Fps irrelevant stutters
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<p>I have been struggling with a problem since day 1, about 1.5 month ago for me. I am having micro stutters mostly noticeable on low level flight (below 1000ft). Their frequency is approximately 1-2 per second. The only solution that I have found is to fully disable trees and grass, that makes the phenomenon barely visible and then to cap FPS from Nvidia CP to 35 and then the stutters are gone (at least to my perception). The weird thing is that the fps counters, both native sim counter and on Frameview from Nvidia (thank you @airtex2019 ) can be steady at 40-90 fps (depending on settings) and the stutters are still visible. They become a lot worse or less visible depending on the sliders of Trees and Grass on BMS setup screen. <br />The lightest version of what I experience is exactly like the youtube from @headcase here <a href=“https://forum.falcon-bms.com/topic/19533/stutters-micro-pauses?_=1648983921313” target=“blank">https://forum.falcon-bms.com/topic/19533/stutters-micro-pauses?=1648983921313</a> . And it gets a lot worst if the sliders on trees and grass go all the way to the right (full). <br /><br />Below are my specs and various tests I have made (countless hours especially the last week). <br /><br />Specs : Toshiba All In One Px35t, i3 3120m 16GM Ram , 1920x1080 resolution on the native Monitor, Asus GTX 950 Strix 2GB on eGPU through mini pci-e 2.0 from AIO and HDMI cable to monitor . Also please note that no such stutters appear on other games (tested thoroughly on Alien Isolation (DX11), IL2 1946 BAT edition on both OpenGl and DirectX (DX9 I think) ) or on any of the Uningine Benchmarks (Valley and Heaven) with full graphic settings on FHD and AA x8 on DirectX 11. I understand that eGPU might be a concern on some of your answers but remember the stuttering is not noticeable on other games or on the very heavy Benchmarks by Uningine. Besides with the eGPU I went from the Integrated Intel HD4000 and 10-15 fps exactly double that (triple that if it wasn’t for the stuttering), so it was a gamble that payed off and well worth it. <br /><br />All tests below were made with freshly installed 4.35 U3 all settings on config --> Hardware disabled and Low res Textures Clouds and Particles and then again with all settings on config --> Hardware enabled and Hi res textures clouds and Particles + @Tom-Catz Korea Textures + HD Cockpit by @dema + HD Runways by my fellow countryman @Arty. <br /><br />The only difference between the 2 settings was the overall lower fps on the second setup, but the stuttering was always there. Also all tests were made on Korea KTO Instant action by immediately diving to 1000 feet and checking both visually for stutters and the 2 fps counters that I had enabled on the 2 sides of the screen. The trees and grass sliders where set on the recommended setting.<br /></p><ol><li>Custom profile for Falcon BMS on Nvidia Control Panel and change at first, one by one the various options, and then tried different combinations of options according to various suggestion I found online on this forum for BMS or on other forums (Nvidia and even eGPU related suggestions). An excellent analysis on V-sync and triple buffering can be found here by @airtex2019 <a href=“https://forum.falcon-bms.com/topic/19717/triple-buffering/27” target=”_blank">https://forum.falcon-bms.com/topic/19717/triple-buffering/27</a> and also fps conversation here <a href=“https://forum.falcon-bms.com/topic/19724/fps-sim-ren/41” target=“_blank”>https://forum.falcon-bms.com/topic/19724/fps-sim-ren/41</a> . Almost all users on Nvidia and eGPU forums mentioned problems on multiple titles not just one game, but that is not the case with me. Also @airtex2019 if possible since you have experienced a similar problem, it would be great if you could test the Trees and Grass slider on BMS (push them both to their edges) on your old rig and your new, to see if that has any effect on stuttering, while at the same time having steady FPS on the counters, above 50 in my case. </li><li>Changed the BMS process’s affinity in order to use only a single core or various combinations of the 4 cores, starting from not using Core 0, because a guy suggested at an Nvidia forum that Core 0 is used mostly by Windows for its own processes.</li><li>Removed Multi Core from BIOS</li><li>Removed Multi Threading from BIOS</li><li>Various Windows 10 tweaks like Remove Full Screen optimizations from bms.exe or from windows 10 Exloit Protection disable Bottom - up ASLR, plus many others that I don’t remember right now</li><li>Of course put BMS on Bitdefender’s gaming list and on its exception list</li><li>Tweaked GPU settings with MSI Afterburner, (underclock, overclock, change PerfCap by temp or power limit up or down). </li><li>Tried different trees by @Polak and by @Arty (with and without the blank tree2)</li><li>disable all unnecessary startup applications from windows task manager and disable all services you do not use with services.msc in windows</li><li>Installed Direct X 11 over Windows 10 DirectX 12 (Still shows Direct X 12 on dxdiag even though successfully completed the installation ) </li></ol><p><br />Read so many articles about stuttering that my eyes started stuttering.