FPS drops and stutters

[doveman]

I'm running a Phenom II X4 955 @ 3.8Ghz, 8GB 1600Mhz DDR3 and a 2GB 6950.

 

Doing a test with "Cold start in Mozdok" I get about 40FPS but if I look left with Ctrl+Num4 (at the start on the runway) it drops to 25FPS. Using the exterior views (F2,F3,etc) whilst still on the ground it was dropping down to 26-30FPS. Flying around I get between 40-50FPS depending on the view but when I fly towards/over the airfield, where about 6-8 aircraft are on the runway with their red tags above them, it drops to 30FPS.

 

The worst problem is that every now and then it stutters and FRAPS shows it drops to 22FPS. This happened right at the start as the truck drove past, once when the Shkval switched to Test mode and a couple of other times when nothing much seemed to be happening.

 

I've just moved to a cleaner Win7 x64 install as I had quite a lot installed on my normal one. With the other one I think I got the Latency down to 100-200us, but with this I get about 977us. If I run TimerResolution and click Maximum this changes to about 488us but that's still rather high. I disabled HPET in the BIOS, so perhaps that's causing this.

 

On my other Win7 install yesterday I was running Helios/SoftTH with a 1920x1200 and a 1920x1080 but with this test I disabled SoftTH and just run on the 1920x1200.

 

The AMD HDMI audio device is disabled as is Cool'n'Quiet.

 

I'm using a couple of mods listed in this thread:

 

Increase Ground Texture Noise/Distance: (Remove blurry landscape textures...)

http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=77297

 

zzzspace REAL SOUND v1.0 for DCS World

http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=92598

 

JTAC & AWACS for KA-50

http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=93228

 

EDIT: After rebooting and re-enabling HPET, latency is back down to about 140us Max (it jumped to 216us when I opened my browser but that's not unusual in my experience as ndis.sys, netbt.sys and tcpip.sys tend to have the highest DPC execution time). Most of the time the latency is from 20us-130ms now, mainly at the 80-120us range. I'll test tomorrow to see if BS2 is any better now.

 

TimerResolution now gives 1.0ms for Default and 0.5ms for maximum. It shows 15.6ms for minimum and once clicking on Default set it to that but now it seems to go to 1.0ms every time. Neither setting seems to affect the latency anymore, although when changing to Default it did cause it to spike to 500us before settling down again.

DCS.zip

Edited September 1, 2012 by doveman

[doveman]

I've got the latency even lower now by moving my mouse from the hub to a direct port but I'm still getting these freezes in BS2 just as much.

 

What can I do? The sim's unplayable like this.

[Darkwolf187]

Your symptoms appear to be stereotypical symptoms of running out of vram on your graphics card. Install HWINFO (google it), and then look at the vram maximums and see if you're running out of video ram when doing the activities you're saying cause issues.

 

You can also check whether turning down/off antialiasing or texture resolution makes the problem go away.

 

What's your video card?

 

Edit: I have a GTX690 with 4Gb of VRAM, pushing three 2560x1440 displays. Since the 690 is two 680's in SLI, I effectively only have 2Gb of VRAM for use. I can run at High texture resolutions just fine, but the VRAM fills. If I run with AA, I get exactly the symptoms you're experience. No _performance_ issues - ie, the card can throw the frames onto the screen fast enough, but if anything in the scene changes that requires VRAM changes (eg, looking around, new textures coming on screen) it stutters while the VRAM is swapped out. What's happening to you sounds like the above.

Edited September 6, 2012 by Darkwolf187
added more detail

[doveman]

Thanks. I've actually got HWInfo installed and was using it to check stuff in ArmA2 but it didn't occur to me to use it for DCS or that it might be a VRAM problem.

 

I've got a 2GB 6950 but I'm only trying to run a single 1920x1200 display at the moment. I'll try turning down AA or texture resolution anyway and see if it helps

[BIGNEWY]

I used to get a lot of stutter, however after changing to a SSD drive stutter was reduced big time.

 

Do you have a HDD or a SSD ?

[Bee_Sting]

You guys are stop on! If your are gonna run dcs world in high res you need alot of vram.Dcs world is very large and people are asking their Gpu to render this large world,the gpu vram with get full.What i do is lower the game res and screen res to half of what the screen can go up too(my screen plays 1600/900 i run it at 1360/768).I run the the game res to med in all the setting except textures and scenery they are on high.I have a notebook with the 6770m 2gb ddr5 and i get about 40fps average.

Edited September 6, 2012 by Bee_Sting

[doveman]

I used to get a lot of stutter, however after changing to a SSD drive stutter was reduced big time.

 

Do you have a HDD or a SSD ?

