Beware of VRAM usage in P3D v5

[Louis Vallance]

Hello everyone,

I've been tweaking my P3d v5 settings to see what makes the sim tick. Unlike in v4, v5 makes very heavy use of VRAM, which is good! However, I and a few others have noticed that it's rather easy to crash the sim by going over the memory limit.

With all the ORBX products installed, sitting at FlyTampa EKCH V2, I easily hit the VRAM limit with my RTX 2080 when sat in a default A/C. Bear in mind that most of my sliders are one notch away from the maximum position.

I just wanted to let you know so that you're prepared for this possible issue ahead of the FSLabs v5 installers coming out. So far I have found that the two biggest VRAM hogs are Advanced Atmospherics (TrueSky Beta) and Texture Resolution.

Just look at the attached screenshots taken at Copenhagen and see how quickly the VRAM usage increases as you choose a higher texture resolution. You can easily save about 600MB just by choosing High instead of Ultra, and both look absolutely fantastic when viewed up close, let alone from the cockpit or high up above the ground.

LM are aware of the issue of high VRAM usage and are looking for ways to avoid hitting the memory limit.

Bear in mind also that I'm intentionally pushing the sim and your mileage will definitely vary. I just assumed that most of us who are invested in the FSLabs busses will be using some high quality add-ons alongside it.

Cheers,

Louis

texture_res.zip

[stephen speak]

i think the problem lies with the fact P3D V5 is DX12..most video cards run DX11..the video card manufacturers need to update things to use DX12..this will take time..

steve

[Louis Vallance]

6 minutes ago, stephen speak said:

i think the problem lies with the fact P3D V5 is DX12..most video cards run DX11..the video card manufacturers need to update things to use DX12..this will take time

steve

Hi Steve,

While that may be part of the overall issue, according to Nvidia's compatibility list, the RTX 2080 is a DX12 card so I think there's a bit more to it than that.

Louis

[Sabine Meier]

anyone running a gpu older than the gtx 10xx series is not able to run dx12 so those systems do need an update.

[Artur Araripe]

Every Nvidia DX11 card also supports DX12, which means even a GTX 480/70/60 is compatible. Doesn't mean the performance would be acceptable, though. 

 

[Søren Rasmussen]

1 hour ago, Louis Vallance said:

I've been tweaking my P3d v5 settings to see whan makes the sim tick. Unlike in v4, v5 makes very heavy use of VRAM, which is good! However, I and a few others have noticed that it's rather easy to crash the sim by going over the memory limit.

With all the ORBX products installed, sitting at FlyTampa EKCH V2, I easily hit the VRAM limit with my RTX 2080 when sat in a default A/C. Bear in mind that most of my sliders are one notch away from the maximum position.

How much VRAM in your graphics card?

 

[Artur Araripe]

His card is a RTX 2080, therefore, 8 GB of VRAM. 

[Christoph Sebek]

Hitting the VRAM limit, sounds like a step back to the "hitting the OOM chime". 

[Louis Vallance]

1 minute ago, Søren Rasmussen said:

How much VRAM in your graphics card?

 

8GB, as Artur said. However, Windows will typically allocate slightly less than the full amount to a given application (about 6.6GB in my case).

[Sabine Meier]

You will never see 8gb allocated to p3d with 8gb of vram.

[Artur Araripe]

I know, right? DX12 is pretty bad with VRAM management. That's why Asobo went with DX11 instead for MSFS2020. It's not optimized enough for huge open world environments. Or should we say, it's sort of ahead of its time and current gen GPUs are not ready for it, which is subject to change once the 3xxx series is out, bringing GPUs with more than 16 GBs of VRAM to the table.

1 minute ago, Christoph Sebek said:

Hitting the VRAM limit, sounds like a step back to the "hitting the OOM chime". 

 

[Søren Rasmussen]

6 minutes ago, Louis Vallance said:

8GB, as Artur said.

Well didn't see that - my GTX 2080ti has 11Gb VRAM (ASUS GeForce RTX 2080 Ti DUAL OC - 11GB GDDR6 RAM)

 

[Louis Vallance]

1 minute ago, Søren Rasmussen said:

Well didn't see that - my GTX 2080ti has 11Gb VRAM (ASUS GeForce RTX 2080 Ti DUAL OC - 11GB GDDR6 RAM)

 

In hindsight I wish I just went for the Ti to begin with. Oh well...

