Optimizing DCS performance

[Airway]

Well as a lot of other users, I experience a strong perfrformance drop since version 1.2.6 of DCS, although nothing changed on my computer system (specs in sig).

 

Even after reducing a lot of options in the DCS settings, there's still a lot of stuttering, fps drop, caching, micro freezes and so on.

 

I read several other threads, wich were not helpful at all.

 

I'm now down to following settings:

 

 

Texture: High

Scenery: High

Traffic: Off

Water: Low

Visib Range: Medium

Heat Blur: Off

Shadows: Low

Resolution: 1920x1080

Aspect Ratio: 16:9

Monitors: 1

Res. of Cockpit Displays: 512

MSAA: Off

HDR: Off

Clutter/Bushes: 0

Trees Visibility: 4741m

Preload Radius: 37380m

Disable Aero Interface: Yes

Tree Shadows: Off

Vsync: On

Fullscreen: On

Cockpit Shadows: Off

TSSAA: Off

Mini HUD: Off

Mirrors: Off

Birds: 0

 

As system I am using:

Windows 7 Pro, 64bit

Quadcore AMD Phenom II 955 4x3,2 Ghz CPU

4 GB RAM

Nvidia GeFore GTX 460 SE with 327.23 driver

Nothing useless running in the background.

 

As I said, this system worked well with DCS pre 1.2.6 with most settings higher than now!

 

So I have my hope you guys have some useful hints for me, how to optimize my DCS, so that it runs smoother.

 

 

I have bought and installed all available DCS modules, so I spent some money. Would be nice if I could use it again.

Not using mods in any way.

 

Thanks in advance for any hint,

 

Airway

[Milli]

Would maximising the Preload Radius improve the situation? Reduces caching etc.

Maybe?

 

Regards,

Milli

[TheMoose]

If you can afford it I suggest to get another 4Gig of ram...

[159th_Falcon]

Please don't, he's already VERY low on RAM.

(pre-loading causes even more RAM usage)

 

I would also suggest getting openhardwaremonitor

Configure it to log your processor load (per core) and GPU load and play the game for a bit.

 

If you see any CPU core close to 100% performance all the time and GPU load well below it. Not much you can do besides upgrading your CPU.

 

If you see your GPU close to 100% performance all the time and highest CPU load on any core well below 100% reduce your graphics settings.

 

(don't forget the settings in your GPU's drivers as well, can make a huge difference)

 

***EDIT***

If you can afford it I suggest to get another 4Gig of ram...

Yep, or if building a new system i would even suggest 16GB. not that much more expensive and when playing DCS

my systems comes awfully close to using 8 GB of RAM.

 

Also, since your system seems to be using the pagefile a lot, you could benefit from an SSD to reduce micro stutters.

Which are caused by loading data from your HD into memory. (i believe)

Then again, getting 8 GB of memory might solve that also.

Edited October 9, 2013 by 159th_Falcon

[BIGNEWY]

The minimum specs have changed

 

Minimum system requirements: OS 64-bit Windows Vista, 7 or 8; CPU: Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz; RAM: 6 GB; Free hard disk space: 10 GB; Video: 512 MB RAM card, DirectX 9.0c - compatible; Sound: DirectX 9.0c - compatible; requires internet activation.

 

Recommended system requirements: OS 64-bit Windows Vista, 7 or 8; CPU: Core i5+; RAM: 8GB; Hard disk space: 10 GB; Video: Shader 3.0 or better; NVIDIA GeForce GTX560 / ATI 6950 DirectX 9.0c or better; Sound: DirectX 9.0c - compatible; DirectX: 9.0C; requires internet activation.

[Mirtma]

Falcon, thank you for program link. But I can't find where to set logging CPU.

[159th_Falcon]

open the program, View, Show Plot.

 

Right click in the graph to set the time period, 30 mins should do for this purpose.

 

Then in the main window, where you have all CPU clocks, temps load etc etc

click the tick boxes to the left of them to show up in the graph.

 

Hope this helps.

 

ps, if you right click in the plot window, and select stacked axis, it splits the window into two different graphs.

