Weather radar seems to cause frame rate drop
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After flying through severe clouds with rain, I noticed a very severe frame rate drop. On the Microsoft forum it was mentioned that others suffer from this as well. It seems to be related to the weather radar. Switching it off and on again seems to bring the frame rates back up. I still have to check this myself.
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Hi Harry,
This is something that's been kicking around since the beginning of the Steam Gauge Overhaul fleet. Unfortunately, it seems so rare and intermittent that I've only recently found one customer willing to help me find the source of the problem. No luck on that front yet, but I am also planning some upgrades that will make it easier to find the source of the problem with a new failure interface.
It's very interesting that you seem to connect the problem with precipitation, though. How certain are you of that? That would certainly help connect the source of the problem with the weather radar, rather than the failure system.
Thanks,
Nick C. -
Hi Nick,
I did two more two-hour XC flights. At the end of the flight the frame rates drop to slide show level (1-2 fps). Weather was great. hardly any clouds. Weather radar did not seem to affect things. I tried all kind of things (deleting cache, turning instruments off and on again)to bring the FPS up again, but nothing worked. I did notice that my GPU usage, which was 35% at the start had gone up to 85%. I do have a 4070Ti 12 GB graphics card, which makes MSFS run extremely well. -
Thanks for the information, Harry. Did the usual solution of turning the weather radar off and on again not have an effect? I haven't heard any instances of that not working yet. I'm almost done with the major changes that separate the failure system from the weather radar, so hopefully that will allow us to troubleshoot further.
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No, switching weather radar off and on did not cure it. It looked like a sort of memory leak, but I am not even sure if it is related to the TBM850. I recently started using FSLT to inject traffic. At the beginning of the flight this definitely has no effect, but perhaps something is happening here. I will make some flight without it.
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This afternoon I performed the longest flight so far. Using the autopilot I flew long-distance for 2 hours and 45 minutes using real weather showing clouds and some rain. Frame rates stayed okay throughout the whole flight. The difference to the previous flight, apart from the region (Norway versus USA), was that I did not use FSLT to inject live traffic this time. This does not mean that FSLT is the culprit, but it is worth investigating.
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Thank you both for offering to help, and continuing to provide updates on your experiments. I hope that it's at least clear why I've had such a hard time tracking this one down because of how inconsistent it is. I just finished separating the weather radar into a much simpler instrument without the failure system yesterday. If you both want to give it a try, you can private message me, and I will send you the files soon. Unfortunately, this necessitates doing some flying without failures or state-saving, but I'm sure the community will thank you if we can get to the bottom of this.
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@Black-Square
I am certainly willing to help. However, I am now doubting whether it is related to the TBM850. I searched the internet and read that other aircraft are also suffering from the same issue after long flights (i.e. a few hours). I also read that there are indications that the issue is Live traffic injection or FSTL traffic injection related. As a matter of fact, I performed some more flights in which I did not use FSTL and in all these cases the frame rates stayed as they were at the beginning of the flight. No stutters.
So before changing anything to your aircraft, which by the way is wonderful, let me play along with FSTL on and off. To be continued. -
Interesting. I have come here because of a jittering frame rate issue that only occurs with this aircraft. It seems intermittent but very regular and renders the aircraft unusable if I can't get to the bottom of it. I also experienced a flight where the frame rate got worse and the cpu load increased by the end of it.
I only bought it on Wednesday but I have spent almost all of that time troubleshooting what is causing it. I bought it with Accuseasons Advanced and they were both installed at the same time and at first, I was blaming REX but after much testing, it isn't. It's just this aircraft.
Coincidentally, just before I came here, I turned off failures to see if that stops it so this thread got my attention immediately. I also see that it may not be the failures but may be the weather radar. Well, I have failures off and if it's gone I will report back. If it isn't I will try flying without the radar on at all and see if that helps.
Very frustrating, apart from the sounds this could be a favourite aircraft. I love the flight model but this issue is a serious problem.
Feel free to ask me any questions. If I can help with this issue I will be happy to because I really want to enjoy this thing.
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@Black-Square said in Weather radar seems to cause frame rate drop:
Thank you both for offering to help, and continuing to provide updates on your experiments. I hope that it's at least clear why I've had such a hard time tracking this one down because of how inconsistent it is. I just finished separating the weather radar into a much simpler instrument without the failure system yesterday. If you both want to give it a try, you can private message me, and I will send you the files soon. Unfortunately, this necessitates doing some flying without failures or state-saving, but I'm sure the community will thank you if we can get to the bottom of this.