[Artur Araripe]

I mean, even the Ti wouldn't be enough for certain case scenarios. Like ORBX TrueEarth GB maxed out in 4k eating a whopping 18 GB of VRAM. 

18 friggin gigabytes

They'll need to do a lot of work with it. Maybe offload some of the vram load to the pagefile and ram. 

[Sabine Meier]

7 minutes ago, Artur Araripe said:

I know, right? DX12 is pretty bad with VRAM management. That's why Asobo went with DX11 instead for MSFS2020. It's not optimized enough for huge open world environments. Or should we say, it's sort of ahead of its time and current gen GPUs are not ready for it, which is subject to change once the 3xxx series is out, bringing GPUs with more than 16 GBs of VRAM to the table.

 

The 1060 has either 3gb or 6gb. The rtx2060 has 6gb with the super 8gb. Maybe we will see a rtx3060 with 8gb as a base and a super perhaps with 10gb. 

[Artur Araripe]

They say the RTX 3070 = RTX 2080ti in performance, but with more vram. 13 or more, maybe 16. Imagine how powerful the 3080 and the 3080ti are going to be. Can't wait to sell my kidney and buy one!

[Sabine Meier]

5 minutes ago, Artur Araripe said:

They say the RTX 3070 = RTX 2080ti in performance, but with more vram. 13 or more, maybe 16. Imagine how powerful the 3080 and the 3080ti are going to be. Can't wait to sell my kidney and buy one!

Currently we only have speculation on leaks that have happened but yeah the rtx3080ti will be a powerhouse. Not to mention the psu that is needed when we get custom cards.

Edited April 19, 2020 by Koen Meier

[Artur Araripe]

Yea, that's true. Maybe they'll pull a 9xx power efficiency again. The GTX 980 was extremely power efficient when it came out, compared to the 780 and 680. 

[Greg Lloyd]

The problem isn't with the gpus. nVidia 10 and 11 series cards are more than capable of handling all the modern graphics apis. It's with the way the new graphics API's work.

There is a video floating around where Austin Myer essentially explains the same concerns in X-Plane when running on Vulkan.

DX12 and Vulkan are both newer graphics api's that work at a much lower level on the graphics card than earlier Direct X versions (for P3D / FSX) and OpenGL (for X-plane).

They offer performance gains because they allow developers to load graphics textures directly into GPU memory rather than having to load them into slower system memory (RAM) and developers can also take advantage of other functions in the new api's that reduce cpu overheads when processing "draw calls". All these things reduce the amount of CPU processing required compared with the previous versions of the API's. The freed up CPU cycles and the faster processing of textures by the video card is what is resulting in the increased performance we see in V5.

However, because developers are now working much closer to the graphics hardware (e.g. loading textures directly into GPU memory), they now must be much more aware of how much VRAM each texture requires and they must manage the VRAM directly themselves. Previous API's did the memory management for them as the textures were in system memory and the graphics API took care of swapping textures to VRAM as and when required. The developers didn't have to worry about the amount of free VRAM and the API managed all that for them. However, the older API's had lower performance since they took up valuable CPU processing time and waited for textures to be moved back and forward between system RAM and VRAM.

It seems that with P3Dv5 it is going to be the end user's responsibility not to load too many textures to exceed their available VRAM. LM doesn't appear to have taken any measures in their code to prevent this from happening. I've had one crash to desktop on my machine so far. Not 100% it was a lack of VRAM as I didn't investigate it too much, but I run at 4K with 4x Super Sampling AA (I use a 65" screen so AA is important) and all graphics and world settings maxed out except dynamic reflections. GPU is the 2080Ti.

I'm prepared for the fact that I might have to drop a few notches once the FSLabs is released. Not because of performance reasons, as I get superbly fluid performance with FSL, but because I might see the VRAM being exceeded from time to time.

[Greg Lloyd]

There's a section on this page that talks about memory management in DX12.

Search for :-

• Avoid vidmem overcommitment

https://developer.nvidia.com/dx12-dos-and-donts

[David Gray]

I'm holding on to my 1080ti until the 3080ti comes out.  I have heard conflicting rumors about VRAM on the 3080 ti and the 3070.  But I really would hope we see 16gb for it.  Though some rumors are now suggesting only 12.  I have most of my airports and all orbx loaded into P3DV5.  No crashes or running out of VRAM.  However I don't have any after market airplanes or typical vatsim ai traffic.  LVFR MIA and FLL definitely hit the hardest, but i've found at my settings i still have enough headroom.  I continue using nvidia control panel to lock at 30hz because I believe this helps.  Especially running at 4k like i do.  

