Whats up with this? More Bugs?

If anyone of you have ever flown around Novorossiysk you would know that it's quite heavy on dragging down the FPS.

Did some tests today. Under you can see two pictures. First one is from the harbor looking over the city towards the airfield. The FPS in that picture is 148 FPS

Second picture is the camera looking towards the docks and industrial area. The FPS in this picture is 66 FPS!!!

That's a drop of 82 FPS!!!!

Under here you can see the load on my GPU's. Every time it's close to 100%, I'm looking towards the airfield and I'm having ~130-140 FPS.

Every time it drops down like a rock, I'm looking toward the harbor area.

And finally, here's my CPU usage. Which are holding steady.

The GPU load looks very familiar to how the GPU's where acting during the "heat blur bug"

http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=101459

Hope ED can have a look at these things properly and tell us whats up.

a lot of objects.

Pretty certain it's just a matter of looking out toward the water in once case and inland in the other. In the first case, the engine is only rendering 1-2 kilometers of land and its objects. In the second, it's rendering about 80 kilometers.

Pretty certain it's just a matter of looking out toward the water in once case and inland in the other. In the first case, the engine is only rendering 1-2 kilometers of land and its objects. In the second, it's rendering about 80 kilometers.

...which in turn causes a bottleneck where the CPU and memory system is not able to send frames to the GPU for rendering as quickly anymore; thus the GPU drops.

It looks pretty much as expected.

You can reduce the FPS hit by lowering the amounts of objects being rendered in a city scene such as Novorossiysk:

open graphics.cfg in notepad++ and look for the line 197

structures = {40, 20000};

change this to something like structures = {20, 10000}; and you'll see an FPS increase but with the cost of reduced building visibility.

So the OS RAM is too slow for the RAM of the GFX card?

So the OS RAM is too slow for the RAM of the GFX card?

There's lots and lots of things that can be at play in something like this.

Basically, it switched from one bottleneck to another - which one the new one is is however hard to pinpoint since this can vary with each computer.

However, a few points to remember: in DX9, vRAM content is actually "mirrored" onto system RAM. Also, there is not only vRAM speeds to consider - the vRAM may have a given speed, but you also need to ensure the memory controller is fast (and wide) enough to keep up with the transaction count. Some cards with "extra" vRAM suffer issues here - a classic example is the 1GB versions of the GTX460 whose memory bus was actually designed for 768MB of RAM; the 1GB version was created through "doubling" up the memory chip on one of the controllers lanes, leading to unpredictable vRAM read/write behaviour on the card. (Stuff like that is the reason why I am generally skeptical of graphics cards that slap on a lot of extra RAM compared to reference designs.)

And finally, it should be remembered that the common tools that display how heavily tasked a GPU (or CPU) is are not reliable. There is no solid definition of what "100%" actually means, and depending on how the measurement is taken it is entirely possible to be bottlenecked on the component even though the metric seems to indicate that there are resources free; and vice versa.

Indeed, i found in my homebrew gamingmachines that informationspeedcapability is far more important than the fastest CPU or GFX card.

A double SSD with the OS and software seperated, instant request and writing together with at least 8Gb DDR3 1600Mhz or 4Gb DDR2 800Mhz RAM seems to eat any game on the market today regardless having the latest CPU or GFX card.

This is why pre-build machines and laptops usualy lack speed on high settings. Boycot DDR3 1333Mhz!!!

a lot of objects.

Pretty certain it's just a matter of looking out toward the water in once case and inland in the other. In the first case, the engine is only rendering 1-2 kilometers of land and its objects. In the second, it's rendering about 80 kilometers.

...which in turn causes a bottleneck where the CPU and memory system is not able to send frames to the GPU for rendering as quickly anymore; thus the GPU drops.

 

It looks pretty much as expected.

Did you guys even have a look at the heat blur bug?

Anyway.

Please explain this then.

This is the GPU usage for this specific scene. I have taken multiple screenshots of the surrounding area and monitoring the GPU usage.

For info, I'm running Kuky's high.lua mod, so my draw distance on cities or whatever is 20km, and not 10km as default.

Every one of the 4 following screenshots are using the GPU at close to 100%. Every single one! (Edited, not CPU, GPU!! )

Every time the GPU is taking a dump, this is what I'm looking at!! What's so freaking special about that scene?

