How I Resolved my VRAM Overflow Issues in DCS World
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- Опубліковано 14 лис 2023
- Taking an in-depth look at the VRAM overflow issue plaguing DCS World right now. I take a look at both Multithreading and Single Threaded DCS World and compare the 2. Additionally I look at how to resolve the issue by setting CPU affinity directly for DCS to help alleviate what I believe the issue is with oversaturating IO operations due to to many threads running at the same time.
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#dcsworld #vram #graphics #overflow #dcs - Ігри
Here's the miz I am using if you want to try yourself
cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/403713358999584778/1174424623572582521/all_nato_mem-test.miz?ex=65678b2a&is=6555162a&hm=b179d947c001123c38dfdb3b02142aba53b4ea9d397a115b581af3086ca39640&
I haven't tried the mission yet, but basically when I went 2D it was a difference of 300 vs 400 FPS, depending on the affinity set. I did this with Windows task manager while sitting on the ramp with an F16 in Marianas (my go-to benchmark). I got the same results through the cmdline options. Doing this in VR, I went from 75 to 75.1 FPS. Basically the first 8 cores are the sweet spot, which is not surprising as they are the ones with the larger cache (AMD 7950x3d). Unfortunately in VR, I am too GPU bound that it has a large impact, but I noticed a speed up in loading times, so likely SSD bound during loading.
Do you maybe have an updated link? This one no longer seems to work... thx!
Dear Jabbers, many thanks indeed for your research. Much appreciated. I will ask our guys to check this out soonest. Kind regards, Nick
You need to get in that office nick .
This is great, I hope ED watches this - although I'm sure they're aware of the problems - and further optimize MT.
My biggest issue with MT is that currently it can miss flags coming up in a mission, sometimes even 2 seconds are not enough for the game to realize a flag came on (one that is supposed to stop an AI task for example) and that completely breaks missions, the IA gets stuck doing a task forever. A lot of work ahead...
Well, explain this to our students as such: if you have to paint a room, you have can have to to 4 people work on the walls. If you have 8, you can have four paint the edges and 4 paint the large areas. However, if you have only one paint bucket, they start to queue up there, so you'll want two buckets. Having 16 people in the room, will likely but paint the room and faster, potentially the opposite. It will only help, if it's like very large room, so you can have multiple people on a wall, but then you'll also need more buckets. People = CPUs, paint = data, brushes = caches on CPU, paint bucket = RAM. Hardware store = hard drive. Getting paint there takes forever ...
Very cool analogy
Quantum computing = Paint sprinkler
Maybe add that the people must walk on planks from bucket to bucket and bucket to wall…data bus? So, if a person is already on a plank, they have to wait for them to clear, right? Bucket to bucket because they probably need to (carefully) assemble different colors of paint to transfer to the wall? The wall=graphics card?
They have to paint two complete, nearly identical walls (VR with a parallax offset), 60 to 90 times per second! 😄.
I see instances where the paint gets splashed on the walls ( maybe the graphics card’s fault?) and sometimes painting halts for .05 to 1+ seconds! That must be where the people get mad and smack each other in the face with the brushes, like the Three Stooges. 🤣
Great video Jabbers! I love how much time youre putting into all of this, so thank you for that ^^
Thanks, Jabbers. I do DCS in VR and the VRAM problem has been rough. Really appreciate your work here.
Great video Jabbers. Will check this out. You r thought process certainly makes sense and fits the data available. Will be interesting to see what others come up with. THANK YOU!
Thank you for the deep dive! Great work and greatly appreciated!
The hardware whisperer 🙏
Thanks for the great video and the knowledge. It makes sense and many of us lack the knowledge to make the settings correct.
Thanks for the vid, Jabbers. Will play around with the affinity.
Great video, nice one. To add, there was a massive spike in the use of normal RAM just before the massive FPS stall. My guess is that DCS was unpacking a whole bunch of textures into RAM, before making them available to VRAM. The fact that we now have MT, probably allows parallel unpacking of those textures, which is why the FPS was better in MT for most of the video. The side effect being that unpacking those textures is probably the reason for the massive RAM spike, as the DCS engine is now conducting across 8 times as many cores. I wouldn't be surprised if the FPS stall was due to windows kicking in it's swap file logic as it was out of RAM. For all that, lowering the number of CPU cores available would almost certainly reduce the number of parallel texture unpacking, and therefore the total RAM required, so it's very much a great idea as a solution.