<br /><br />The stuttering was always there only on Falcon BMS and only with either trees or grass enabled (even by just a click on the slider).<br />As I said above I will live with it because I love the sim and a few trees will not come between us. But I will also hear every suggestion you have and try anything you can think of, except reinstalling Windows or upgrading hardware (not an option right now). The stuttering is still barely visible if I don’t cap the FPS at 35. Basically I chose the lowest possible FPS that I have seen so far on the sim with TGP and WPN Mavs screen on, and subtracted 4-5 frames so I ended up with the magic number 35. As I was experimenting with the FPS limit I noticed that as the limit set by me was reached the stuttering appeared (barely noticeable though with trees and grass off). <br /><br />I believe it is related to my medium spec machine, in the sense that a higher end machine user would not notice it. Maybe it is there but if you get 120 fps, loosing a frame or two will not make a difference visually. So now I have a steady 35 fps sim (I have tested it on various TE training missions so far but no campaign yet). I am writing all this as a possible stepping stone, so maybe a dev will find a bug to fix on the next release (I know 3-4 weeks is not enough time but I keep my fingers crossed), or maybe another simmer that has a similar problem will be aided to find a different solution than mine (especially one that includes trees). <br /><br />As I said above if you have any suggestions I will gladly implement them If I can, but for now I will enjoy my training on a treeless enviroment ;-)<br /><br /><br /><br /></p>
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<p>@danaos75 This sounds like what I experience … sorry I don’t have much further to add, in terms of a solution. I just try to reduce frame-rate such that adding 7ms time won’t cause a missed/late frame.<br /><br />Also, I gave up on g-sync … I just run 60hz fixed-refresh rate now. Variable refresh sounds nice in theory, but in practice, to my eyes, I find an occasional skipped frame is less jarring than seeing a frame rendered out-of-phase with all the others, once a second.<br /><br />I do fly with Windows 10 “fullscreen optimizations” enabled. (I measure it saves 1 frame of input-lag, when running borderless-window with overlays present. I don’t recall it having any effect on the micro-stutter experience, though.)<br /><br />My older quad-core rig is at a different location, so it may be a while before I can test on it.<br /><br />But yes, for quad-core systems I recommend doing the affinity-mask thing, to run BMS on cores #1-3 (leaving core #0 free for OS, DWM, graphics driver, audio, input and networking etc).<br /><br />Hopefully 4.36 will be available soon, and we can start our testing over, from scratch. :P<br /></p>
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<blockquote>I have been struggling with a problem since day 1, about 1.5 month ago for me. I am having micro stutters mostly noticeable on low level flight (below 1000ft). Their frequency is approximately 1-2 per second. The only solution that I have found is to fully disable trees and grass, that makes the phenomenon barely visible and then to cap FPS from Nvidia CP to 35 and then the stutters are gone (at least to my perception). The weird thing is that the fps counters, both native sim counter and on Frameview from Nvidia (thank you @airtex2019 ) can be steady at 40-90 fps (depending on settings) and the stutters are still visible. They become a lot worse or less visible depending on the sliders of Trees and Grass on BMS setup screen. <br />The lightest version of what I experience is exactly like the youtube from @headcase here <a href=“
” target=“_blank”><em> </em></a><br /><br /><em>Please enjoy, leave your like, comment and share!</em><br /><br /><em>I hope you have a great week!</em><br /><em>Stay safe and stay tuned!!</em><br /><em>malpaso</em><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></p> -
<p>“Falcon 4.0” + “stutters”.<br /><br />Wow. Those are two words you most seldom ever see together since 1998…!<br /><br /><br /><img src=“/plugins/nodebb-plugin-emoji/emoji/android/1f633.png?v=gcfd8gb1ch8” alt=“” class=“not-responsive emoji emoji-android emoji–flushed” /> </p>
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<p>Hello i was struggling a lot on stuttering, i found that it was the track ir <br />i change from precision to standard mode in camera settings and it make the trick for me<br /></p>
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<p>Hi @malpaso, I just saw your video (most of it), you have 3 times my fps and I see no stuttering, except when sometimes when you decrease your FOV (zoom in). But that is not what I experience. By the way it seems that you have antialiasing disabled if I can see correctly, why is that? Great map!</p>