You can reduce the FPS hit by lowering the amounts of objects being rendered in a city scene such as Novorossiysk:

 

open graphics.cfg in notepad++ and look for the line 197

 

structures = {40, 20000};

 

change this to something like structures = {20, 10000}; and you'll see an FPS increase but with the cost of reduced building visibility.

Thanks Mustang, I already know about this one. You showed me it one time before :) I have it at 30 atm.

I'm more interested in why the GPU is taking a dump just by looking at those specific buildings. Specially when I can render the entire Tbilisi with 20km range without seeing anything like this behavior from my GPU's.

Are the buildings/containers made of gold? Some special coding. If they are such a resource killer, why not change them?

This comes up about once or twice a year for the past oh i don't know, at least the 8yrs i been here, even since lock on days. It'll never change.

Can't wait for EDGE and to see what it can do. Here's to looking at the future :thumbup:

This comes up about once or twice a year for the past oh i don't know, at least the 8yrs i been here, even since lock on days. It'll never change.

 

Can't wait for EDGE and to see what it can do. Here's to looking at the future :thumbup:

Yeah, I made a post about it myself a while ago. Got an answer, and felt okey with that.

But after the few findings I made the last few weeks I'm starting to wonder.

Is it impossible that there are no improvements to be made?

I understand that there is a bottleneck somewhere, but why? Why is that specific scene using so much resources? If it's clogging up the CPU, why is it so?

Only answers so far is..... because....

Every time the question about performance in specific situations are brought up, it's the same answers mostly. You have a bottleneck. Your system is to weak. DCS is a CPU hungry game. And so on.

It's never: oh hmm, look at that, yeah, that seems a bit strange.

There are so many other places where there is a lot more to be rendered. More objects, more land, more details etc. And they are far from this resource hungry.

I'm I the only one who finds it strange that a "top down" view on that area of the harbor require more resources then rendering the rest of the entire city and airfield in one view????

Cause if that is the way EDGE will be optimized I don't think we have much to look forward to FPS wise. I hope I'm wrong!

you realize that TFCSE was coded and built when GPUs still had a separate part of the Chip for Geometry and a Separate part for Shaders right?,

The Geometry Units did most of the Work, the Shader units made stuff look pretty,

Now it's straight Shaders doing all the work.

TZeer, you might have a point... while I agree with others when they say there are lot of objects to be rendered and calculated by the CPU (not just video card) and you are using my High.lua which doubles the distance which increases the objects count to more than 3x times (as doubling the diameter of a circe creates way more that doubling the surface area in which objects are located)... but having look at your last image of docks I wonder if there is some 3d object that is not optimised? and is the reason for high FPS hit even if there are actually not that many objects in FoV?

I remember back in the FC1 days where I accidentally noticed that HUMMER 3d object caused way more FPS hit then any other 3d object (vehicles 3d objetcs) and reason for this was HUMMER had no LOD at all and no matter what distance the HUMMER was at (100m, 1Km or 10Km the object trigonometry was the same (in game FPS counter I could see no change in Objects count) so maybe some of the objects at these docks has same issue???

I am suspecting the cranes at docks could be it... not only are they with bit more surfaces/trigonometry (or what ever that's called in 3D object mesh) but cranes are also animated, maybe that animation is the cause... I don't think any other object/building has any animation accept the cranes

Is this similar with the impact of the hangars at Senaki? They seem to be animated too and in numbers.

1) Harbor scene is very dense. Lots of objects close to each other, what means that they are all rendered at the same LOD. Looking at city at angle might be less heavy on resources even if more objects were rendered, because most of these objects would be rendered at distance and so at lower LODs.

2) Animation = CPU hog, always. I wouldn't mind if there was an option turning off scenery animations.

I am suspecting the cranes at docks could be it... not only are they with bit more surfaces/trigonometry (or what ever that's called in 3D object mesh) but cranes are also animated, maybe that animation is the cause... I don't think any other object/building has any animation accept the cranes

Is there any way of removing those cranes? (by removing/rename some object file or editing some lua).

This way we could try to search for that "gold made object".

I think that the other suspect objects could be those circle silos...