Great video, Jabbers. Thanks. 🍻
This is exactly what I said when they announced the MT development effort. It would be a bottomless pit and increase their bug and testing load by a factor of at least 10x.
And thanks for that affinity trick in the shortcut! Didn't know you could do that! (I'm on a 4 core so won't help me any but just good to know in general. I do think yesterday's 2.9.1.48111 update might be behaving a bit better though - despite no mention of any fixes in the Changelog - but not entirely sure yet as I haven't played properly yet, only run some tests.)
Thanks Jabbers! Good work!
Mikey boy, you ok back there? We're coming to getcha
13900KF, RTX 4090, 64GB Ram, Varjo Aero here and couldn't figure out why I was barely able achieve 90fps on basic VR settings. After applying your recommendation of 4 cores, I'm solid at 90fps with med VR settings. Thanks for taking the time sort it out and share with us. Liked and subscribed bro. Dreday out
pardon my ignorance but what is considered “medium vr settings”? Like what’s your pixel density set to / what resolution are you trying to achieve in vr?
Kind of new to this and wanting to upgrade by building a new cpu but within reason. Relatively straight forward for most things but DCS VR has been quite the rabbit hole since everyone’s expectations of what is shit to acceptable to great seem to vary. So trying to set my own.
For context I’m currently running potato af settings as I learn the F-18 on a i78700, 1060, 32, Samsung Odyssey WMR. So I have a feeling I’ll be much more easily impressed than the rest of the VR community but trying to confirm that.
if i recall this in one form or another has been there for ages. I remember in the [now defunct] AO server we had to lock down liveries so people couldnt change it as it was causing unnecessary vram strain/load. Great research and investigation
Its not just liveries. Its actually the modules themselves. Some have a MUCH higher impact than others. The two that jump to mind are 1) the Tomcat and 2) the JF17.
Also, switching over to the map while in-flight...yeah, you're going to screw your VRAM up for some odd reason.
This is old as ever problem. Based to the original Flanker since it was just a simple polygon model and not with textures. Since then the engine has been limited similar way as other east European game developers own engines (Flashpoint, Stalker etc).
This was very obvious back then when VRAM was 256 MB and when finally you got 512 MB and then 2 GB etc that how things worked between game engines.
DCS has as well always had horrible memory management for the module itself.
Look example when you switch modules in empty map. Set mission have multiple different aircraft like Apache, Hornet, TomCat and Hind.
And just jump to one slot, let it load, sit there minute and jump to another. Repeat.
The engine should purge everything from the memories when you exit the vehicle, and only after then load the new module for your use.
If you have 6 GB or 8 GB of VRAM, you fill it after first or second module, the memory doesn't get purged and your framerate drops as previous textures and model is loaded, even when it has been eliminated from whole game map existence.
If you jump between two, it is much faster to load than initially as it uses the cache. But only if you have enough memory to hold these.
One purge happens when you exit mission by selecting "quit". But not completely, as if you press "Fly again" or track replay, almost everything is kept in memory.
Only when you jump to main menu from debriefing, is in few seconds the modules purged from memory. But not always. Sometimes it requires to exit the whole DCS to get windows clear that cache. And it can take again few seconds.
And then when you do, you still get faster loading than first time after windows reboot as some is kept in cache by windows, but you start filling modules again. This is obvious example that your mission loadings can be much faster.
One of the problems really is that ED use 4096px size textures that are 48bit. Individual trees and vehicles on ground etc are just filled with those.
When your model appears in given range, everything is loaded to RAM and from there with settings to VRAM. Just consuming memory for nothing.
Most textures could very well be 5-8bit by quality and models around couple hundred or even tens of polygons.
Even a dog fight ranges could the models be very simple and low textured, what the new LOD slider in settings should allow to make.
It is just odd that we just got far more cpu Cores to be used, and resource demands went through the roof.
Why so many is now spending money to 4090 and like to get quality.
I have started to consider 128 GB of RAM as 64 GB ain't enough anymore. But it is only DCS that is using it, and I don't play multiplayer or use many assets...
Excellent detailed reply. @@paristo
I have a 3060 12GB and see my GPU sitting at 95-98%, This did help a ton, it was my last 4 cores were e-cores on my 12,700k. Disabling those made a huge impact
Awesome work man!
