Performance Guide For DCS World

[TZeer]

If you haven't cranked your graphic settings to the max and saturated your GPU, you should see increased performance by overclocking your CPU :)

[SkateZilla]

Not to revive an old thread,

 

but I was reading through my DX9c pdfs, and stumbled across A section that stated if the rendering engine had more than 475 objects it would cause severe CPU Bottlenecks.

 

"DirectX API/Objects Overhead".

 

Since someone was posting the FPS Dips when large amounts of "Objects" were being reported in the Shift PrntScrn Info inside of DCSW, I thought this info would be important.

 

DirectX10 and 11 improve the Objects Overhead to reduce the bottleneck.

[doveman]

Not to revive an old thread,

 

but I was reading through my DX9c pdfs, and stumbled across A section that stated if the rendering engine had more than 475 objects it would cause severe CPU Bottlenecks.

 

"DirectX API/Objects Overhead".

 

Since someone was posting the FPS Dips when large amounts of "Objects" were being reported in the Shift PrntScrn Info inside of DCSW, I thought this info would be important.

 

DirectX10 and 11 improve the Objects Overhead to reduce the bottleneck.

 

Interesting. I'll have to check that on the mission I was playing the other day (can't recall the name right now but I think it was the first in the default campaign) where I was getting 8fps when the enemy projectiles were being launched towards the friendly positions.

[SkateZilla]

Yeah, I cant find it, but there was a thread, where someone actually found out the unoptimized models have higher object counts in EDM Viewer, and the game starts to bog down when there are ALOT of objects inview (using the SHIFT+PRNTSCRN info).

[Mustang]

Here's something else you guys could try, quite an old tweak but still quite a relevant one:

 

in graphics.lua set line 148 to far_clip = 100000;

 

this will reduce the terrain draw distance by 1/3 giving a nice FPS boost and lowering system resource usage, however this may result in some terrain clipping on the horizon most noticeable when you're flying at higher altitudes - this can be circumvented by making a small edit to the High.lua:

 

line 3 distance10x10 = 160000.0;

 

this will give a nice seamless rendering to the horizon.

[Mustang]

Created a package for the above post if you don't want to make any edits for yourself, just extract the Config folder and copy to root directory (remember this is for high scenes only!)

 

P.S check your FPS around resource hungry areas of the map such as Senaki Kolkhi airbase, my FPS are up by around 8-10 FPS with these edits.

 

P.P.S http://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=1766357&postcount=2 this mod comes highly recommended with this tweak.

Edited September 13, 2013 by Mustang

[Wesjet]

Great stuff. Does anyone have information on preload radius settings? Is having it maxed really advantageous? Max setting being 150,000m (80.99352 nautical miles) - seems pointlessly large.

[JayPee]

What does pre-loading do technically, does it render objects in advance and cache them in the VRAM?

 

If so, I'd argue to set it to something like 10,000 metres to have as much of the VRAM available for on-the-fly processing of new/unforeseen objects, which are probably the majority vs. pre-rendered object.

 

Anybody wanna help me out?

[gavagai]

When I tried reducing the preload radius it was system ram use that decreased. My guess is that preload radius determines how much terrain is stored in system RAM so that it does not have to be loaded from the hard drive during flight. VRAM is more for things like textures, shadows, lighting, antialiasing, etc.

[JayPee]

If that is the case, anybody not coping with a RAM shortage would want the highest possible pre load radius...

[gavagai]

Yeah, but it seems to affect load times, too. With a full load radius I saw 4+ gb ram use. When I lowered it to about halfway it ws 3+ gb.

[JayPee]

Loading times prior to a sortie or loading stutters during flight? I'd say loading times prior to a sortie are irrelevant anyway.

