Fps drops from around 120 to 30 every 10 seconds or so

[Hiob]

1 hour ago, Leg2ion said:

That said what does disabling the Power service do over and above setting things to ultimate? 

 

The problem - generally - with the power service is, that it does frequent interrupts to poll different processes for their state to determine the resource needs (don’t nail me on the phrasing, but you get the picture). Changing the powerplan to ultimate does change what happens with the information but doesn’t change the polling (in fact in increases the interrupts). 

I hope that makes sense. Difficult matter to explain in non native language. There are good videos on youtube on the matter. Search for topics related to latency or latencyMon.

This Video, even though it is only indirectly linked to the topic, covers some interesting topics. It’s a very interesting piece for people that are concerned with stutters/latency and performance in general:

 

Edited April 7 by Hiob

[Leg2ion]

@Hiob Thanks - I'll give it a go and see what happens. Out of curiosity if disabled do you have to do it every time you restart - or does it stay suspended indefinitely?

[sleighzy]

2 hours ago, PatientSquire27 said:

I don't understand how to disable tac view

I believe TacView has an uninstaller, although I don't know if it completely removes everything.

In your C:\Users\username\Saved Games\DCS\Scripts\Hooks directory remove any TacView files (back them up first).

In your C:\Users\username\Saved Games\DCS\Scripts\Export.lua file remove the TacView line (back it up first). It may look something the below. Use something like Notepad++ to do this.

local Tacviewlfs=require('lfs');dofile(Tacviewlfs.writedir()..'Scripts/TacviewGameExport.lua')

Check in the DCS settings (under the Special tab) and select Tacview on the left hand side if it is there. Untick the Tacview Module Enabled box. 

Edited April 8 by sleighzy

[Hiob]

8 hours ago, Leg2ion said:

@Hiob Thanks - I'll give it a go and see what happens. Out of curiosity if disabled do you have to do it every time you restart - or does it stay suspended indefinitely?

Either way. Depends on you how you set it. But I leave it disabled always on all of my machines. Work and home.

[Leg2ion]

@PatientSquire27 another link here with more suggestions:

 

[Leg2ion]

1 hour ago, Hiob said:

Either way. Depends on you how you set it. But I leave it disabled always on all of my machines. Work and home.

One other question, how does this tie up with 'C States' - if at all. I normally disable C states in the BIOS, as they manage power and differing levels of idling state, so would that have the same effect or again 'same but different'..

[Hiob]

2 hours ago, Leg2ion said:

One other question, how does this tie up with 'C States' - if at all. I normally disable C states in the BIOS, as they manage power and differing levels of idling state, so would that have the same effect or again 'same but different'..

Not 100% sure tbh. Power service is on an OS-level, C-states is on microcode (CPU-) level I would guess. 
So for the sake of latency power service has a greater impact I would assume. 

[Leg2ion]

7 hours ago, Hiob said:

Not 100% sure tbh. Power service is on an OS-level, C-states is on microcode (CPU-) level I would guess. 
So for the sake of latency power service has a greater impact I would assume. 

So just had a play - disabled power service - no noticeable difference in my experience - if anything made things not as smooth so have now re-enabled. One thing I didn't try was to re-enable C-States - take a flight - and then disable power services and repeat. Just pushed my log file through the analyser and the only real advice was to roll back my nVidia driver.

All our back and forth aside - OP @PatientSquire27 - any joy, or things worse or better dependent on what you have tried? 

[Hiob]

12 hours ago, Leg2ion said:

So just had a play - disabled power service - no noticeable difference in my experience - if anything made things not as smooth so have now re-enabled. One thing I didn't try was to re-enable C-States - take a flight - and then disable power services and repeat. Just pushed my log file through the analyser and the only real advice was to roll back my nVidia driver.

All our back and forth aside - OP @PatientSquire27 - any joy, or things worse or better dependent on what you have tried? 

That there is no noticeable improvement by disabling power service, depending if and what kind of issues you had, I absolutely believe.

It is very unlikely though that it would have any negative impact. A process that doesn’t exist can’t cause latency. 

edit: the purpose of this process is to suspend resources and reduce power consumption. If it is disabled everything just runs unhindered.