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<p>@fiffinolmo alas stuttering is there with or without track ir (actually I use opentrack with led track clip). All the testing was done without the track clip, hotas, and voice control. Only keyboard controls.</p>
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<p>Well I can maybe point to some other things you can try, this coming from me who has never experienced stutters on Falcon BMS. Download display driver uninstaller (DDU) and boot into safe mode and use it to completely remove you graphics driver, then reboot into windows and install your latest graphics driver. If that doesn’t work, disable all unnecessary startup applications from windows task manager and disable all services you do not use with services.msc in windows. If that doesn’t work, install all DirectX June 2010 runtimes. If you tried all those and still get stutters then it might just be down to hardware that cpu i3 3120m is a very old and pretty bad CPU at 2.5Ghz with IPC not really up to standard, along with not knowing how much of the CPU is being saturated with background tasks and windows. Along with a pipe through of PCIE 2.0 might also be an issue. I would argue that you can stop troubleshooting and just accept nothing will work bar a hardware upgrade but maybe I’m wrong so try out the recommendations. </p>
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<p>If stutters occur when flying at low altitude or when looking through the TGP, it could point to micro-pauses caused by loading of terrain features. Is BMS installed on a conventional hard drive or an SSD ?</p>
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<p>@WurminatorZA thank you for your suggestions</p><ol><li> Download display driver uninstaller (DDU) and boot into safe mode and use it to completely remove you graphics driver, then reboot into windows and install your latest graphics driver. <strong>I have read about DDU at certain forums but haven’t tried it because the eGPU and nvidia drivers were installed about 1.5 month ago a few days before BMS</strong></li><li>disable all unnecessary startup applications from windows task manager and disable all services you do not use with services.msc in windows. <strong>I have already done that no change, sorry I forgot to mention it at my list on my first post, updated</strong>. </li><li>install all DirectX June 2010 runtimes. <strong>I have found and installed directx 11 again, got a message that it was successfully installed but on dxdiag it still shows directx12. I think it is Windows 10 related, so I don’t know if it is the same thing as what you suggest but I will search for DirectX June 2010 runtimes</strong>. </li><li>If you tried all those and still get stutters then it might just be down to hardware that cpu i3 3120m is a very old and pretty bad CPU at 2.5Ghz with IPC not really up to standard, along with not knowing how much of the CPU is being saturated with background tasks and windows. Along with a pipe through of PCIE 2.0 might also be an issue. I would argue that you can stop troubleshooting and just accept nothing will work bar a hardware upgrade but maybe I’m wrong so try out the recommendations. <strong>I agree with you, I will upgrade my CPU to a compatible i7 3rd Gen anyway and see if that changes anything, but for now I removed the trees and grass, everything else is at full detail both in the sim and config and 4x AA and still have a steady 45-50 fps with no TGP MAvs, around 30 with both of them on. So I am just enjoying the sim. </strong></li></ol>
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<p>@jayb BMS is on a Samsung 500GB SSD, and the stutters are there with no TGP or MAV WPN screen on. You might be right about terrain loading (hence the trees and grass) but Uningine Benchmarks are way heavier than BMS (I get 25-26 fps average) with no stuttering. </p>
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<p>@danaos75 Hardware can help but not completely eliminate it… for reference, on my i7-9700F w/ GTX 1660 Ti (and with 4.35.3 bug fixes and perf improvements) it’s down to about +5ms frametime spike every 1.5 seconds<br /><br /><a href=“https://imgur.com/a/YKc6GRu” target=“_blank”>https://imgur.com/a/YKc6GRu</a><br /><br />So, it’s measureable and reproducable, but… apparently very hard to debug and pinpoint the root cause of this. :(<br /><br />If one can get the frametime spikes to stay below 16ms, as seen on that graph, then one can achieve smooth 60fps flight without stutter.<br /><br />In heavy weather conditions, or a lot of activity within my bubble, I’m sure my spikes do exceed 17ms … and in those cases, I will skip a frame. But it’s not that noticeable to me, with g-sync disabled. (Especially if there’s heavy action … or, heavy clouds outside the cockpit :)<br /></p>
