Occasional performance issues (CPU, GPU, RAM?)

[ShamrockOneFive]

Although its not something unexpected given that I have a five year old PC ... I have been wondering at doing some tweaking to try and improve performance and then building my way towards a new PC maybe by next year.

 

Here's the issue I have. BoS runs very well when it's just me and a few other aircraft kicking around in the sky. I run at the High level of detail and that seems to be a good spot for my system. When there are many more objects going then it really starts to bog down and the FPS starts to drop fairly dramatically. It's not the worst stuttering I've ever experienced (that goes to F-15 Strike Eagle III by Microprose on my old 386) but it is game affecting. One mission I flew recently had a ton of ground activity and plenty of air activity going on too... my group of five IL-2s and four Yak-1s were wedged between two dogfights featuring Stukas and 109s up against LaGG-3s and Yak-1s fighting some Heinkels. Again, I expect it to bog down but here's the curious bit.

 

I checked the basic system monitoring in Windows 7 and although the CPU was being pushed it was still maybe at 60-70%. Memory use was maxed out at 3.85gb (ish). What I don't know was what stress the GPU was under.

 

So... what's the bottleneck here? If CPU utilization was 100% or 90% I'd assume my CPU was just maxed out and that was cause the frame rate drop. I know my RAM wasn't fully utilized (I assume this is a 32-bit application and it won't make use of the extra memory). Maybe it was my GPU? Which makes the least amount of sense to me given that all these objects were not on screen at the time. Just nearby.

 

What do you guys think?

 

System specs:

 

Core i7 870 (released Q3 2009)

Asus P7P55-D

GeForce GTX 570 (1GB)

12GB of Mushkin Blackline DDR3 PC-1333 RAM

An assortment of hard drives... IL-2 BoS resides on a OCZ Agility 3 SSD.

 

It's old but my system is no slouch either. Kind of wondering about replacing the GTX 570 with a GTX 960 or 970 as a first step towards a new system.

[Dakpilot]

Your biggest bottlenecks in order

 

1. CPU performance and clockspeed

 

2.32 bit OS limiting ram access to 3.5/4 GB

 

3. GPU Vram of 1 GB

 

4. GPU performance

 

whilst CPU is only showing 60-70% usage it can still be a bottleneck, and when multiple A/C and objects are around it is CPU that has most effect on min FPS

 

A new GPU will certainly make it look better and allow you to  run smoother with GRX enhancements, but will not improve minimum performance.

 

use GPU-Z and MSI Afterburner to check GPU utilisation.

 

If you can replicate the situation, run in low settings in game, at a lower resolution and turn off all extra graphic options and AA in Nvidia CP, when you still get slowdowns you have proved that it is a CPU bottleneck

 

A new MB and CPU will cost about the same as a new GTX970, (you should? be able to re-use your ram) get best 4core CPU you can afford that is highest on this chart, this is the performance parameter that BoS/most flight sims need, you can compare your current CPU as well

 

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

 

Cheers Dakpilot

[ShamrockOneFive]

Thanks Dak pilot. One thing I should have mentioned... I have Windows 7 64bit. Battlefield 4 is more than capable of sucking up 8gb just on it's own but IL-2 Battle of Stalingrad doesn't ever do that so far in my checking into this.

 

I figured it was CPU but without it being pegged at 100% I figured there might still be room. Perhaps more complicated than that?

[coconut]

Today I did some tests with various settings, running a replay with MSI Afterburner showing the GPU and CPU utilization.

I have 60 FPS when planes are not visible, 40 FPS (or even lower, e.g. 20FPS) when one or more planes are visible. During these periods at 40 FPS, my GPU is underused at 75%, my CPU cores are used to varying degrees, but never above 84%.

 

 

I was using the balanced settings, with NVidia DSR (2715x1527 scaled down to 1920x1080), I also tried ultra and low and disabling DSR. All that changed was the GPU utilization. I have disabled vsync and set the FPS limiter to "off" (which apparently limits FPS to 60).

 

My CPU is kind of old, a core i7 950 @ 3Ghz. I would love someone with a more recent CPU record a video with FPS showing. I don't want to invest in a new CPU and motherboard if utilization remains low and does not lead to improvements. I'm also wondering why the game performance takes such a hit when all visible airplanes are 1km away or more.

[Dakpilot]

I would say that FM and physics calculations (on CPU) still have to take place if aircraft is + 1km away

 

as an experiment drop your resolution to one or two levels below native, and turn off as many graphic enhancements, this will allow you to see pure CPU bottleneck having taken all the strain off GPU

 

it is rare to see CPU show 100% utilisation, this does not mean it is not bottlenecked below that level for some reason.

 

You will see a big performance increase from a faster CPU, although i7 9 series are very good for (some) multithreaded programs see link in post two for single thread performance (what BoS needs x 4core) of your chip compared to newer ones

 

Cheers Dakpilot

[coconut]

I would say that FM and physics calculations (on CPU) still have to take place if aircraft is + 1km away

 

as an experiment drop your resolution to one or two levels below native, and turn off as many graphic enhancements, this will allow you to see pure CPU bottleneck having taken all the strain off GPU

 

it is rare to see CPU show 100% utilisation, this does not mean it is not bottlenecked below that level for some reason.

