congo wrote: ↑Wed Nov 11, 2020 3:53 am
There is probably several reasons Condor will CTD or black screen etc., however,
I wish to address the long pauses before resuming flight, and a possibility that the thing
I am about to describe may cause some PC's to crash as well.
I have made a discovery and it is tested and repeatable, so you can see this for yourself.
The number of thermals being generated has a profound effect on Condor2 performance
and will cause the game to stutter or pause while the CPU or GPU or combination of the two catch
up with their work. This loss of performance may also trigger or become worse as you move from
one area on a scenery to another, perhaps as new textures or tiles are loading from the scenery.
Large add-on scenery such as AA2 are the worst offenders it seems.
There are just a lot more thermals on the map perhaps.
Thermal density in Condor2 is controlled by three factors that I know of.
1) Inversion height set in the flight planner for the task.
(The lower the inversion, the more closely spaced thermals become)
2) Thermal Density set in the flight planner for the task.
3) The scenery thermal map.
If your flight plan has:
a large area scenery
a low cloud base,
a high thermal density set in the flight planner
a dense thermal map (AA2 does NOT have a very dense thermal map, it is just a huge map!)
..... then you can expect performance loss and troubles.
Certain PDA maps (PDA screen 1) are often very high resolution bitmaps and are notorious for causing
frame rate and performance loss. This will add to the strain on your PC. (AA2 is one of the worst).
These maps can be reduced in size if you are struggling with them, but expect a loss of quality on the PDA.
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Add to those problems your Condor2 graphics settings (visible distance, tree density, anti-aliasing, texture quality, etc.)
and your super computer is suddenly not so super any more ...... almost any high end PC will at least be challenged.
Despite how much video ram or whatever that you have, I believe there are certain hard limits regarding memory allocation at
basic low level hardware settings intrinsic to Windows OS.
Also, Windows and your software overhead is operating as well as your Condor2 sim. Your video card driver or it's associated
software may be influencing or changing things without your knowledge (GeForce Experience?)
How fast is your SSD hard drive getting the scenery loaded? This is another area that you may believe is working correctly,
but is it really? When Condor2 needs to load textures for the next frames, how quickly does it happen in reality? Surely there
is a latency as the textures are called, processed and then finally displayed. Even the latest tech NVME PCI Express SSD's,
working in excess of 3 Gigabytes per second cannot promise a seamless interface with your Condor2 display screen!
All things together, your Condor2 settings, flight plans, Windows environment, DirectX, video driver, concurrent software,
antivirus etc. must be running in harmony, without conflicts or programming errors to avoid crashes and pauses.
I have a 30+ year history of streamlining computers, Windows OS's, software environments and game settings to make
simulators perform well. There is no easy answer, but being a minimalist will get you a lot closer to the perfect sim machine.
Keep it simple. Try to shut down auto starting software. Disable auto updates as best you can or anything that will interfere
with the smooth running of Condor.
Skype, social networking or anything running in the background can potentially cause a problem, the less software running,
the better. If your PC is used for all things, then it's possible to use a dedicated boot drive for Condor, and a minimal software
regime.
Unfortunately, not everyone has the knowledge or time to set up a simming PC perfectly for Condor2. So we do our best!
If ANY part of your computer is slow or compromised or running hot or not up to the job, don't expect ideal results.
Also, you can throw a lot of money at a PC, and you may think it should be the perfect gaming machine, but have you
really got the experience it takes to set up a clean sim machine? It is truly a challenge to obtain that goal.
Condor2 may get the odd bug that causes an issue, but the majority problems are on the user's end.
Shot245.jpg
Good evening, thank you for the extensive answer.
I understand that my high settings have a negative impact on performance and high HW requirements, but I've never had this crash problem until the last few updates. I really have everything set to MAX, resolution 3840x2160, verical sync ON. The problem is that the crash cannot be simulated, it is done irregularly in different scenery with different weather settings. He definitely doesn't do it with every racing task. It is really possible that it does more when a large scenario meets with much very large clouds, but I have not verified it in reality.
I don't have anything else running in my system, I only use Windows for simulators (Condor 2, X-Plane, MSFS 2020, AeroFly, PhoenixRC, etc.), I don't have any other programs installed. Only TeamSpeak and OpenTrack run in the background in parallel with Condor.
I have the system and other simulators on NVME 1TB Samsung EVO 970 disk, Condor 2 is separately on Crucial MX 512GB SATA SSD. I can try to move it to the second NVME disk, which is about 6 times faster, but I don't really believe it will help. During the flight on the Condor, the computer is almost unloaded, nothing is heated anywhere. Warming up only starts at MSFS 2020
Zdenek.