[JayPee]

Regarding the opening post, I did a full evening of testing and came up with the following results:

 

Baseline, clean northern area: 46FPS

32x SA-6 radar or 32x Abrams northern area: 46FPS

 

here come the hitters:

 

MSAA 4x + AF 4x: -7FPS

Navigation light strips ON: -10FPS > annoying

Clouds with rain and lightning storms: -20FPS > unplayable

Clean Batumi airport with no units around except those 'units' rendered as buildings: -6FPS > playable together with MSAA + AF

NOE dives for gun runs: -15FPS during the dive > difficult to maintain control

TGP on: -5FPS

Zoomed-in explosion on TGP screen: -10FPS > annoying

Dumping 1 flare: no change

Dumping 10 flares: -5FPS

 

So what's the issue here? CPU GPU? At no time do I have a fully loaded thread in taskmgr so I'd say graphics card but I'm not sure whether knowing a thread is never fully loaded is enough to deduct it being the GPU.

Edited September 18, 2013 by JayPee

[JayPee]

I've managed to narrow it down some more.

 

Large amounts tend to give a proportional FPS hit. However, it's true, smoking kills... FPS! Smoke and lightning cause huge drops, the more, the larger, the persistent, the worse the FPS.

 

What can be done about this? GPU is already at 100% performance when it has to render the northern test zone with only my a/c in it.

[EAKMotorsports]

great topic.

[pacotito]

I've managed to narrow it down some more.

 

Large amounts tend to give a proportional FPS hit. However, it's true, smoking kills... FPS! Smoke and lightning cause huge drops, the more, the larger, the persistent, the worse the FPS.

 

What can be done about this? GPU is already at 100% performance when it has to render the northern test zone with only my a/c in it.

 

What is your gpu usage when you're not in the northern test zone? If it drops from 100% that would be a sign the CPU isn't sending information to the gpu fast enough.

[JayPee]

In every scenario the GPU's operating at 100%. CPU never reaches 100%...

 

Conclusion: GPU's the bottleneck?

[uboats]

I'm using i7 4700QM and GT750m 8G

 

The problem is that even I set everything to low but texture to high, the temp from the cool fan is still too high and the monitor shows cpu temp is 80

 

Do you have any suggestion on how to tune the nvidia config for DCS?

Which would dominate the performance between nvidia config and game option config?

Edited October 5, 2013 by uboats

[cichlidfan]

How to turn on the FPS display in the game?

 

RCtl + Pause

[BitMaster]

Hello All,

 

nice info regarding FPS tuning, the core problems of all armchair pilots in low level flight !

 

I see the biggest hurdle in the limitations given by the old code being used and/or carried along since Flanker.

 

DirectX 9c is outdated and not suited for this game with such a high object count. DX9 at its high times wasn't meant to be used for such high load scenes. A failure by design to bet on that old horse...and now it causes headaches to get it lifted up to DX10 or 11 versions.

 

CPU Core usage:

Modern CPU's of past Pentium Dual Core have a built in core balancer functions that allows every

thread to more or less make use of all cores to some extend. It can or could also be enabled by manually attaching cores to a thread through task manager.

Nonetheless, a adequate exe would natively make use of all available cores and thereby not need to have the CPU do the load balancing that often caused FPS-stuttering on any kind of hardware

when 1 core unloaded work to another. This got a lot better with Core2Duo and later Intels.

Battlefield 1942 and 2 Servers had LOTS of issues since it was the time of arising multi-cores ( Pentium Dual Core etc..).

 

Developers should spend a year for renewing DCS at it's core.

 

Native SMP support for multi-processors and cores ( there are 12-cores out there ! )

DirectX 11.x support

 

Then, and only then after fixing this they should add more content.

 

My frames differ from 45fps @ 2880x1800 when flying high

down to 7 fps @ 1920x1200 with different settings.

I now fly 1920x1200 with mostly low or mid settings.

 

Thanks to this thread, I hope to gain some 5-10 fps in certain parts of the game and for sure will not blame my Mac for 7 fps on a low fly-bye over the runway on my favorite Aerobatics Server.

 

Some servers I play with 25-40 fps mainly and some ( mainly my favorite one ) I quickly end up with 15-20 fps since they changed a few things on the session the server is running.

 

There is ALOT of potential in DCS, lets not talk it down. There hasn't been a better one around for over a decade and it all sounds promising for the future as DCS does seem to make money. That's a good point when the DCS Team needs to decide if they give it a major overhaul or not.