 

You will see a big performance increase from a faster CPU, although i7 9 series are very good for (some) multithreaded programs see link in post two for single thread performance (what BoS needs x 4core) of your chip compared to newer ones

 

Cheers Dakpilot

 

I don't think FM and physics calculations are the problem, for a number of reasons:

1) These calculations are independent from visibility. The simulation has to take place regardless of whether you see the plane or not.

2) I was talking about online multiplayer performance. My PC only needs to simulate my plane, the other players' planes are their CPU burden, not mine.

3) The CPU cost of physics simulation for an airplane is pretty stable. Unlike rendering, where the amount of things to render depends very much of where you are looking at, the things that affect your plane's simulation are always the same: your engine, and the air around it.

 

About CPU utilization: I suppose if the game has e.g. 4 tasks that can run in parallel, and each can potentially take more than 50%, one gets the somewhat disappointing utilization I'm seeing. It would be nice if the devs managed to break these tasks into smaller ones, thus making it possible to cram more of them into the available cores.

 

Thanks for the link re: CPU performance, by the way. I was not aware sequential performance was so big with the newer CPUs compared to my generation's.

On the positive side, this game actually takes advantage of multiple cores. Most games are seen do very poorly in this area. They will use one core at 100%, and leave the rest pretty much unused.

[Zmaj76]

SSAO

[VeganMobster]

I've had performance issues with this game from the get go. I reinstalled Windows, and recently upgraded my GPU from a Radeon HD 7870 to a Geforce GTX 970. I still get bad frame rates in dogfight situations. I made this video to illustrate what's happening.

 

 

The FPS can be seen in the upper left corner of the screen. I used Fraps to display it, but I didn't use Fraps to make the recording. As you can probably determine from the poor video quality.

Edited February 16, 2015 by VeganMobster

[Urra]

Having same problem. Only one of my cores is being utilized above 60%, two others run at around 10%, which I imagine might be for Windows tasks in the background. Would be great to get an answer regarding cpu core usage from team if the game would ever really be able to more than one core for everyone. It doesn't seem to do it on my i7. Maybe next patch? If I can get it to do this currently, then how to enable it?

Edited February 16, 2015 by roaming_gnome

[Urra]

This is where we are...This is the future?

 

http://www.dsogaming.com/news/dx12-is-able-to-handle-600k-draw-calls-600-performance-increase-achieved-on-amd-gpus/

[Fishbed64]

Your PC is just old and not powerfull enough,and you should never check windows CPU utilization that tells you nothing because it is very unreliable ,the only think that you can watch ingame performance is by FPS.What you need is complete upgrade-best thing that dont cost that much is get i5 4690k and  GTX960 and 8gigs of ram.

[damhan]

I run sli 970's liquid cooled i7 at 4.2, 16 gigs of ram. I play Dcs at 3k at 60 fps no AA, just Fxaa. In this sim I cant get a steady 60 at 1080p on medium settings. It is not the op's rig. It is a choppy, stuttering mess of an engine

Edited March 26, 2015 by damhan

[AvengerSeawolf]

I've had performance issues with this game from the get go. I reinstalled Windows, and recently upgraded my GPU from a Radeon HD 7870 to a Geforce GTX 970. I still get bad frame rates in dogfight situations. I made this video to illustrate what's happening.

 

 

The FPS can be seen in the upper left corner of the screen. I used Fraps to display it, but I didn't use Fraps to make the recording. As you can probably determine from the poor video quality.

 

I reconn this has to do with the server than the game , or does it  acts llike that also offline , i e. in campaign ??

[ShamrockOneFive]

Latest patch seems to have solved some issues for me... not entirely. I don't think I have unrealistic expectations but I've been trying to find benchmarking information and even being a few years old the Core i7 870 still benches fairly well.

 

Also curious as to why the performance chart on Task Manager isn't accurate. Is it not correctly reporting the CPU load? Is there a better metric? I'm using whatever tools are available to me to find out what is more heavily loaded...CPU, RAM, GPU, etc.

 

I'm still thinking that a new build will be in order but maybe that will be next year after Intel's Skylake processors comes out and the prices settle down a bit.

Edited March 31, 2015 by ShamrockOneFive

[Dakpilot]

Benchmarks for single thread performance

 

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

 

while i7 870 (on list @ 1298) is no means slow and had near performance to an i7 965 which used to be a Monster $1500 chip that people drooled after, in single core/thread performance it is now getting a little old in the tooth, although BoS does take advantage of multicore chips, it is that single core clockspeed/performance that BoS really needs available in a minimum of four core chip

 

While Skylake will be THE definite upgrade path, I expect it to still be quite a while until release and prices become reasonable, an upgrade to i5 4690k/i7 4790k will give you a significant performance increase and last well enough until skylake update. And prices for the i5 now are pretty good

 

Cheers Dakpilot

[AvengerSeawolf]

 Look , the best benchmark is the one you do to your PC with your specs, hardware and programs  running at the back ect.ect. So find that 3D mark program and do your benchmarks on various 3D tests of the program. War Thunder game gives you also the option to see some benchmarking.
 So to cut the long story short,  forget 3rd party benchmarks, nothing to do with what your PC  set up can really do.

[Dakpilot]

The benchmarks I linked are simply a reference to compare CPU's in the same regime that BoS uses, an i7 965 will beat many other CPU's in other types of tests but in BoS a much more modest and cheaper CPU can humble it, always bearing in mind that 4 core (min) is what you need

 

Cheers Dakpilot