TZeer, you might have a point... while I agree with others when they say there are lot of objects to be rendered and calculated by the CPU (not just video card) and you are using my High.lua which doubles the distance which increases the objects count to more than 3x times (as doubling the diameter of a circe creates way more that doubling the surface area in which objects are located)... but having look at your last image of docks I wonder if there is some 3d object that is not optimised? and is the reason for high FPS hit even if there are actually not that many objects in FoV?

 

I remember back in the FC1 days where I accidentally noticed that HUMMER 3d object caused way more FPS hit then any other 3d object (vehicles 3d objetcs) and reason for this was HUMMER had no LOD at all and no matter what distance the HUMMER was at (100m, 1Km or 10Km the object trigonometry was the same (in game FPS counter I could see no change in Objects count) so maybe some of the objects at these docks has same issue???

 

I am suspecting the cranes at docks could be it... not only are they with bit more surfaces/trigonometry (or what ever that's called in 3D object mesh) but cranes are also animated, maybe that animation is the cause... I don't think any other object/building has any animation accept the cranes

Thanks.

I did one more test. I put my view distance down to medium and taking your high.lua file out of the equation. Same results.

Kinda funny. When I'm using your high.lua file and looking over the city towards the airfield, I get 140+ FPS. And thats with 3x more stuff according to your statement.

But looking at the harbor, even with view distance at medium, are only giving ~70 FPS.

As you can see on the picture, there are hardly any other buildings to render. And regarding your crane theory, you could be right. Cause when I'm using the F11 view from the airfield, everything runs fine. Until the harbor comes into view. And I think from that distance, the only objects I could see where the biggest buildings and the cranes. I'm not 100% sure.

If there are any other tests you want me to do. Just say so :)

explosives are the solution to all of life's problems, so why don't you blow the cranes up and see if there's a performance increase or atleast change?

Blowing them up will either make them disappear or change into a destroyed LOD which should reveal if this is indeed a lod issue or not.

I'm still wondering if it's the water rendering that's contributing to the performance hit.

Try Options-->System/Graphics and set the Water to Low. Scan those same areas and see if that helps.

TZeer, you can check object count in the scene by pressing LSHIFT+PAUSE once more.

EDIT: looks like kran_port.edm is the file name, try renaming it, then test if you get any difference in FPS

EDIT2: I tried this and I get 36fps with no kranes and 35fps with kranes there, not much difference, nothing like fps hit you say you have

What's EDGE all about?

new graphics engine ED is developing

TZeer, you can check object count in the scene by pressing LSHIFT+PAUSE once more.

 

EDIT: looks like kran_port.edm is the file name, try renaming it, then test if you get any difference in FPS

 

EDIT2: I tried this and I get 36fps with no kranes and 35fps with kranes there, not much difference, nothing like fps hit you say you have

You could try the following:

Setup a vertical up to down view of the area, zoom very close of the objects and pan the position to the left or right while watching FPS counter.. if you see the fps drops .. probably you have found the gold ;)

I'am at work .. so i can't test it by myself

I'm still wondering if it's the water rendering that's contributing to the performance hit.

 

Try Options-->System/Graphics and set the Water to Low. Scan those same areas and see if that helps.

Already running water on low. Had some un-explainable performance issues with it on high.

TZeer, you can check object count in the scene by pressing LSHIFT+PAUSE once more.

 

EDIT: looks like kran_port.edm is the file name, try renaming it, then test if you get any difference in FPS

 

EDIT2: I tried this and I get 36fps with no kranes and 35fps with kranes there, not much difference, nothing like fps hit you say you have

Renaming the the kran_port.edm gave me about 10 FPS difference.

I think the reason your not getting the same as me is due to your 3 screen setup. And possible your settings. I'm running single screen 2560x1440. MSAAx2, water on low, TSSAA off, heat blur off, cockpit shadows off, tree shadows off, everything else on max. And your high.lua file.

Is it a way for me to find the name of the buildings in that harbor? Or even the object for that harbor itself. Would like to test every object there.

Did the object count Kuky. Was interesting.

Here is the view over Tbilisi with your high.lua mod. 231 Objects.

here is the view from the harbor towards the airfield at Novorossiysk. 635 Objects.

Now, here is top down view over the Harbor. 1720 Objects!!!