One for temps and one for Load.

(if you also have clocks selected you also get a separate graph for all clocks, etc etc )

[Mirtma]

Oh, great! TNX

[aceviper]

Turn down scenes to medium..it will help.

[159th_Falcon]

You should get an image similar to this;

 

GPU load is averaging 80 to 90 %

CPU load is only averaging ~30%

 

Clearly, in my case the graphics card is the bottleneck whit my current settings.

The reason my GPU is not loaded 100% is that i limited the FPS to 30.

[TheMoose]

Please don't, he's already VERY low on RAM.

(pre-loading causes even more RAM usage)

 

I would also suggest getting openhardwaremonitor

Configure it to log your processor load (per core) and GPU load and play the game for a bit.

 

If you see any CPU core close to 100% performance all the time and GPU load well below it. Not much you can do besides upgrading your CPU.

 

If you see your GPU close to 100% performance all the time and highest CPU load on any core well below 100% reduce your graphics settings.

 

(don't forget the settings in your GPU's drivers as well, can make a huge difference)

 

***EDIT***

 

Yep, or if building a new system i would even suggest 16GB. not that much more expensive and when playing DCS

my systems comes awfully close to using 8 GB of RAM.

 

Also, since your system seems to be using the pagefile a lot, you could benefit from an SSD to reduce micro stutters.

Which are caused by loading data from your HD into memory. (i believe)

Then again, getting 8 GB of memory might solve that also.

 

I actually meant add not replace ;)

[YeaImRota]

Your processor needs to go. In fact, it's time to upgrade that machine. At the very least, you should have some form of i5, preferably a K model that will let you overclock to 4.5GHz, and a GTX660Ti or GTX670. Also, 4GB of RAM isn't going to cut it. Time to double that.

[Jeesus]

You should get an image similar to this;

 

GPU load is averaging 80 to 90 %

CPU load is only averaging ~30%

 

Clearly, in my case the graphics card is the bottleneck whit my current settings.

The reason my GPU is not loaded 100% is that i limited the FPS to 30.

 

I would not consider this as bottlenecking, beacuse the 40 percent CPU load is to due to the fact that th engine uses "1,5" cores only. And the gpu still has 20 percent unallocated resource.

 

I would say your system is quite well balanced :)

 

I found similar things on mine, check out, the only thing that is different on mine that I cheked Core 0 only for the load graph, this was like 40 minutes of online play in a P-51D on the Virtual Aerobatics Server with medium amont of people around, good balance here as well I think, what we cannot take over is the engine's limitations itself.

 

Opinions?

 

Cheers

Edited October 9, 2013 by Jeesus

[159th_Falcon]

I would not consider this as bottlenecking, beacuse the 40 percent CPU load is to due to the fact that th engine uses "1,5" cores only. And the gpu still has 20 percent unallocated resource.

Not really, i logged each core separately, so there are 4 CPU load graphs.

Two cores show 30 to 40% load and the other two cores show 2 to 7 % load.

 

Same thing can be going on on your system. But can't say for sure if you don't log each core.

Also, i need to be able see which line is what.

(ie core1, core2, core3, core4, GPU load)

 

 

Could you try and make a similar screenshot to the one i made?

[Jeesus]

Not really, i logged each core separately, so there are 4 CPU load graphs.

Two cores show 30 to 40% load and the other two cores show 2 to 7 % load.

 

Same thing can be going on on your system. But can't say for sure if you don't log each core.

Also, i need to be able see which line is what.

(ie core1, core2, core3, core4, GPU load)

 

 

Could you try and make a similar screenshot to the one i made?

 

Sure, here you go, smaller timeframe from around the middle of the session.

 

Thoughts?

 

Edit: Now that I'm checking it seems strange, none of the cores were idling... probably the background processes.

Edited October 9, 2013 by Jeesus

[Hunden Ynk]

Now that I'm checking it seems strange, none of the cores were idling... probably the background processes.

