ATI Radeon troubles after 4.006 update

[LuftManu]

I'm getting a 6700XT next month. I will also update if I find any artifacts or problems.

I will also try to help the team with AMD issues, being with the testers and having another AMD/RADEON will sure help things.

 

 

Kind regards,
Manu

[LuftManu]

After several days with my new 6700XT I am not having any issues with artifacts or strange problems.

[halz]

On 3/12/2021 at 6:17 PM, Jaws2002 said:

There's some major issue with the game engine and the new AMD 6000 series cards.

....

I was trying to investigate the dismal performance scaling with AMD 6000 series GPUs with this particular DirectX 11 title, and I came across Microsoft's PIX: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/pix/pix-2108-18/ It has recently (Aug 19 2021) added support specifically for profiling of AMD 6000 series (and 5000) GPUs in DirectX titles.

 

Having bought IL2 from Steam, I am at the distinct disadvantage of not being able to directly launch IL2 with the profiling .dll in order to obtain a GPU frame capture. So, I am only able to grab a fairly useless frame of the in-game "Login page" (where I haven't got an account, due to the steam link'ing. I may be able to use some dll side-loading technique, but even so, never-minding that, this might be an exercise in vain for an end-user/someone without access to the IL2 .pdb / debug symbols and/or source code, because the timing graph would likely just have references to memory addresses without any meaningful function names, etc. But in the hands of a dev, this could bring a laser focus to exactly whats holding things up across the graphics pipeline.

 

Take this tutorial of using PIX as an example to identify frametime bottlenecks, quickly being narrowed down to the specific lines of code that could be optimized:

I have been able to do CPU profiling, by attaching to the running process, and can see a good number of stalled threads, waiting on the main thread-- but without the debug symbols, theres no telling what those functions are doing or what they're waiting for. Well, there is always "a way", but it would mean a bunch of time consuming reverse engineering.. and probably would be easy and faster to just find an unpaid internship with the development studio to scratch this itch on behalf of the community. haha!

Edited September 17, 2021 by halz

[Jaws2002]

Welcome to the Il-2 universe. 

That sounds interesting. So because you have the steam version, you can't use that app to investigate the problem, am i correct? 

 

If you had the version of the game from the official store, would you be able to do some diagnosing?

 

 

 

[halz]

1 hour ago, Jaws2002 said:

Welcome to the Il-2 universe. 

That sounds interesting. So because you have the steam version, you can't use that app to investigate the problem, am i correct? 

 

If you had the version of the game from the official store, would you be able to do some diagnosing?

 

 

 

Thank you, happy to be here!  Yes, since the official store version lets it launch without the steam login wrapper/magic to do the login. So, if someone was able to get past the in-game login and grab some low FPS in-flight GPU frames, could move on to the next step of seeing which parts in the GPU render pipeline are stalled and where/if they are waiting on the CPU render pipeline in the game's main thread, or if its stumbling along on some other AMD driver/dll aspect.

 

Next step could be to compare with a similar frame captured with an Nvidia card and see how all the pipelines compare, if the same functions seem to be taking more or less time, etc.. I've still got my old 1080 Ti I could put to the task. But I really think that without the debug symbols/source, this method would only be able to show some code/memory addresses that are taking a lot of time to render, and not the more helpful function names that we see in the youtube tutorial.

Edited September 17, 2021 by halz

[Jaws2002]

Ok.  I sent you a code for the battle of Kuban premium, from the official store. It has nice variety of planes and a very nice map. You should find the activation key in your profile on the main site.

  You can install it as standalone, and see what you can find out.

Good luck!

 

Cheers.

Edited September 17, 2021 by Jaws2002

[halz]

Thank you for that! Got me through the login portion and I was able to capture some GPU frames. And well, this was more fruitful than I could have imagined. The PIX tool really holds the hand of the developer with doing optimizations, incredibly even without the full suite of debug symbols and source code.