[Sabine Meier]

i feel like some scnery devs do need to investgate their products with regards to dx12.

[Christoph Sebek]

38 minutes ago, David Gray said:

LVFR MIA and FLL definitely hit the hardest

They haven‘t been frame wonders in V4 either unfortunately. And when running both simultaneously, due to the close proximity, it creates a lot of taxation to your system. But they do look good.

[Bob Zolto]

Nvidia GeForce  driver 445.87 reportedly eases some of the OOM problems.

[stephen speak]

5 hours ago, Koen Meier said:

anyone running a gpu older than the gtx 10xx series is not able to run dx12 so those systems do need an update.

My gtx 980ti runs p3d 4.5 no problem..I have DX12 in my system..I didn’t know until earlier.. but my sim runs smooth as silk with a 6 year old system..I don’t know what difference there is in the architecture of V5 but there must be some to cause these problems 

[Sabine Meier]

Just now, stephen speak said:

My gtx 980ti runs p3d 4.5 no problem..I have DX12 in my system..I didn’t know until earlier.. but my sim runs smooth as silk with a 6 year old system..I don’t know what difference there is in the architecture of V5 but there must be some to cause these problems 

V4.5 is not dx12.

[stephen speak]

1 minute ago, Koen Meier said:

V4.5 is not dx12.

Just going off what you said..980ti is older than a 10xx series..obviously the V5 is built around DX12 architecture..that stands out..I think it’s the way it’s using vram that’s the problem..new product new problems..this will carry on until it’s patched..some of the versions of msfs had bad oom problems..but on 32 bit the memory wasn’t used properly 

   6 hours ago,  Koen Meier said: 

anyone running a gpu older than the gtx 10xx series is not able to run dx12 so those systems do need an update.

[Artur Araripe]

Anything above GTX 4XX is compatible with DX12. 

Any DX11 card is also a DX12 card. At least NVIDIA-wise. Not sure about AyyyMD

 

 

[Sabine Meier]

3 minutes ago, Artur Araripe said:

Anything above GTX 4XX is compatible with DX12. 

Any DX11 card is also a DX12 card. At least NVIDIA-wise. Not sure about AyyyMD

True but I think we also have to consider the vram. Nvidia lists only the 10 series as compatible on their dx12/dxr page. Some searches regarding amd is they have compatibility to Radeon 7000series. But I feel vram still is part of that 

[Artur Araripe]

If you roll down, the other cards are there too. They are not listed at the very top cuz not available for sale anymore. 

"PREVIOUS GENERATIONS"

[Christoph Sebek]

Mine says it‘s DX12 ready. I‘ll hold it to its description once I try V5 out.

[Richard Nellyer]

RTX Titan it is then for P3D v5......
What can I sell?

 

[Tristan Leski]

That VRAM usage problem is pretty strange... I have a pretty modest configuration : i5-6600K@4.4GHz and NVIDIA GTX1070 with 8Gb of VRAM.

I am using P3Dv5 for some days now, doing some 20/30min flights in FlightBeam/ORBX airports with ORBX enabled, TrueSky on, sliders very close to the right, and I had 0 VRAM exceeds so far. My VRAM hitted maximum ~4.5Gb, which is actually very far from my GPUs limits.

Am I the only without any VRAM issues so far ?

[Christoph Sebek]

Wait for payware aircrafts, only then you'll know if you're save or not. 

[Edwin Mayer]

13 hours ago, Tristan Leski said:

That VRAM usage problem is pretty strange... I have a pretty modest configuration : i5-6600K@4.4GHz and NVIDIA GTX1070 with 8Gb of VRAM.

I am using P3Dv5 for some days now, doing some 20/30min flights in FlightBeam/ORBX airports with ORBX enabled, TrueSky on, sliders very close to the right, and I had 0 VRAM exceeds so far. My VRAM hitted maximum ~4.5Gb, which is actually very far from my GPUs limits.

Am I the only without any VRAM issues so far ?

same here with my 1070Ti. 

From the 8GB VRAM 6,7 GB are available in Sim.

 

THe only way for me to run out of VRAM was setting all texture resolutions to maximum and go to FlyTampa LasVegas with all options on in my Carenado Plane.