I have been doing some more flights to try to get to the bottom of this today and so far it seems directly tied to the weather radar. If I leave the weather radar off and never touch it at any point from start to finish I have a smooth jitter free flight. My FPS are locked at 60 and they stay there at 60 the entire time. However, if I so much as turn on the weather radar then I have constant jitters for the entire flight. Even if I turn off the radar. And it's not that my frame rate drops below 60, it's just that there is this ever-present jitter when looking around. It's unusable. It seems to get worse as the flight progresses and it is most worse during approach and landing and then being on the ground.
I don't know what is going on but it feels as though when you turn it on it's processing the weather and causing jitters but turning it off doesn't really turn it off. It's started a process that can't be stopped without shutting down the sim and starting again.
I need to do more testing. Tomorrow I will try not touching it again for a flight or two and then turning it on again just to confirm today's testing and after that I will try turning on failures again with and without weather radar but at the moment the radar or the gauge is causing a serious issue on my rig.
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@Jazz "If I leave the weather radar off and never touch it at any point from start to finish I have a smooth jitter free flight. My FPS are locked at 60 and they stay there at 60 the entire time." That's interesting, how long was that flight? I've tested this previously in the Bonanza and more recently in the TBM but on my system the performance degradation still occured with the radar off the entire time.
What I've also noticed: In the Bonanza this always started happening to me right around one hour after loading into the sim. In the TBM I've managed to do flights around 90 minutes before FPS started to drop. -
Interesting subject, never felt a significant performance issue that I could attribute to the TBM850 or the WX.
Just did a quick test standing still on the runway with the TBM850 with WX in off state, my FPS were around 58. When turning on the WX , even in STDBY , FPS dropped to around 50. Turning off the WX revived the FPS to 58.
Then I switched to the default TBM 930, where actually I was expecting to see slightly less FPS with the G3000. but interestingly, The FPS were constant 59-60 (vsync limited here ) and didn't dropped a bit when turning on the WX. Will do some further testing.... -
@glideslope Just to clarify, what's happening here is a FPS degradation over time. You might loose a few FPS using the WX radar in general but the issue is that after a certain amount of time (in most cases after an hour or even longer) the performance starts to degrade significantly. At the point this occurs my FPS will drop from ~50 to less than 5 within minutes.
I've done many tests in the past, reinstalled the sim and did flights without any add-ons but the Bonanza/TBM, build a new PC and tested it with an "as clean as it gets" Windows installation so I can pretty confidently say that the issue is not some sort of conflict, it all comes down to the WX radar itself. I'd love to try the separated version but haven't heard back from Nick yet. -
@Outermarker no prob, and definitely will keep an eye further... just pointed out also that it's clear to see the impact in general performance compared to the default TBM too ( I'm using a single GNS530 ) when using the WX radar. Not sure that the performance different is "by design" but these could be either isolated or related issues.
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I just did another flight where I didn't turn on the radar at all and although I didn't see the problem as bad during the flight towards the end it started to rear its ugly head and yet again, as soon as I get on the ground the jitters appeared quite badly. They were not there on the ground when I departed but as soon as I land they are there.
To be honest, I'm getting really frustrated with this aircraft and beginning to regret the purchase. My rig is pretty powerful and my experience is always butter smooth with anything I fly and I have been doing this simming thing since the beginning so I'm quietly confident I'm not making any newbie mistakes here. There really does seem to be something wrong with this plane somewhere and I can't quite pin it down.
If it wasn't for this I would be really enjoying it but this issue is a show-stopper.
I wonder if there aren't two things impacting this. My problems begin immediately when I turn on the weather radar but if I leave it off the problem doesn't seem to appear until well into the flight and then peaking when I get on the ground.
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@Outermarker fully understand your frustration... I had some odd issues every now and then but usually they get resolved. I would strongly recommended creating a consistently reproducible test-case , attempt it several times and then check with the TBM850. I would disable as much as possible external factors and start with empty community, no addons, preset weather , no AI. would load a fixed FP to the TBM930 and would fly it 2-3 times to see that the problem doesn't occur with clean stock sim. Then would load the TBM850, stock avionics only and repeat the test.
From my perspective, other than sim bugs (which I've seen enough since the early alpha days), worth opening developer modes -> FPS display and verify VRAM usage and also monitor main thread and gpu usages.
Sharing some recent issues that got resolved: Issue I had during SU13, a first time ever... were severe stutters in flight which disappeared when I disabled the rolling cache. Since then I'm with rolling cache enabled now in SU14 beta. During SU14 I reported some hard freezes issues but since then that seems to be either fixed or resolved by my driver update. I've also updated my nVidia drivers to 546.01 recently. Every change could be a cause or a remedy so I suggest making sure you are isolating factors and testing as much as feasible.
Hope it helps... good luck!
