FPS drops and stutters

[Andyg63]

Cured my stutters on a Sager NP7280 laptop 3.0 ghz 6 gb ram and 7200 rpm hdd. Increased ram to 16 gb and changed to a Corsair SSD. Now I can run with all the graphic settings to high quality and no stutters at all. Tried running with FRAPS and the frame rate is very stable at around 55 all the time. Been running for about 4 hours continuously with no problem. Previously stutter were regular especially if aircraft was rolled or view slewed.

[59th_LeFty]

Hi there!

 

I got this problem:

 

Windows 8.1, recently installed DCS.

AMD 6350 3,9GHz 6-core CPU, 8GB1600MHz RAM, with a GTX760 (MA970UD3board)

 

First I noticed low fps in DCS, but the source is convinient, the task managershows that my cores are only running in 1.33 GHz, and I don't know why the system does not detect that DCS would need more. Any ideas?

[SkateZilla]

Turn off Cool n Quiet, C1E and C6 States in the Bios.

[59th_LeFty]

Thank you! Cool&quiet solved it. But come on, really this is the only way? DCS sux...

[SkateZilla]

you should be able to enable/disable it through "AMD Overdrive".

 

it's a BIOS/CPU Function, Dont Blame DCS for Hardware Manufactures integrating Powersaving Features.

 

Cool'N'Quiet is designed to Lower CPU Frequency to Lower Power Consumption when Idling or CPU Demand isnt High.

 

Cool N Quiet should automatically increase your CPU Speed and Voltage when Running DCS, however, it maybe Raising and Lowering them Randomly causing stutters.

 

 

AMD Overdrive:

http://sites.amd.com/us/game/downloads/amd-overdrive/Pages/overview.aspx

 

 

Also, Check your Power Management profiles, as usually You have to Set the Min/Max CPU Speeds.

 

ON my Gaming Rig, Cool N Quiet is disabled, as it causes Stutters/FPS Dips and Sync Issues in Alot of games when it Dynamically Changes Speeds.

Edited October 30, 2013 by SkateZilla

[Psyrixx]

Battlefield 4 keeps crashing on my PC. Damnit DCS! Why do you suck so much!!

 

:P

[SkateZilla]

Battlefield 4 keeps crashing on my PC. Damnit DCS! Why do you suck so much!!

 

:P

 

BF3/4 Online with CnQ Enabled is a stutter fest....

[Psyrixx]

I actually have no problems with DCS or BF3/4, I was just playing the Blame DCS For Everything™ game.

[unknwn]

For 8GB ram users read my topic DCS 1.2.6 lag/freezing/fps drop "fix" if you want to fix fps drops without upgrading RAM. SSD isn't even needed to fix it.

[doveman]

you should be able to enable/disable it through "AMD Overdrive".

 

it's a BIOS/CPU Function, Dont Blame DCS for Hardware Manufactures integrating Powersaving Features.

 

Cool'N'Quiet is designed to Lower CPU Frequency to Lower Power Consumption when Idling or CPU Demand isnt High.

 

Cool N Quiet should automatically increase your CPU Speed and Voltage when Running DCS, however, it maybe Raising and Lowering them Randomly causing stutters.

 

 

AMD Overdrive:

http://sites.amd.com/us/game/downloads/amd-overdrive/Pages/overview.aspx

 

 

Also, Check your Power Management profiles, as usually You have to Set the Min/Max CPU Speeds.

 

ON my Gaming Rig, Cool N Quiet is disabled, as it causes Stutters/FPS Dips and Sync Issues in Alot of games when it Dynamically Changes Speeds.

 

You can probably leave CnQ on, so that the PC doesn't waste energy/heat when idling/browsing and just switch the Power Profile to High Performance, which will keep the CPU at full speed, before playing DCS World and other games. I actually have CnQ disabled and use PhenomMSRTweaker but that was because I had trouble with my overclocking and nothing to do with DCSW.

 

You can switch Power Profiles manually before playing of course but you can also do it with a batch file using

 

powercfg -s 8c5e7fda-e8bf-4a96-9a85-a6e23a8c635c

 

You can find the specific GUIDs for the power profiles on your own system by opening a command line window and typing

 

powercfg -list

 

As I have an AMD GPU, I use Radeon Pro and create a profile for DCS.exe and then on the scripts tab, set Pre-Start to run a batch file containing the powercfg command to switch to High Performance and under Post-finish, another batch file that sets the Power Profile back to Balanced. I use the same batch files to overclock my GPU by switching MSI Afterburner to an overclocked profile before playing and back to the normal profile afterwards.

