Frame rate limiter that works with 2.3?

[Don Quixote 76]

Hi everyone,

 

Many apologies if this has been asked before, but I could not find any conclusive answers.

Anyway, is there a working fps limiter for P3D 2.3 and Nvidia cards? I have tried Nvidia inspector, which does not have any effect at all, as well as the "half refresh rate" Vsync setting in the driver, which does not work for me either. I've been using the internal limiter for a while now, but I lose more than 40% fps when it's enabled, and that's just not good enough when landing at large airports.

I'm using the 337.88 drivers, by the way.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers! :-)

Steve

[SteveW 1,792]

Hi Steve,

 

An external limiter might only cap the fps, whereas the internal limiter not only caps the fps but also introduces pre-rendered frames. This appears to sap some of the available fps, but when fixed fps is trained to the optimum frequency it will actually improve overall fps:

 

 

 

 

These readings are from a heavily loaded FSX, but the P3D results will be more or less the same.

[TrafficPilot 121]

But does 15fps in P3D look better than 15fps in FSX? One would hope so.

[SteveW 1,792]

No, the idea isn't to go with 15 fps if you don't want to, the idea is to show what is happening. So you would set your sim up to do say 30 mean, then set your fps limiter to 30.

 

Actually as it happens I found FSX to be marginally smoother than P3Dv2 at 15 with FSX at full screen and 1/4 vsync, but that's a different matter with P3D a desktop window.

[Don Quixote 76]

Hi Steve,

 

Thanks for your explanation; I can't claim to understand all the technical background but simply from experience I also noticed that with the limiter enabled, performance is actually smoother than the fps numbers would suggest.

This is true most of the time, however, when approaching a detailed and/or busy airport (such as FlyTampa Tampa) my framerate drops to around 12, whereas with an "unlimited" setting I achieve a healthy 22 fps. As mentioned, numbers alone are not everything, but the flight is definetly much smoother with the unlimited setting. But this also means that the hardware is going full blast all the time, including the fans... And that's why I'm looking for an external limiter.

 

 

I guess the perfect solution would be to have an option which automatically disables the limiter once the framerate drops below a certain level.

[SteveW 1,792]

Yes I get you, those graphs compress the time which makes them look rougher than it is in the sim with hands on controls. The look-ahead frame count can be set to one in NI, maybe that's worth a try.

[DylanM 1,069]

Steve (OP), have you tried the "adaptive" v-sync setting in the driver (instead of 1/2 refresh)? I've been running this in combination with unlimited FPS with good results...

[vgbaron 3,714]

You can use the EVGA Precision Utility to cap frames also.

 

http://www.evga.com/precision/

 

 

Vic

[Don Quixote 76]

Thanks guys, unfortunately neither of these work for me. Perhaps I need to update my drivers...

Anway, I did a test flight today with "unlimited" and actually noticed plenty of micro-stutters - which were inexistent with the limiter set to 34 fps. Of the two scenarios, the micro-stutter free actually seems preferable right now. I had not been bothered by the issue too much originally, but it would seem that I got used to not having it after a month or so with the limiter enabled.

[SteveW 1,792]

The fixed 30fps graph is smoother than the Unlimited graph because of the work done on look ahead frames, however it does not show a large decrease in available fps when compared to the Unlimited setting.

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

You can use the EVGA Precision Utility to cap frames also.

 

http://www.evga.com/precision/

 

 

Vic

The present version has been "taken off of the market temporarily" due to copyright infringement issues which are spelled out at that link and have been discussed at AVSim previously. If one uses Google, one can find a non-EVGA download site for the previous version. MSI Afterburner does the same thing. Both utilities work with any major brand of nVidia video card.

[spirit_66 2]

There's also an EVGA PrecisionX version 5 Beta to find with Google and it works very well without the RivaTuner. I'm happy with this because on my rig suddenly the OSD didn't show up anymore with EVGA PrecisionX version 4. The same is with the MSI Afterburner because it uses RivaTuner too. I couldn't find the reason yet but it's since I patched to P3D v2.3 (??).

Spirit

 

PS: EVGA PrecisionX and MSI Afterburner can be used to cap the FPS.