group walks away from DCS and takes a break until things stabilise. But for it to stabilise, ED needs a change in tolerance quality before releasing updates. Getting rid of Stable and Open Beta and running one version as though it’s an open beta is not a good long term strategy moving forward. ED needs a higher standard of quality before releasing to the public if this new single release is going to work. 

Edited August 24, 2024 by Dangerzone

[db349]

For what it's worth, I also experienced strong performance degradation during a recent mission from the awesome FIWOS campaign from Groundpounder Sims.

About half way through mission 8 (no issues in prior missions though) my FPS start to degrade from 60 (capped) to between 30 and 50 to finally settle between 10 and 20 FPS during the last 30min, which is totally unplayable for me. I have virtually the same rig (5950X 32GB RTX3090) as Bogey Dope who flew the same mission on youtube several months ago and he seemed to have no loss of frames throughout the mission. We are also using more or less the same graphics settings; I am not running any mods.

This leads me to believe that recent patches are most probably the culprit. Since the FIWOS campaign spawns many ground units throughout its missions and as far as I understand recent patches introduced expanded AI capabilities for these units I have a suspicion that they saturate the CPU too much.

I could be totally wrong of course, but in task manager I saw 2 CPU cores pegged at 100% when the FPS started to tank. Other parameters like RAM or VRAM seemed normal to me. Never had such severe FPS degradation in the many years of flying in DCS. Can't comment on multiplayer since I only fly SP.
Can't upload a track file because the file of this long mission would be too large.

[Willdass]

1 hour ago, db349 said:

For what it's worth, I also experienced strong performance degradation during a recent mission from the awesome FIWOS campaign from Groundpounder Sims.

About half way through mission 8 (no issues in prior missions though) my FPS start to degrade from 60 (capped) to between 30 and 50 to finally settle between 10 and 20 FPS during the last 30min, which is totally unplayable for me. I have virtually the same rig (5950X 32GB RTX3090) as Bogey Dope who flew the same mission on youtube several months ago and he seemed to have no loss of frames throughout the mission. We are also using more or less the same graphics settings; I am not running any mods.

This leads me to believe that recent patches are most probably the culprit. Since the FIWOS campaign spawns many ground units throughout its missions and as far as I understand recent patches introduced expanded AI capabilities for these units I have a suspicion that they saturate the CPU too much.

I could be totally wrong of course, but in task manager I saw 2 CPU cores pegged at 100% when the FPS started to tank. Other parameters like RAM or VRAM seemed normal to me. Never had such severe FPS degradation in the many years of flying in DCS. Can't comment on multiplayer since I only fly SP.
Can't upload a track file because the file of this long mission would be too large.

Same for me in FIWOS mission 8. I flew missions 1-7 in 2.9.5 with usually above 70fps in VR (4090, 5800x3D and 64gb). In 2.9.6 I had 45fps at the first half of mission 8 and sub 15fps in the last part. Absolutely unplayable, sometimes below 7fps. No changes in mods, settings.

Edited August 24, 2024 by Willdass

[Pande4360]

Guy from retribution reported that if he sets the ground units to 10 per side, he could raise the aircraft count to 100v100 again.

[Pande4360]

vor 5 Stunden schrieb Glide:

I believe you are incorrect.  This is a performance issue thread, and members are seeing the issue even in the menu.  I personally don't have any issues; I'm just trying to help.  The sim is very playable and getting better each patch.  I'm loving it!

Was it better though on 2.9.5? As the thread is indeed about degredation from 2.9.5 onwards. If this was generally an issue it might be worth starting a new thread for that specific issue.

Edited August 24, 2024 by Pande4360

[Karman]

Whether it's the MT or SP version there is clearly a performance problem and it's really a problem in our squadron we are quite numerous to deplore the current performance drops; and we see pilots taking a break towards War thunder or other games.. In short the new maps or the new modules should become secondary in the face of the optimization in fps and fluidity of the simulator. This is becoming urgent.