You're an asset to DCS
Cheers Jabbers 🍻
Seriously great troubleshooting jabbers, excellent work. This would go a long way to help guys our with 3080/4080 etc and 10 to 16gb vram.
I'm hoping you've still got the contacts in ED to be able to share these findings?
I'll try it with my 4090 and ping you on discord.
Pete
I remember rumblings of using CPU affinity way back on 2.7 too. Except back then it may have been placebo. I had to fix VRAM overflow by upgrading to a 12GB card mid-way through 2.7 development, then towards the end of 2.8 development I had to drop all my texture quality to avoid overflow.
Doctorate level work here good sir!
Another awesome PSA! going to try this.
On point as usual👌
now the F4E Phantom is out, I learned a lot from your F14 RIO video's and I see my self of more of a backseater then a pilot, so i was hoping maybe you can do a video on it some time, sooner or later. once again Ive learned a lot from your f14 vids and i love your tutorial vids.
Wow. few good tests. Thanks.
Awesome. video jabers. I got a new vr reverb g2 amazing fo4 dcs and msfs . Inoticed thou with MT it was overladimg vram. I am going to cut down to 5 threads and see. I already hage peoject lasso. Keep lighting the cans buddy
Great video and testing there's definitely a lot of tweaking especially when it comes to VR I have top of the line everything 128 Megs of ram a 4090 you name it and they're still stuttering
The problem is people are buying hardware thinking it will make a difference . it is clearly a DCS problem not hardware .
Is DCS the new Crysis? I hope ED takes note of this video.
Thank you Jabbers, there is also a big thread on the forums regarding stutters and MT, but the solution by the community is to unpark all cores, did you tried that?
Also might be interesting to see if ground units are contributing to the issue
Great vid, thank you.
Listening to your intro I was convinced that you didn’t know what you were talking about. However, before mouthing off I decided to check my “facts” and discovered that you are in fact completely right. What I hadn’t realised is that in June 2023 Nvidia introduced the feature allowing the gpu to offload data from vram to system ram and then in a later version, the ability to switch this feature off. I’ve learned something new. Glad I stopped by 😊
media.tenor.com/39mLNuMFLCsAAAPo/thats-what-i-do-i-drink-and-i-know-things.mp4
What it the exact name of this Nvidia feature? Maybe it will help with these stutters on my system. And a warm hello from May 2024, DCS is still stuttering like hell sometimes.
While we're all here, I found a few other things that help 2.9 I heard from a few sources. I can't remember them all, maybe Reflected and Juice or Tricker...anyways, make sure your frame rate setting is capped. Don't let it just try for as much as it can muster. Cap it at like 80 fps. Also when you load DCS make sure you're doing it as Administrator. I right click on the desktop icon and choose Run As Administrator from the menu. I can't tell you why this works only that it does. I noticed a HUGE improvement in performance. Also, don't run with scissors and don't eat yellow snow.
First option doesn't work with VR users, 2nd option makes no sense :(
@@Jabbers I agree 100%. I just saw it and tried it. I will try to find the source and post it here so you can watch it too. And the capping fps is probably what made all the difference for me, not the Admin thing. I don't have VR so it's all 2D for me. Just trying to help if I can!
I have watched DCS creep up in RAM use over time. Used to make due with 12 GB DDR3. Have had 16 gb DDR4 for years, now maxed out, results in crashes on pub servers now but I used to play reliably at the same settings just two years ago. I wonder if its a VRAM issue on an 8 GB 1070 looking at this now.
I started playing DCS last week and was having this really nasty stuttering every 4 or 5 secs, to the point it was simply unplayable. I know I have a mid-tier PC, but anyways I searched all over the web for fixes and realized it's a pretty common issue even on very high-end machines. Tried all suggestions and fixes and nothing worked until I just bought an NVMe SSD disk and installed the game there. I was running the game from an HDD. No more stutters, even with all graphics cranked to the max I get solid 50/60 fps with zero stutters. The game now runs perfect. It's mindblowing how easy it was to fix the problem (not cheap though lol). My specs are:
- Ryzen 5 2600X
- GTX 1660 Ti (6GB)
- 32Gb DDR4 Ram
- NVMe SSD WD_Black SN770 1TB
DCS hasn't been able to run on an HDD for years now, just to IO hungry
One thing I noticed in your video that I don't think you mentioned (If you did I'm sorry if I missed it.) is that it appears that not only the VRAM usage goes up in ST but also RAM usage as well. I'm not sure what to make of that. Just more MT optimization stuff? Or are they much more related than I understand and it's natural for them to rise and fall together?