It's normal, the Windows thread scheduler will allocate resources on the cores as it sees fit. Not keeping one application to one core, and bouncing things around like that is no problem. So, a large bunch of short running tasks in sequence, might make a (largely) single threaded application, like DCS, look like it's doing things in parallel, when it's not.

The total load percentage is a giveaway; say you have four cores and the task manager displaying a total load of 25 % with one running application (disregarding any background tasks), that's a sign of a single threaded program running to the max.

[Airway]

I heard you all and thanks for your recommendations and hints!

 

Did three testruns. As is, lower settings, tuned CPU & GPU. Here's the result:

 

 

So the Mainbord is capable of running up to 16 GB of RAM - I will invest here.

And the graphics card is a bottleneck too. Will maybe invest here in a faster card with 2 or 3 GB videoram instead of the 1 GB it has now.

The CPU seems ok so far, till I decide to set up a new system next year.

I hope this tuning works out till then.

 

I also set scenes to medium. Didn't do a lot but a little.

 

In my last test step I reved the CPU from 4x3,2 Ghz to 4x3,5 Ghz, the GPU Core from 650 to 800 Mhz and the GPU memory from 1700 to 2000 Mhz. Seemed to help also. But only until the RAM and new NVIDIA arrives wich I have to choose first.

 

I hoped to hear some editing tips for the DCS config files to get better fps and lower memory though. Wasn't there a little tool for Flaming Cliffs once, where one could reduce some items to load?

[vanzant_cl]

 

A little comparison between 3 titles.

 

Arma 3: Maxed out

Battlefield 4 beta: Medium preset

DCS World: Low Preset, preload radius to min...

 

pc specs:

AMD Phenom II x6 1090 @3.2

8Gbram

Geforce GTX 770

 

As you can see, when playing BF4 the bottleneck is horrendous, but DCS eats ram like a madman with everything at low and just barely getting 60+ fps.

Only 2 cores go past 50% but the overall load its pretty low and i dont have any idea of what that means :D

 

[Airway]

As I said, before version 1.2.6 was released, I ran DCS on the same machine with a lot higher settings and huge preload radius.

 

That's why I wonder and opened this thread.

 

Isn't tweaking in DCS' files an option?

[AtaliaA1]

Wow!!! And that is with a GTX480oc w\1.5Gigs of DDR3 memory.

 

I used to say that a 2Gig card was needed for this sim. but now a 3Gig seems to be the way to go.

 

This is good Evolution is a must in this genre, if one wants longevity and solid market share.

Good on ya ED.

[Airway]

Well, as this is an old game and engine, I recommend optimizing it by the developers. Especially RAM usage.

Just think of all those differents modules and multiplayer.

Huge lags and freezes will be the result if its going on like this.

 

It's not an option and affordable for everyone to buy new hardware, just because the old DCS engine is so inefficient. And it doesn't fix any bugs.

[Blaze]

It's not just the engine, new models and techniques introduced in DCS like specular and normal mapping coupled with much higher resolution textures means it's certainly more GPU heavy. Think of it, now a lot of the models have 3 texture sets being displayed simultaneously, texture, normal and spec. That adds up.

[Jeesus]

It's not just the engine, new models and techniques introduced in DCS like specular and normal mapping coupled with much higher resolution textures means it's certainly more GPU heavy. Think of it, now a lot of the models have 3 texture sets being displayed simultaneously, texture, normal and spec. That adds up.

 

Do you have any info, how will they be optimized in the new game engine? If I can have a guess the unit models wil remain the same...

[AtaliaA1]

Well, as this is an old game and engine, I recommend optimizing it by the developers. Especially RAM usage.

Just think of all those differents modules and multiplayer.

Huge lags and freezes will be the result if its going on like this.

 

It's not an option and affordable for everyone to buy new hardware, just because the old DCS engine is so inefficient. And it doesn't fix any bugs.

 

 

I get you Airway. Like "Call of Duty4" (I think it was) I know it was an FPS. that had very high system and GPU requirements but was capable of running on a lower grade system at the same time, with a few tweaks of course.

[WildBillKelsoe]

Problem is, I dont want to migrate to the new engine as I hate win8 and got a solid system.