 

I hope they do the things needed to make DCS future proof.

 

I actually wanted to build a game rig but as it seems, it doesn't give that much more fun for the buck so I wait and see if DCS gets things moving. If it stays like it is, it seems like you can throw HW wise at it what you want, DX9c will limit your possible achievements if you max things out in settings and object counts. I don't see the point in 2 big and fat NV's in SLI if you can't really make use of any of the great features in that NV chip. Brute Force never got u far in Flight Sims,

you will face a brick wall that will freeze FPS at a certain value. Upgrade the code and we can upgrade HW with confidence.

 

 

Just my 2 cents

 

Bit

 

"Thunderbolt 214th.com"

 

Running DCS on a MacBook Pro Retina Mid2012, Core i7 2.6GHz, 16GB DDR3-1600, 256GB SSD, NV-650 GT-M @ BootCamped Win7-64 Ult on a ded. Win7 install just for DCS.

[BitMaster]

I would like to know if others are also playing DCS on a Mac/BootCamp.

 

If there wouldn't be that ATI Crossfire issue one could have a look at the new Mac Pro haha.

 

12 cores and lots of GPU power(s) and some ultra fast SSD.

 

With fixed ATI Crossfire bug and native SMP this 12 core monster could rip any Alienware apart :)

 

DCS and ATI how about ?

 

 

Bit

[SkateZilla]

Hello All,

 

nice info regarding FPS tuning, the core problems of all armchair pilots in low level flight !

 

I see the biggest hurdle in the limitations given by the old code being used and/or carried along since Flanker.

 

DirectX 9c is outdated and not suited for this game with such a high object count. DX9 at its high times wasn't meant to be used for such high load scenes. A failure by design to bet on that old horse...and now it causes headaches to get it lifted up to DX10 or 11 versions.

 

CPU Core usage:

Modern CPU's of past Pentium Dual Core have a built in core balancer functions that allows every

thread to more or less make use of all cores to some extend. It can or could also be enabled by manually attaching cores to a thread through task manager.

Nonetheless, a adequate exe would natively make use of all available cores and thereby not need to have the CPU do the load balancing that often caused FPS-stuttering on any kind of hardware

when 1 core unloaded work to another. This got a lot better with Core2Duo and later Intels.

Battlefield 1942 and 2 Servers had LOTS of issues since it was the time of arising multi-cores ( Pentium Dual Core etc..).

 

Developers should spend a year for renewing DCS at it's core.

 

Native SMP support for multi-processors and cores ( there are 12-cores out there ! )

DirectX 11.x support

 

Then, and only then after fixing this they should add more content.

 

My frames differ from 45fps @ 2880x1800 when flying high

down to 7 fps @ 1920x1200 with different settings.

I now fly 1920x1200 with mostly low or mid settings.

 

Thanks to this thread, I hope to gain some 5-10 fps in certain parts of the game and for sure will not blame my Mac for 7 fps on a low fly-bye over the runway on my favorite Aerobatics Server.

 

Some servers I play with 25-40 fps mainly and some ( mainly my favorite one ) I quickly end up with 15-20 fps since they changed a few things on the session the server is running.

 

There is ALOT of potential in DCS, lets not talk it down. There hasn't been a better one around for over a decade and it all sounds promising for the future as DCS does seem to make money. That's a good point when the DCS Team needs to decide if they give it a major overhaul or not.

 

I hope they do the things needed to make DCS future proof.

 

I actually wanted to build a game rig but as it seems, it doesn't give that much more fun for the buck so I wait and see if DCS gets things moving. If it stays like it is, it seems like you can throw HW wise at it what you want, DX9c will limit your possible achievements if you max things out in settings and object counts. I don't see the point in 2 big and fat NV's in SLI if you can't really make use of any of the great features in that NV chip. Brute Force never got u far in Flight Sims,

you will face a brick wall that will freeze FPS at a certain value. Upgrade the code and we can upgrade HW with confidence.