ST just loads all of it more than likely. I think MT tries and unload things from memory, probably to aggressively.
Thanks for investigating these issues. Can you please tell me whats the benchmarktool is called which you've run on the top left corner?
MSI afterburner
I was hoping for some magic fix here. I have 8 GB of VRAM and I play in VR and I really wish my game didn't freeze just because something launched a weapon. Hopefully I can take some of what you learnt.
Jabbers! what app were you using to monitor your Vram usage?
MSI Afterburner
Hello at 4:50 the Helis are starting up and spinning their blades- how did you set this up in the mission edtitor, so it is not static anymore? Thanks
Just add helicopter AI
Any idea what a happy medium would be between assigning cores and blocking cores for DCS? Would it also improve other programs like OBS? Putting OBS ie on the cores DCS is not using?
It's going to be system dependent for cores on dcs vs obs
I get great performance with no stutters (after MUCH testing) on my 12700k and 3080ti by disabling HT and setting affinity to only the performance cores.
That leaves the efficiency cores for background and OS processes, much like they were designed for. Performance was also fine when disabling the efficiency cores but alt-tabing and everything seems smoother with them enabled (for obvious reasons).
Before the testing I was having MAD stutters in certain aircraft like the AH64D. I also disabled the power management process in Windows 11, as in, blocked it from launching at boot. Even in 'High Performance' mode, it was giving stutters in DCS.
Completely off topic of the video, but I just have to ask where you got the Alamo F-16 skins you showcased in this video? I made those so long ago and it actually threw me for a loop seeing them again. We have much nicer skins these days.
I downloaded some pack, i think on the 104th discord
@@Jabbers I didn't know they had it. Thank you for letting me know lol
Hey Jabbers thanks for the research. I've used PL for many years. With my current i9 13900KF I use 8 Performance cores to run DCS.exe. Do you change CPU & I/O Priority for DCS.exe to High? Thanks.
I don't typically tinker too much so no I haven't set high priority. I usually only change things when the current results are undesirable
Does this error cause the DX Device removed error ?
I play with the Oculus Rift S and was receiving these annoying framerate stutter/spike every 45-60 seconds. Did not change anything but lowering how much cores I use(which is 7), now those framerate stutter/spike come every 3-5 minutes! Barely noticeable and makes me sane again, I'm going to drink a beer in your honor sir.
Interesting, as there are still people complaining about being CPU bound as well. Curious what this looks like on a dense map too.
CPU bound is normal, especially with a high end CPU.
I just had a flashback to creating pseudo-disk in RAM to quicken the game. Ah, to bad old days!
*_Add:_* My bad; cross linked web brain memory ... that was with early ArmA.
Do you run with resizable bar enabled? Not saying it is any kind of fix or anything to do with it.. I am just curious if it changes anything?
Yep it's on, didn't really see any difference on or off
I can imagine this was a 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' type of thing for ED, if they didn't try to leveradge every core hoggit would shit themselves.
I think it needs to be "SPACE dash dash affinity=
Also it doesn't seem to fix the problem for me. I found the best fix was to disable one core but even then I'm not sure if there was any real affect.
So basically, DCS is hogging all cores and getting in a fight with the other threads running
Does explain why I kept a more stable performance in ST than MT
I got a huge improvement just by setting the affinity in PL to not use E cores. (i7 12700k) I also set the I/O priority to high for dcs.exe
ya, makes sense, this also is not something we the consumer should have to do though :)
@@Jabbers True but such is the life of someone who partakes in DCS.
IIRC the original MT patch notes said that E-cores are to be used on specific purposes if available.
But seriously saying, the CPU should be utilized better for tasks, like does DCS allocate own cores to specific AI sides and types, (one core for red ground, other for red air, third for blue ground, fourth to blue air, fifth for missiles, sixth for explosion etc) or is they just all trying to process same?
Does it matter if you use process Lasso or use that entry in the DCS.EXE file? For me that entry doesn't work, it brings up some error message saying the entry in target is invalid.
You typed it in wrong if you're getting that message, but process lasso it does the same thing
I am still thinking about how much resouces takes the data encrypting/decrypting in the DCS.