 

You could use a RP profile for Launcher.exe instead of DCS.exe but the loading process is a bit weird and Launcher.exe seems to unload/reload at least once when launching a module/mission, so by assigning it to DCS.exe at least the batches only run once at the start and once at the end of a mission. It's necessary to create a profile for DCS.exe anyway if you want to tweak any of the graphic settings, etc with Radeon Pro as Launcher.exe isn't the actual DX engine so any such settings made under that profile won't have any effect (you can test this by enabling the OSD and seeing that it doesn't appear), so there's not much point making two profiles.

[doveman]

I got my Samsung 840 EVO 256GB SSD now and from a quick check it looks like it's given me about 5-10fps extra when looking left or right at the start of "Cold Start at Mozdok"

 

Whereas it used to go something like 40-21-23 (Forward, left, right), now it's more like 40-30-28.

 

I'll have to do some more testing to confirm though.

[Lange_666]

Mmm, weird. An SSD should not increase your FPS, only speeding up your loading times.

[doveman]

Mmm, weird. An SSD should not increase your FPS, only speeding up your loading times.

 

I know, I wasn't expecting it, only faster loading times and less/no stutter due to loading scenery whilst flying.

 

As I say, I'll have to do some more comparisons as there's been updates and I might have changed mods since my previous results with the HDD on that mission. It's easy enough to run the HDD install and then the SSD install to compare, so I'll do that when I get a chance and also try booting Win7 from the HDD instead of the SSD and compare the two DCSW installs like that as well.

[doveman]

@eXPeRT

 

Whilst that's all almost true (my read speeds only boosted about 5x, from 100MB/s to 500MB/s), it also applies to RAMDisks and I was running DCSW from one of those before, so I'm quite surprised to see an fps increase like this.

 

Anyway, as I said I'll need to do some more testing to compare to check I'm not just imagining things! Something went wrong last night as it was back down to 19fps when looking left out of the cockpit in the same situation and looking around (with FTNoIR) was very jerky, whereas earlier it had been nice and smooth. I noticed the sun was going down so there was a lot of glare from that, so maybe that was having a negative effect, so I'll have to ensure that any comparisons are done at the same time of day as I'm not sure that "Cold start at Mozdok" always does or if it using random times.

[Lange_666]

@eXPeRT

 

Whilst that's all almost true (my read speeds only boosted about 5x, from 100MB/s to 500MB/s), it also applies to RAMDisks and I was running DCSW from one of those before

 

Spot on there doveman. I have used a RamDisk before to see what it would bring and it would bring nothing FPS wise compared to loading from an HD. I even set up the RamDisk to avoid loading stutters which i thought i had but there weren't any. SSD only loads up your game/stuff more quickly... getting more FPS from it... nah...

[will-]

i cannot give facts on this only my view, but switching to a SSD showed a FPS, if not a overall improvement in performance in DCS:W.

 

Yes you will still get a FPS drop when looking at areas, and still get game crash's etc. But is it as severe? no i don't think so.

[doveman]

There's no way you had a consistent data transfer of 100MB/sec with the HDD, unless you had a couple raptors in RAID 0.

And even then, for large, fragmented files and for random reads/writes, the HDDs speed is very slow, like 20MB/sec.

Benchmark alone does not reflect the actual performance difference between an HDD and an SSD. It's much greater than that.

 

When you ran DCS on RAMDisk, the OS was still on the HDD.

That includes everything that the application needs like system files.

Page file also. DCS constantly reads/writes as it's operating.

 

Plus, you don't know what kind of optimizations went into DCS and MS VC++ and DX, GFX card and your motherboard chipset drivers, including SATA/AHCI.

These can increase the overall performance and output on the screen, if the data is more readily available.

 

All those together, with an SSD for OS, get a major boost that will, inadvertently, result in FPS increase in a 3D rendered software.

 

OK, true I don't know what speed the HDD was reading when DCS was loading from it but I did have a separate partition for games that was defragged.

 

Regardin the RAMDisk, I've disabled the pagefile as I have 16GB, so that wasn't being used at all but you might be right that the OS would have been accessing files in the background, although I'm not sure that should've made much difference to DCS when all it's files were on the RAMDisk.