Dynamic Lighting performance - Was: Spotlights kill FPS

[Terblanche]

I created beautiful spotlights for the PMDG B738 but at night the FPS drops to a dismal 20-21 FPS ... the moment you disable them, the FPS is back at 30 where VSync holds it on a 4K monitor. While in flight you can turn them on and the same happens. Either they conflict with DL or they simply don't like P3D4.

Now that I know this, I also disable them during night flight in the A320X and somehow I still have all the cockpit lights but it does seem as if the Bus runs more smoothly with SL disabled. Don't know, maybe it's just me, but something somewhere somehow doesn't gel with my settings.

Note: Every other aircraft in my library runs the living daylight out of P3D4 with all sliders ULTRA or MAX but not when SL are in the picture and/or the A320 for that matter.

[Lefteris Kalamaras]

Dear Terblanche,

all FSLSpotlights does is take advantage of dynamic lighting in P3Dv4 effects, albeit with a bit more "gusto" as we can actually dynamically tweak lots of parameters in there that are otherwise unavailable (brightness on the fly, etc).

Your issue therefore is NOT with FSLSpotlights themselves, but rather with P3Dv4's Dynamic Lighting (as is now well known to most everyone).

If your graphics card is anything less than a 1080Ti and/or if you're running 4K resolution, you're SOL as Dynamic Lights shader logic will kill your FPS.

[Terblanche]

That's the thing Lefteris ... I do have a 1080Ti and i7 7700 processor and personally I don't have any issues with DL as long as you stay with MSAA during night flying. As I'm typing here I'm flying the PMDG B738 into Munich with almost all sliders MAX and the FPS sits at 30 and drops every now and then to 29. Personally I don't have any hope that LM will fix or change DL just as BLOOM was always just a tickbox in FSX and never optimised. Not even a hard core PC could turn BLOOM on without suffering the consequences. That said, I understand and respect the argument that FSLabs and PMDG decided to go with the DL development in designing your cockpits and lighting systems. Unfortunately, as I said ... something somewhere somehow get slaughtered in the process. But thank you for responding so quickly. Really appreciate it.

[>>P.@tr1c_kk@.w@m.ur@]

So this means 1080ti which is a top of the line hw today is required to use night lighting?

 

the rub is there is no slider, either lights or zero lights, using msaa still hammers fps like dx10 preview and bloom did on fsx....

 

LM made a bad decision to serve up this 'feature' with a binary option.   Same goes for devs getting on the bandwagon knowing that majority of committed simmers are not there with hw.

 

Where is santa?

[Terblanche]

39 minutes ago, aru maw akkc1rtap said:

LM made a bad decision to serve up this 'feature' with a binary option.

The whole 'light system' in P3D sucks big time ... has from P3D1 and very much still in P3D4. As a pilot myself I know what runway lights look like at night and we got very close in FSX with editing the halo.bmp file. Now runway and approach lights are white and red shimmering blobs that look sooooo unrealistic. I never had any shimmering in FSX and never had to constantly fiddle with HDR just because the sky colour changed ... too bright at night, too dark during the day ... sometimes even cartoonish.

But no, the whole scenery library system was a pressing issue that needed change and now I sit with airports all over the place with no influence on higher priority. Instead I was hoping they will fix basic stuff like the coast lines that are still the same as FS9 and at some places like around Cape Town hopelessly wrong; fix AI traffic that lands at take-off in opposite directions or park on the runway and you have to do a GA; bring (ALL) the lights of FSX back they were just fine; and while they are at it ... can they please do something about ground vehicles driving through your aircraft?

But let me not lament ... x64 is the way to go! I just spend a fortune in upgrading my PC with the hope to, at least for the time being, never have to witness a stuttering or shimmering again or to worry about FPS. I was sadly mistaken.

[Luca vom Bruch]

On 26.10.2017 at 11:41 PM, Lefteris Kalamaras said:

If your graphics card is anything less than a 1080Ti and/or if you're running 4K resolution, you're SOL as Dynamic Lights shader logic will kill your FPS.

The FSLabs lights looked fine to me in v3 why can't you add legacy lights to the v4 version? If I disable dynamic lighting in v4 settings I have no landing lights in the A320X

At addon airports I have like 5fps with Dynamic Lighting enabled. on 2560x1440p and GTX 1060. Not the highest end of cards, but not a peasant card either.