Edited April 9 by Hiob

[PatientSquire27]

I changed power mode to standard and tried with both performance and turbo mode and it didn't seem to change much, I still had the drop to 30 fps but now ground fps was around 90

tried setting shadows to flat, didn't seem to help either.

[Hiob]

Well most of what I suggested is generally aimed at smooth frametimes and regular (micro-) stuttering. 
As mentioned earlier (iirc) the intermittent large fps-drops point to some external problems like (e.g.) core parking or I/O-problems (read/write or cache-problems).

Another issue I could imagine is problems with scripts. I lost track - did you already checked your export.lua? Maybe delete/rename it for testing.

[Matias Montaldo]

Hi to all, I'm having a similar problem with massive drops of FPS from 60 (I use V-sync) to 10 fps, every 10 seconds (looks like a repeated process that is broken. Is not clear what triggers the issue but after 3 days of full testing (more than 20 hours of gameplay) I noticed that is activated during the landing when the wheels are approaching the runway, and after that, every 10 seconds. It can also happen above in the air, but the circumstances are not clear. Flying low or approaching forest area may trigger the issue (clearly a CPU/GPU overload triggers the problem). The characteristic of this bug is that once it starts, it doesn't stops, making the game unplayable. Also, is impossible to land the aircraft if the FPS drop happens in the same second you are doign touch down. Is really annoying.

I can confirm that graphics configuration has nothing to do (I downgraded all the quality options and I still get the same issue). Also the mods have nothing to do as well (I tested with and without them, after clean installation and same results). This issue happens with all demanding aircraft, like official modules F-16, F-18, etc. Because of this I understand that this is a general DCS issue after the latest patch (game was running good during the last 6 months).

Regarding core unparking, power management, tac view and all the tips mentioned in this thread, I tested all of them and they did not solve the problem. I'm attaching the log file just in case (you will see errors of textures and models not found, don't pay attention to that, I deleted many objects of Caucasus map on purpose to improve FPS performance of the map. The issue mentioned happens with and without these objects)..

 

dcs.log

[Hiob]

Last resort here from my part.

There has been a lot of talk of crappy Nvidia drivers lately. I think the last stable one is from last year. Can’t give you the exact version number, but you‘ll find it one Youtube.

[Matias Montaldo]

I downloaded Nvidia drivers from Dec 2024 (last version stable for some people in youtube) but no results. I can confirm that the FPS drop starts just right before approaching the runway for landing, and then keeps droping every 10 seconds. Is there any possibility of creating a support ticket in DCS for this? I'm pretty sure this is a game problem, not windows or hardware related.

By the way, I'm doing the testings with a single plane (F-16, F-18 and Mig-29) in an empty map (caucasus) with the editor. There are no other objects or entities that could increase the overload in that specific location of the map.

[Hiob]

24 minutes ago, Matias Montaldo said:

pretty sure this is a game problem,

may very well be, but there has to be something triggering it, because it obviously doesn’t affect all players.

[sleighzy]

21 hours ago, Matias Montaldo said:

Also the mods have nothing to do as well (I tested with and without them, after clean installation and same results)

This log is full of errors and mods + texture changes so makes hard to read, and muddies the waters to know if the log contains a root cause. When you say you removed the mods did you delete them from your Saved Games directory and then also delete the fxo and metashaders2 folders in Saved Games? Doing a clean install won't touch the Saved Games\DCS folder so anything in there will have remained. I'd recommend removing all mods from Saved Games and the core game, run a slow repair with the "Remove extra files" option checked, delete fxo and metashaders2 folders, and then provide another log.

Additional notes from the DCS log analyzer:

• Turn down Anisotropic Filtering.
• If you have FPS issues, try turning off VSYNC in graphics settings.
• Turn off SSAO. (this is a performance hit with little benefit)
• If you have stability or performance issues pointing to your GPU, rollback the GPU driver to version 566.36
• Verify that this is configured correctly in Windows:
  • Game Mode disabled
  • Hardware accelerated GPU scheduling disabled

Edited Sunday at 04:24 AM by sleighzy

[BJ55]

Matias, you simply don't have enough cores (IO cores: {}) and RAM to run the lots of

On 4/11/2025 at 1:23 PM, Hiob said:

I/O-problems (read/write or cache-problems)

present in current DCS release... Follow sleighzy suggestions, if you still have issues then better start thinking at a HW upgrade.