Probably not that much
One thing that I noticed is that you appear to have 24 threads available to work with. I believe you said elsewhere that you are currently on an AMD system. That leads me to think that it's probably a 12C/24T chip like a 5900X or 7900X. Those chips have 2 6-Core CCDs on them. Is it possible that you are running into issues with the Infinity Fabric and the IO die trying to cross talk between the CCDs? I've heard of that being a problem before in other games when it comes to performance, which is why generally the AMD 8C/16T 1 CCD chips (5800X, 7800X, etc) can outperform the 12C/24T chips.
Also, I have been doing something similar with Process Lasso on Intel CPUs since 12th Gen to force DCS (and other games as well) to only run on the P-Cores and not on the E-Cores at all, while forcing as many background tasks (Discord, Steam, other game launchers, etc) to run only on the E-Cores as I can get away with. That has also shown some good performance gains in many games in my somewhat limited testing.
Curious about your thoughts on this.
I'd like to clarify i actually don't REALLY have this issue, its an issue those who have less VRAM than I do are encountering. I have a 7900X3D, and turning off the cores that don't use the X3D cache doesn't help either.
Cheers
I have no problems running F-16, MiG 21, Mi 8 and other modules on high graphics but as soon as i step into the f14 all hell breaks loose. Realy hard stuttering even on low graphics.
I tried this and this is the first time I have seen less than 100% of 12GB of VRAM. Granted it is 99% but still it seems like it stopped the overflow. I am using 4 cores to start.
It may not be much but I am encouraged to tinker further.
This behavior has been present for years and i think MT has exaggerated it to a level more people are noticing it and can more easily induce/replicate it. I had this exact issue on a 980Ti and a 2500k in DCS 2.2 when i went from 1080p to 1440p. Same behavior just induced in a different way via F2'ing around as fast as I could in a complex mission and i think youre on to something with the sort of "overstacking" of loading tasks with all these threads
Did you by chance try these tests with the "Precaching" section of the Graphics.lua set to 0?
pretty sure precaching only works with terrain, not jets and their liveries. I have it set to the minimum in the settings menu
@@Jabbers Precaching values in the lua are separate from preload radius and are not visible in the in game menu. Was just curious for somewhat related reasons :)
Gotcha I sometimes wonder if those actually do anything, seems to be a lot of orphaned Lua code
Granted I havent tested it since early 2.7 but it usually results in RAM use reduction far too high to be margin of error, several gb's worth especially after an hour or more in mission with no downsides that I could notice. I was suspecting its something left over from Edge or earlier when most people were on HDD's.
Hey jabbers, can you test something? I assume you're using an Nvidia card.
Using Nvidia Profile Inspector:
2 things I found. First, Shader cache in Nvidia Profile is limited to 4gb. I bumped mine up to "unlimited".
Second, even tho I have access to ReBAR, it is DISABLED by default in driver. I enabled it.
I seem to have gotta a small boost from this. Would like your take on it.
Rebar does nothing for me. I'll try the shader cache but shaders are not that big, you would never hit that amount in a single game
is there any way to use an affinity mask ? (for example to only use physical cores) ?
Yes
@@Jabbers sorry to be dense m8, but, how ? is it just drop in the hex mask 0x0000000000055500 as an example?
Process Lasso -> Disable SMT (or manually deselect the logical cores of each processor) @@speed-of-heat
@@theegg-viator4707 yeah thanks , i already do that .
@Jabbers Get the latest Nvidia driver. Set CUDA - System Fallback Policy to "Prefer No System Fallback". Make new video.
well for dummies like me how did you move through the planes?? I tried my joystick, Wasd and the arrow keys none seemed to have moved through the plane line as you did?
@roberts3141 Yes that was it. I was not able to max the vram out I guess as I have my textures on medium and low terrain..
Ya, set it to high will do.
@@Jabbers Yes that was it. I messed around and I was getting issues when trying to end the mission and get to the menu or to the desktop the game will take forever to log off and goto desktop.. I tried several affinity assignment it seemed 8 was good for me. but I only have 8 cores with HT I have 16.
I'm not sure it works for me. Or has a recent update to DCS changed things?
I put this into 'target' field in the shortcut...
"C:\Program Files\Eagle Dynamics\DCS World OpenBeta\bin\DCS.exe" --affinity=f
After the end quotation mark, is it affinityf ? Is it case sensitive, f or F?
