major performance loss after first map change

Hello,

i finally found a way to replicate a major loss in performance that i experience for a while now.

when launching the game and loading in a mission i get good fps without stuttering. starting another mission on the same map and same season will still result in good performance.

however when changing the season in the editor (in caucassus) or loading a mission with another season, fps is nearly halfed (~60 to ~30) and i experience some stuttering.

my pc is fairly old and has only 8 gigs of ram, so i asked a friend with a modern, overclocked i5 and 16gigs to test it and he experienced it too, although less severe!

i'm on stable branch. tested on caucassus map in sp and mp with very light missions.

I believe mission editor is pretty ram hungry, emtying the cache whilst changing season is a good idea

i want to add, that i am very clearly cpu/ram limited on my system (lynnfield oldtimer i7-860@3,4ghz, 8 gigs of ram), so when recreating the bug a more powerful system might make the loss in performance less obvious.

since i get nearly 50% less performance on a system that normaly runs dcs decently, i think it can still be classified as a mjaor bug and should be investigated thoroughly...

I believe mission editor is pretty ram hungry, emtying the cache whilst changing season is a good idea

how would i do that apart from restarting the game?

how would i do that apart from restarting the game?

that's what I meant...just restart the game ;):):D

probably switcing between seasons required loading of shaders which is the reason of fps drop.

that's what I meant...just restart the game ;):):D

probably switcing between seasons required loading of shaders which is the reason of fps drop.

haha. ok, i'll keep doing that then.

i still insist though that this is a severe bug, that needs fixing asap.

also to be clear, the performance does not recover after the season switch. it just stays more or less halved than before until i restart the game.

i have the suspicion that this bug is one of the reasons of the stuttering reported by other users in other places, as i could imagine that on a more modern pc, you don't get the severe loss in fps that is istantly reckognizable, but maybe only some micro-stutters and frame-time issues, because the cpu is not as much at it's limit as with my system...

do you need me to provide more information?

even though the work-around is quite effective, i still feel that this is a major issue. i could imagine that the underlying bug might also be responsible for performance problems experienced by other users in other situations.

or is it already fixed in the open beta?

on stable it is 100% reproducible with nearly 50% less performance on my system.

i found another way to reproduce that performance loss without changing the season:

a more complex mission with a handful of different ai aircraft models and some ai ground units would run with around 60fps on first loading and would only run with about 30 fps after exiting to the mission editor and running it again.

on going back to mission editor and starting again, fps would sometimes be normal again and sometimes halfed. very strange.

as with the first example, exiting dcs and restarting the whole game, would reliably give good performance on first mission start.

i am on stable branch.

problems seems still to exist after the latest big patch to stable.

loaded a small mission in caucasus:

50 -70 fps, very smooth.

back to editor, reload mission without significant changes to it:

30-35 fps in the very same situation

(this time i did not even change the season to trigger the performance loss)

could someohne else with only 8gigs of ram confirm this?

there seems to be a major bug eating away performance somewhere. as mentioned above, a friend with a more modern pc, experienced the same performance hits, only much less severe.

i did not yet encounter this problem in NTTR.

*edit*

i did not notice, that there was a new stable patch today. the following posts refers to lasts weeks stable version DCS 2.5.4.26552.

after the last stable patch, it seems to be quite consistent on caucasus, that after loading in the first time, performance is good, after loading in a second time (back to editor an play again) performance is halfed (50-60fps to 25-30fps in my case).

This is without changing the season or doing more editing on the mission. Tested with a very lightweight mission.

I suspect, that it has to do with me having "only" 8 gigs of ram, so it might not show on better systems, yet it still makes caucassus practicaly unplayable for me. I'm also sure, that this severe bug will also manifest on better systems, just maybe not as severe as on my.

I suspect that it is related to the memory management and the other stutter-related problems reported in this subforum.

retested with current stable built:

problem persists!

my current test mission has only the player aircraft and nothing else with dynamic weather this time (since static weather is known to cause stuttering on its own).

on first load ~60fps

second load still ~60fps

on third load and after that 25-30fps!

this makes the game practically unplayable for me, since restarting the whole game just to clear this bug takes several minutes and is infuriating.

could this bug get acknowledged at least? is there any more info i should provide?

is there any more i have to do to get this problem acknowledged by the devs, or get any advise how i could prevent this performance degradation?

i'm running an old i7-860 oc'ed to 3,3 ghz. 8 gb ram, gtx 770.

windows 10 on ssd, dcs on "fast" hdd. the system is in very good shape overall, not many background-tasks, good performance on other programms and benchmarks. page file and other options managed by windows without usermade changes.

