Massive sudden drop of framerate

[Duckster]

Hi all,

I´m fairly new to BMS, in fact, I installed it just when 4.33 got released, so I consider myself lucky that I didn´t have to wait for it
I love the sim so far, this thing is truly amazing and surely a lot of hard work and dedication from the dev team / community must have been put into it.
However, I have a game-breaking issue that keeps occurring.

Whenever I am in-game, things run very smoothly , high frame rate etc. After approximately 18 minutes, however, the game seems to freeze up and the frame rate drops down to very few fps (order of magnitude of a single frame per second). I’ve flown the navigation training mission quite a few times, and it seems to happen very consistently after the same amount of time. After this has occurred, the performance is very bad when I restart the sim. Not until I restart my entire system the frame rate is good again for another 18 min.

Things that I tried that do not improve the situation:

• Making sure my graphical drivers are up to date
• Performing a thorough virus scan
• Reinstalling BMS
• Cleaning out my PC (lot of dust lol) and making sure temperatures are okay
• Trying with both the RAM strips to see if one of them is dodgy
• Disabling AV software
• Disabling multi-sampling
• Extensive search for similar problems

None of these made a difference… The big difference (I think) between the issue I’m having and others are having is that the sim performs outstanding initially, only to collapse later on…

I’m sort of out of ideas now, flying for less than twenty minutes before requiring a reboot obviously isn’t an option

Anyone that can point me into the right direction to resolve this issue?

Thanks

[haukka81]

Your system specs ? and what mission, campaing etc… more info please

[Duckster]

Will post my system specs tomorrow (in bed by now), but I’m quite sure they’re more than sufficient. I was flying in the “BASIC NAVIGATION” training mission, as described in the BMS-Training.pdf manual. To check if it wasn’t just an anomaly in the mission, I started up another mission (I think it’s called Cockpit Orientation) to see if it would occur again. Found myself on the ramp, sitting in a A-10A, decided to leave the program running while doing some other stuff. When I came back surely enough the frame-rate was horrible.

Edit: Thanks for the quick reply haukka81 Let me know if you need anything else!

[haukka81]

Maybe some program runing in back sametime? Or antivirus program?

But i will be back to help you soon as you get more info here

[Duckster]

I’ve tried running it without the antivirus enabled… No success… And there are -some- programs running in the background, but there’s aren’t really demanding a lot of resources … Also necessary stuff like TrackIR, Saitek software etc…

Regarding PC Specs:

Summary
		Operating System
			Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1
		CPU
			Intel Xeon X3440 @ 2.53GHz	68 °C
			Lynnfield 45nm Technology
		RAM
			8,00GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 802MHz (9-9-9-24)
		Motherboard
			MICRO-STAR INTERNATIONAL CO.,LTD P55-GD65 (MS-7583) (CPU 1)	55 °C
		Graphics
			S23A750D (1920x1080@120Hz)
			1024MB ATI AMD Radeon HD 5800 Series (ATI AIB)	42 °C
		Storage
			119GB OCZ-VERTEX4 ATA Device (SSD)
			931GB SAMSUNG HD103SJ ATA Device (SATA)	30 °C
		Optical Drives
			DTSOFT Virtual CdRom Device
		Audio
			Realtek High Definition Audio

[haukka81]

Your cpu is quite warm, if thats idle temp im quite sure that its problem. 68 is lot if thats in desktop.

Your cpu may Throttle when its gets too hot. Try to log temperature when playing. Then just look how high temp is when fps drop ocurs

Use come temp or any other program that can log temps

[hoover]

How about power saving settings? It strikes me that the system sort of “shuts down” after 18 minutes, Do you experience this in other games?

Maybe you could try running some sort of benchmark suite in a loop to check if it’s a system-wide issue or just something with bms.

Cheers, Uwe

[Earlybite]

It is IMHO a little similar to what I can notice sometimes…
After ramp start (~17 min.) and take off, it looks like the sim get stuck for one-tenth of a second. Then all fine…
The difference is, that I now can fly over an hour without any issue (of this kind).
But near (in my case Kimpo) (~18nm out of Kimpo) the same, getting a short stuck.

IMHO there can be three points:
1. Either the sim raises heavy load
2. Or the PSU has an issue
3. Or the GC has an issue

Maybe there are some points to combine… (e.g. 1 + 2, 1 + 3, 2 + 3, 1 + 2 + 3).

Greeting
Earlybite

[Duckster]

Well I’ve started up DCS yesterday, after getting the issue in BMS, and it runs smooth as butter, which makes me strongly suspect the issue being BMS specific.

[uri_ba]

have you used 32 or 64 bit BMS?

[Duckster]

See attachement for CPU temp profile. It is on the high side, perhaps I need to remove, clean, apply fresh thermal paste & install my heatsink, but I think the approx 80 degC should be within operating limits. Tj MAX is specified at 99 degC. Sorry for the poor Excel graph Issue occurs just before the steep decrease in temp. After that I closed BMS, which is possibly the reason of the temp-decrease (less load on CPU)

[Duckster]

@uri_ba:

have you used 32 or 64 bit BMS?

64 bit

[Duckster]

And another temperture profile

[Migbuster]

What’s the GPU temps at 18 mins?

[uri_ba]

can you please give 32 bit a shot, just to make sure it behaves the same.

[Duckster]

Yes sir, which means I’ll get back to you folks in probably a little under 20 min

[Duckster]

32 bit makes no difference…

Regarding the GPU temperture: at a steady 64 degC until the issue starts, then it rose to 70 degC, a clear sudden increase in temp is visible in the attachment

[Migbuster]

Right so what is the throttle back temp for that card? I remember an old GTX-670 I used to have throttled back at 69 degrees by default.

[uri_ba]

in falcon config,
make sure “Hi-res textures” is OFF
and you can try turning off some shaders, consult the BMS manual in the FPS optimization chapter as for which shaders to turn off first.

GC throttling might be the case, or maybe it’s out of memory or something. so let’s try reduce its workload and see if that makes a difference.

[Duckster]

I don’t know the throttle back temp for my card, and can’t find it right away, but Catalyst control center tells me the current 71 degC is no problem, fan running at 64% and it’s not throttling back either… Flying around in DCS now with these conditions, all steady so far… I actually doubt it’s the workload on the GPU because it performs fine in other applications such as DCS