It seems to accept it and runs DCS, but how do you tell DCS is only running 4 CPUs? In Resource Monitor I have 16 CPU's showing, all of them have some activity but 4 of them seem to have the most activity. It's an i7-13700F CPU.
Check the DCS.log in saved games
@@Jabbers Looks like it uses 8 cores, 16 threads
2024-04-29 08:16:11.273 INFO EDCORE (Main): Created boot pool: n:16
INFO APP (Main): Command line: "C:\Program Files\Eagle Dynamics\DCS World OpenBeta\bin\DCS.exe" --affinity=f
INFO APP (Main): DCS/2.9.4.53707 (x86_64; Windows NT 10.0.22631)
INFO APP (Main): Application revision: 233707
INFO APP (Main): Renderer revision: 24955
INFO APP (Main): Terrain revision: 25070
INFO APP (Main): Build number: 92
INFO APP (Main): CPU cores: 8, threads: 16, System RAM: 32608 MB, Pagefile: 2048 MB
I am on single thread and have cockpit pop in. How odd.
So I just went and tried your miz file. I have a 4090 + 12700k (OC'd to 5.2 all-p-core, 4.4 e-core) + 32gb of 3600mhz DDR4.
in 2d/Non-VR @ 4k, with textures high, max forest/building slider, LOD 1, and FLAT shadows, clouds high. DLAA on, however I'm running the newest Nvidia DLSS 3.5.10 DLL and using DLSSTweaker to run "Preset-F" not DCS's default of "Preset-C".
with just straight all the cores on as default, I'm not seeing the big stutters you are and am not seeing VRAM limit. I'm seeing about 13-14gb of VRAM used (allocated?) if I zoom in/out and move the camera around like a madman it drops to about 10 on the low end and 14.5 on the high end.
system ram sits around 24gb, however 4gb of that is probably my browser b/c I'm too lazy to close it.
There's occasional hiccups, but not like you are seeing, and I'm not seeing the ram limit.
I have my page file set to 64gb (2x system memory, because some games "need" it, even if they dont use the ram all that much), and its on a UD90 power silicon M.2 NVMe 4tb.
I experimented using process lasso turning off some of the P-cores and E-cores, and there is quite a bit of performance loss in FPS for me.
ST is just straight bad, let alone not having the option for DLAA/DLSS. HOWEVER -- one thing I do notice, A-10A instant action, the IR mav's for some reason seem to render differently between ST and MT, the picture in ST is just straight "better"? might be a bug?
I forgot to mention I'm in VR, it's no where near as bad on a monitor
@@Jabbers Did more testing (this time in VR), one thing I noticed, make sure you're selecting the "right" cores -- the physical cores, and not the logical. I forced DCS to only use 6 of my physical cores and it seems to have helped. I want to do more testing and see if there's some combination of min/max cores, and if maybe HT on certain cores can help (HT is "rule of thumb" supposed to provide about a 25% boost per core it adds, which may or may not help the "rendering thread"). Also need to test more on the E-cores and if that effects them. I'd rather have the physical E-cores than the logical cores, but I don't think DCS is using them at all.
Now if only we could get ED to start optimizing textures, instead of releasing high-res pilot bodies that no one asked for, and all of us will likely default to off...
EDIT: also I used Process Lasso to trim the memory and enabled "Smart Trim" and enabled "Performance Mode" and "Probalance" -- turned off 4 of the total P-cores(2 phys and their matching logical threads) from my 12700k and it seems to have steadied out fairly well.
@@Munky332 The problem is DCS don't ask its customers what they want . We ask but mainly gets ignored .
I have nearly all the modules and half the maps , I've spent a lot of money on this DCS hobby like most of us .
But lately I've slowed right down . Things just arnt getting fixed .
No point buying a $60 module if the game engine is broken .
would resizable bar help?
Nah mines on, no noticable difference on and off
That 1000+ms frame time was rather painful. Ultimately these findings aren't super surprising over all. A lot of games have diminishing returns as core/thread count increases. Typically seen past 8 cores / 16 threads, tho many even deteriorate at anything over 6 cores / 12 threads. You can probably attest to this but while parallelization is great, there comes a point where the management overhead / bottlenecks starts to stagnate and decrease the gains. I think the most curious part is can ED lower these memory requirements? RAM/VRAM management has always been a challenge for DCS. Often times my rig with 32GB of RAM would have the capacity completely filled, prompting me to get 64GB for my newest computer. I really don't see this behavior in any other fight sim, or any other game that I own or observe benchmarking on.
