What’s wrong with performance on some tracks?

There must be something massively wrong:

The good thing: I get fluid 72 FPS when racing against 20 AI opponents even at night AND rainy conditions (thunderstorm!) at INTERLAGOS. (Playing in VR with Pimax 8k plus by the way...).
The environment is reflected in the puddles of water;... lights everywhere; the headlights of the opponents dazzle in the rear view mirror. Looking gorgeous. Although it’s the most demanding situation my monster rig can handle it and I get fluid frame rate. The same of course at daylight or at sunset with lots of cool godray effects...

And now listen:

Now I switch the track from Interlagos to Kyalami. No further changes (same car, same graphics settings...)

And now comes the bad thing I don’t understand:
At daylight in dry conditions: everything is fine, same fluid 72 FPS as written above.
BUT once the sun has disappeared behind the horizon I suddenly get stuttering 55 FPS and the GPU frame time almost doubles from 10 to 18... EVEN if I drive alone without any opponents and even in dry weather conditions (!).
Same thing happens by the way if I turn on storm-weather-condition or thunderstorm. Here I get the same phenomenon (stuttering 55 FPS and 18 ms frame time) even if I drive alone and even at daylight (!).

I can reproduce this anytime.
Any ideas what’s wrong here?

 

I hope that Nordschleife, which should be released this week, won’t have the above performance problem...
Can’t wait for DLC-release...

 

Hi Mike,
The problem you describe is real and unfortunately happens with quite a few other tracks.
Unfortunately the problem is very difficult to spot as most of sim racers run races at the default hour in game, usually around noon so they never get to race at sunset or do night racing.
In my opinion this is one big missed opportunity by Reiza!!! because if the Madness engine does anything brilliant it is day night transitions and night racing and it shines over other games like rf2 or AC without killing the fps or needing a monster PC(as you have )
The fps problem you notice is there since the game was launched at Imola, I reported the bug in july but no fix yet . The problem is there are newer tracks as you mention Kyalamy that are released with this fps problem.
I did these days some testing with SCE2020 car at all tracks and i found quite a few tracks with problems, perhaps you can do some tests to and we can both report the fps problem in the bug report forum page and this way perhaps Reiza will acknowledge it.

Tracks with fps problem :
Imola - all versions

Kansai

Kyalami Modern

Taruma - all
Jerez - all
Hockenheim Modern, Hockenheim1988 1977

Adelaide modern, Adelaide 1988
Bathrust (start finish straight lowest fps)
Brasilia - all(start finish straight lowest fps)
Velopark - all

Good tracks for comparison
Donington

Campo Grande

Montreal

Interlagos

 

Thanx for sharing your experience. Yes I will try other tracks too, but it’s not only night time, it’s also rain (thunderstorm). Today I tried modern Kyalami again, alone without AI and at daytime but with thunderstorm-weather. Even if I turn all settings to the lowest possible option I can’t achieve permanent 72 FPS.
And this is the proof for me that there must be something wrong with this track for example. It cannot be that with my hardware I can’t achieve 72 FPS at thunderstorm without AI, without night/lights, with lowest graphics (no AA, lowest resolution, no PP, no Supersampling, lowest shadows, lowest reflections, lowest FOV in my Pimax called “potato”-FOV, lowest EVERYTHING...).
Can’t achieve 72 FPS at Donington too at thunderstorm weather by the way...
Do you also have troubles with thunderstorm-weather at daytime?

Maybe there’s something wrong on my side because I can’t believe that it’s really not possible to get fluid frame rate without reprojection (and the minimum is 72 Hz/fps) on lowest settings with my hardware.
On the other hand at Interlagos or Nurburgring for example I get fluid 72 FPS at max settings, at night&rain, even against full AI grid.
Don’t get it...

 

If you have 100fps a hit of 15fps is no problem but when you struggle with 60-70fps and you load Kyalamy Modern and you see 40fps...that hurts )!
Start finish straights seem to cause frame drops on many tracks.

 

I do not think there is something you should try to understand, there are clearly tracks with problems.
I did very few laps with rain, I do not like racing in the rain, i like racing at sunset at golden hour so I cannot say.
Would be great if you could test the tracks I mentioned in the same conditions and after we can move on to daylight with storms

 

On some tracks you will experience a huge hit to performance when the sun goes down, probably related to shadows.

 

I don’t think it’s a shadow problem. As I described above I tested such a problematic track with LOWEST graphics settings, which means also shadows off or lowest (don’t remember if shadows can be turned off completely, if yes I turned them off for my test) and the FPS drop was still there...
On those tracks something isn’t optimised or wrong calculated compared to other tracks which don’t have this performance problem.

 

Oh...ok, than it's apparently an additional performance issue on those tracks

 

Oh my god!
Today I installed latest AMS2 update and also a new Pimax update and I can’t believe it.
Huge performance gain and no problem with Kyalami track anymore!!
Don’t know which update caused this but I am sooo happy!
Thank you guys! Best sim ever!

 

Relating to fps drops I am curious to know why in replays the fps tanks until the field spread out but starting from last on grid and following the pack closely fps is fine.

 

Replays in VR are still much better for me since yesterday’s updates.
Before there was always stuttering and ghosting.
Most annoying thing remaining concerning VR replays is the depth of field effect which should be turned off completely in VR. And many tracks don’t have trackside cameras. Others have but on some of them the cameras don’t switch automatically to the next to follow the car...

 

I get huge impact on frame rate at Nordschleife in the section immediately before the carousel. Everywhere else the performance is good.

 

I just did a test at Imola after the sunset and for me nothing changed, still unplayable.

 

Yeah, Imola at night is not working correctly.

 

The worst tracks for night performance for me:
Imola
Kensal
Jerez
Kyalami

I believe it’s to do with having multiple light sources (car lights and track objects) and calculating shadows / reflections from trackside objects. Turning down the number of AI is the easiest way to improve the performance. Turning off 3D grass also helps (and looks better IMO). MSAA is also a resource hog, I can barely tell the difference between medium and high, but performance difference is significant.

 

For me the track with the worst performance now is Adelaide at sunset.

 

I’ve been doing a lot of tinkering today to try to get Gsync to work on my displays.

I’m not 100% sure this is correct; but it seems like using Nvidia vsync rather than the in game vsync gives a pretty good performance boost.

Its been a very long tinkering session, and I’ve changed lots of settings, but the problem tracks I mentioned previously are all running much better (in most cases 75fps with good settings). Definitely worth a try if you are struggling.

(I also finally got Gsync working on my triples. Game looks gorgeous!)