 

 

Just my 2 cents

 

Bit

 

"Thunderbolt 214th.com"

 

Running DCS on a MacBook Pro Retina Mid2012, Core i7 2.6GHz, 16GB DDR3-1600, 256GB SSD, NV-650 GT-M @ BootCamped Win7-64 Ult on a ded. Win7 install just for DCS.

 

EDGE is Due out soon, which Brings the Image Render to DX11

 

Now that we are getting very close to integrating EDGE into DCS, I can share a few more details.

 

1- DirectX 11 / DirectX 11 Windows 8 based.

2- Can support up to four GPU (either SLI or CF).

3- Uses clip maps.

4- Two cloud layers can be created with options for none, cumulous, cumulous nimbus, and stratus.

5- Terrain shadow projection is supported.

6- World can be as large as the designer wishes them to be, it is more of a question of development time / map detail.

7- Option to project map on globe surface.

[BitMaster]

SkateZilla,

 

How about SMP ?

 

DX11 sounds great,but what about SMP ? ¾ of my CPU is wasted in DCS.

 

Bit

[Lange_666]

2- Can support up to four GPU (either SLI or CF).

I just hope that it still runs decently on a single card setup and that it is not designed with SLI or CF in mind. Not everybody can afford a 2 GPU system, let alone 4 GPU's.

[doveman]

As an ATI user who is resigned to the fact that until we get EDGE the chances of getting Crossfire to work correctly is poor.

 

I have tried all different ways and failed, closest I got was using crossfire and SoftTH, but even then it was not great.

 

Since then I have opted for 1 card ( yes still ATI LOL ) I have taken a gamble hoping EDGE will benefit ATI cards.

 

When I run the test mentioned above I get a good 120 FPS which is great, but of course as soon as you are on a mission and there is a lot going on it drops 60 > 40 > 17 depending on what is going on.

 

DCS needs optimizing big time, and I have said in other threads I do not think they will optimise it, why would they ? an out dated outgoing graphics engine would take up to many hours to put right.

 

I just hope we do not have to wait to long for EDGE.

 

I don't know why but my results are much lower, around 54fps as you can see from these screenshots (I took an external one just to show it's not using vsync or limited to 120fps).

 

 

I copied most of the settings from the OP, other than the resolution to 1920x1200, Heatblur off, HDR to Normal and Trees Visibility to 6000m.

 

When I play actual missions, the fps drops drastically, to an unplayable 17-19fps, as the number of Scene Objects increase. So I might start with 40fps and 12-13 objects, which drops to 17fps as I fly over a town (no enemies nearby) and the objects increase to 30-40.

 

I'm using a number of mods, mostly cockpit and sound tweaks but none that should negatively affect the fps and a few that should improve it:

 

[Less Smoke for more FPS] (might not be doing much as I also delete smokecloud.pfx from Bazar/Effects/PFX/High anyway)

 

[Reduced Distance for more FPS] (also set "structures = {20, 10000};" in graphics.lua for High)

 

and this is needed to stop flickering white dots appearing when HDR is enabled:

 

[HDR with a 'D' like Dynamic for DCS WORLD]

 

These are the rest, none of which should be having much, if any, effect on the fps:

 

[Ricardos Blue HD cockpit]

[Trimmer Mod]

[A10-C Bigger HUD Font]

[A10C Horse of War]

[Airfields v3b]

[Center HMS]

[Clickable Radio Menu for 1.2.6 V3.1]

[Custom Snapviews]

[Headtracker for 1.2.6]

[Labels Mod]

[nrgized NVG mod]

[Real Sound 1.2]

[isegrims Sounds for DCS World zzzspace RealSound Version]

[Reduce Avionics Volume]

[Diveplanes DCS A10C AUDIO MOD Pack]

[Diversified Switch & Key Sounds]

 

I'm also using Radeon Pro and using the following for DCS.exe which I understand are the recommended settings for it:

 

Tesselation Control: Force Off

Ansiotropic optimization: Enabled

Trilinear optimization: Enabled

Surface Format Optimisation: Disabled

Texture Filtering Quality and Mipmap Quality: High Quality

Texture LOD: 0

Flip Queue Size: 1

 

So is there anything else I can do to at least get my fps up to near what others with similar hardware are getting?