 

HDD, although I've just moved DCS and a couple of other things to their own drive.

 

HwInfo doesn't show the VRAM for my 6950 but I use MSI Afterburner for that and that shows it only hit about 1GB in a quick test. I'll test more later, when I've worked out why RivaTuner won't display the OSD in DCS (it works in everything else and FRAPS shows up fine in DCS).

[Kuky]

2G vRAM is plenty, this is not your issue

[doveman]

I just tried with Triple Buffering enabled in Radeon Pro and it was worse than ever. It started about 30 FPS (this was in the training mission How to Take Off ABSU) but kept freezing and dropping FPS.

 

I guess the FPS counter isn't that relevant in these situations as obviously if the game freezes the FPS are going to drop to 0, it's just a matter of how long the freezes are that determines what the counter drops to. I saw it on 5 FPS a few times but more often it would get down to 16-20 before recovering.

 

Might have been a coincidence and nothing to with TB/RP though, so I'll try again without it.

[159th_Viper]

 

I've got a 2GB 6950 but I'm only trying to run a single 1920x1200 display at the moment. I'll try turning down AA or texture resolution anyway and see if it helps

 

Do not set your AA/AF via your vid card - your ATI 3D settings have to be set to 'Application-Controlled'. Are they? Not evident from your posts - this does lead to FPS issues if so - set your AA etc etc via the SIM GUI.

[doveman]

Do not set your AA/AF via your vid card - your ATI 3D settings have to be set to 'Application-Controlled'. Are they? Not evident from your posts - this does lead to FPS issues if so - set your AA etc etc via the SIM GUI.

 

Yeah, they are. I should have posted this screenshot to make things clearer (note I've upped AI to High Quality now): http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/966/a2oacccsettingswin7a.png

[PeterP]

un-check "enable surface optimisation" in the catalyst A.I setting and set "texture filter quality" to high quality.

(Or do you really believe the AMD crew has tested their drivers with DX9c and DCS?!)

 

That's the best guess I can give you about you CCC settings.

 

 

edit:

I read now the whole thread - Pleas post us your exact in-game settings.

Edited September 6, 2012 by PeterP

[doveman]

un-check "enable surface optimisation" in the catalyst A.I setting and set "texture filter quality" to high quality.

(Or do you really believe the AMD crew has tested their drivers with DX9c and DCS?!)

 

That's the best guess I can give you about you CCC settings.

 

 

edit:

I read now the whole thread - Pleas post us your exact in-game settings.

 

As I said I've already changed AI to High Quality but I'll try with Surface Optimisation disabled, thanks. Not sure what you're getting at with that question. No, I doubt AMD have tested their drivers with DCS. Does that mean I shouldn't expect to be able to play it?

 

I attached a zip with some of my config files to the first post but here's the graphical part of options.lua

 

 
       ["multiMonitorSetup"] = "1camera",
       ["color"] = "32",
       ["preloadRadius"] = 150000,
       ["heatBlr"] = 0,
       ["scenes"] = "high",
       ["water"] = 1,
       ["fullScreen"] = true,
       ["disableAero"] = false,
       ["visibRange"] = "High",
       ["treesVisibility"] = 6000,
       ["aspect"] = 1.6,
       ["haze"] = 1,
       ["HDR"] = 0,
       ["TranspSSAA"] = false,
       ["textures"] = 2,
       ["cockpitShadows"] = false,
       ["shadows"] = 0,
       ["effects"] = 3,
       ["MSAA"] = 2,
       ["height"] = 1200,
       ["sync"] = true,
       ["shadowTree"] = false,
       ["civTraffic"] = "",
       ["width"] = 1920,
       ["clutterMaxDistance"] = 0,
       ["lights"] = 2,

 

Just ask if you need to see any other config files that aren't in the zip.

[PeterP]

what I wanted to say is that driver specific optimisations are not always to the benefit of DX9 applications.

...

and after looking through your options I can say that the stutters are not graphic related.

 

just maybe put the preload radius down to 8000 while testing.

 

go this route :

 

Got stutters? Odd lag? This helped us! - ED Forums

[doveman]

what I wanted to say is that driver specific optimisations are not always to the benefit of DX9 applications.

...

and after looking through your options I can say that the stutters are not graphic related.

 

go this route :

 

Got stutters? Odd lag? This helped us! - ED Forums

 

Ah, I see what you meant. Thanks for checking my options for me.

 

I've seen that thread and tried most of the things already. Disabling HPET made my Latency jump to 448-992us and I've got it down to mostly 20-50us with HPET re-enabled (it was mostly 100-140us until I moved my mouse from a hub to a direct USB port).