I think slideshow or 1080Ti is not very customer friendly. All of the interior lights seem to work with dyn lighting disabled, but needs runway turn off lights, landing lights and taxi/to lights.

[Lefteris Kalamaras]

1 hour ago, Luca vom Bruch said:

The FSLabs lights looked fine to me in v3 why can't you add legacy lights to the v4 version? If I disable dynamic lighting in v4 settings I have no landing lights in the A320X

At addon airports I have like 5fps with Dynamic Lighting enabled. on 2560x1440p and GTX 1060. Not the highest end of cards, but not a peasant card either.

I think slideshow or 1080Ti is not very customer friendly. All of the interior lights seem to work with dyn lighting disabled, but needs runway turn off lights, landing lights and taxi/to lights.

At that resolution, try lowering your AA settings - any SSAA choice will kill your performance (and you don't need it anyway).

[Luca vom Bruch]

I run 4xmsaa, at none it doubles the fps to 10fps which doesn't really help me all that much.

It only affects some runways of addon airports, I will just take off and land in the dark. P3D is not that pitch black anyway.

I understand that LM made it so that it works in default aircraft and default airports without problems, also the FSLabs by itself seems ok, but the FSlabs AND detailed airports kill my system in terms of dynamic lighting.

If I ctr+alt+del out the new GPU activity in task manager ist just stuck at 99%. look away at the overhead and it is 50% again, look otuside on the runway when landing lights and interior lights and airport lights are on -> 5fps.

But it still would have been nice to get legacy lights. All the VC lights seem to work with DL disabled only the landing lights don't do anything. They are ON from the outside view though.

[Mihai Armas]

yeah, too bad... with p3d v3 there was problems with VAS and now with v4.1 the problem is DL, and i simply can't fly it at night, cause i get 10 fps at medium settings

[Philipp Schwaegerl]

2 hours ago, Mihai Armas said:

yeah, too bad... with p3d v3 there was problems with VAS and now with v4.1 the problem is DL, and i simply can't fly it at night, cause i get 10 fps at medium settings

The next update from LM must fix this issue! There is no excuse anymore for not patching this DL thing. 

[Jeff baird]

The DL and slow autogen loading are terrible in P3D v4. Flying at night truly looks poor in my opinion. I truly love the FSL A320 but hate this platform. It's no wonder why people keep jumping over to XP. If FSL and PMDG ever made their aircraft compatible with XP this platform I believe would really suffer. I have a 1080ti as well and really don't have many performance issues with this aircraft. 

[Marc Ehnle]

On 10.11.2017 at 4:27 PM, Philipp Schwaegerl said:

The next update from LM must fix this issue! There is no excuse anymore for not patching this DL thing. 

and what are we going to do if they don't fix it? ^^ Cry? actually it's up to the mercy of LM.. But if I was them in our capitalistic world I would probably leave it just like it is and promise a great DL in V5   I mean, hey, Call of Duty WW2 was released for 60€ and a few days later the seasons pass came out for an other 50€ LMAO.. And people seem to pay for it. I honestly would not be surprised  Get a 1080Ti or suffer... (Yes, I hate it too)

[Philipp Schwaegerl]

5 hours ago, Marc Ehnle said:

and what are we going to do if they don't fix it? ^^ Cry? actually it's up to the mercy of LM.. But if I was them in our capitalistic world I would probably leave it just like it is and promise a great DL in V5   I mean, hey, Call of Duty WW2 was released for 60€ and a few days later the seasons pass came out for an other 50€ LMAO.. And people seem to pay for it. I honestly would not be surprised  Get a 1080Ti or suffer... (Yes, I hate it too)

If they don't get their things together, I will leave the P3D plattform. I use XP11 parallel to P3D and there are not such problems like FPS lost with dynamic lightning. There will be a great A320 soon in XP with amazing details and honestly, without the FSLA320 I would have left P3D. This amazing aircraft is the only reason I stay with P3D. 

[Lefteris Kalamaras]

Thanks for your comments, at this time there's no reason to continue this thread, really. I am locking.