Question for the devs

[Creaghorn 10]

i was wondering what's the MAIN reason for stuttering or drop in FPS. of course every little parameter adds the causes for stuttering, so there is for sure not only one main reason, but maybe the devs know wich one has the biggest impact.

 

is it the airactivity overall?

is it the number of military defences or similar facilities (artillery, infantry, observation ballons etc.)?

is it the size of the "package" of a facility, which is different, depending on density setting (e.g. 10 pileboxes, 20 soldiers, 5 trucks in each observation balloon package etc...)?

is it the number of trees?

is it the gas clouds or arty explosions?

is it the number of trenchparties?

 

i was wondering because when having sorties near the coast, even over the front, the sim runs perfectly, doesn't matter how big a furball is,

in other places over the front, the sim suffers a lot, so that's why i'm wondering what's the main cause for it.

 

thank you in advance

[+Polovski 460]

No idea off hand Creaghorn as we don't see stuttering? If you have a slow or busy hard drive it may do some as we write data during flight.

Or maybe you are over doing the cfsconfig sliders - or maybe flying in areas with lots of aicraft and textures loading (need a faster vid card / more memory??)

 

Or maybe your BIOS has CPU throttling enabled (will slow down when hot etc).

 

So

1) It's not something we have seen particularly.

2) Stuttering can happen in any PC game

3) It could be from a zillion places in PC land.

 

If we all saw it, and secondly knew what caused it, then it would be fixed anyway if possible so not sure how else to answer that.

[Hasse Wind 46]

My guess is the air activity levels. At least they have a major impact on FPS. You can easily test this by starting an early war career, when there are only a few aircraft here there, and then compare the situation to a late war career, when you can't go anywhere without meeting flights of enemy and friendly aircraft.

 

Maybe you should try lowering the settings a bit and see if it helps? I have some stuttering too, but not very often.

[+Polovski 460]

Yep that's one possible and will vary from PC to PC as I say. What works for one will not necessarily work for another either.

 

Too much of anything can cause stuttering in games. In that case more aircraft = more textures loading more work for GPU, more for CPU to calculate where they are blah.. more heat etc.

So knock back settings, or get better PC/video/drive/CPU/Memory components etc is the usual ..

[Olham 164]

For me, the air activity is never the problem.

Like Creaghorn said - near the sea it works best.

And what is there, near the sea? Half or a third of the map is just plain water surface.

I have less frps in the Marne region, where there are more trees.

And in Alsace's very woody regions, they get lowest.

 

Try reducing Scenery Detail Slider, and also the density of ground objects in "Workshop".

Also helpful in souther regions is to reduce the Terrain Detail slider.

It will still look good.

 

Creaghorn, what graphic card do you use? I have an ATI 4870 and could send you my

settings for that.

Edited April 12, 2010 by Olham

[Hasse Wind 46]

I keep the ground object density to low. The scenery looks very good even then, and when I'm in the middle of a dogfight, I don't have time to admire how many trees are in the forest below me - a good framerate is the most important thing.

[Morris 2]

Creaghorn,

 

I solved my stutter problems in OFF with better Hard Drives. I installed 2 x Intel M series 80 Solid Slate Drives (RAID) for Windows 7 and OFF.

 

NO stutters at all. I use to get stutters during combat (that seems to be loading times).

 

Those SSD are still expensive but if you do get them make sure that its possible to firmware update the drives. The Intel M series are high performance drives.

 

Morris

[Bandy 3]

I was just looking for feedback on whether anyone has had experience with solid state drives (SSD's) and OFF, so thank you for posting Morris!

 

Any other information or details of your experience with them would be sincerely appreciated. I'm still waiting for the price to come down...

 

But beware, not all SSD's are created equally. There are 1st generation SSD's that are being sold much much cheaper, but they are problematic. An old but excellent review HERE another HERE. Current stuff HERE

Edited April 12, 2010 by Bandy

[Olham 164]

Clouds are no problem - tried that. Pushed them up to five, and it's fine there!

[Morris 2]

Bandy,

 

I first had 3 Kingston V series 60 gig SSD and those were terrible. The Kingston could not be updated by firmware and had serious stutter problems playing games with Windows 7 (something called TRIM).

 

I took them back after reading about INTEL SSD. These new SSD are 1000% better. As time goes by I'm sure that the latest SSD will perform like Knight Rider.

