KMIA Performance

[aburek]

Hello,

Im having pretty rough performance at KMIA in P3D v5. Not sure of this is related to the same issues others are having with FLL that is caused by P3Ds bad VRam handling or not. Thanks!

Allan

[atcogl]

I can barely get it to load. Once it does FPS performance isn't terrible happily.

In order to even load it I had to do some texture conversion.

In the KMIA texture folder are 31 textures that are 4096x4096. There is absolutely no reason for 4096 textures in an airport scenery 2048 is perfectly fine.
Those 31 textures *alone* load 586MB of textures into P3D.
By converting them all just down in size to 2048 they come in at 146MB - a saving of 440MB.

Doing that I was actually able to get KMIA to load, although its Vram consumption is still significantly higher than other comparable complex airport scenery and for the first time I was able to slew around and take a look at it.
When the main terminal came into view I took another 400MB hit on Vram from 5.9GB upto 6.3 but it still had 400MB of room before crashing (I have an 8GB card so 6.7 seems to be my limit).
Slewing around the airport I did increase up to 6.7 once but fortunately no crash.

However this was of course in a default aircraft with no AI and no Truesky or anything else fancy (including no FLL installed) so while its not really useable, I did at least succeed in getting it to load.
I would suggest that scenery developers drop 4096 textures completely.
Its clearly early days though and some teething troubles are to be expected. I'm sure LVFR and LM between them can sort all this out in time.

[RicardoLVFR]

I can barely get it to load. Once it does FPS performance isn't terrible happily.

In order to even load it I had to do some texture conversion.

In the KMIA texture folder are 31 textures that are 4096x4096. There is absolutely no reason for 4096 textures in an airport scenery 2048 is perfectly fine.
Those 31 textures *alone* load 586MB of textures into P3D.
By converting them all just down in size to 2048 they come in at 146MB - a saving of 440MB.

Doing that I was actually able to get KMIA to load, although its Vram consumption is still significantly higher than other comparable complex airport scenery and for the first time I was able to slew around and take a look at it.
When the main terminal came into view I took another 400MB hit on Vram from 5.9GB upto 6.3 but it still had 400MB of room before crashing (I have an 8GB card so 6.7 seems to be my limit).
Slewing around the airport I did increase up to 6.7 once but fortunately no crash.

However this was of course in a default aircraft with no AI and no Truesky or anything else fancy (including no FLL installed) so while its not really useable, I did at least succeed in getting it to load.
I would suggest that scenery developers drop 4096 textures completely.
Its clearly early days though and some teething troubles are to be expected. I'm sure LVFR and LM between them can sort all this out in time.

Hi, KMIAv5 was designed in 2019 for P3dv4.

And for almost a year people have been using KMIAv5 without any issues in P3dv4. LM released P3dv5 just recently and we have been made aware of these issues, and LM has acknowledged them and they are addressing them as we speak, I hope they resolve this soon with a hotfix.

But as for the textures, the idea with scenery is and our projects is to improve them as we go along with new sims that are supposed to be better and accept more detailed scenery.

I can't see how we will treat P3dv5 as if it were a FSX and degrade detail on it, I am betting on LM getting this sorted soon.

If not, believe me if we have to reduce quality so it works on the sim, we would have to, but lets assume we won't and wait for them to release the hotfix.

Also you needn't do the texture degradation manually, on your settings you can select to reduce texture sizes to 2048, 1024 and it brings all of them down.

[atcogl]

Hi Ricardo,

I totally agree KMIA is a lovely airport, and I've been enjoying it in V4 immensely.
It looks great and runs very nicely.

I'm not suggesting that you should reduce detail and degrade things but equally its not wise to act as if there are no limits.
LM are seeking out ways to improve things but the fact is V5 is a DX12 product and LM can't change how DX12 allocates and renders.
As Beau himself puts it:
"We will continue to work ways to avoid going over budget. For certain UI settings like terrain, and advanced atmospherics, we can predict memory usage well, because we control the number and size of all textures and buffers used by those features. For the general sim, it's hard to do because it is very content dependent. Every model and texture added to the scene takes GPU memory. Compressed 4k textures take up 16MB each which can add up really fast.

DirectX11 allows applications to go over budget and the driver then attempts to shuffle resources on and off of the GPU to keep the app running. This tends to cause major performance issues, so it was always best to stay under budget, It just wasn't clear in Dx11 what your budget was or how much was in use. DirectX12 drivers don't allow apps to go over budget...............Our focus for 5.0 was to optimize performance under the assumption that settings and content are tuned to keep the app under budget."

DX12 is not going to allow the Vram to go over budget no matter what.

Also I'm fairly sure that the Texture Resolution setting just displays the maximum texture dimensions that P3D will display, it does not reduce the Vram loading of the texture. I'm not expert by far but my understanding is that the 4096 texture is still loaded into Vram but P3D won't display anything higher than the 2048 sized mip-map?
I believe the only way to reduce the Vram loading is to reduce the physical texture size.

As I said the only way I could get KMIA to load was after reducing the size of those 31 textures. It saved 440MB and that equates to what I saw when KMIA first loaded, I went from 6.3GB down to 5.9GB and after slewing around for a bit I was at 6.3GB instead of crashed after hitting 6.7.

Don't get me wrong I'm a massive fan of your work, I'm not trying to crap on you guys at all.
I think that with V5 however after V4 freed us from the nightmare of 32-bit memory limitations, so DX12 has delivered us another hard and fast limit. This one however has an immediate cure - A graphics card with more Vram, but that's not going to be an option for everyone.
I think it would be wiser to choose more carefully where one allocates high resolution textures rather than just make them all high res because there was no penalty for doing so in V4 (although it did cause performance reduction - It was less noticeable though because overall performance was worse under DX11). Do tire marks and oil stains really need 4096x4096 detail or is 2048 or even 1024 good enough to get the desired results? Airports have to be flyable, they are not functional if they are works of highly detailed art that nobody can fly in and out of

Again, I'll repeat its only been a few days, there is a lot to digest with the new sim, and infact a whole new DX version which has brought about massive changes to how things run already.

All the best, I'll always be here cheering you on and buying your products.

[RicardoLVFR]

Thank you, we will reduce the physical size of the textures if needed be, let me see what happens with the HF, and if anything we will update KMIA for P3dv5 if its necessary.