DCS not using all of my GPU capability ? ( vsync is off )

[ash0787]

I am getting between 35 and 120 frames per second, it varies quite a lot, but when I look
at my gpu load using afterburner or GPU-Z it always says the GPU load is well below maximum, like 50 to 80 %, is this just a bug with the reading for DCS and its actually using it fully, or is it possible that my framerate is being limited ?

[fearlessfrog]

Activations should only be used when making hardware changes and not deactivating first - so that doesn't sound right. Are you changing hardware often, as just uninstalling and installing won't use an activation?

You specs look great - what sort of frames-per-second are you seeing and in what sort of way is it bad (i.e. irregular or just low frames)? I have a similar system and will get a steady 60fps in air and dips to 40fps when over a busy city/airport.

We're all looking forward to 2.0 very much

EDIT: Ninja'd by Mr H - what he said

EDIT2: Best guess maybe older AMD drivers?

[kazereal]

Try to return to normal clocks and check performance then.

On my PC overclocking of CPU has bad side-effects regarding DCS framerate, it seems to be due to some weird timing problem (no idea why).


Don't try to run everything at maximum, start with low-medium and increase when more familiar with the setup. Disable things like tree shadows and TSSAA which can have huge impact on framerate.

Check that you have newest AMD drivers (14.12) since there has been huge improvement in them. Check settings in the drivers, allow application control over all settings.

Edit: also as mentioned, disable SLI/Crossfire. Multi-GPU support should be better in DCS 2.0 but until then it causes just slowdown to use that kind of thing.

[Toukoi]

Thanks so much for the replies guys, I appreciate it.

I should have said I'd added a second SSD since my copy and paste specs but that doesn't matter too much. I have installed the game on both the SSD's and on the HDD and other than a very slight loading improvement there's not much difference at all in performance on the drives.

I didn't know about the deactivation before uninstallation, that could have saved me a couple of activation's. I'll make sure I do that next time. The first time I uninstalled was from my old X51 R2 and I got a new rig similar to the one in my specs so that was one activation loss. Then that new pc set on fire, a little bit too much heat going through that :)
Then I got my current rig for which I tried a new install and had to activate the third time. The frame rates were bad so I figured I would uninstall and wait for Edge but it's a long time in the making and I got impatient so I tried again today. Frame rates are bad again, for example the Frogfoot training mission, on the ground I was getting 19fps - 35fps with textures high, view distance low, tree shadows off, civ traffic off, shadows medium, just generally set it all to mid spec other than the stuff that I figured should run ok on this rig.

I get great fps on all games, other than Watchdogs of course

I tried turning off my other two graphics cards and I still have the same issue. But I'm yet to try turning off the CPU OC so I'll give that a try in a minute and update you with the results.

Many thanks again guys, I hate to seem like a moaner but I can't wait to get into this game in a big way.

[Hadji]

Check this thread as well. Might be something worth picking up in there. One thing I recommend is testing your fps in the area of the map that is described in the thread.

http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=107551

[Toukoi]

Thanks very much El Hadji, I'll go through that guide and try again.

I've just been doing some testing and with the graphics set Low, Medium, or High I'm not getting any significant increase in FPS.

I reset my CPU Overclock to stock and that made no difference, I made sure crossfire was disabled in CCC and again no difference. It seems really odd to me. Anyway I'll go through that guide now and see what happens.

[Chameleon_Silk]

I think a lot of it comes down to what you consider good for this type of game, its not a fps twitch shooter so for me 30+ frames is fine.

people who want occulus and 144hz monitors etc might "complain" that they aren't getting good frame rates.

for me anything that appears choppy and effects flight controls is unplayable, everything else is playable... and this is comming from someone who played COD4 competitively with 255 fps and runs FPS shooters at maximum frame rate... its just not the same type of game and therefore all that matters is that it appears smooth for controls input.

my 2 cents.

[DM]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von twitch.tv/land_force:

I think a lot of it comes down to what you consider good for this type of game, its not a fps twitch shooter so for me 30+ frames is fine.

people who want occulus and 144hz monitors etc might "complain" that they aren't getting good frame rates.

for me anything that appears choppy and effects flight controls is unplayable, everything else is playable... and this is comming from someone who played COD4 competitively with 255 fps and runs FPS shooters at maximum frame rate... its just not the same type of game and therefore all that matters is that it appears smooth for controls input.

my 2 cents.

DK2 users want/need 75 FPS to enable low persistence mode, which gets rid of stuttering and is one of the more important issues, if you dont have low persistence you get VR sick in a hurry. Add to that the fact the DK2 needs stereo support so you have to render the game twice, which lessens the probability of getting a constant minimum 75fps.