i'm running a 1280*1024 monitor at the moment, so my gtx 770 archieves solid 60fps on high/very high details on caucasus with small/medium sized missions (heavy missions are limited by cpu and ram i think).

when (on caucassus terrain) i start a mission the first time, it runs well, but after loading in a second time (back to editor and play again) it runs with only 20 to 30 fps (but no apparent stuttering, mostly bad fps). sometimes it runs still fine on second load, but runs slow on a third try.

to get better performance again, i have to completely quit dcs and start again, or load another terrain (in my case: NNTR) and then load back again to the caucasus terrain, where i can play with good performance until i reload a second or third time.

this seems to be a bug with dcs memory management!

could this please get fixed, or at least acknowleged? i understand that i'm on the low end specs wise, but well within the minimal system configuration and since i do get smooth and solid 60fps on high details, the problem must be with dcs...

is there any more i have to do to get this problem acknowledged by the devs, or get any advise how i could prevent this performance degradation?

 

i'm running an old i7-860 oc'ed to 3,3 ghz. 8 gb ram, gtx 770.

windows 10 on ssd, dcs on "fast" hdd. the system is in very good shape overall, not many background-tasks, good performance on other programms and benchmarks. page file and other options managed by windows without usermade changes.

 

i'm running a 1280*1024 monitor at the moment, so my gtx 770 archieves solid 60fps on high/very high details on caucasus with small/medium sized missions (heavy missions are limited by cpu and ram i think).

 

when (on caucassus terrain) i start a mission the first time, it runs well, but after loading in a second time (back to editor and play again) it runs with only 20 to 30 fps (but no apparent stuttering, mostly bad fps). sometimes it runs still fine on second load, but runs slow on a third try.

to get better performance again, i have to completely quit dcs and start again, or load another terrain (in my case: NNTR) and then load back again to the caucasus terrain, where i can play with good performance until i reload a second or third time.

 

this seems to be a bug with dcs memory management!

could this please get fixed, or at least acknowleged? i understand that i'm on the low end specs wise, but well within the minimal system configuration and since i do get smooth and solid 60fps on high details, the problem must be with dcs...

it's definitely a problem with your memory i have i5-3570k@ 4,4Ghz Gtx 1060-6gb and I used to have a 16GB memory, whit more complex mission lots of stuttering after upgrade to 32Gb memory all run smooth so look for some used ram stick and SSD give huge advantage is well

it's definitely a problem with your memory i have i5-3570k@ 4,4Ghz Gtx 1060-6gb and I used to have a 16GB memory, whit more complex mission lots of stuttering after upgrade to 32Gb memory all run smooth so look for some used ram stick and SSD give huge advantage is well

not very helpful. i can imagine, that more ram could negate the issue, however the small/medium sized missions that i normally play run fine with 8gb. dcs does not even take all memory that it could take.

also the hdd has nothing to do with it: it's not about stutters. it's just the fps cut in half.

even if throwing more ram at it might help, there is evidently a problem with memory management or sth. closely related.

sure, another 8 gigs of ram won't kill me, but i don't want to spend money to negate a problem, that should be solved by the developer.

it gets more obvious in your case actually: i think it is absurd, that people "need" to invest in 32gigs of ram when you can do a solo flight/small mission in caucasus on high detail settings with a memory foodprint of under 3gigs.

On a 16 gig system, you get nearly 5 times the amount of ram you evidently only need for a simple ground attack mission in caucassus terrain on high details with smooth 60fps.

there is something broken with ram management and i don't feel that telling other user to throw more ram at it, is the best solution (even if it helps).

now i got the performance degredation just after playing for some time.

very small mission with only some ground targets started with 60fps. after approx. 2 hours i noticed that fps was halfed again.

the actual ground attack part was still running with 60fps, but at some later point, when we were just doing formation flying and pattern work, i noticed it (i was host for a 2 player coop).

now i get the feeling, this might just be a simple, ugly memory leak with the caucasus terrain...

at this point, i have no hope, that anyone from ED will ever acknowledge this bug, or even try to fix it.

but isn't it kind of cathartic to post here?!

well, today i figured out, that when you load into the caucasus map for the first time on a mission set in winter (i assume this is also for spring and autumn), the engine seems to load the summmer textures (or part of) first and loads the seasonal textures on top of it.

so, from my testing, on summer caucasus i have some more headroom until i hit the halved-performance brickwall.

i also have longer load-times on non-summer caucassus missions.

i have no idea, if this "double loading" of seasonal data is directly connected to this memory leak, or if it is just showing faster on non-summer caucassus, because there is more data crunching going on before the mission even starts.

Yeah its unlikely anything will be fixed, I have reported many bugs and non of them have been fixed.