 

When i found this, i decided to take this scenario to optiimize my sttings, reducing texture resolution till im safe in that situation and now have an optimized system never running out of VRAM till i find an even more VRAM consuming Scenery ;-)

[Marc Stanford]

I have a GTX 1070 with 8GB of VRAM but I only have a HD monitor, not 4K so should I be good for V5?

I have never run out of VRAM for any other game (GTA V, Arma, XP11, Black Mesa, etc.) with my MSI GS72 Gaming Laptop, will it be enough for P3D v5?

Also it is possible when P3D 5.1 comes out LM may fix or at least optimize VRAM usage, don't forget it's still in initial release just food for thought.

[Edwin Mayer]

your 8GB give you a good base for v5, but it alldepends on the addons you run.

 

If Scenery, Aircraft and sky use lots of details and high resolution textures, you may still encounter CDT - like i wrote earlier here...

 

[Louis Vallance]

2 minutes ago, Marc Stanford said:

I have a GTX 1070 with 8GB of VRAM but I only have a HD monitor, not 4K so should I be good for V5?

I have never run out of VRAM for any other game (GTA V, Arma, XP11, Black Mesa, etc.) with my MSI GS72 Gaming Laptop, will it be enough for P3D v5?

Also it is possible when P3D 5.1 comes out LM may fix or at least optimize VRAM usage, don't forget it's still in initial release just food for thought.

I think you'll be fine after you tweak your settings. In my test I was intentionally pushing my settings to the limit to see what I could get away with.

I don't wish to give the impression that v5 is just guzzling VRAM with normal/low settings, rather that in v5 we will have to be more cognizant about the sim's VRAM budget. That's why LM have added this data to the InfoGen text  (Shift+z).

[Marc Stanford]

I did a test with the FSL A321 at LatinVFR KMIA v2 with high settings.

-4096 texture size

-High resolution terrain textures

-Full overcast thunderstorm clouds with cloud shadows.

-Water quality set to max

-Shadows in the cockpit and outside, building shadows, and terrain shadows enabled

-PBR to maximum

After doing this I noticed my VRAM never went higher than 6 GB so I think I should be good for V5.

[Brian McCumiskey]

On 4/20/2020 at 6:35 AM, Marc Stanford said:

I did a test with the FSL A321 at LatinVFR KMIA v2 with high settings.

-4096 texture size

-High resolution terrain textures

-Full overcast thunderstorm clouds with cloud shadows.

-Water quality set to max

-Shadows in the cockpit and outside, building shadows, and terrain shadows enabled

-PBR to maximum

After doing this I noticed my VRAM never went higher than 6 GB so I think I should be good for V5.

Get ready to be disappointed. I have an RTX 2070 and an i9-9900K. Almost every single time in addon scenery it crashes

[Nuno M Pinto]

I got rid of my 2070 SUPER for a 1080Ti. Best thing i ever did, not only it is a tad faster but its 11GB VRAM don't let me down with everything maxed out at my 1440p resolution.

[Richard Nellyer]

1 hour ago, Nuno M Pinto said:

I got rid of my 2070 SUPER for a 1080Ti. Best thing i ever did, not only it is a tad faster but its 11GB VRAM don't let me down with everything maxed out at my 1440p resolution.

Couldn't agree more. The 20 series cards I skipped as the 1080ti still has the performance to compete and RTX brings nothing to the Flight Sim World. The jump in price between the 10 and 20 series was totally unjustifiable to me. I've been running a Gigabyte Aorus 1080ti Xtreme that is running at stock but boosts to 2000mhz it's a beast of a card. If the 30 series brings a significant amount of performance uplift then I'll have a look. We really need AMD to bring something to the party that can compete with nvidia's top line cards so at least there'll be competition to bring the prices back down to sensible levels. I hope no one "upgraded" from the 1080ti to anything other than the 2080ti.

 

[Steffen Schlakat]

So does anyone / can anyone guess how much VRAM the FSLABS Busses will use? I tested my systems with all the scenery addons etc. and I have about 1-2 GB VRAM left. Will this be enough? I have a RTX 2080 SUPER with 8GB Card.

[Artur Araripe]

According to this new chinese leak (reliable source, apparently), VRAM won't be an issue soon. Big performance jump!! Can't wait 

Come at us v5 and MSFS 2020

[Sabine Meier]

Vram speed has been at 16 for a while I believe