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<p>@airtex2019 based on your graph and description I did an approximately 40’’ flight recorded on FrameView and made a similar graph. All settings are to the lowest on the Config and Sim setup screen to achieve as high FPS as possible the session Avg FPS = 88.236,Min FPS = 40.489,Max FPS = 129.687,90th % = 81.447,95th % = 75.263,99th % = 55.568 and the graph for that flight’s first 20’’ is :<br /><img class=“ql-image” src=“https://i.imgur.com/N82uQAG.jpg” /><br /><br />very similar to yours. On my case the previous frame from the one that spikes, had a drop of 4-5 ms, that is visible on the graph.<br /><br />Hmm the plot thickens…<img src=“/plugins/nodebb-plugin-emoji/emoji/android/1f914.png?v=1h7gjqihaqv” alt=“” class=“not-responsive emoji emoji-android emoji–thinking_face” /> <br /></p>
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<p>@danaos75 Just want to take a moment to acknowledge how awesome it is to get 88 fps of anything, on a third-gen Core i3 and GTX 950. :)<br /><br />Looks like … v-sync=off and triple-buffering=On?<br /><br />I think that’s probably the best you can do, to mitigate the frame-time stutters on older systems.</p>
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<p>I have a feeling that the issue is with data flow…<br /><br />Not to say BMS is perfect in optimization but can you check memory on GPU? Memory swapping can often create such issues.</p>
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<p>@MaxWaldorf I will do more testing tonight, though I have to study for my Falcon Lounge exams master <img src=“/plugins/nodebb-plugin-emoji/emoji/android/1f609.png?v=1h7gjqihaqv” alt=“” class=“not-responsive emoji emoji-android emoji–wink” /> <br />@airtex2019 I just found an excel template that Frameview has, at the installation files called FrameView_Analysis_Template.xlsm. It is very cool, you can load up, up to 3 exported csv’s and it has ready made graphs and statistics. Haven’t seen it in depth yet, just thought you might be interested. </p>
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<p>Just a quick update on testing further. @MaxWaldorf I started with the memory. The 2gb gpu memory is almost all the time around 1900mb - 2020 mb so I guess full . And around 6-7 GB of system memory used out of 16gb. But I see no sudden spikes on the memory graph during use. Also I checked the egpu pcie connection load. Msi afterburner has a bus load graph, it varies from 40 to 70 %, but it never came close to 100%. Made a fresh install of bms today. Started the sim as installed config shaders all off, 1024x768 borderless mode recommended trees and grass and I had major stutters at 60-70 fps, until a disabled trees and grass. The only solution for a steady sim (edit:for my setup) is no trees and grass and rivatuner 's scanline sync /2 and every shader option on on config and FHD resolution. Scanline sync is like vsync, freesync etc, I use it at half the refresh rate of my monitor so steady 30fps, at everything I have tested it on te training for now. I will stick with that for now and hope for developer’s hand at 4.36 . Developer’s hand : when a developer tries to improve something but unintentionally breaks something else, or in my case hopefully fixes something else. <img src=“/plugins/nodebb-plugin-emoji/emoji/android/1f60a.png?v=opoh9i0f0lo” alt=“” class=“not-responsive emoji emoji-android emoji–blush” /> <br /><br /><br /></p>
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<p>Your GPU memory seems to be a potential root cause…<br /><br />Your GPU will constantly swap with system memory causing latency and stutters.</p>
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<p>@MaxWaldorf After all those tests and the fact that BMS is the only application (from the ones tested : Alien Isolation, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, IL2 1946 BAT and Uningine Benchmarks (Valley and Heaven)) that consumes instantly all of the 2GB vram plus regular ram, I will agree with you that gpu memory seems to be the problem. All the other games use around 1GB of vram. If I had a 4GB GPU handy I would test it to verify that assumption. I am a developer my self but I don’t do games and graphics, so I don’t know if BMS code can be optimized to best utilize Vram so as to keep it at 85-90%, not 100%, or at least have that as an option on some config file. If I get my hands on a 4gb card I will test it and get back with the results. Also when I tested with all shader off and on 1024x768 resolution, Vram was still at 100% when I entered the sim with Trees and Grass on recommended. Without them is 100-150 MB below 2000.</p>
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<p>@danaos75 I am also a developer with very little experience in games and graphics… testing, tuning and debugging Falcon BMS is a very fun way to learn two things at once, right? :)<br /><br />fwiw I still observe the cpu frame-pacing spikes, on 4GB and 6GB cards. Per taskmgr, BMS appears to consume just under 4GB of gpu ram… (I do not know if that will hold true, for 4.36… so maybe wait for that, before buying a new gpu)</p>