Its an interesting problem, would a solution be to move the textures to RAM rather than removing and reloading the data from disk each time?
I mean ideally that's what happens for you.. but not sure if ED is actually unloading things to try and keep ram usage down... its odd behavior to see such a crazy flux in mem usage.
@@Jabbers It looks like during your testing there is no 'look ahead caching' before all the threads going 'give me all the textures now'. But during the unload you can see it is either expiring from vram into ram and holding it there for a bit or its just a mass eviction overwhelming the ram which causes paging when all it really wants to do is evict the textures. Without proper tracing it will be hard to know. It appeared you were hitting your 64GB ram (assuming thats what you got) routinely during the assumed eviction. It would be interesting to also capture commit size as that will tell you what the VMM is really dealing with.
I do performance testing for a living but not on games (anymore)
@@Jabbers I guess what would be good is if ED gave us with more RAM (i got 128GB) the option to dump the textures to Memory rather than remove them. I thought that is what REBAR did but I don't know enough about it to be sure. Perhaps it's time to stop letting players use different textures on their aircraft to improve performance. Good analysis mate.
DCS reserves ram 64gb of ram, that was not my commit size. It was not really using 64GB
you can set the affinity on-the-fly and without restarts using windows task manager
But dcs doesn't respect this and it doesn't save for the next time you run the fame
@@Jabbers the last time I checked dcs did respect , but I will try again in 2.9.
Same issue... I dont know how can they fix this problem for us..
Interesting now that many other dcs UA-camrs is now suggesting your suggestion as their own. including the use of the same app to perform CPU core affinity.
Eh welcome to YT, no biggy so long as it reaches more people
@@Jabbers your observations on how dcs work as an app is most valuable. For most time I am running 13900 with 4090 I was able to get 90 frame almost stable with occasionally frame slowdown when coming in to carrier landing.
In term of memory and vram. It kinda consumes a fair chunk.
If you have time and assets to try. I hit Into a pimax crystal problem with GPU bandwidth limitation when I connect my 4090 with a 240hz 4k monitor and pimax 120hz 2880x2880 per eye resolution. It only get resolved when I power off my 240hz monitor and replaced with a 60hz 4k monitor.
Can you post your hardware and Graphics settings?
7900X3D
3090
64GB memory
Almost all settings on high (hit me up on discord for a screenshot)
@Jabbers Could this be a CCX issue with the 7900x3d (using the CCX that doesn't have the 3d cache)? Not sure I have seen this issue yet but it may be I'm not playing on servers/maps with enough stuff on the screen (5800x3d here with 4090).
Nah, not CCX, same issue persists with just the 3d cache cores.
Does anyone else here have an MSI nvidia RTX 4060 Ti card? I have one that came with a Costco “gaming PC” with i7-13700F, 32GB Ram, 1TB SSD and MSI MB.
It seems like it has most trouble in Mission Editor. Every so often it just starts a series of freezing up for 15 to 30 seconds. Looking at Task Manager, performance, the CPU is running about 5 GHz but only 15-20% busy, with one core continuously at 100%. The graphics card is at about 90% when it’s running smoothly, and drops to 15-40%, up and down, while the video is freezing and hesitating. And there’s a lot of corrupted video outside of the ME window. This all in VR.
MT-, with affinity=F, game loaded much faster. (i7, 1070ti, 32gb ram, sata hdd, i know) p51 looks great, smoother. Awesome
Awsome, i only disable my core 8 when the stutters happen, then its better until it happens again , then i switch off core 9 and enable core 8 again. But i will test your solution ( can you also test in vr?)
What you saw was in VR
@@Jabbers i have tested it wit ff so 8 cores. No improvement. Ill test with 4 cores . Do i need to step in 2 so 4 then 6?
It's hugely hardware specific and won't work for everyone, just try I can't tell you what will work best for your machine
@@Jabbers hi jabbers thx for reply but i use the steam version and if in do C:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\DCSWorld\bin-mt\DCS.exe --affinity=F
so this is a shotcut on my desktop, it starts the singel thread one not the multi
Sorry I don't know anything about the steam version
You could've ust said the affinity value is a bitmask with the LSB being the first core and the value is in hex.