 

C1E and Cool'n'Quiet are already disabled. I haven't tested with Surface Optimisation disabled yet and I'll try disabling AI. It's a bit confusing as Texture Filtering Quality (which you've advised me to set to HQ) is under the AI section, yet the guide says to disable AI completely. I don't have a MipMap Detail setting either.

[doveman]

Well I gave up and restored an even cleaner Win7 (to a VHD, I've run out of partitions but I'll move this over the non-working partition soon).

 

Seems to have fixed the stuttering thank goodness. I still get a lot of sticking looking left/right at the start on the runway and the FPS drops from the average 36 FPS to 25 FPS when looking at other aircraft on the airfield and for other strange reasons but at least I can fly along now without dreading that it's going to keep stuttering all the time.

 

I'll try and make a video sometime so that someone can have a look and see if what I'm experiencing is normal.

 

I've only got Cat 12.4 installed at the moment but I'll update to 12.6 when I've backed up. I might try 12.8 again but as that caused problems with Arma2 I'm not sure, although the problems might have been caused by a combination of 12.8 and something else screwy on the OS.

 

I haven't disabled Catalyst AI yet as the instructions on that other thread would seem to disable it for everything, not just DCS, which I don't want. I tried making a profile for Launcher.exe but it said there was already one and I'd be overwriting it, so I made one for ka50_protect.exe instead but I couldn't find a separate profile.xml that had created where I could disable AI just for DCS.

[doveman]

Well I spoke too soon there. I've just about had it with this program!

 

I realised I still had the Cat 12.6 atiumdag.dll in the DCS/bin and Mods\aircrafts\Ka-50\bin\x86_64/ folders (I got an error about dx9 when loading DCS once, which is what reminded me) so I thought I should delete those (still running 12.4 at the moment). Then it was back to stutter-fest again.

 

I checked Arma2OA, which also required that dll in it's folder with my previous Win7 with Cat 12.8 and that works fine now without it and my other problems with Helios hanging for several minutes when loading profiles in the editor or Control Centre have gone, so the only problem now seems to be with DCS.

 

I tried putting the dll back in the two folders and that did seem to help as I didn't get any freezes during the 3min auto-startup sequence on the ground but they started happening almost as soon as I started flying around.

 

So then I killed some other programs and again no freezes on the ground and it seemed better when flying as well, for about 30 seconds and then it started freezing about every 5 seconds.

 

I've attached my options as I let it recreate the Saved Games/DCS folder when I moved to a different Win7 but I think they're much the same as before. I've also attached the Winsat output, which means squat to me but might hold a clue for someone more knowledgable.

 

Even when it's not freezing I only get about 25 FPS, which seems rather low for my system. It does go up to about 50 if I look directly up through the roof of the chopper though.

options.lua

Winsat.txt

[doveman]

Well I've tried a fresh install of DCS World and just tested with the SU-25. That stutters.

 

Then I tried just installing BS2 standalone and that stutters too. I don't think I'm ever going to be able to play this sim :(

[BIGNEWY]

with my ATI hd6770 1gb lowest I go is 17 fps but normally 35 - 40 fps running three screens, depending on what is going on.

 

I am no expert and I know its a big investment to make, but having dcs and my OS running on a SSD made a huge difference for me. I did not have a lot of cash so purchased a 60gb first for my OS and then eventually another which has all my flight sim stuff on. It stopped all of my stutters using a ssd as VRAM was obviously running quicker.

[doveman]

with my ATI hd6770 1gb lowest I go is 17 fps but normally 35 - 40 fps running three screens, depending on what is going on.

 

I am no expert and I know its a big investment to make, but having dcs and my OS running on a SSD made a huge difference for me. I did not have a lot of cash so purchased a 60gb first for my OS and then eventually another which has all my flight sim stuff on. It stopped all of my stutters using a ssd as VRAM was obviously running quicker.

 

I do plan to get a SSD when I can afford it but I'm only trying to run one screen with my 6950 and I only get about 25 FPS even when it's not freezing, so something doesn't seem right. I'm going to try under XP next to see if that's any better.

[doveman]

I think I've finally got it working reasonably well :yay:

I'm not sure just yet exactly what did it as I moved the installation to a different HDD but also did a fresh install of the KA-50 module in case any of the mods I'd installed were causing problems and used Gamebooster to kill a load of stuff before loading DCS. I actually had DCS and a few other games on their own separate drive and now they're on a partition on my drive which contains Windows, the pagefile, etc but maybe the other drive was that much slower (it's connected by eSATA at the moment but that should be as fast as a SATA connection as far as I know). I'll test by copying the installation back to the other drive and see what happens.