 

The most interesting discovery is this warning about 'Small command lists executed. The warning text reads:

 

Quote

PIX has detected that these ExecuteCommandLists calls triggered <= 1 GPU work item. Consider analyzing these ExecuteCommandLists calls and the command lists passed into them to see if they can be optimized. Optimizations may include combining the command lists with other command lists that trigger more GPU work, or combining ExecuteCommandLists calls. These changes may improve the application's performance by avoiding the cost associated with unnecessary ExecuteCommandLists calls, or by reducing the risk of the GPU sitting idle if it executes command list(s) faster than the OS schedules the next one(s).

So it has detected five commands being executed for a single frame that could likely be batched into one batched operation.

 

The next interesting piece is from the CPU timeline, where we get a breakdown of CPU execution time per thread. And here, seeing that calls to 'ucrtbase.dll account for 20% of CPU time in this range of about 11 frames. Maybe thats a lot? AT least this fellow developer on StackOverflow encountered some performance issues with it, and worked around a multithreading challenge by allocating memory in a more clever way. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/63725525/c-how-to-trace-down-reason-for-code-not-saturating-cpu 

 

 

So thats what I have from a quick look at this. I'll be trying to get my 1080Ti back into service temporarily so I can do some trace comparisons and see if anything sticks out. But wow, this would be muuuuch more fruitful with a full dev stack to work with. Really just stumbling around in the dark otherwise with memory addresses and module names  For example, I am not able to run the timing analysis portion of the GPU frame capture without 'Enabling developer mode'.

Edited September 17, 2021 by halz

[halz]

Turns out there is just a check box under Windows control panel > Update & Security > For developers > Developer Mode 'On' that allows for the GPU timing analysis parts to function. Neato! This dumped out a mountain of seemingly actionable information about just a single frame that was captured. It looks like they have some specific guidance even for NVIDIA hardware.  I wonder if these GPU analysis warnings could be a symptom for how the CPU is working non-optimally in providing the GPU with work.

 

Priority	Warning
Medium	Descriptor duplication detected (1003)
Medium	Descriptor table recommendations (4)
Medium	Large number of descriptors detected
Medium	Potentially slow depth/stencil copies on NVIDIA (2)
Medium	Redundant SetPipelineState calls - state already set (365)
Medium	Resources can be transitioned to more constrained states (1)
Medium	Specialized root signature recommendations (2)
Medium	Suboptimal transitions between read states (2)
Medium	Unused root parameters (33)
Low	No split barrier usage (67)
Low	Potential "all_resources_bound" usage
Low	Potential CBV/SRV DATA_VOLATILE usage improvements
Low	Potential clear color optimizations (3)
Low	Potential DENY_SHADER_RESOURCE additions (2)
Low	Potential RESOURCE_FLAGS removals (19)
Low	Redundant transitions due to resource promotion (1)
Low	Small command lists executed (1)
Low	SRVs that may perform better as CBVs on NVIDIA (1)

 

Otherwise, the GPU analysis parts of PIX also look incredibly helpful for identifying the cause of visual artifacts/weirdness (let alone helpful for the performance tuning aspects). Even just clicking around I was able to get a sense of how IL2 assembles its 3d scene, textures, lighting, etc.. all taken out of just one frame capture. Neat stuff! Next thing I wonder is how this all works with the VR pipeline. But now I really think this is all I can do in some spare-time dabbling without making a change in careers IL2 would need to be instrumented with some debugging information to really get into unlocking its performance bottleneck mystery.

 

[102nd-YU-cmirko]

On 1/25/2021 at 9:11 AM, chiliwili69 said:

I just wanted to bring to your attention the unexpected bad performance of the new GPU cards from AMD.

Other reports show that that cards are almost on pair with 3080 (but a bit below): https://babeltechreviews.com/vr-wars-the-rx-6800-xt-vs-the-rtx-3080-15-vr-games-performance-benchmarked/

But tests with the SYN_Vander benchmarks show a very low performance.

It seems there is some kind of software issue with those cards and IL-2 (monitor and VR).

 

 

it seems this is still the case based on the testing I've done lately on a 5800x/6900xt combination, if I can help with some kind of test please ping on PM ?

 

 

 

[RossMarBow]

In my previous post I stated sharpening caused shimmering on the horizon

However having sharpening on is better than having sharpening off

Is their some way the devs could implement a fix for this so that the sharpening wasn't applied to the land textures?

I don't know if this is a AMD specific issue I think it effects everyone maybe