Could have, but not everyone knows what a bitmask or hex is
I think you'd be able to "fix" this by lowering your texture details to medium instead of high? Also maybe lowering the preload distance.
You can fix with textures at medium, but the problem can still occur... my preload distance is at the lowest setting.
I always thought that if you had 24gb vram and 64gn ram then you should Max the preload. I don't really understand that settings impact.
It's for terrain stuff only afaik.
@@Jabbersdoes the new LOD graphic setting help at all?
@@Jabbersalso try turning your preload up to like 75 percent? Might stop the stuttering since most of those planes will already be buffered
DCS - 2.9 is a stuttering mess , DCS Has big memory issues . clearly ED need to hire you Jabbers . lol 😂 😂 Thank you for your hard work and time mate .
Edit : so i tried this last night on the servers and i had good results i would say 70% of my stutters were gone . Tried six cores .
I'm experiencing a lot of stuttering and lagging only on DCS multiplayer.
are u a intel guy or amd...
Both, AMD at the moment as I do not have a personal nuclear power plant to supply enough power for an Intel chip lol
@@JabbersI'd be more concerned about the need to own the arctic circle ice mass to cool the Intel more than the power requirement!
I might not understand this properly, but why can’t they just make MT load more stuff in RAM?
Well its using 48GB of my memory in this test, so its not like they aren't using it. I think the problem is they are aggressively trying to cleanup memory or something so some assets are being removed or deallocated, and far to quickly.
@@JabbersAh, I see. I figured you must have 64 gigs of RAM or more since I see the RAM exceed 50 at some points, but I guess it’s also counting the pagefile?
Besides the fix you have in the video, which I’m definitely gonna try, do you think more RAM would remedy the issue (without a fix from ED) better than more VRAM? DCS really seems to eat all the RAM you can throw at it.
Prob help but I think ED should solve some of this vs everyone just having to throw hardware at it
@@Jabbers Very true. I hope ED can fix this, and videos like this hopefully go a long way to making them aware of the issue.
Idea: Just like how that Brazilian team got a 3070 and soldered 16 GB of VRAM on it, there should be a capability for GPU manufacturers to enable us to add VRAM to their cards kinda like a modular system, so that we can use our old GPU but add x GB of VRAM to it later.
But they won't do that because money.
Well the server lag is there, I actually told a friend who wanted to get into DCS that it was better not to because of how screwed the game is right now.
lets goo dude
Well literally my issue :(
Quite unplayable for me...
An option for Simplified models and textures for aircraft other than ownship would be nice. I don't care about super detailed models that Im not going to see super up close 99.9% of the time.
That is what the LOD slider should do.
Example, give me a nice clean 8-bit 128x128 texture 200-400 polygon tomcat when it is 300+ meters from me. Almost like game from 1999.
Now it is like 500'000 polygon 4096x4096 with 48bit cockpit, model, IR map etc all at once.
@@paristo The problem is the slider basically does fuck all in actuality. I've tested both ends of the spectrum and it doesn't help me. Granted I'm on a 4090 so VRAM isn't an issue, but IMO there is an absolute shit ton of optimization that needs to be done, instead of ED focusing on "High Quality Pilot Bodies" that no one asked for and 99% of the player base is going to turn off anways.
Or like the BS3, why the fuck are all the panels modeled?
Immmmeerrrssssiioooonnnn 🤣
Never had this issue with 6gb VRAM. Don't know how people have so many issues.
I'm guessing you are running lower texture settings and thus not capping out your vram/ram as quickly.
Guys. In today gaming. We have to actually put some work, effort for the product that we buy to have fun. Imagine if you a 60-70 years old does not have IT knowledge or maybe you are a manager, senior manager, CEO and you just don't have time to do all this. Thx man for your video.
The problem exists in MT and ST for me. It is unplayable.
If its a problem in ST, its probably something else.
unknown command --affinity=F
nvm was doing it on updater shortcut LOL
Just show they don't know how to stream IO needs ... the queue is never emptying because the resource asked is not needed anymore. It's just pure dumb programing "I need that in a queue" without managing the queue.
And like Jabbers said : it's complicate to do multi thread properly. Hence a 10 man size company should not do this kind of crap themself. Other engines already exist, use them.