 

I did try BS2 in XP but I couldn't even get it to finish loading and it kept getting stuck saying please wait, forcing me to hard reset (until I changed it to run windowed, it still wouldn't load but at least I could kill it), so I don't have any comparisons from that. I tried it in Win7 though (obviously it installed the x86 version under XP) and it loaded OK but still stuttered badly, even though the Scenes and Textures options maximum is Medium, compared to High in DCS World. I haven't tried running that from my main HDD yet though as I haven't got space to copy it but I can probably find some stuff to delete and try it.

 

Anyway, whilst the stuttering is almost eliminated, it still occurs in at least one situation, which is at the start of cold start in Mozdok, rotating the view with Num4/Num6 from straight ahead to left or right. It's strange as it seems to happen the first time I do it, then it will be OK if I repeat but then some time later after leaving it looking ahead I'll try again and it will stutter again, even though nothing's changed to my left (just the same helos sitting still next to me). It did stutter once when I was divebombing another helo but mostly flying around it's fine, which is great after all the trouble I've had.

 

I still have an issue with FPS drops though, which is related to having other craft in my view. I did some tests in Cold start in Mozdok as follows, rotating the view from straight ahead to my left (where there's several stationary helos) or right (where there's one, which powers up and taxis past me). The first three tests were done without my helo powered up at all.

 

Start: 45 FPS, look left 30 FPS, look right 35 FPS

 

Helo to right starts engines: 41 FPS, look left 26 FPS, look right 31 FPS

 

Helo to right taxied to far left of runway, 53 FPS, look left 29 FPS, look right 42 FPS

 

My Helo ready: 45 FPS (with other helos passing in front 39 FPS), left 24 FPS, right (no helos in view) 43 FPS

 

No moving aircraft nearby or on runway (daylight fading) 60 FPS, left 40 FPS, right 46 FPS

 

As you can see, there's some quite substantial drops when I have other aircraft in my view, even if they're stationary and not powered up, which seems strange. I even thought it might be the labels that were the problem, so tried with them off but that didn't make much (if any) difference. The daylight was fading throughout the tests, which might have made a bit of difference.

 

From the second result, it seems just having another aircraft powerup near me drops the FPS a bit, which I suppose makes sense as the CPU has to start calculating information for that.

 

Once I took off and flew away from the airfield and other helos, I was getting anywhere from 45-70 FPS and when I flew back and got close to the airfield, it dropped down to around 35 FPS again.

 

I've still got the options on fairly low (no AA or HDR, low shadows) so I'm not sure if my results are reasonable for my system. It would be great if some other people could try Cold start in Mozdok and see if they get the same large drops when looking left or right at the start though and what sort of FPS they get, including their GPU/CPU details and graphics settings.

 

I don't think I've changed my settings from before but I can't upload my current options.lua as it says I've already uploaded that file, so I'll just post the graphic settings section:

 

        ["multiMonitorSetup"] = "1camera",
       ["color"] = "32",
       ["preloadRadius"] = 150000,
       ["heatBlr"] = 0,
       ["scenes"] = "high",
       ["water"] = 1,
       ["fullScreen"] = true,
       ["disableAero"] = false,
       ["visibRange"] = "High",
       ["treesVisibility"] = 6000,
       ["aspect"] = 1.6,
       ["haze"] = 1,
       ["HDR"] = 0,
       ["TranspSSAA"] = false,
       ["textures"] = 2,
       ["cockpitShadows"] = false,
       ["shadows"] = 0,
       ["effects"] = 3,
       ["MSAA"] = 0,
       ["height"] = 1200,
       ["sync"] = false,
       ["shadowTree"] = false,
       ["civTraffic"] = "",
       ["width"] = 1920,
       ["clutterMaxDistance"] = 0,
       ["lights"] = 2,

[BIGNEWY]

a lot of members on this forum would envy you for getting those kind of frame rates in DCS :)

[Mirtma]

a lot of members on this forum would envy you for getting those kind of frame rates in DCS :)

 

Indeed.

[doveman]

a lot of members on this forum would envy you for getting those kind of frame rates in DCS :)

 

Yeah, I'm pretty pleased with them and hope they hold up once I enable some AA (doesn't seem to affect other games much at reasonable levels, so I'm hopeful), it's just these massive drops when looking at the helos to my left or right that bother me now.

 

As having other helos in view (or to a lesser extent near to me), seems to be a problem, I'm a bit worried how it's going to perform when I actually try attacking some targets or working in formation.

[BIGNEWY]

you will get drops, especially in multiplayer, buts thats part of DCS we have got used to :)

 

So unless you have OCD I would try not to worry to much :)