 

Cheers

 

Morris

 

[Creaghorn 10]

What i mean is the microstuttering wich appears more when over the frontlines or near airfields. i also noticed that many AC wich are visible are no problem, but the formations of the AC sprayed unvisible in the theater are slowing the sim overall down. not too much fps wise, but it's not smooth anymore. setting sliders down didn't help a lot, so i think it's a combination of all factors wich increase the longer the war goes. imo mostly airactivity. nonetheless near the coast it runs lot smoother, so it must also be the scenery.

 

my brother told me it might be worth to use faster memory, not necessarily bigger. so far i have 4 gig with 600 something clocking rate. maybe trying faster RAM (800+ or something) will cure the stuttering. it works only with 3.5 since i have dualboot with xp sp3 and win7, and on win7 i somehow wasn't able to make it run, so i fly on xp. but maybe it's worth a try.

 

i have a gtx 260 oc and graphics are fine and it works well. it's only this stuttering.

[Olham 164]

Some things that might help:

- switch off program control in your Anti-Virus program for the time you fly

- make Windows run TrackIR prior-ranking (don't know the right expression - perhaps someone can help)

- try to increase "smoothness" in TrackIR

[Hasse Wind 46]

I think it's called setting the priority of a program, Olham. So for TrackIR you can put its priority to high, but I remember somebody somewhere (here?) saying it shouldn't be put to real-time.

[+Polovski 460]

Listen to what the guys are saying Creaghorn. Data is written all the time (capturing what is happening). More aircraft more guns near the frontline = more data. Maybe try a HD defrag first.

[Morris 2]

SSD will help. no more stutters.

[RAF_Louvert 101]

.

 

Hasse Wind wrote:

 

I think it's called setting the priority of a program, Olham. So for TrackIR you can put its priority to high, but I remember somebody somewhere (here?) saying it shouldn't be put to real-time.

 

 

That is quite correct HW, use the task manager to set both TrackIR and OFF to high priority and there will be a noticeable increase in the performance of each, (but as you cautioned, do not set them to "real time").

 

Cheers!

 

Lou

 

.

[gaw 5]

this is CLASSIC..................tried the "set priority" with ctrl alt delete to bring up the task manager.......right click and set the OFF mgr to "high", not "real time" as per this thread thank you "Hasse Wind"..................AND THE WHOLE DEAL IS SUDDENLY SMOOTH AS SILK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! All these years....this is first time I've EVER heard of "set priority".....I feel totally stupid (am). Never fiddled w/ the "Black Viper" settings..........how to explain to the war department that something has gone terribly wrong suddenly.........and then this "set priority" nugget comes up as a casual aside in a thread. OK.....there's more than me out there as ignorant of finesse moves (if this even counts as finesse)...or maybe I haven't paid attention (likely)..... that COMPLETELY ELIMINATES STUTTERS IN BIG COMBAT (lots o' planes) OR OVER YOUR AIRFIELD. It did all these for this happy flapper at least............so, question is....a casual scan of the net shows a program called PRIO that'll save your priority settings...your settings revert to "normal" each time you start the game...........but PRIO only works for 32 bit set ups in Win 7............I'm 64 Win 7.........Hasse, anybody???....how do I save my priority settings in 64 pls??? This is like the invention of the wheel for me at least after all these years of chasing slider settings, config options, hardware, etc., etc, etc...............GREAT TIP!!!!!!

[RAF_Louvert 101]

.

 

gaw, Win 7 64 must be different from XP Pro 64. My priority settings stay right where I put them. And you're welcome, even though you didn't thank me for my elaboration on HW's comment. It's OK though, I've grown accustomed to being summarily dismissed and/or ignored around here.

 

.

[gaw 5]

RAF..........beg pardon......I've clearly missed thread details.....so thank you too .....still bleary after a 14hr flight from Bangladesh.....but I'll beam in tomorrow when I'm alert....a relative condition in my case to be sure. And as for summary dismissal.....I take it you're married too. Cheers.....gaw

[RAF_Louvert 101]

.

 

hee, hee...22 years to a wonderful woman who loves me, tolerates me, and reminds me of my place on a daily basis.

 

.

[gaw 5]

she who must.....

[rwmarth 0]

If you havent done so already, perhaps limit the frame rates? Locking at 30 got rid of the stutters for me