Helmut_AUT 0 Posted July 9, 2009 Sorry for the crosspost, but I figure a lot of people do not frequent both boards, and I found this interesting maybe also for others with performance problems. ************************ Hi all, Bought this game yesterday, and I'm positively surprised about the production values and looks for such a bargain. I especially like the "self-shadowing" where parts of the aircraft throw their shadows around the cockpit and wings. However, there seems to be a weird performance-draining bug: When I enable High Shadows (Medium or Low do not have that nice self-shading effect) AND when I then in flight see my own shadow on the ground, my framerate drops from avg. 30 to 15. It's not actually a problem when there are shadows moving around on the aircraft cockpit or upper wing, the framerate remains stable. But if I get my own shadow on the ground insinde my view - or the ground shadow cast by any other aircraft - the framerate drops to half. Now, it doesn't make much sense, since even two aircraft in view hardly cause any framerate drop, but a single airplane shadow does? I'm looking for ways (maybe by editing the CastShadowDistance and MaxVisibilityDistance) to keep the self-shading on the aircraft, but remove the shadows thrown on the ground. I rarely pay attention to them in any sim, anyway. Does someone have pointers on fixing this performance problem? As for tech specs, a 5000+ AMD X2 with 2GB RAM and a 512MB 9600GT Video card certainly should be able to run this game, given the core engine and graphical features compare to IL-2 or FS9? I can't see any advanced shading, bump-mapping or HDR being applied, and purely for textures and 3d-objects, the system should be plenty. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
+Tailspin 3 Posted July 10, 2009 Shadows have always been a drag on framerates with 3rdwire sims. I've got a system close to yours... C2D e5200, 1G 9600, 4G Ram and run shadows on med. Only A/C cast shadows. I think I have everything else set to High, with only Ground Objects set to Unlimited. I haven't noticed the ground shadow problem but when I'm flying low over an area that has a lot of objects to render, like airfields, bigger cities, etc. my frames drop below 20 sometimes. Since the sim doesn't utilize dual cores IMO the bottleneck is the CPU. At only 2.5 ghz per core its like running a 2.5 single core. I wish I had gotten a bigger single core CPU especially since I don't buy many new games anymore. Still yet in the open skys, in cockpit fps are 50+ and there's not much of a slowdown in dogfights. Anyway, probably the best thing to do is try and turn other graphics settings down to compensate. Maybe someone else will have some ideas? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Helmut_AUT 0 Posted July 10, 2009 Thanks for the reply. I already reduced Horizon to NEAR since that's also an incredible framerate hog - and with the engagement distances/visibility of these small aircraft, it shouldn't be a realism issue anyway. But I'd really like to keep the cockpit shadows. I need to experiment more with the two shadow parameters, since I would think it should be possible to remove the "ground shadow". Maybe the framerate problem when ground shadow is in view is related to remains of the "old" method of casting shadows by a LOD? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