And most 144hz monitor owners feel kinda short-changed if they can't get a game working anywhere near 120hz or better, but most of them don't realise sim's are CPU intensive in the way most other games aren't, and you need pretty serious hardware or a forgiving engine to get most PC games running reliably above 100fps constantly.

I would imagine you would get screen tearing a lot running a game at 255 FPS?

[Toukoi]

Hopefully the 390x will be as good as it is being reported and the Rift will be running games as it should.

Ursprünglich geschrieben von twitch.tv/land_force:

I think a lot of it comes down to what you consider good for this type of game, its not a fps twitch shooter so for me 30+ frames is fine.

people who want occulus and 144hz monitors etc might "complain" that they aren't getting good frame rates.

for me anything that appears choppy and effects flight controls is unplayable, everything else is playable... and this is comming from someone who played COD4 competitively with 255 fps and runs FPS shooters at maximum frame rate... its just not the same type of game and therefore all that matters is that it appears smooth for controls input.

my 2 cents.

My main issue is that I can't get a steady enough FPS to play the game without input lag etc. It's too choppy which is really odd. This is also a new restore of Windows I'm running.

Still no luck today guys. I'm going to wait for Edge and let my graphics cards bring me back into the realm of smoothness. Hopefully it's coming soon, please Devs, give us Edge ASAP.

[Dr.StrangeSpock]

Windows 10, ...which is free for 8 users, is said to have a 50% better gameplay in Maximum PC mag last issue. Do not know if it will apply to older games.

Clearly, I have been educated by the genius cats on this forum that GPUs ALONE are not the key for FPS in SIMS. .. the faster the CPU the better..to instruct the GPU what to paint.

Maximum PC advises to buy the fastest SINGLE video card you can get, instead of imagining that you can just ADD ON more of the same card in SLI/CF as time goes by. By very expensive tests for me ..THAT does not work. MULTI-Screen you must of course but for me... with 350 installed games in my 2 TB private Arcade (with no 25 Cents needed anymore) SLI/CF can be worse and cause bugs in MANY games. Plus... you will find these Motherboards end up making the 3rd card norminal unless you have the TOP CPU and TOP MB!

[Chameleon_Silk]

oddly enough I don't remember seeing to much tearing it has more to do with the funky inner workings of the engine, your fire rate would be faster and jumps more bounding and crisp, so against a top player you wouldn't want anything less since they would be running 255 fps for sure as well...

I think 144hz is a bit of a pipedream comming from a gamer who started playing nascar racing on my 486 with 17 fps, 18 fps is I turned rubber marks off... I remember often playing on sub par hardware throughout my life and having to get bargain bin games (which often were still great games) nowadays people want sliders on ultra and get 100fps which is ridiculous if you ask me, ultra should crush modern rigs so that way 4-5 years down the road the game still looks semi good.... however I digress because this is unrelated to DCS and the OPs topic.

I get about 28 at some of the busiest scenes on the taxiway but it only gets smoother once you get rolling and airborne. usually 40-70 fps and heavily dependant on the mission file, if your testing on the same mission file try a blank mission file and check performance maybe its just the mission your trying to run (doubt it but worth a shot)

[=AiR FORCE=]

My old but powerful GeForce GTX 285 is almost always at 99% utilization in DCS.
If it doesn't utilize the GPU enough, that means that the bottleneck is the CPU, and it's true for DCS. Now with DCS 2.0 it will certainly change and take better advantage of both processing units.

[bozont_svk]

well my cpu barely gets over 60%, gpu the same and still dont get more then 40 , cockpit view, sitting in the huey .... cpu is i7 4790k, gpu ati r9 290 , 8 GB ram at 1866 Mhz.... HT turned off etc etc....i have a lazy HW maybe :D:D:D

[Toukoi]

Similar specs to mine there Bozont and a coincidence on the FPS similarities too. Mabye this CPU card setup is something that suffers in this sim.

[bozont_svk]

we have a "handbrake" hidden somewhere :D:D

[=AiR FORCE=]

It's called Intel..

DCS uses 2 threads, but the distribution of this workload along the physical cores of a particular chip can easily differ between Intel and AMD as well as within their own line of CPUs.

My old AMD Phenom II X4 @ 3.6Ghz with just 8GB of 1067 DDR2 and GTX 285 (512-bit bus width, last in its kind) pushes DCS better than the performance out of the systems you mentioned here. I swear, I would have already upgraded if it was anything but smoothly playable. Even the heat blur gets processed just fine. The mirrors take a 1/3 of the fps off, but rarely use them.

But DCS 2.0 is coming, so it will improve and better utilize the hardware, that's when I will need to build a new system.