Thessaloniki V2 low performance with dynamic lights

[Makinen]

Good morning,
I purchased Thessaloniki X V2 for P3D V4. I run a pretty fast system and I have no issues with dynamic lights anywhere else.
Specs are 7700K @ 4.7 GHz, 16 GB ram @ 3200 XMP and a GTX 1080Ti Aorus Extreme.
When approaching the apron, the passing light of the beacon shines through the PMDG 737 cockpit, which looks brilliant, but completely kills my FPS. When the light is away I have 25+, and the moment it shines through I get 15-16 making it very frustrating as it lags terribly and I cannot work switches or anything else. I have the same issue exiting the runway, especially with landing lights on. As soon as I turn the lights off, performance is improved massively.
Is there anything I can do apart from disabling dynamic lights? I built this system to have dynamic lights on, and I have no FPS issues anywhere else apart from Thessaloniki.

[horst18519]

Are you talking about the airport tower beam or the light beams on the lamp posts? We placed dynamic lights on all apron lamps (15 at LTGS). P3Dv4 has to calculate a lot of things for each individual light so a performance impact is normal with that number of lights. We have very limited influence on this since dynamic lights are not much more than a simple line of code telling P3Dv4 to render a volumetric light beam at a certain position. I expect the performance impact to be similar to other airport addons using dynamic lights. To my knowledge very few developers include dynamic lights in their sceneries yet. Like in the early days of FSX we probably have to wait a couple of years until the average user's hardware is up to the challenge the P3Dv4 graphic capabilities provide.

[Makinen]

Hi Thorsten,
I have no issues with other airports though, even more complex ones than Thessaloniki. And as I said, I have no issue anywhere else apart from the apron at night. I am mainly talking about the tower beacon that moves around, this is what mainly kills me when in the pmdg. Interestingly enough, if I turn off all the cockpit lights it is usable, still low fps but usable. With all the lights on, it completely lags. Again, with a Gtx1080ti overclocked I would like to keep the lights enabled... Is there no other solution to this?

[horst18519]

Thanks for the clarification. The airport beacon is not a dynamic light, it uses some old code that seems to cause problems in P3Dv4. I'll ask Emilios to remove that beacon - he's out of office at the moment, though.

[Makinen]

That is some top-level support! Thank you for acknowledging the issue instead of telling me to turn off DL in my sim
Can't wait for the patch

[Makinen]

Hi guys,
I know this is probably not very high on your priorities, but has there been any progress on fixing performance at night with dynamic lights on? I would love to enjoy this scenery at night but I really struggle with low fps, despite a frankly monster system

[EmilG]

Hi guys,
I know this is probably not very high on your priorities, but has there been any progress on fixing performance at night with dynamic lights on? I would love to enjoy this scenery at night but I really struggle with low fps, despite a frankly monster system

apologies for the delay.
Check if this will help. Go to ..\FSDG-Thessaloniki_1\scenery and find the file called 'beacon.bgl' and rename to 'beacon.off'

that should get rid of the animated light-check to see if perf is any better.

[Makinen]

I did this, and WOW! What a difference! I am getting roughly twice the performance now, and the airport is finally usable at night! The main fps drop is my landing lights on the PMDG 737 (all other lights are OK) and this combined with the beacon shining through the cockpit was killing the sim. It is now much better, still dipping at around 23 fps sometimes (when I am getting 60+ in Athens for example) but absolutely usable - it was going down to 13 when the beacon was shining through the cockpit.
So there is an idea for an optimization patch then Thank you for your support.

[EmilG]

thanks for reporting back. We are still trying to figure out how to best optimise dyn.lights in v4. some parameters seem to affect FPS way too much..beacon apprarently was one of them as it gets the *landing light effect on it with a huge range